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Australia, on both sides of the house, also understands the importance of Immigration. However we just neglected to build anywhere for them to live... We are

Australia, on both sides of the house, also understands the importance of Immigration. However we just neglected to build anywhere for them to live... We are in a cost-of-living crisis, a per-capita recession. One of the reasons we are not in a full-blown recessions is the wealth that immigrants brought with them! Building firms are going under, and we gutted the trade schools years ago. So the housing crisis isn't going to resolve anytime soon...

daft_pink 2y ago
I think there is a lot of divisiveness towards illegal immigration in the United States and securing the border, but there is a lot of agreement that the mechanism for legal immigration here is also broken and should be fixed and that’s a totally different thing. It’s sad that the fix is about who they think these people will vote for though.
redandblack 2y ago
I never understood that lack of understanding by politicians on what people need - totally understandable in US where corporate lobbyists rule congress. Australia, Canada governance are mysteries to me. On the residential homes - i assume it not a question of land/resources.
awkii 2y ago
The Australian and the USA's immigration system are substantially different in terms of underlying values. The Australian system assigns points based on skill and merit. The US has an emphasis on reuniting families, a lottery system, and difficulty through ambiguity. Anecdotally, my friend who immigrated from Silicon Valley to Australia was able to explain his process to me in about an hour. In contrast, I have had the USA system explained to me many times, and it still hasn't clicked. I can't help but to feel like this is by design. As for our (USA's) housing crisis, the New York Times had a podcast about that just four days ago [1]. There are some notable parallels to what you have described. TL;DR: The 2008 recession pushed us from building 2.2 million houses a year to 600K, for the last 20ish years. The skilled laborers and tradesmen who used to build houses have closed shop. Now here we are years later and millions of houses short with no clear way to reboot the industry. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/podcasts/the-daily/housing-crisis-michigan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/podcasts/the-daily/housin...
- 0xy 2y ago
  There's substantially more immigration to Australia through university scams (fronts that don't actually educate) than genuine immigrants. The majority is not skill and merit based because of the "temporary" "students" who can work and never leave the country, as well as the chain migration loopholes. Australia has almost the highest immigration per capita in the world, and a massive chunk of that is pure fraud. [1] 75% of "students" come in via unregulated agents, many of whom direct students to these university fronts. In fact, Australians overwhelmingly reject mass immigration. 71% oppose it and are regularly ignored by the powers that be on both sides. The left imports immigrants for ideological reasons and the right imports them for cheap labor for their corporate buddies. [1] https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/fake-schools-fake-students-criminals-make-mockery-of-education-visas-20230419-p5d1mw.html https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/fake-schools-fake...
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    While Australia might have a lot of fraudulent immigration, they harass the normal tourists under the pretense of preventing fraudulent immigration. This happened some years ago, so perhaps the system has been improved meanwhile, but I strongly doubt it. At that time, I was living in an European country, but I was working for a subsidiary of an Australian company. There was a reciprocal agreement with Australia that visas must not be required for visiting the other country. In Europe, the agreement was observed, so any of our Australian colleagues could visit the local subsidiary at any time, no questions asked. However, there was a moment when the Australian headquarters decided that a team from the European subsidiary must come in a visit to them, for an important meeting where some future strategies had to be decided. We expected that the travel to Australia would be as easy as the reverse travel for the Australians, but no, while Australia could not demand a visa, which would have been illegal, they had replaced the visa requirement with a requirement for some kind of "electronic" permit, whose name I do not remember, which was nothing else but a visa with another name, because without it you would have been denied entry in Australia. To obtain the Australian permit one had to provide a really ridiculous amount of personal information about yourself and about a lot of family relatives (not only spouse, parents and siblings, but even grandparents), certainly at least as much as when applying for some security clearance of the highest level. I have traveled through many countries, and even those that require visas do not request such an amount of information. You do not need to provide such information even when going to Israel, where they have reasons to be more careful. The most annoying was that they were not satisfied with providing a bank account where you held an amount of money greater than would be required for all your travel and stay in Australia. They also required for that bank account a detailed lists with all the transactions done with that bank account for the past three months. Initially we have provided the list of banking transactions with only the amounts of money that had been transferred, but that was not good enough, they wanted for each transaction the complete information, like the invoice that has been paid and for whom. I could understand if they had required only the source of the money that credited the account, to determine who was paying for the travel to Australia, but a complete list of transactions, including everything that you have bought, was an abusive request. If we had known in advance the Australian system, we would have created three months earlier a bank account with the only purpose of storing money for the Australian visit, which would have had an empty list of transactions. As it was, because this was a business trip, the account with money for the trip was the company account. Disclosing all the transactions from the company account could potentially disclose some confidential information for competitors and it would also disclose to the employees going in that trip information considered confidential by the company, i.e. the salaries of all employees. Due to the complications created by the need to provide all the information requested by the Australian authorities, the process for completing the applications for the permit was very long. Even after providing all the required information, on-line to some immigration offices located in Tasmania, the processing of the applications took a few months. Because it was delayed so much, eventually the Australian headquarters has cancelled the visit to Australia and they have organized a meeting in Europe, where they did not fear that the Australians are illegal immigrants. Our case was certainly not a singular one, because at the same time there was in the news a case when there had been an important meeting of some international organization, which happened to be organized in that year in Australia, and the representatives of some countries could not reach the meeting because they had received Australian visas much too late, even if they had been requested early enough and there was no doubt that they had a valid reason to come to Australia.
User23 2y ago
All else being equal immigration drives down wages by increasing the labor supply and drives up housing by increasing housing demand. Nevertheless sufficiently wealthy (if they actually onshore that wealth) and productive immigrants can be a net benefit for the receiving nation. Hence the point systems and such to select for them. As it happens, the US powers that be are big fans of real estate appreciation and wage depression. They evidently don’t much care about selecting for high value immigrants either. Tech workers who pay big taxes and create bigger value get a way harder time of it than obvious public charges. It’s strange, but revealed preferences never lie.
searealist 2y ago
> Australia, on both sides of the house, also understands the importance of Immigration. Then you proceed to list the ways things are worse. Maybe immigration is not good for you and you should not take it as an axiom?

