When a determined and resourceful young man from Punjab — I’ll call him Hari — was driving me home recently, our conversation turned to his experiences and aspirations in Australia. He’d finished a Masters in IT in Melbourne and secured a two-year post-study work visa that was supposed to give him professional experience. But he soon discovered many firms are wary of hiring newly minted graduates on temporary visas. Why invest in someone who might not be allowed to stay? So Hari, like many contemporaries, ended up driving for Uber.
He also hatched a plan to retrain as a carpenter. Australia needs more tradies to meet its ambitious home-building targets, so carpenters are eligible for a “core skill in demand” visa. Labor’s promise to fast-track construction trades would enable him, he hoped, to qualify as a chippie in fifteen months. Having laboured for an arborist during his studies, he had no fear of physical work. His concern was cost.
To secure his traineeship, he expected to pay a potential boss, another Punjabi, a $25,000 “thank you.” He then anticipated doing countless hours of unpaid overtime on an entry-level wage. “That’s the way it works,” he shrugged. But it would be worth it to get permanent residence. Not only for the eventual pay-off in decent wages, but because he loves living in Australia.
Hari’s story illustrates what LSE economist Alan Manning calls “the infernal circle of immigration policy.” The cycle can be summarised very simply:
• Wealthy nations put controls on immigration to manage the number and mix of people coming.
• The number of wannabe migrants to wealthy nations far exceeds places available.
• Would-be migrants do all they can to breach or sidestep the barriers in their path.
• Residents of wealthy nations fear being overwhelmed and call for even tougher controls on immigration.
As Manning tells us in his new book, Why Immigration Policy is Hard, he became involved in this policy field “by mistake” after surrendering to a colleague’s entreaties to join the British government’s Migration Advisory Committee. He ended up as committee chair for four years until 2020, when his contract was not renewed. (“Was I sacked?” he wonders.)
His schema is instructive, if necessarily simplified. One missing step, of which Manning is aware, is governments’ tendency to open new migration pathways, often as an ad-hoc fix to other problems, with unforeseen, though predictable, consequences.
My Uber driver’s post-study work visa is a case in point. Work rights for international student graduates were expanded in 2013 to stop a sharp decline in overseas enrolments and revenues at Australian universities. Enrolments had slumped from 320,000 in 2008–09 to 250,000 in 2010–11. Work rights were offered to help Australian degrees compete against rival offerings in Canada, Britain and the United States. Hari was an eventual beneficiary.
The upgraded 2013 post-study work visa was itself a fix of a fix of a fix. Back in the early 2000s, Australia’s resources boom had been creating labour shortages. The Howard government responded with a near-automatic pathway from study to permanent residence. Private colleges sprang up to meet demand, churning out cooks and hairdressers who often had little training. The Rudd government cracked down, narrowing the study–migration nexus just as a surging Australian dollar made Australia very expensive for overseas students. Enrolments fell, which in turn made the incentive of post-study work rights seem a good idea.
Manning has seen the same dynamic play out in Britain:
Migrants use student visas (normally legally but sometimes not) in ways that are different from what was intended. A scandal results and more restrictive policies are put in place that reduce student migration. This in turn harms the universities, which then lobby (aggressively in my experience…) for more liberal policies and, with time, the previous scandals are often forgotten. Policy is eventually liberalised, leading a few years later to another scandal — and we go round the infernal circle again.
Another local example of unintended consequences is the transformation of the working holiday scheme into a temporary labour program. In 2005, to fill rural job vacancies, the Howard government offered young travellers from eighteen countries a second twelve-month visa if they spent at least eighty-eight days fruit-picking or doing other “designated work” in a regional area. Since then, Australia has signed working holiday agreements with another thirty-two countries, lifted the age limit from thirty to thirty-five for selected nations, broadened the definition of designated work, and created a third twelve-month visa. Unsurprisingly, the number of working holiday makers is at record levels.
