Why 1,500 Newcomers a Day Keep Australia Afloat

The temperature around migration is high, but the data tells a calmer, sharper story: Australia’s aging population and deep labor shortages mean skilled newcomers are not a luxury—they’re the reason emergency rooms stay open, bridges get built, and classrooms don’t go dark. We dig into how the 1,500 people arriving each day are selected to fill critical gaps in healthcare, construction, aged care, education, and tech, and why this intake is modeled to support growth, not strain it. Along the way, we challenge the most persistent myths—do migrants take jobs, depress wages, or drive the housing crisis?—with evidence on complementary jobs, tax contributions, and the long shadow of chronic underbuilding.

You’ll hear how training alone can’t meet urgent demand fast enough, given multi‑year degrees, clinical placements, and system bottlenecks. Migration doesn’t replace local training; it buys the time and funds the capacity to expand it. We also zoom in on housing and homelessness with hard numbers and practical solutions: linking visa planning to build targets, fast‑tracking construction and planning roles, and directing more settlement to regions where homes and jobs sit waiting. The human side grounds it all—stories of a nurse, an engineer, and a developer whose work stabilizes services we rely on every day.

If fear grows in scarcity, confidence grows in planning. Smarter migration aligned with real workforce needs, plus stronger training and faster housing supply, is how we protect wages, lower pressure, and keep Australia competitive and compassionate. If this conversation shifted your view, follow, share with a friend, and leave a review—what one policy would you implement first?

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting the Stakes: Facts Over Fear
• 1:21 Australia’s Migration History and Purpose
• 2:38 The Growth Equation: Population, Participation, Productivity
• 3:35 Where Migrants Keep Australia Running
• 4:48 Myth One: “Migrants Take Our Jobs”
• 6:01 Myth Two: Housing Crisis Blame
• 8:02 The Cost Myth: Taxes, Welfare, and Reality
• 9:16 Why Xenophobia Rises in Scarcity
• 10:39 Faces of Migration: Alicia, Carlos, Nia
• 12:05 Long View: Demographics and Fiscal Health
• 13:15 “Train Our Own” vs Time and Demographics
• 15:03 Education System Limits and Bottlenecks
• 16:27 Economic Multipliers and Essential Services
• 18:07 Matching People to Places and Skills
• 19:19 Smarter Migration and Stronger Training Together
• 20:24 Housing and Homelessness: Data, Not Blame
• 22:03 Building Supply, Funding, and Workforce Gaps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome back to Fitzcapades. My name is Michelle. And look, as I've said in previous podcasts, I've been hanging out too much on X lately, and I have become astounded by the amount of xenophobia and racism that is openly um put openly uh put out there by Australians and actually everyone like peop people from all nations uh and as I grew up in a time when racism was not was frowned upon, you know, and and yeah, it's just outrageous seeing some of the things that people are writing now that that's actually uh uh acceptable to be so racist. But today I wanted to um you know I wanted to to look at skilled worker migration um because I was quite astounded by the fact that we're letting in so many people and and I thought to myself there must be a very good reason for this and there is. So every day roughly 1,500 new people arrive in Australia to make this country their home. Some come to build bridges, others come to heal the sick, teach children, drive buses, or write code. And indeed hairdressers too come because believe it or not, there is a shortage of hairdressers in Australia. Where would we be if we had bad hair? But lately that number has become a lightning rod. Fifteen hundred a day, critics asked, isn't the housing market already broken? Aren't wages stagnant, and aren't migrants taking jobs? So today I'm gonna unpack those questions calmly with facts. Why does Australia bring in so many skilled migrants? What does it do for the economy? And why has this the conversation turned so bitter, so fearful, so fast? So Australia's uh immigration program has always been quite cyclical. So after World War II came the populate or perish era, mass migration from Europe to build industries and defend a vast continent. In the 1980s and 90s, as the economy shifted from manufacturing to services and technology, skilled migration replaced bulk labour intake. By 2024 to 2025, the government set an annual permanent intake target of around 190 people plus temporary workers and students, averaging roughly 1,500 arrivals per day. When you combine visas, family reunions, and humanitarian entrance. Those aren't arbitrary numbers, they're the product of workforce modelling, projections of who will fit shortages in healthcare, engineering, education, construction, and IT as Australia's population ages. So every modern economy grows through three levels, goes uh through three levers productivity, participation, and population. When birth rates fall and retirement rate uh rises, you can't expect expand the GDP without new workers. That's where migration comes in. So, like in Australia, we've got a aging population, people aren't having as many babies, you know, um uh the average age is rising, and what we're having is more retirees depending on social welfare, and less, if we just had counted Australian natives, we'd have less Australians contributing