Edwin Rubenstein’s articles on the immigrant displacement of American workers show that the immigrant share of U.S. employment has, at least in the pre-Trump era, been remorselessly increasing, to the cost of American workers. There are close parallels with this phenomenon in Australia, as shown by Tim Colebatch, somewhat surprisingly because he is an establishment (and “unambiguously pro-immigration”) senior mainstream media hack in Australia. [Yes, there is such a thing as too much immigration, by Tim Colebatch, Inside Story, April 20, 2017]

From 2008 to 2016, the Australian labour market increased by 474,000 full-time jobs but only 74,000 of them went to the Australian-born. That’s just 16% or fewer than one in six.

Foreign-born workers, “and their families”, Colebatch notes, find it absurdly easy to gain permanent residency and with it a ticket to Australia’s generous welfare, health and education systems, our clean air and water, efficient public transportation, and other government benefits, without having contributed a tax-paying lifetime to financing them.

As Colebatch notes, employers warmly embrace foreign workers—wage underpayment is rife and there are no training costs for off-the-shelf foreign skilled workers.

Colebatch concludes that Australia has followed, with similar disastrous outcomes for the native-born, “the US model of importing skilled labour and leaving the young in the rustbelt to scrape by as best they can” and that migrant workers “do not generate enough demand to replace the jobs they have taken”. “What is clear”, he says, “is that our current system is not working for those who were born and raised here”. It is not, he says, “anti-migrant, let alone racist, to say that that is an outrageous failure of policy”.

Temporary work visas, like student visas and ‘refugee’ immigration., are all about getting a foot in Australia’s residency door, melting the multicultural hearts of government officials who wave in the foreign workers under the banner of ‘Diversity’ and not wanting to be seen as racist, whilst the cheap labor lobby pockets the proceeds.

Rubenstein notes that immigrant job-theft in the US is “a development apparently only tracked by VDARE.com” and Colebatch’s final observations would not be out of place on VDARE.com, viz. that the same phenomenon in Australia is “generally ignored in the policy debate” because “many on the left and centre-left seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that there can be such a thing as too much immigration”.

All credit to Colebatch for looking honestly at the migrant employment data and going where the politically correct fear to tread.

Phil Shannon writes from Adelaide, South Australia, and describes himself as a “VDARE.com supporter (from the ‘Alt-Left’!)”