Thanks to Scott Morrison, the largest cohort are young Brits. When he wasn’t swapping Tim Tams and Penguin biscuits with Boris Johnson under the 2020 UK–Australia free trade deal, he agreed that British backpackers could live and work in Australia for up to three years without doing any designated work. Home Affairs data shows the number of British citizens in Australia on working holidays rose by 134 per cent between December 2019 and December 2025, triple the rate of increase for other nationalities.
There are now a combined total of 452,000 working holiday and graduate visa holders like Hari in Australia, almost double the number before Covid. They have contributed to record rates of net overseas migration, prompting alarmist if often misleading headlines, public unease and government anxiety. Yet there is virtually no dispassionate analysis of past decisions by administrations of both stripes that brought us to this pass.
As Alan Manning writes, debate about immigration policy is plagued by three problems: it is “too binary, too polarized, and tries to find someone to blame when it all looks a mess.”
The dominant immigration-good/immigration-bad rhetoric is “profoundly unhelpful” for policy development, says Manning. So, too, argument by anecdote, whether it’s a tale of a refugee-turned-millionaire or a refugee-turned-murderer. We should expect nothing different from migrants than from anyone else, he writes, since we are all a mixture of characteristics, “saintly, sinful and just plain ordinary.”
Contrary to strident claims about the benefits and drawbacks of immigration, Manning says much of the evidence is unclear or shows the impacts are not very significant one way or the other. “Immigration often causes change that cannot be put in boxes simply labelled good or bad,” he writes. “And different types of immigration have different effects on different people.”
This doesn’t stop protagonists from cherry-picking evidence to suit their positions. As examples, Manning cites a German report from 2022 celebrating the entrepreneurial benefits of migration on the basis that 22 per cent of all start-up founders came from a migrant background. Given that 24 per cent of the German population had a migrant background, it really showed nothing at all. On the other side of the debate, a 2012 Daily Mail headline proclaimed that “foreign nationals were accused of a QUARTER of all crimes in London.” Again, no surprise, given that 26 per cent of London’s population are foreign nationals.
Even when the evidence is unambiguous, migration policy can be as much about ethics as data. It’s beyond question, for example, that elderly parents are not economically desirable immigrants since they have few years of productive work ahead of them, won’t pay much income tax and are entering a stage of life in which they are likely to draw heavily on government services, especially medical treatment. Yet such facts are no response to questions of love and filial duty and the widely accepted obligation to care for our parents as they age, which is hard to do long distance.
Until the 1980s, parents could migrate to Australia to join their adult children as “close family members.” Over time, a series of administrative changes have redefined “close family” to include only dependent children and rendered parent migration nigh on impossible. This may be an evidence-based decision, but it is also a moral choice.
As a fraction of the global population, the share of migrants around the world has barely increased since the 1960s, leading some analysts to ask what all the fuss is about. But Manning’s focus is on migration to high-income countries, and here the numbers have changed markedly. In 1990 only about half of the world’s migrants lived in wealthy countries. Now, the share is two-thirds. On average, the proportion of migrants in the population of high-income countries doubled from 7.5 per cent in 1990 to 15 per cent in 2024. In Australia, it rose from 23 per cent to 31 per cent.
Such statistics provide context to the resurgence in public concern about immigration and the tendency to claim governments have lost control of borders. They also remind us that migration patterns are shaped by powerful demographic and economic forces.
“If all countries offered much the same quality of life, migration flows would be smaller and more symmetric,” Manning writes. But as long as inequality between nations persists, so will the desire to migrate. And since population growth is concentrated in countries where incomes are lower, the drivers of migration to wealthy nations will only intensify.
The flip side of these external pressures are demands for labour in affluent countries arising from longer lifespans. We’re told we need young migrants to counter a shrinking workforce, restore the balance between wage earners and retirees, and keep income tax revenues healthy. But as Manning points out, this is another temporary fix, because migrants age too.
“Immigration makes the population younger in the short term yet older in the long term,” he writes, and so it’s “not a very effective tool for dealing with the long-term challenges posed by ageing.”
