Australia can exploit Trump’s stupidity, change thinking on migration

For a country notionally obsessed with how to lift productivity and growth, Australia seems oddly uninterested in the easiest way of all to improve both: import them. Donald Trump’s systematic destruction of the US economy and its global appeal is presenting enormous opportunities for policymakers to exploit Australia’s growing comparative attraction compared to the United States.

While tariffs, policy uncertainty, blatant corruption and reputational damage have all been scrutinised as significant parts of the damage inflicted by Trump and the MAGA cult on the United States, migration has received less attention. That’s because policymakers and the broader governing class, including the media, have bought into one of the core elements of the MAGA worldview, that migration is fundamentally problematic and must be regulated as a threat. But that makes about as much sense as the neoliberal view that free movement of people is always and everywhere a good, and should be regulated as little as possible.

In that context, other core elements of neoliberalism — the enfeeblement of government and its role in infrastructure and service provision, and the distortion of policymaking by powerful economic forces — have served to undermine support for high migration. Governments were encouraged to outsource and sell off infrastructure, and slash investment and the taxes needed to fund it, leaving communities to bear the brunt of increasing population size without commensurate growth in infrastructure and services. And powerful vested interests gamed the political system to stymie extra housing supply — NIMBY homeowners prevented increases in housing density; property developers hoarded supply to maximise returns, while often constructing sub-standard dwellings.

Instead of addressing those structural problems, it was a lot easier simply to blame migration — whether you’re a MAGA Republican engaging in the racial NIMBYism of exploiting white resentment, or an Australian education minister trying to reduce foreign student numbers on the spurious basis that they take our houses.

But no proponent of lower migration is ever able to answer a fairly basic question: where are the workers we need for a modern economy going to come from? And as the 2020s become the 2030s and western societies and China go from ageing to shrinking populations, the question is going to become more acute. The poor productivity growth of Australia and other Western economies also requires we ask where the highly skilled and innovative workers are going to come from.

Adopting an implacable hostility to migration, or an openly racist migration policy as the United States now has — no refugees are welcome unless they are white — is a simple refusal to engage with reality, unless you prefer lower economic growth, higher inflation, not being able to find anywhere to look after your aged parents or your toddler, and waiting three months to get a tradie.

Conveniently for Australia, Donald Trump is extending his hatred of migration to one of the most economically beneficial forms: foreign students. His regime has already made the United States — ostensibly the most attractive place in the world to study — markedly less attractive to foreign students through visa cancellations, kidnapping students off the street, and his economic war with China.

The US isn’t as reliant on foreign students as Australia is — it has fewer than twice as many foreign students in total as Australia does — but it’s a similar story there to ours: as public funding to universities has been cut, they have pursued more and more full-fee paying foreign students, who partly use it as a pathway to remaining in the United States to pursue careers.

Turning on foreign students is bizarre behaviour for a country that complains about trade imbalances with other countries — the 1 million-plus foreign students in the US generated tens of billions in exports. But we know Trump and his coterie don’t view services exports in the same way as goods exports, and regard higher education as the kind of malignant, elitist, reality-based evil that must be purged of anything to which MAGA Republicans can object.

Trump’s effective declaration of war on Harvard, via an almost certainly illegal ban on visas for foreign students, issued on the fake charges of antisemitism, is a step-up of this purge.

The potential benefits for Australia are significant. While Australia can’t replicate the research opportunities of US institutions or the appeal of working in the world’s largest economy, we’re an Anglophone country with strong educational standards and greater proximity to key markets such as China and India. More, and more high-quality, foreign students should be encouraged to come to Australia rather than risk studying in Trump’s increasingly fascist dystopia.

The same principle applies to attracting academic talent. Unlike the United States, Australia can commit that it doesn’t randomly turn back academics at the border, that the rule of law applies here and that, despite the toxic, if declining, influence of News Corp, there remains a degree of academic freedom in our institutions.

Indeed, all Australian industries that seek to attract international talent should be reflecting on how to use Trump’s immolation of American appeal to our benefit. Given our health sector remains the industry with the direst skill shortages, we should be looking to cherrypick talent from the US health sector, with the pitch that unlike the United States under Trump, in Australia we actually believe in science and have a commitment to a public health sector and health research, and seek to remunerate care sector workers fairly. The same applies across other skilled or professional categories, around half of which face shortages.

But saying is easier than doing. Our policymakers may not all be virulent racists, but they are stuck with the mindset that migration is some sort of fundamental problem. From the point of view of the 2050s, when the world’s population may already be shrinking, that’s going to look staggeringly wrongheaded.