To help remedy the situation I decided to write about migration myself. Since I am a migrant myself, I know how the system works as I went through the system myself. I also know that not all migrants are going through the same system as I did. There are many types of migrants, and their experience and reality of migration varies dramatically. I personally saw different kind of migrants with completely different situation and prospects compare to myself.
Couple of years ago I already wrote about this topic once, but it was poorly structured and worded, so I decided to write it anew.
I will be being from the very beginning. There were at least two distinct waves of migration since mid 90s. There were more before that, but I cannot judge them much as they happened way before I was born. They say back then (50s -60s) you could get 10 pounds for moving to Australia or even get a free land for your farm somewhere in the outback. In my time (2000s) you had to pay department of immigration $2500 just to look at your application. The only explanation to that is that application is 20+ pages long and there is lots of supporting documents to process.
First Wave - Skilled Migration - mid 90s to late 2000s
First wave that I was part of was skilled migration. Back then people complained that there are not enough doctors in Australia and you had to book one month in advance to see a GP. The solution they came up with was to convince foreign doctors to come to Australia and so Skilled Migration was born.
In addition to doctors, government decided to add other professions that are in short supply, for example accountants as well as IT professionals because IT was new and hot back then and government did not want to fall behind in tech. Other professions were available too, but they had fewer points awarded thus pushing your approval bar higher. There was a many pages long list of all recognised professions, each with different number of points available. It's likely still available on immigration website.
To simplify it worked as follows: you education and profession decided you immigration prospects. If you have a profession a country really needs (doctor, accountant), your migration will be relatively easy and streamlined. If you have somewhat average profession, they could let you in if you had a lot of qualification and experience. If you had a profession the country does not need as we already have plenty of locals doing it, they you will be told Australia is closed permanently and you cannot migrate here, unless it is to spend your money here and come back home. Blocked for immigration professions include ecology experts, teachers, lawyers (unless from Common Law country), fishers (locals do that enough already) and more.
There were other requirements too, like health (no-disabilities), English language proficiency and more. Finally, there was age. Government did not want people close to retirement to come here and almost immediately fall on government pensions. People between 18 and 25 got maximum points and then every 5 years will cut 5 points off your total, making passing it harder and harder. Cut off age was 45 and if you are older than that, too bad, Australia is closed for you permanently.
One subtype of this program was student migration. If you do not have the desired profession but willing to learn it, you can come and study in Australian University and after graduation you can get a skilled visa with permanent resident status with naturalisation pathway. All that has to be paid out of pocket and on double rate compared to locals.
All in all, it was rather realistic, even cynical system that will bring the skills country needs, while filter out those who are not needed here. No education beyond school, you cannot come here. Uni degree but in ecology or liberal arts, the same as for school only. Too old, also no go. Disabled, same. Back that I did not care for any of that, I qualified and could change drab cold dictatorial Russia with crazy Putin and his equally crazy supporters for a tropical paradise of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. I am pretty sure I was not the only one who thought this way.
Despite strict requirements, applicants were many. Somewhat well-off and educated inhabitants of various dictatorships like China and Russia were very eager to escape their oppressive nations. Thus, demand was always higher than available quotas.
Overtime as country was managed to plug its shortages of certain skills, it could afford to be even more selective, and requirements got even tougher. Higher language skills, more points and so on. It's probably much harder to get this visa now compared to when I applied and got it.
Selection criteria were tough, but you could estimate in advance if you will meet them or not. If you do not qualify, you will not bother going through with it or try a different country instead. If you qualify then you can plan ahead and be fairly certain you will get your permanent resident status and naturalisation in the end. After naturalisation you will be considered a citizen (national) of your new country with the same rights and responsibilities as those who were born there. Now it's your new home and you are not foreign anymore. Doing that sometimes will deprive you of your original citizenship, making it impossible to travel back freely, but most migrants will naturalise anyway.
Life on people who went through Skilled migration program was quite cozy for the most part. Once you are approved, your status is the same as that of locals. Since program is geared towards selecting only well adaptable people with professions in demand, the new migrants on average did much better than locals. That will probably not be so if you only measure people in compatible professions, say local accountants against migrant accountants.
Nonetheless I knew a migrant family on one accountant income, who had 2 cars and 2 investment properties and one daughter. Back then Migrant Dream or Australian Dream was real and well and alive. I missed out on all that thanks to Financial Crisis of 2008 and Ben Bernanke personally, if I was born earlier, I would have had that as well.
It all ended with a financial Crisis of 2008. Not program itself, it got it requirements toughened to really reduce intake of skilled migrants. However, by that point Australia had enough professionals to fill in skilled work no one knew how to do. Now they needed people to do work no one wanted to do.
Second Wave, Unskilled Migration
If first wave of migration was about filling the jobs no one knew how to do, then second (post-crisis) wave was about filling the jobs no one wanted to do. Simple unskilled but physically demanding roles like cleaning, hauling cargo, construction (in Russia at least) and so on. Low pay and unpleasant working conditions make these roles unappealing to pretty much everyone. How to fill these roles, by using those who for one or another reason have no other choice.
Demand for unskilled labor gave rise to a new kind of migrant. Lack of uni level skills was not the only difference with the first wave migrant. Second wave migrant was a complete inversion of the first wave one. Unskilled migrants were very poor, hardly knew much English beyond simple phrases, often were rather stupid and/or unable to adapt to a new environment and finally had dubious legal status.
Unlike skilled migrants, unskilled ones did not have a dedicated legal pathway visa program for them. Some were refugees, other came of tourist visas and overstay, others had no visas at all. Unlike skilled migrant visa, with tourist visa one has no legal right to work in Australia. With no visa at all one had no right to even be in Australia. It is them who are the illegal migrants; people so like to hate.
