Skilled migrants help our economy grow. They are younger, likelier to be in work and better educated than the average Australian, and thus boost participation, productivity and population. Skilled migrants today meet strict criteria related to in-demand occupations, skills and English. Reforms during the past five years have tightened eligibility to the point where Australia now accepts only the best and brightest.

In 2011-12, seven of the top 10 permanent migration source countries were Asian and India became our largest source of permanent migrants for the first time. This immigration trend is deepening our economic engagement with the fastest growing region in the world. The SPA/SPP aim to sever that connection.

Divergence and the SPA/SPP look at the world in terms of systems and measurement. They have assumed the high moral ground by saying that science is on their side. But this ignores the fact that science, by definition, doesn’t supply value judgments.

Science provides no justification for or against a particular policy. What we have here is a battle of underlying value judgments. When Divergence and others ask what positive things humanity has done, and refer to a record of wastage and destruction, remember that they don’t regard human life as a positive value.

When Dick Smith and Flightcentre boss Graeme Turner, the funders of the anti-people movement speak at the national press club, they will have an opportunity to go in to more detail about the sociobiological roots of their extremist philosophy.

Shockadelic,

Large families are not a problem in Australia from a population point of view. The overall fertility rate has been slightly below replacement level since 1976, so the relatively few large families are balanced by lots of people who don’t have children or only have one. I am sceptical about whether large families produce more creative people. There are many reports in the literature showing a negative correlation between large family size and/or high birth order and high educational performance, although there is dispute about the relative contributions and the causes. The negative correlation held even when the researchers controlled for family income, parental age, and other factors.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp1713.pdf

“In contrast, we find very large and robust effects of birth order on child education. To get a sense of the magnitude of these effects, the difference in educational attainment between the first child and the fifth child in a five-child family is roughly equal to the difference between Black and White educational attainment calculated from the 2000 census [in the US]. We augment the education results by using earnings, whether full-time employed, and whether had a birth as a teenager as additional outcome variables. We also find strong evidence for birth order effects with these other outcomes, particularly for women.”

http://www.econ.ucla.edu/people/papers/Black/Black493.pdf

Your real concern ought to be that the policies promoted by people like Malcolm King are leading to the crowding out of fertility in the existing population, so that people become increasingly unwilling to even replace themselves. See these maps for a number of European and East Asian countries that show a strong negative correlation between population density and fertility rates.

http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/another-tale-of-two-maps

Paddy King,

The concept that immigrants “help the economy grow” is just immigration propaganda and misinformation.

Do you believe in propaganda and misinformation?

From the research report “Economic Impacts of Migration and Population Growth” report produced by the Productivity Commission

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/9438/migrationandpopulation.pdf

“However, the Commission considers it unlikely that migration will have a substantial impact on income per capita and productivity because:
– the annual flow of migrants is small relative to the stock of workers and population
– migrants are not very different in relevant respects from the Australian-born population and, over time, the differences become smaller.”

So income per capita and productivity remains the same, but population grows.

Not good, not good.

Unless you are likely to financially gain from an increase in consumption because of an increase in population.

But the bad news there is that the increase in consumption is only temporary, because resources inevitably run out.

So the 1% can gain financially now, but not later on.

Paddy,

It is not anti-human or racist to object to an airplane being overloaded, even if the last lot of people to get on board are foreigners or black people. Scientific or engineering knowledge has policy implications. You are ignoring the evidence of serious problems on a whole host of environmental fronts, both globally and here in Australia. I won’t list them or the links once again. Even if some problems turn out to be exaggerated or have good technological solutions, there will be plenty of others to do us in. It is not just a question of unproductive crops as in the 1960s, which was largely solved by the Green Revolution. Our agricultural productivity can really tank without cheap oil and phosphate, or if some of the nastier possibilities from climate change come to pass. Eroding our safety margins with high population and economic growth is foolish in the extreme and possibly treasonable.

If all that skilled migration is so beneficial to the economy, you need to explain why GDP per capita has been fairly stagnant since 2006. It was growing much faster in the previous 20 years.