revenue via tax. So, according to Treasury modelling, migrants contribute around 1% point of Australia's annual uh GDP growth. They pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, especially in their first 10 years. And around 60% of skilled migrants are under 35 years of age, so arriving in their most productive years, meaning decades of tax paying ahead. And because most come on work, tested visas, they don't take jobs, they fill jobs that employers can't otherwise fill with staff from Australia. So, where migrants keep Australia running is an interesting topic. Let's zoom in. More than 40% of doctors and 35% of nurses practicing in Australia were trained overseas. Without them, regional hospitals would shut their emergency wards overnight. In the construction and engineering field, skilled visas, supplied tradespeople, surveyors and engineers are central to housing, infrastructure, and pro and infrastructure projects. Precisely the areas critics claim migration worsens. Without workers, new homes can't be built faster. In the aged care sector, one in three aged care employees is an immigrant. As the baby boomer generation retires, that share must grow to prevent a humanitarian staffing crisis. In terms of technology and research, from AI to renewable energy, migrants drive innovation. Over 30% of Australian startups were founded by people born overseas. So let's look at the myth number one that migrants take our jobs. This is the older sphere in economics and the easiest to debunk. Labour markets aren't zero sum. When skilled workers arrive, they don't just compete, they create demand. A new engineer hires local admin staff. A doctor supports a receptionist, cleaners, and local suppliers. Economists call it the complementary effect. Each migrant job supports roughly 1.2 additional local jobs on average. Studies by the Productivity Commission show no sustained negative impact on wages or unemployment from migration, even during downturns. If anything, shortages left unfilled down drag growth down for everyone. So it's better to fill those positions with migrants. So the second myth is that migration drives high housing crisis. We've all heard this one. Housing costs are rising, that is true, but migration is a minor driver compared to with decades of underbuilding, zoning limits, and investment policy. Economists from ANZ and Grattan Institute estimate that migration accounts for less than 15% of recent price pressures. The core problem is supply. So Australia built fewer dwellings per capita than any advanced economy through the 2010s. Cutting migration won't fix that. It would just remove the construction workers needed to build more homes. So long-term migrants help expand the tax space. Funds infrastructure, the roads, trains, and housing programs that critics demand. Yet Treasury data shows the opposite. Because migrants are on average younger and working, they contribute tens of billions more in taxes than they receive. Permanent skilled migrants also wait several years before accessing welfare payments by design. And think about it. That's not a burden. That's actually intergenerational balance. The xenophobia issue, why fear is rising. Still, facts don't always win hearts. Why? Because fear thrives in scarcity. When housing, healthcare, and wages feel strained, people look for someone to blame and migrants become visible scapegoats for invisible policy failures. But xenophobia isn't just ugly, it's quite dangerous. It fractures workplaces, fuels hate crimes, and discourages the very talent Australia needs to stay competitive. Visa applications drop. Sectors already short of labour like nursing, teaching, and IT fall further behind. Racism also carries an economic price. Deloitte modelling suggests that if migrant workers were fully included and not underemployed, Australia's GDP would be forty billion dollars higher each year. So in short, xenophobia doesn't protect prosperity, it only strangles it. Let's have a look at some real stories, the human side of the numbers. So meet Alicia, she's a Pakistani nurse in Perth who works double shifts filling aged care rosters locals won't touch. Meet Carlos, a civil engineer from Chile, overseeing flood recovery projects in northern New South Wales. And Nia, a software developer from Kenya, creating cybersecurity tools used by Australian banks. They don't take jobs, they stabilize communities. They coach footy teams, pay rent, volunteer, raise children who will speak with Aussie accents and vote in Australian elections. Migration isn't an abstract policy, it's 1,500 daily acts of trust in this country's future. So looking ahead over the next 20 years, by 2045, one in three working age Australians will be over 50. Without migration, the dependency ratio, so the number of retirees per worker, would skyrocket, shrinking the tax base that funds Medicare and pensions. Productivity Commission projects that maintaining roughly today's intake keeps GDP per capita six percent higher by mid-century than a low migration scenario. So the daily arrival of 1,500 newcomers isn't charity, it's it's strategy, an economic life support system that keeps the country young, skilled, and solvent. So moving so moving past fear and what what can we do about this? If xenophobia is a disease of scarcity, the cure is connection, community orientation, mixed housing, local job partnerships, small things that make strangers visible as neighbours. Education helps too. Accurate uh media coverage, miss busting school migration history