daft_pink 2y ago

I think there is a lot of divisiveness towards illegal immigration in the United States and securing the border, but there is a lot of agreement that the mechanism for legal immigration here is also broken and should be fixed and that’s a totally different thing. It’s sad that the fix is about who they think these people will vote for though.

redandblack 2y ago

I never understood that lack of understanding by politicians on what people need - totally understandable in US where corporate lobbyists rule congress. Australia, Canada governance are mysteries to me. On the residential homes - i assume it not a question of land/resources.

awkii 2y ago

The Australian and the USA's immigration system are substantially different in terms of underlying values. The Australian system assigns points based on skill and merit. The US has an emphasis on reuniting families, a lottery system, and difficulty through ambiguity. Anecdotally, my friend who immigrated from Silicon Valley to Australia was able to explain his process to me in about an hour. In contrast, I have had the USA system explained to me many times, and it still hasn't clicked. I can't help but to feel like this is by design. As for our (USA's) housing crisis, the New York Times had a podcast about that just four days ago [1]. There are some notable parallels to what you have described. TL;DR: The 2008 recession pushed us from building 2.2 million houses a year to 600K, for the last 20ish years. The skilled laborers and tradesmen who used to build houses have closed shop. Now here we are years later and millions of houses short with no clear way to reboot the industry. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/podcasts/the-daily/housing-crisis-michigan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/podcasts/the-daily/housin...

