Permanent migration cap raised in Australia

Overview

In order to help Australia address its severe labour shortages, the permanent migration cap was raised for the first time in ten years.

Australian healthcare professionals have been requesting more employees.

The pandemic and Australia’s strict border rules have made a number of sectors’ workforce shortages worse. The government claims that workers from key migration sources for Australia, such as China, India, and the UK, are required to fill these positions. Although there are more than 480,000 open positions nationwide, companies are finding it difficult to fill them because unemployment is at an almost 50-year low. Industries that have been particularly heavily hit include those in hospitality, healthcare, agriculture, and skilled trades.

After peaking at over 190,000 per year in the middle of the 2010s, permanent migration started to decline in 2017 as immigration became a hot topic in politics. However, advocates for business and labour have campaigned for an increase in immigration, as have political rivals.

Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil said, “Our focus is always Australian jobs first… but the impact of Covid has been so severe that even if we exhaust every other possibility, we will still be many thousands of workers short, at least in the short term,” Additionally, the government has pledged A$36m ($24.4m; £21m) for additional workers to help reduce the large backlogs in visa processing.

The number of immigrants to Australia has increased by almost a million since 2016, despite the pandemic’s lowered migration.

More than half of the population in Australia was either born abroad or has an overseas-born parent for the first time, according to the census.