in uh teaching migration history in schools, and leadership, politicians willing to say out loud that diversity isn't a problem to manage, it's a strength to cultivate because a confident nation doesn't shrink from the world, it welcomes it. So the next time someone says 1500 migrants a day is too much, remember, those 1500 future taxpayers, teachers, inventors, and carers, they're not taking something from Australia, they're adding to it. Migration built this nation once and it's still building it now. And in the fear, in the face of fear, the bravest thing we can do is stay open, open to people, open to truth, and open to tomorrow. So um you've probably heard the phrase we don't need more migrants, we should just train our own. And it sounds simple, responsible, even patriotic. But here's the problem Australia's been saying that for twenty years, and still tens and thousands of critical jobs remain empty. So I wanted to just look at why training our own isn't the f silver bullet, it sounds like, and why migration isn't a shortcut, it's a partnership with our future. Right now, Australia faces chronic work short force shortages across almost every major sector. Around 300,000 job vacancies nationwide, aged care shortage are short by 35,000 workers. Healthcare projected is projected to need 85,000 nurses by 2035. Construction is short half a million workers over the next five years. Teaching, childcare, cybersecurity, hospitality, and yes, hairdressing, all short staffed. Truth is we could train every school lever and retra retrain every unemployed adult, but and still not close those gaps fast enough. And why is this? Because training takes time and demographics are against us and demand is growing faster than supply. The pipeline problem and why training takes years. So let's say tomorrow we start training 10,000 nurses. It will take three to four years for them to graduate, then another year to gain supervised practice. That's five years before a single nurse is fully qualified. The same with teachers for four-year degrees, engineers four years plus, electricians, apprenticeships lasting up to five. Meanwhile, the shortages are happening now, and as time goes on, they will be increasing. So hospitals can't pause emergency rooms for five years, builders can't delay projects for half a decade. That's why migration fills a time gap, not a talent gap, bringing in skilled professionals who are all ready to work today while we train the next generation. We have to again look at the aging nation. So another issue is that Australia's workforce is aging. For every five workers who retire, only about three young Australians enter the labour the workplace market. Productivity Commission warns that without migration, the ratio of working age people to retirees would drop from 3.9 to 2.7 by 2050. And that means fewer taxpayers funding more aged care pensions and hospitals. So even if we trained every unemployed person, the math still wouldn't work. We simply don't have enough young Australians to replace those leaving the workforce. There's also education system limits. So train our own also assumes that the education system can suddenly scale up, but universities and TAFEs are struggling too. And in the last decade, Australia lost one in five TAFE teachers. Nursing programs can't expand because hospitals lack supervisors for placements. Construction apprentices have a 50% dropout rate, so we're pretty lazy Australians. We're already training as many Australians as the system can handle. Adding hundreds of thousands more students without expanding facilities or funding just moves the bottleneck further down the pipeline. Migration doesn't replace education, it buys time to fix it. There are economic multipliers too. So skilled migrants aren't just workers, they're economic multipliers. When a nurse or engineer moves here, they don't just fill a vacancy, they create demand for housing, services, and goods. They boost the GDP, they keep business operating that would otherwise shrink or shut. Without them, economic growth stalls, inflation rises, and tax revenue falls, leaving less money for exactly the education programs critics say we should invest in. So paradoxically, migration is what funds the ability to train our own. In terms of the urgency of essential services, consider healthcare and aged care. By 2033, one in five Australians will be over 65. We'll need tens of thousands more carers and nurses just to maintain today's standards. If we rely solely on domestic training, we'll need to double nursing school enrolments, build new hospitals and training facilities, fund placement supervisors we don't have yet, we don't yet have. Even if the money existed, those graduates wouldn't arrive in time to treat today's patients. And that's not hypothetical. Like during the pandemic, aged care homes begged for staff and migration bans exposed how dependent the system already was. When borders reopened, those sectors recovered, not because of miracles, but because skilled workers came back. Some people ask if there are job shortages, why not just give those jobs to unemployed Australians? And it's a fair question, but most unemployed people either don't live where the jobs are or they don't have the right qualifications. Regional hospitals, abattoirs and farms can't recruit locally because locals don't apply. And many jobs from IT to nursing require years of specialised study. Short-term migration feels the geographical and skill mismatches that the domestic training can't fix