MacroBusiness
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at 12:40 pm on July 20, 2021 | 12 comments
Labor has called on the federal government to lift the pay floor on temporary ‘skilled’ visa holders, claiming that it is mugging Australians of job opportunities and contributing to the nation’s low wage growth:
Aussies are missing out on pay rises because employers are able to fill gaps with cheap overseas workers, according to the federal opposition who are crying out for government action.
Australian workers are being denied long-awaited pay rises because the minimum wage paid to temporary skilled migrants has been frozen for eight years, it is claimed.
MacroBusiness
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at 12:15 am on May 27, 2021 | 8 comments
The skilled stream is the largest component of Australia’s permanent migration program accounting for 61% (110,000) of Australia’s 179,000 permanent migrants (including the humanitarian intake) before COVID hit in 2019:
Australia’s permanent migrant intake is dominated by ‘skilled’ visas.
Empirical survey data from the Department of Home Affairs’
Continuous Survey of Australia’s Migrants shows that Australia’s permanent migration program is failing to attract highly paid and highly skilled migrants to Australia.
As show in the next summary table, recent permanent migrants experienced higher rates of unemployment and are paid less than the general population:
MacroBusiness
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Mark Lucas, the chairman of the peak lobby for education agents working in Australia called the
“reinstate the link between international students and immigration” to reinvigorate the edu-migration industry.
“Australia can’t survive without migration. Our birth rate is getting to below replacement levels”…
“So why not have students who you can assess while they are studying? And when they’ve finished, you can say, ‘yes, you are educated and yes, you have assimilated into the culture of the country’”…
He said Australian vice-chancellors should lobby the government much harder to open the door again to students…