In the late 19th century, about 60,000 Pacific islanders, pejoratively called Kanakas, toiled away on cotton and sugar plantations in Queensland. At that time about 10 per cent of the state’s population – rich landowners – fought bitterly to keep them after Federation, when a racist White Australia policy promptly deported most of them.
History doesn’t repeat but often rhymes. About 10 per cent of Australia’s population is once again in an economically highly disadvantaged position after an unprecedented influx of 1.2 million immigrants since 2022 doubled the population on temporary visas to more than two million, up from one million in 2015.
Largely from low-income, non-English-speaking nations, they have come to constitute a “vast underclass”, write Bob Birrell, Katharine Betts and Ernest Healy, from The Australian Population Research Institute, in a new research paper that lays bare the nation’s risky, high-speed socio-economic transformation.
“Their stay in Australia is precarious, with little access to Australia’s welfare benefits and they are vulnerable to exploitation by employers,” the researchers write, noting the vast bulk of them work in low-skilled jobs despite their university and vocational qualifications.
Migrants who didn’t speak English well faced a 28 per cent income penalty and were less than half as likely to report an income “over $20,000”, according to a 2024 research paper published by economists at ANU.
Remarkably, about 60 per cent of the 180,000 permanent residencies awarded last year were to temporary visa holders already in Australia, ensuring a vast and growing pool of hundreds of thousands of mainly student new arrivals who will be compelled to jump from visa to visa as they seek to stay permanently.
The number of bridging visas (which include full work rights), allocated to those waiting for other categories of visas or appealing the rejection of visas has jumped to 400,000 this year from a little over 200,000 in 2019.
Just like the Queensland farmers in the 1900s, high-income Australians benefit from this underclass, enjoying much cheaper transport, cleaners and immigrant-staffed restaurants, for instance, without enduring the social disruption caused by an influx of migrants to outer suburbs, than they otherwise would.
It’s been a gold rush for the higher education sector too, selling the increasingly elusive prospect of permanent residency.
For most new and native-born Australian citizens, especially the young, the economic impact of migrants, however, is becoming severe, supercharging rents amid ferocious competition for low-skilled work.
“For others, they are adding to urban congestion and competition for urban services and, for some, a disturbing transformation of the ethnic makeup of the city,” Birrell and his colleagues write.
After three years of steady decline in real incomes, the electorate has woken up to the impact.
Support for One Nation, a party known for its consistent stand arguing for lower immigration, has soared to almost 30 per cent of the primary vote in the latest YouGov Poll, foreshadowing the greatest political realignment since the Labor Party split 70 years ago.
The deafness of the Labor and Liberal parties to the rising anger throughout last year has been extraordinary. According to TAPRI’s survey of more than 3000 people in late 2024, 80 per cent of Australians want lower immigration, and more than half want it to be drastically lower.
Yet not a single, concrete change to immigration settings of any note has been proposed by either party. Despite a brief and modest reduction in 2024 in visas for international students, who already make up about half the total university population, the federal government in August 2025 increased the allocation for 2026 by 25,000 to 295,000 to “provide stability and certainty for the international education sector”.
No doubt the higher education sector is enjoying a gold rush, but many younger Australians are not enjoying the same stability and certainty.
The ABS on Thursday said net permanent and long-term arrivals had increased to 480,520 in 2025 – the highest such calendar year figure on record. A different measure from the most widely quoted “net overseas migration”, to be sure, but it hardly points to a radical reduction in immigration in keeping with community concern.
Yes, the level of net immigration has been falling to a “mere” 305,000 over the 12 months to September last year. But is a level more than three times that permitted during the early 1990s enough to mollify the public?
The left of politics has always been much better at sloganeering than its opponents. But its opponents have finally scored a win with “mass migration”: the phrase has become entrenched, it resonates and, while subtly pejorative, is more or less accurate to any fair-minded observer.
No one rationally blames immigrants for this situation – they understandably would prefer to stay in this beautiful country for good. If Switzerland had immigration rules like ours, it would be swamped within months, potentially undermining its very high standard of living and social cohesion.
Especially for an island such as Australia, immigration is a choice, as the pandemic illustrated starkly.
In a shameful episode in our history, the Kanakas were forced to come here but many ultimately didn’t want to go home. The racism that drove their expulsion has mercifully dissipated in what self-evidently has become a very welcoming nation.
But if the concerns of ordinary Australians continue to be so flagrantly ignored, we risk an ugly political response.
Only half of the migrants who arrived in Australia between 1951 and 2021 obtained citizenship, Birrell points out, and “for arrivals since then the share obtaining citizenship has contracted sharply”.
Whoever wins the Liberal leadership on Friday should resist the mistaken elite opinion that significant reductions in immigration won’t appeal to voters.
The multimillion-strong temporary immigrant wave has transformed Australian society – but none of them can vote.
