MigrationEssay title: MigrationIntroductionAustralias population reached 20.3 million by the end of June 2005. Of the new permanent additions that numbered 167, 319, Australia gained 47, 171 skilled migrants but lost 29, 621 skilled people through permanent emigration. The problem is plain to see. Australia is one of the fastest growing countries in the world yet it does not have the necessary highly skilled workforce to not only maintain the current economic growth, but as at Jan 2006 it does not have the required workforce to support current requirements in areas such as Health, Engineering and Construction. In response to this current skilled labour crisis, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) has launched a massive Migration Program to maximise the number of employer sponsored skilled migrants.
The problemHowever in a paradoxical twist that sometimes makes a mockery of the skills shortage, it is now harder to gain entry in to Australia as a skilled migrant that it ever has been since the Migration program began in earnest in 1948. State and Federal programs often contradict each other and there is no central database that records skills shortages in relation to company, state or location. A skilled migrant can obtain a working visa and search for work in Northern New South Wales often with little or no success. Yet the same skills that may not be in demand in Ballina can often be the subject of a chronic shortage in Brisbane, yet there is no central agency to control the allocation of work or availability of migrants. As a result dynamic international business opportunity has arisen in the Business of Migration for the skilled workforce. However this business opportunity is not so simple and this can best be explained using Theiss, the Construction and
Sectional Migration.
The work available to Australia
The need of skilled migration is reflected in immigration policy and government action to provide skilled and unskilled labour in Australia. There are about 30 million skilled workers, mainly in skilled skilled work in manufacturing and construction; this is the equivalent amount of foreign guest workers in Australia and the average Australian is about 8.5% [p>50] of international arrivals to Australia [p>18]. By far the largest demand of skilled migration is available to nationals from within Australia, up to 20 million persons of Australian nationality were identified from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Commission.
The demand for skilled migration is so large that the Bureau of Statistics (BSS) released its report 2011 “Foreigners, Work and the Skills of Australian Immigrants” but it was the first to quantify the supply of temporary labour to Australia, or to measure employment by the number of individuals who arrived in the U.S. in 2011 [53] . The results were a major embarrassment for a country that was expected to have an attractive and highly-skilled workforce: The report released by BSS on 21 January showed that the employment figure for skilled labour in the United States in 2011 was 1.4 million workers [56].
The lack of skilled migration and growing pressure on employment to arrive in Australia further shows how low there is in the demand for skilled labour, with many Australian job agencies now relying on imported foreign workers to provide workers for their clients throughout the year. Consequently the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Commission’s (IRCTC) figures show the level of migrants and the percentage of people seeking work for them has been cut in half by 2014. Figure 2 shows how often people are able to identify that their first job application has been accepted on their way to and they are now seeking work in Australia. This is in response to the introduction of an Immigration Act that increased the number of migrants taking up temporary visas from 2,816 during 2014 to 3,200 as early as July 2012.
Figure 2: Estimates of the number of skilled migration workers across Australia in 2011. Source: The Employment Statistics Collection 2010. Download Excel sheet
If the Bureau of Statistics (BSS) data do not show the proportion of persons with labour skill in Australia of these individuals, there are other ways to estimate the figure of the foreign worker in Australia. The Federal Migration Council (FEFC) suggests that the employment figure is more than half a million workers over one year, but a separate estimate is not reported that shows this. This is due to the fact that immigration has been affected by changes in the composition of the workforce, changes to visa requirements, changes to skilled migration policies, or changes in visa requirements in some industries. A better assessment of the labour market in Australia suggests that the number of skilled visa applications processed will only rise after the end of the year, from 28,831 to 34,500 in October 2015 and even if these numbers continue to increase they can still come out of the blue.
There are other measures available for estimating the labour market in Australia that do not include immigrants from elsewhere. The FMCG calculates the number of Australians employed in those other industries by working in all other jobs in the same business, by looking further afield from the employment index for that same source and using the figures from Figure 3 which show a downward trend from 2013 onward to 2011. Figures 2 and 3 show the total number of people working for non-standard contractors and the number of non-standard workers in a particular industry. It looks at the number of people with working knowledge of another industry in the same industry and compares these with other workers from that industry (such as the industry with the smallest workforce level), the total number of people with working knowledge of another worker and the average level of productivity in that industry.
Figure 3: Summary of the employment figures for the nonstandard labour sector. Source