Skilled Migrants or Guest Workers?
The Federal government has launched a campaign to fill 20,000 new places in the skilled migration program. This comes after Federal Treasurer Peter Costello ruled out the use of ‘guest workers’ as being ‘inconsistent with Australian values,’ despite being an obvious way of meeting both skilled and unskilled labour shortages and an effective form of development assistance for source countries. Of course, we already have a de facto guest worker scheme in the form of European backpackers on working holiday visas, so a new guest worker visa category is not such a great leap.
What surprises me is that very few people see the guest worker concept as also being an obvious solution to the high cost of child care and the work-family balance issue. Creating a special visa category for live-in amahs from South East Asia could dramatically lower the cost of child care and domestic help and promote higher labour force participation rates.
posted on 16 August 2005 by skirchner
in Economics
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Comments
Again, this kind of thinking is pure financial rationalism - examining the effects on the balance sheets of fully monetarised economic agents rather than taking account of politico-economic spillovers. Guest workers usually need health care, law enforcement, children to be educated etc. Nannies would be just the thin edge of the wedge.
And then there are the politico-cultural considerations. A nation is not just a service station for itinerant economoids. It is a place where citizenship is nurtured and developed.
Guest workers, lacking citizenship, would have little or no loyalty to the state. They would become an official caste with all the moral deformations that go with that benighted status.
This system has been tried in both Europe (“Gastarbeiter”) and America (“undocumented workers”). The results have been not altogether pleasing to those native and adoptive citizens who are not in any special need for nannies or exotic cuisine.
To cover any unskilled labour shortages we might have Australia should try to take in some more Melanesians. They like Australian because they are Christians, play rugby and we share a history in the Pacific War.
If the Australian economy needs more skilled labour then we should entice more high IQ people here as immigrants, increase the training of our own smarties and invest in robot R&D.
We should also stop pissing money down the drain of the realty market, which mainly enriches traders at the expense of producers. That would encourage smart women to have more children, because they would not be forced to become mortgage slaves.
These plans are on the nose politically, as shown by the popular hostility to lax immigration in both America. A canny cultural populist like Howard would not touch this idea with a forty foot pole. Is I-E really so tone-deaf to issues of political culture that he could seriously contemplate such a scheme in the present climate?
Posted by Jack Strocchi on 08/16 at 11:59 PM