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2014/03/australian-gdp-in-detail-2/

Skilled migrants bring family members who aren’t skilled with them, and all compete with existing residents. There are also claims that the skilled list is being gamed for the sake of the universities.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/accountant-glut-prompts-skilledmigrant-list-rethink/story-e6frgcjx-1226812384269

According to Roy Morgan Research, real unemployment is now 10.6% and underemployment is 9.5%. Unlike you, I believe that a nation state and its elite have an obligation to look after its citizens and permanent residents, not just the other way around.

Even if there were a modest gain to ordinary people (and I don’t think that there is), it would be more than soaked up by higher housing costs and balanced by more misery from crowding and congestion. The median house price in Sydney has now passed $800,000. The demographer Joel Kotkin points out that the vast majority of people around the world prefer single family housing with some privacy and a back yard. High density is also poison for fertility rates.

http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/00806-city-leaders-are-love-density-most-city-dwellers-disagree

So far there has not been one intelligent, critical article of Ms Wilshire’s article. This is extraordinary as it demolishes the facile anti-immigration policies of the SPA/SPP (same thing).

The SPA/SPP live in the world of Camelot, of runes, where divination and the personification of data to “prove” an ideological point coupled with radical assertions of population growth and rising sea levels - to name just a few - have produced “media facts”.

These “media facts” congregate and become “proofs” for a radical vision of a dystopian future. In fact, much of their evidence comes from News Corp newspapers, the ‘masters of media facts’, whom they loath. Their Facebook pages are testament to racist hate language against minorities in Australia.

In fact, when they encounter citations and arguments, such as those I’ve listed above, or throughout the articles I or others have written on OLO and elsewhere, they duck, weave or ignore them. Or they become highly selective in copying and pasting quotations. Note Divergence has suddenly dropped her obsession with the 2006 PC report.

The SPP/SPA - supported by radical anti-immigration forces in America - want to turn establish trade barriers – a new Fortress Australia - and reduce Australia’s population to between 7-12 million by 2050. While most of the anti-people lobby are IT specialists who think the Cultural Revolution involved a lot of dancing, their fear campaigns of a Malthusian world a-brim with ravenous people (usually Africans and Chinese), is redolent of Soylent Green or ZPG.

Much of the realpolitik of their campaigns involves protesting against alternative power sources such as windfarms, building affordable apartments for young people in our cities and inner suburbs, and appropriating nature as a an anvil to try pulverize criticism.

I have alerted my contacts in the Canberra press gallery to ask Smith and Turner why the SPA is using tax payers membership fees to run political campaigns for the SPP and what exactly is the relationship between these anti-immigrant groups and NumbersUSA and the Social Contract.

Sulloway isn't the only voice in that choir, Paddy.

Even if you refute his findings, anecdotal observation/common sense alone would indicate children with siblings will have a more "robust" psychosocial development.

They aren't growing up *alone* in a world of adults.

They must deal with the simultaneous development of *other* children, with different personalities/temperaments/interests/skills.

They learn to communicate, share and play with, have disputes with and care for other children.

The time to do this in school is minimal and comes only after 5-6 years of home life.
The home life of a sibling do not revolve around him or her *exclusively*.

This will better prepare them for real life as an adult, where they must live and work with many different people.

"now accepts only the best and brightest"

In the skilled category, maybe.
Not the *other* third.
Why do we need them?

"This immigration trend is deepening our economic engagement with the fastest growing region in the world"

Is it? How?
"Asia" isn't a "region" economically or culturally.
It is many different, unrelated social systems.

Who cares who's "fastest" growing?
Focusing there means competing with many other wolves salivating over the same lamb.

Why not focus on South America or Eastern Europe instead?
They also offer "opportunities" and their people are more closely related to us, making "connections" much easier and causing less noticeable demographic change here.

Divergence, from your link: "there is a trade off between child quantity and ‘quality’ (Becker, 1960; Becker and Lewis, 1973), where child ‘quality’ is proxied by educational outcomes"

And education is all that matters, right?

Some of the world's most famous movers and shakers had little or no education or their field of mastery in no way benefited from it.

"Your real concern ought to be that the policies promoted by people like Malcolm King are leading to the crowding out of fertility in the existing population"

I am concerned about both internal and external impacts.

But we can't have many more native births while the immigration avalanche continues.
That must stop first.