Daggett (my apologies for unintentionally mispelling your name)

You ask what's my secret agenda? This is a well-worn tactic when the argument is running against you.

I am neither "peddling propaganda" nor advancing "career prospects"; but I should not have to defend my self from these baseless personal slurs. Stick to the issues.

I am pleased to note that you "...will return in the near future soon in order to dissect your summary dismissal of the evidence I presented earlier."

After all, I'm defending the status quo on migration which obviously has bi-partisan political support and a track record of success. You are the one challenging the current policy, so let's hear a logical and reasoned argument other than the discredited migration-causes-all-our-ills one.

Spikey,

From the April 2006 Australian Government Productivity Commission report on Economic Impacts of Migration and Population Growth:

• Economic gains accrue mostly to skilled migrants and capital owners (page 151): "The distribution of these benefits varies across the population, with gains mostly accrued to the skilled migrants and capital owners. The incomes of existing resident workers grow more slowly than would otherwise be the case."

• Hourly wages will drop slightly under high immigration (page 161).

• These results are consistent with research both in Australia and overseas (page 161).

• Environmental impacts are likely to impose a drag on productivity and living standards, but the details are "too hard" to quantify (page 122).

The reason for the bipartisan policy is that the elite, who donate heavily to the major political parties, benefit from population growth, at least to the point where collapse is staring them in the face, as in China. They get bigger markets, high real estate prices (since there are more people, but God isn't making any more land), and a cheap, compliant workforce, much of which is of prime age and already trained at someone else's expense. The chanting about the need for migrants goes on while Australia has the highest unemployment rate for disabled people in the OECD.

Divergence,

Nice try, but a few selective quotations from a 402 page document won’t pass as detached analysis.

Let’s compare what you quote from the Report with quotes I found on the same pages:

• You say: Economic gains accrue mostly to skilled migrants and capital owners (page 151): "The distribution of these benefits varies across the population, with gains mostly accrued to the skilled migrants and capital owners. The incomes of existing resident workers grow more slowly than would otherwise be the case."

The Report says: “Migration has a neutral to mildly positive effect on overall living standards…Positive contributions arise from the increase in labour supply, the changing skill composition due to migration, and a consumption price effect.”

• You say: Hourly wages will drop slightly under high immigration (page 161).
The Report says: “… migration has relatively small but generally benign economic effects.”

• You say: Environmental impacts are likely to impose a drag on productivity and living standards, but the details are "too hard" to quantify (page 122).

The Report says: “The annual growth in the mining and agriculture, forestry and fishing industries that is attributable to migration is likely to be in the order of only 0.56 and 0.76 percentage points, respectively.”

According to Professor Sloan, the Productivity Commissioner who supervised the Report, 'Migration contributes to the economy in many ways. As well as the upskilling of the workforce, economies of scale and the development of new export markets would further add to the economic benefits of migration. Environmental issues associated with a larger population would need to be managed, however'.
http://www.pc.gov.au/projects/study/migrationandpopulation/docs/finalreport/mediarelease

Overall, the Productivity Report showed that migrants tend to raise Australian living standards because Australia’s migrants are more highly skilled than the locally-born population on average and more concentrated in working age groups.

A more recent Productivity Commission Report (Feb 2008) concluded that Australia may particularly benefit from migrants building social and business networks that improve the quality of information flowing between countries and lower the costs of international trade and investment. 

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/76265/migraton.pdf

Spikey,

You are also being selective in ignoring social class, as well as quality of life issues. It is quite possible for mass migration to have a neutral or even mildly positive per capita economic effect without having any significant benefits (or even having a negative effect) on ordinary people. It depends on how the gains and losses are distributed. If Australia's billionaires get a few billion more, it may raise the nation's mean wealth, but it won't make me any better off. I may even be worse off, because the people who have the wealth can use it to buy my government.

There is a strong correlation between mass migration and social inequality, although it is not the only factor. See this graph by Nicholas Gruen showing the proportion of total income going to the top 1% of the population over time for various countries.

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2006/08/24/policy-and-perhaps-culture-matter-for-income-distribution/

In looking at the US data, note that mass migration was cut off in 1921 and stayed near zero net until 1965. See also the links (especially to Prof. Borjas work) in

http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/070129_nd.htm

I doubt that many Australians are jumping for joy that their housing costs have doubled or tripled in terms of the median wage over the past 35 years. Nor do most of them enjoy urban consolidation. Robert Cummins' study for the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index showed increased happiness at lower urban densities, even if people had less money.

You are also skating over some very serious environmental issues. Per capita energy consumption has actually gone down in the US and Western Europe since the 1970s. Total increases in these countries are entirely due to population growth and, as I recall, mostly due to population growth in Australia. See

http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0806/fig_tab/climate.2008.44_F1.html

The Productivity Commission report of January 2006 was clearly trying to paint immigration in the best positive light, however, the underlying data, even in terms of the flawed measures of inflation and the Gross Domestic Production (GDP) (whether per capita or not) did not bear that out.

The small increase in GDP income was, in fact, less than the increase in anticipated hours worked, so, in one absolute sense the Productivity Commission shows that we will be worse off.

Still, if we took that document at face value without reading it too carefully we could probably tolerate high immigration.

However, as Divergence has pointed out, income has clearly been skewed as a result of immigration.

A more critical flaw in this document, which it shares with just about all other mainstream reporting of economic performance, is its unquestioning acceptance of measures of inflation as reflecting the true increase in the cost of living and of the GDP.

The GDP's originator Simon Kuznets devised it for the US Government for an entirely different purpose in the 1930's for what it has since been used. (Geoff Davies wrote of this on page 5 or 6 of "Economia")

The GDP is flawed because it counts all economic activity as positive. Thus the economic activity necessitated by the reconstruction following the bushfires of early 2003 was counted by the GDP as adding to our prosperity. Also, the GDP ignores the contribution of economic activity that does not entail money changing hands.

It is for these reasons that Simon Kuznets warned against the use of the per capita GDP to measure prosperity, but his warnings were ignored by establishment economists including those attempting to justify high immigration.

It is my view that our incomes have massively declined as a result of both immigration and the adoption of the neo-liberal economic dogma. I wrote of this in my article "Living standards and our material prosperity" of 6 Sep 2007 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6326&page=0 and found that this was in accord with the expereinces of most who contributed to the discussion.

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The House of Lords in the UK recently put the claimed economic benefits of immigration under the microscope and found that they had no basis (see "House of lords tells UK government to limit immigration" of 11 Apr 2008 at http://candobetter.org/node/407 ) and even that did not take adequate account of the effect on the environment accourding to Britain's Optimum Population Trust (see "House of Lords’ immigration report 'forgets environment'" of 2 Apr 2008 at http://candobetter.org/node/395).

Intuition and common sense would tell us that increasing numbers of people beyond the optimum level which Australia has long ago exceeded, will reduce the per-capita access to natural resources and, hence, our quality of life.

Only by resort to flawed measures such as the GDP can it be viewed otherwise.

Less intuitive are the diseconomies of scale resulting from higher populations. Once we have suprassed an optimium poplation level, we find that construction the necessray infrastgructure to supply roads, public transport, health, electricity, water, education, etc, cost more and not less per capita.

So, the reduction in living standards due to less individual access to natural resources is compounded.