An alternative is temporary migration, a trend long evident in Australia. Bring in young workers to do dirty, dangerous, difficult and demeaning jobs and send them away before they become a burden on the state. Temporary migration enables wealthy governments to avoid the costs both of raising and educating children, and of caring for elderly migrants. Of course, it has the opposite effect in the countries from which migrants come.
Temporary visa holders already make up about 10 per cent of the Australian population. But can we claim to be a democracy if our economy relies on the labour of workers who are denied the vote? What kind of “fair go” is it when migrants pay taxes but lack access to essential services like Medicare?
Some temporary migration programs, such as the Pacific labour scheme known as PALM, tie workers to their employers. But if workers can’t change jobs easily, warns Manning, they end up as captive labour, vulnerable to exploitation: “The low wages and exploitation of these workers is a feature, not a bug; it is the only way the sectors can survive.”
Segments of the labour market that depend on temporary migrant workers on tied visas tend to detach themselves from the rest of the economy. This may already be true of horticulture and meat processing in Australia. Governments shouldn’t bail these sectors out with special migration arrangements, says Manning. “The only solution to these shortages is to improve pay and conditions; if the sector cannot do this, it probably should be a smaller part of our economy.”
This hard economic reasoning is not politically palatable. In theory, Australia’s horticultural and meat industries could attract local workers with better pay and conditions and recoup profits though higher prices. But it would mean blocking cheaper imports, and Australian exports would struggle even more against products from lower-wage countries.
Manning’s view is different. He believes industries forced to offer better pay and conditions would find ways of boosting productivity — or fold — and he argues persuasively that low-skilled immigration can hold back innovation. Indeed, a lack of rural workers was historically credited with driving the efficiency of Australian agriculture relative to other nations.
After setting the global scene in his opening section, Manning works his way systematically through the issues. He first considers migrant perspectives: the impact on their lives, their children’s lives and the countries they leave behind. His crisp summary comes as no surprise: “quality of life improves for the average migrant to a high-income country, with bigger gains for those coming from poorer countries.”
Next, he tackles issues of importance to receiving countries — including population, ageing, economic growth, productivity, innovation, employment, public finances and community relations — busting myths along the way. His final section spells out policy options for different types of migration: labour migration, student migration, family migration, asylum seeking and unauthorised migration.
When it comes to numbers, Manning concludes that “the absolute outer limit for a sustained net migration rate might be 1 per cent per annum.” In Australia, population roughly 28 million, this equates to a maximum of 280,000 migrants per year. On the most recent figures, annual net overseas migration to June 2025 was 305,600 people, a little above Manning’s outer limit. But the trend is downward as Covid-era disruptions recede, and the long-term average is within Manning’s acceptable range.
Manning also cautions against pursuing explicit targets for net migration because there are just too many variables. In what could be a reference to Australia’s experience before and after the pandemic, he warns that “too much emphasis on meeting a certain level of net migration every year can lead to a boom–bust cycle that it is important to avoid.”
Angus Taylor has promised to release the opposition’s new immigration policy within weeks. A draft plan leaked under his predecessor proposed restricting migration from regions where listed terrorist organisations are in control — bad luck if you are a refugee fleeing persecution. While Taylor has distanced himself from the document, he says immigration standards have been too low and numbers too high, and he’s vowed to “shut the door on people who don’t adopt our core values and beliefs.”
Beyond performative rhetoric, it’s hard to say what this might look like. Under Section 501 of the Migration Act, the home affairs minister already has sweeping powers to refuse or cancel a visa on character grounds, and all visa applicants must pledge to adhere to Australian Values before entering the country. As former deputy immigration secretary Abul Rizvi argues, testing for these values would either be a box-ticking exercise or else “clog up an already heavily backlogged visa system” at great expense.