However, these were exact traits that made them desirable for their employers. Countries like Australia have strong labor laws, guaranteeing workers protection, relatively good wages together with safe and sound working conditions. All these things cost employers a lot of money and limit their power in the workplace. Bewielded by these rules, some unscrupulous employers would like to circumvent these laws in some way. Second wave unskilled migrants provide them with just the way to do it.
Uneducated unskilled foreign worker is unlikely to know that labor laws even exist, much less what is written in them. That make it easy to exploit them by paying them much less then minimum wage and making them work in hazardous environments. Even if they knew what minimum wage is, their own precarious legal status will prevent them from taking it to court. While court may award them the salary they were underpaid and other compensations, it will also likely order their deportation due to violating visa conditions or not having visa at all. Also, unlike first wave migrants, those of the second one have no access to welfare and have to work to survive. Because of that these illegal unskilled workers continue being overworked and underpaid by their employers.
Because unskilled worker migrants are typically also illegal migrants, they cannot simply enter the country normally using planes and airports like skilled workers do. Because of that they rely on smugglers who know ways around rules. Smugglers arrange for them to be shipped on some boats and such. The infamous boat people are likely these types of migrants.
Though saying migrants rely on smugglers is somewhat misleading. Its smugglers who often advertise their services, luring unsuspected people towards life of near involuntary servitude. Smugglers could also screen future migrants to pick more obedient ones and turn down more unruly or knowledgeable ones.
Even after migrants are in the country, their smugglers likely continue as their handlers. Unskilled workers do not have enough ability to find their way around the country; this and their legal status prevents them from safely interacting with people around them or police. Thus smugglers/handlers do it for them. Handlers arrange for accommodation, food and work for unskilled migrants. Said accommodation is likely not much better than for similarly unskilled workers in Dubai (see here), but here they cannot show it as that violates Australian labor laws, but not Dubai labor laws.
Because of the abovementioned laws, unskilled workers do not work for Aussie companies directly but rather through some shady employment company, set up by their handlers. Such a company subcontracts their work to Aussie employers for prices below minimum wage, collects their pay and later pay actual migrant workers much less than what they received for their work, pocketing the difference.
A person from a country that lives on 1 dollar a day will likely be happy to be paid five times that much without thinking how little it is in the country they are in. They cannot go out and interact with people in Australia so they cannot know how much a dollar buys in Australia. Their handlers will also be happy with how high the difference is between what they pay their smuggled migrants and what get from Aussie employers who use their labour. Smugglers are the real winner of this arrangement.
Unlike skill migrants that take work for which locals do not have skills, the unskilled migrants actually take work from equally unskilled locals. School grads with no tafe or uni degree are likely to be affected the most. Due to how labor law works employers actually prefer to unskilled migrant to a local because they could pay a migrant less than minimum wage and treat them like shit, while local in the same situation will eventually take them to court and win. Locals know labor laws and that is why employers prefer foreigners who do not.
That said if unskilled migrants were completely removed, most businesses will likely close rather than begin employing locals. Years of paying less and neglecting safety and other regulation will likely make complying with laws too expensive to be profitable.
I personally did not meet anyone from the second wave in Australia, but I have seen how people in compatible situation lived and worked in Russia and it was not pretty. There are people who live in the same construction site they are working at, surrounded by their work tools, toxic paints and other chemicals. Their documents are confiscated by their employers, and they cannot go anywhere out of fear of being arrested for being illegal and deported back to Tajikistan (most of them are from this country, but some are from other Central Asian or post-Soviet states).
Thanks to that knowledge of unskilled worker reality in Russia I could reasonably reconstruct and estimate what happens with unskilled illegal migrants in Australia. After all the idea that government out of sheer generosity and kindness of their hearts gives migrants free humane accommodation and everything while neglecting locals, just like Murdoch press claims, is a pure fantasy to rile up nationalistic sentiment. Unskilled migrants live in terrible conditions and work for money you will rightfully consider a sick joke or an insult. People who bring them here do so to take advantage of this fact.
Conclusion
All things considered in our current economy being on a dole over competing with unskilled migrants makes the most sense for pretty much any local. That is why being on dole should be normalised and it should be transformed into a permanent citizen allowance/dividend rather than temporary (in theory) arrangement for those looking for work. Mutual obligations and job search requirements should be dropped, and payment should be reimagined as permanent citizen allowance. The UBI solution.
However, just like age of skilled workers came to an end, the end is coming for unskilled ones as well. Automation will soon replace many menial unskilled jobs, making illegal unskilled migrants obsolete. Unlike the legal skilled migrants before them, they will not be able to fall on the dole and will either be deported or starve to death. We will or course soon forget all about them as we embrace our fully automated future.
Extra: How All That related to War in Ukraine
One final bit of insight as to why conservatives support Russian war in Ukraine. War produces refugees who flee destruction caused by war. Since it's an emergency they have to leave with next to nothing. Once abroad these clueless foreigners with no local knowledge or language ability will very likely become easy prey for the same unscrupulous employment companies that used to smuggle boat people. These smuggler/handlers now have extra 9 million strong pool of refugees to work with, enough to man every unskilled work out there. To top this pool up even further Putin constantly shells Ukrainian civilian targets instead of military ones. Dead soldiers will not make good unskilled underpaid workers but civilians whose homes were destroyed will.
On the other hand, Zelenski refuses to help this effort out by limiting Ukrainian shelling to military targets and infrastructure. Putin and Trump want Zelenski removed because they hope a different leader will target homes instead of valuable military equipment and will add many more millions to the already large pool of refugees, this time from Russian side of the border. Putin does not need them in Russia as they tend to protest his rule and demand fair election in which they could elect Navalny to replace Putin. Putin is tired of using riot police and communal trucks blockades to keep them off his Kremlin office.
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