0xy 2y ago
There's substantially more immigration to Australia through university scams (fronts that don't actually educate) than genuine immigrants. The majority is not skill and merit based because of the "temporary" "students" who can work and never leave the country, as well as the chain migration loopholes. Australia has almost the highest immigration per capita in the world, and a massive chunk of that is pure fraud. [1] 75% of "students" come in via unregulated agents, many of whom direct students to these university fronts. In fact, Australians overwhelmingly reject mass immigration. 71% oppose it and are regularly ignored by the powers that be on both sides. The left imports immigrants for ideological reasons and the right imports them for cheap labor for their corporate buddies. [1] https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/fake-schools-fake-students-criminals-make-mockery-of-education-visas-20230419-p5d1mw.html https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/fake-schools-fake...
- adrian_b 2y ago
  While Australia might have a lot of fraudulent immigration, they harass the normal tourists under the pretense of preventing fraudulent immigration. This happened some years ago, so perhaps the system has been improved meanwhile, but I strongly doubt it. At that time, I was living in an European country, but I was working for a subsidiary of an Australian company. There was a reciprocal agreement with Australia that visas must not be required for visiting the other country. In Europe, the agreement was observed, so any of our Australian colleagues could visit the local subsidiary at any time, no questions asked. However, there was a moment when the Australian headquarters decided that a team from the European subsidiary must come in a visit to them, for an important meeting where some future strategies had to be decided. We expected that the travel to Australia would be as easy as the reverse travel for the Australians, but no, while Australia could not demand a visa, which would have been illegal, they had replaced the visa requirement with a requirement for some kind of "electronic" permit, whose name I do not remember, which was nothing else but a visa with another name, because without it you would have been denied entry in Australia. To obtain the Australian permit one had to provide a really ridiculous amount of personal information about yourself and about a lot of family relatives (not only spouse, parents and siblings, but even grandparents), certainly at least as much as when applying for some security clearance of the highest level. I have traveled through many countries, and even those that require visas do not request such an amount of information. You do not need to provide such information even when going to Israel, where they have reasons to be more careful. The most annoying was that they were not satisfied with providing a bank account where you held an amount of money greater than would be required for all your travel and stay in Australia. They also required for that bank account a detailed lists with all the transactions done with that bank account for the past three months. Initially we have provided the list of banking transactions with only the amounts of money that had been transferred, but that was not good enough, they wanted for each transaction the complete information, like the invoice that has been paid and for whom. I could understand if they had required only the source of the money that credited the account, to determine who was paying for the travel to Australia, but a complete list of transactions, including everything that you have bought, was an abusive request. If we had known in advance the Australian system, we would have created three months earlier a bank account with the only purpose of storing money for the Australian visit, which would have had an empty list of transactions. As it was, because this was a business trip, the account with money for the trip was the company account. Disclosing all the transactions from the company account could potentially disclose some confidential information for competitors and it would also disclose to the employees going in that trip information considered confidential by the company, i.e. the salaries of all employees. Due to the complications created by the need to provide all the information requested by the Australian authorities, the process for completing the applications for the permit was very long. Even after providing all the required information, on-line to some immigration offices located in Tasmania, the processing of the applications took a few months. Because it was delayed so much, eventually the Australian headquarters has cancelled the visit to Australia and they have organized a meeting in Europe, where they did not fear that the Australians are illegal immigrants. Our case was certainly not a singular one, because at the same time there was in the news a case when there had been an important meeting of some international organization, which happened to be organized in that year in Australia, and the representatives of some countries could not reach the meeting because they had received Australian visas much too late, even if they had been requested early enough and there was no doubt that they had a valid reason to come to Australia.

User23 2y ago

All else being equal immigration drives down wages by increasing the labor supply and drives up housing by increasing housing demand. Nevertheless sufficiently wealthy (if they actually onshore that wealth) and productive immigrants can be a net benefit for the receiving nation. Hence the point systems and such to select for them. As it happens, the US powers that be are big fans of real estate appreciation and wage depression. They evidently don’t much care about selecting for high value immigrants either. Tech workers who pay big taxes and create bigger value get a way harder time of it than obvious public charges. It’s strange, but revealed preferences never lie.

searealist 2y ago

> Australia, on both sides of the house, also understands the importance of Immigration. Then you proceed to list the ways things are worse. Maybe immigration is not good for you and you should not take it as an axiom?