Immigration Industry

As someone with a strong distaste for spin and misinformation a recent trawl around internet sites dealing with immigration to Australasia has provided me with plenty to get annoyed about.

Under the topic of ‘immigration consultants’ on Google, I found an Australian gem at‘http://www.migrationint.com.au which outlines various types of jobs through which people can enter Australia under the skilled migrant category. Under the categories of ‘associate professionals’ and ‘skilled professionals’ were expected job types like ‘plumber, ‘civil engineer’, ‘roofer’ and ‘nurse’. However, I wasn’t expecting to see jobs like ‘real estate salesman’, ‘archivist’, ‘librarian’, ‘acupuncturist’, ‘museum or art gallery technician’, ‘drug and alcohol counsellor’, ‘chef’ and ‘TV Journalist’.

Well, to anyone from overseas who expects to get a job in a library, museum, art gallery or archive in Australia or N.Z I can assure that there are plenty of qualified local graduates for such positions who can’t find jobs in these fields. Jobs in archives are particularly difficult to get into, despite paying about the same as many unskilled manual jobs. Similarly, unless you are a top level clinical psychologist don’t expect to get a job in counselling. Also, given the competition for positions on journalism courses we should be able to recruit enough TV journalists. As for acupuncture well, we have enough new age, anti-scientific, types as it is without importing more.

Even in some areas where there is a shortage of workers is it questionable whether Aust and N.Z should actually be importing more workers. For example, there is apparently a shortage of chiefs, but there is also a surplus of unprofitable restaurants. Do we really want to support unprofitable industries that pay poor wages?

Admittedly, official government sponsored sites are more realistic and hard-nosed about labour shortages but even here there are some questionable listings. For example, on the NZ government site http://www.immigration.govt.nz/, most of the skilled job listings are for technical and skilled manual sectors like construction and medicine. However, there were also listings for furniture manufacturing. Now, given that Chinese competition is rapidly closing down many cabinet-making firms isn’t it a bit disingenuous to lure immigrants on the promise of work in the furniture industry. This smacks of the short-term dishonesty of the British bureaucrats who bought Pakistani immigrants into Yorkshire in the 1960s to work in unprofitable mills that were soon to close. If jobs in industries like furniture-making are advertised then they should at least be listed as temporary positions.

Under the ‘Investor category’, on the NZ government’s immigration website, conditions appear to be pretty stringent for would be immigrants with tough English language and minimum capital requirements. There are no requirements though, that investments must be put into productive activities that generate jobs for New Zealand workers. Should people be allowed to become NZ citizens just because they have sufficient capital to buy their way into the country? Where a country has loose restrictions on investment based immigration then organised criminals are more likely to establish themselves. A laissez-faire approach to immigrant investment also tends to encourage illegal immigration since some investors can use the opportunity to import cheap labour from their country of origin and employ them in businesses such as restaurants, brothels and garment shops.

Although the shift towards skilled-based immigration and tougher English language requirements in Australasian immigration policy is a positive move immigration consultants don’t appear to be communicating national labour needs to perspective immigrants. Similarly, central government is also not immune from spin and still appears to have a blasé attitude to immigration and investment.