quickly. And why training and migration must work together? This isn't an either-or issue, it's both. Like we need to train Australians, absolutely. But we also need skilled migrants to keep the system afloat while we do this. Think of migration as a bridge that connects the present needs to future capacity. Without it the bridge collapses before the next generation crosses. Like countries like Canada and New Zealand know this. That's why their migrations systems are tightly aligned to training programs. Migrants mentor, teach and transfer skills to the locals, building domestic capability over time. That's the model that works, collaboration, not isolation. How do we address the fear? So most people say train our own. What they mean is take care of Australians first. That instinct comes from love of country, not hatred. But love without perspective becomes fear, and fear can bind us to the truth. Migration doesn't replace Australians, it empowers us. It keeps our hospitals open, our classrooms staffed, our taxes flowing, and our futures funded. It buys the time to train and the resources to do it as well. So the real solution isn't fewer migrants, it's smarter migration, stronger training, and a nation confident enough to do both. So let's look at the housing issue because that's an important issue. Let's delve into that a little bit more deeper. So every time migrant numbers hit the news, one question follows fast how can we let in 1,500 people a day when Australians are sleeping on the street? And it's a fair question and a painful one. Homelessness has risen, rents are up, and shelters are full. So let's talk honestly. Can we keep welcoming migrants and tackle homelessness? The answer is yes, but only if we stop treating migration and housing as enemies and start treating them as parts of the same system. So let's begin with the data. Right now, around 120,000 Australians experience homelessness on any given night. But here's what's critical: most are Australian-born, the drivers are housing costs, domestic violence, low incomes, mental health gaps, and not migration itself. The housing shortage has been has been building for two decades, long before recent migration spikes. Between the years 2000 and 2020, the Australia's population grew 30%, but housing supply only grew 22%. We fell behind by hundreds of thousands of homes. So migration didn't create the shortage, it just arrived in the middle of it. So why can't migrants be part of the solution? And here's the paradox. The very people we bring in, builders, engineers, electricians, and planners, are the ones who can fix a shortage if we let them work. We need construction workers to build homes, nurses to staff mental health housing, and social service staff to support people at risk. And right now, almost all of those industries have massive labour gaps. Cutting migration would actually slow home building further. It's like having a leaky roof and fixing only and firing the only roofers who can fix it. The missing piece is planning and investment. So what actually brings homelessness down? There are three levers. Build more affordable housing, stabilise rents, and support people before they fall through the cracks. This means that government needs to treat housing like critical infrastructure, the same way we treat roads and hospitals. Economists estimate Australia will build at least must build at least 1.2 million new homes by 2029 just to catch up, and that requires not fewer workers but more, including migrants in construction, plumbing, surveying and planning. How do we fund these solutions? So more homes need funding and migrants help provide it. Each skilled worker adds the tax revenue, GST, and local demand. That money fuels the budgets that fund public housing and homelessness programs. It's the same cycle that powers schools and hospitals. More workers equals more tax equals more service equals less homelessness. Migration handled smartly doesn't have to take away resources. It can expand the pie. So what are some targeted policy ideas that might work? So how do we keep migration strong but make housing fair? There are a few evidence-based steps. So you can link planning, visa planning to housing forecasts. So every time the government raises the intake, it also raises affordable housing investment targets. You can fast-track skilled migrants in construction and planning so shortages in those fields don't delay new builds. Incentivize regional settlement where housing is cheaper and jobs go unfilled. Expand social housing using part of the increased tax revenue from migration growth. This isn't guesswork, it's happening in places like Canada and New Zealand, where migration and housing plans are now directly linked. The heart of both issues, migration and homelessness, are people searching for stability, one fleeing for conflict, another fleeing poverty or violence at home. Both need safety, belonging in a place to live. Blaming one group for the other's pain won't build a single house. But understanding that their futures are connected, that will. Because when we build homes, we're not just building for migrants, we're building for Australians. And when we strengthen the system, it shelters one, it shelters all. So we can welcome 1,500 migrants a day and reduce homelessness. Absolutely, we can, but only if we build faster, plan smarter, and care deeper. Migration is part of the solution, not the problem, and the real enemy isn't who's arriving, it's what we've failed to build in years before.