If ensuring all migrants adhere to our core values and beliefs is tricky, so too is cutting migrant numbers, even from their historically high levels. While opinion polls show One Nation surging in regional areas, for example, you can bet Taylor won’t propose cancelling working holiday visas or shutting down the PALM scheme, two sources of labour vaued by many conservative voters in rural areas.
Nor, given the workforce shortages in the residential construction industry, is he likely to wind back skilled migration in the building trades. Or starve regional areas of health workers by restricting migration by health professionals. New Zealanders are moving across the Tasman in record numbers, thanks to higher wages, higher growth and better job opportunities, but it would be a bold step to renege on the 1973 Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement that allows Australians and New Zealanders to live and work in each other’s countries.
There is barely any room to cut family migration since the vast bulk of visas are partner visas. It would be draconian indeed to tell Australians not to marry people from overseas, and processing times for partner visas have already blown out to unconscionable levels.
The Liberals could promise to scrap parent migration, which would be a more honest than the current do-nothing policy that has allowed waiting times to balloon to thirty-plus years. But the category is too small to significantly reduce overall numbers. Likewise, the humanitarian program: before the 2025 election the Coalition flagged cutting the intake from 20,000 to 13,500. This is small beer.
What is left? A stricter immigration policy could target international students (and graduates like Hari), overstayers and people on bridging visas. But even here — as Manning puts it in his book title — the options are “difficult.”
In October 2025, the number of new students studying in Australia was down 15 per cent on the previous year, partly thanks to Labor’s massive hike in visa application fees, tougher English-language requirements and restrictions on moving between different visas. Pushing student enrolments down further would invite a massive fight with the higher education sector.
Under Sussan Ley, the Coalition was talking tough about deporting more than 100,000 asylum seekers who’ve had their claims for refugee protection rejected. But the figure is misleading: about two-thirds of them are here lawfully appealing departmental decisions. Based on past statistics from the Administrative Review Tribunal, about one in ten are likely to be successful.
As we see today in the United States and know from our own not-so-distant past (think Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez Solon), mass round-ups and heavy-handed enforcement actions are likely to lead to mistaken arrests and harassing of law-abiding residents. Finding, detaining and removing overstayers would require a massive injection of funds into Home Affairs to boost Border Force staffing and intelligence gathering. This is difficult to reconcile with Angus Taylor’s promise to make government smaller.
Efforts to reduce the number of people on bridging visas, which has blown out from 216,000 to 388,000 over the past six years, present similar problems. Bridging visas are held by would-be-migrants and asylum seekers who have been denied a visa and are challenging that decision. The Administrative Review Tribunal has 129,000 active cases on its books, including 75,000 migration cases and 40,000 involving asylum seekers, but is only funded to finalise 60,000 applications annually.
As Manning writes, “immigration justice is rough justice,” often under-resourced and — because the burden of inadequate processes and bad decisions falls mostly on legal residents from minority communities — effectively discriminatory.
When the Albanese government was first elected in 2022 it set about tackling Australia’s “fundamentally broken” immigration system. In response to an impressive, evidence-based expert review, energetic home affairs minister Claire O’Neill and policy-oriented immigration minister Andrew Giles promised a new migration strategy for Australia.
Their plan was to overhaul skilled migration and then tackle family migration. While much was achieved, reformist zeal evaporated when the High Court ruled indefinite immigration detention unlawful and forced the government to release 148 people, some of whom had served jail time for serious crimes. The media frenzy prompted a cabinet reshuffle, and O’Neill was replaced by Tony Burke, who seems more intent on keeping immigration out of the news than on significant reform.
The politics of immigration is never easy, and Manning’s book helps to explain why crafting coherent policy is so hard. As he writes, “it’s much easier to criticise, to say what you wouldn’t do, than to say what you would do.”
It’ll be interesting to see what Angus Taylor comes up with. The new opposition leader, his shadow ministers and their advisers should make reading Manning’s book their top priority. •
Why Immigration Policy is Hard: And How to Make It Better
By Alan Manning | Polity | $51.95 | 416 pages
