Tag Archive for: Migration

6.5 million on the move: across the world, migration is surging

Global migration flows have risen to record levels since the pandemic, driven by economic opportunity and conflict, and are facing a widespread policy backlash.

A record 6.5 million people made new homes in advanced nations last year, according to the newly released Migration Outlook of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Migration flows into advanced countries last year were 28 percent higher than in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic.

This does not include the exodus from Ukraine, which about 300,000 people left last year, taking the number of Ukrainians who have fled the war to 5 million.

A further 2.5 million people moved to advanced nations temporarily last year, including students, working holiday-makers and contract labour.

Rising migration is a defining feature of globalisation. The number of people living in a different nation from where they were born has risen from 153 million in 1990, representing 2.9 percent of the global population, to 281 million in 2020, or 3.6 percent of the global population.

In advanced nations, the population share of immigrants has risen from 9 percent to 11 percent over the past decade. Among OECD members, Australia has one of the highest rates of foreign-born residents, at 29 percent. It is surpassed by only Switzerland and Luxembourg.

The incoming Trump administration’s plan for mass deportation of undocumented migrants is part of a global rethink of migration policy, particularly affecting those seeking asylum.

Countries toughening their asylum policies include Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Italy and Britain, while the United States has already strengthened border controls under the Biden presidency.

Official humanitarian migration rose 20 percent to 650,000 last year, however this was only a fraction of demand. Applications from asylum seekers already in a host country rose 30 percent to 2.7 million in 2023, having jumped by more than 90 percent in 2022.

The surge in demand for asylum was greatest in the US, where there were 1.2 million new applications. The biggest source countries were Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba, while applications from Haiti and Nicaragua also soared.

Germany is the second largest destination for asylum seekers. Its 329,000 new applications last year represented a 51 percent jump. Asylum applications in Australia leapt 69 percent last year to 32,550. Iran, Vietnam and India were the biggest source countries.

Several nations have also sought to cap temporary labour migration. Canada is aiming to reduce the population share of temporary migrants from 6.25 percent to 5 percent by 2027. Britain is limiting the ability of temporary workers to bring dependents and has raised the required minimum salary by almost 50 percent. New Zealand has tightened its rules on low-income temporary workers, including by imposing a new English language test.

Australia, Canada and Britain are all implementing policies to slow the flow of international students, aiming to ease the pressure on infrastructure, particularly housing. The number of tertiary students receiving residency permits in Australia last year, 235,000, was 50 percent higher than in 2019, before the pandemic.

Globally, new international student numbers reached 2.1 million last year, which was a third higher than in 2019.

India is the biggest source of migrants globally: 560,000 Indians moved to an OECD country in 2022, an annual increase of more than 30 percent. There were 300,000 Chinese migrants to OECD countries, while migration from Russia more than doubled in 2022, rising to 270,000. Turkey, Israel and Germany were the favoured destinations for Russian migrants.

While governments in the major migration destination countries are responding to the pressure on infrastructure and public services, the OECD says migrants generally have good employment outcomes. It suggests that cutting the number of migrants to relieve the pressure on housing would also reduce the number of skilled construction workers to add to housing supply.

There is very little difference in overall rates of employment across the OECD: 71.2 percent of working-age migrants are employed, compared with 72.0 percent of the native born. In both Australia and the US, the unemployment rate among migrants is lower than for the native born. The ability to tap global labour markets to cover areas of skill shortage is the central economic argument for higher migration flows.

The UN-affiliated International Organisation for Migration reports that advanced nations are home to 80 percent of the world’s 281 million migrants. While that is consistent with the idea of migrants seeking a better life, its annual migration report shows that advanced countries (including Germany, Italy and Britain) and the more affluent emerging nations (such as China, Mexico and Philippines) are 16 of the top 20 origin countries for the world’s migrants. None of the poorest nations is in the top 20.

The vast majority of people displaced by war and poverty do not have a chance to migrate. The International Organisation for Migration estimates there were 35 million refugees in 2022 from conflicts including Syria, Yemen, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and Myanmar. A further 71 million are displaced internally as a result of conflict and violence.

Privatising visa processing is the only practical option

In May 2016, the Turnbull government announced plans to overhaul and automate Australia’s visa-processing system. The initiative involves creating a new digital platform using artificial intelligence and big data technologies.

The Department of Home Affairs, the lead agency overseeing the project, has described the change as the ‘most significant reform to the Australian immigration system in more than 30 years’. Few would disagree that Australia’s visa framework is in desperate need of reform and a technological makeover, but criticism of the government’s approach has gained momentum over recent months (see here, here and here).

It’s an ambitious idea, but Home Affairs’ decision to partner with the private sector to co-design, implement and operate the platform is generating controversy. The department’s private-sector partner will be responsible for the end-to-end processing of all simple and short-term visa applications. To meet this requirement, it will handle data collection and verification on behalf of the government, including health checks, application responses, and character assessments.

If that measure wasn’t contentious enough, the government has also opened the door for its partner to use the ‘global digital platform’ to offer non-visa and non-government services to create new revenue streams. Those revenue streams could include paid advertisements from businesses such as airlines and hotels on client-facing web pages.

Understandably, the initiative has drawn criticism regarding the ethics of visa-processing services being privatised, the potential threat to privacy, the overall costs and the effective undermining of the traditional role of public servants in adjudicating visa applicants.

So why can’t the government just build its own system? In July, Amelia Meurant-Tompkinson and I highlighted the challenges faced by Home Affairs in responding to technological innovation in an ASPI Special Report. Those who participated in our research consistently highlighted that the public sector never has enough resources to invest in all the worthy initiatives and innovations that it develops.

New and emerging information and communications technology is ensuring that technological disruptions continue to increase in frequency. Our research found that the current trajectory of technological developments was drastically reducing the life cycle of ICT investments—particularly when it comes to applications that rely on the underlying ICT infrastructure of servers, networks and storage. So traditional public-sector approaches to technological innovation projects require greater capital expenditure, more often.

The short lifetimes of government contracts and budgets hamper the development of consistent road maps for innovation when uncertainties persist. In recent years, agencies in the home affairs portfolio have initiated numerous innovation projects that have resulted in the development of various stand-alone data repositories and platforms. Those systems continue to have immense corporate and operational value.

Unfortunately, their maintenance and upgrade incur costs that are often, for the most part, unfunded as continuing budget line items. Hence, we often see today’s technological initiative become an unfunded legacy system, whose upkeep is made challenging by the Department of Finance’s rules on operational and capital expenditure.

In this context, privatising the visa system begins to make sense. Home Affairs can drastically reduce the upfront capital expenditure used for purchasing the next-generation visa-processing system. By doing so, it reduces many of the inherent project risks that so often plague large government technology projects. Home Affairs can also shift the risk of ongoing maintenance and operating costs to the provider.

It’s important to note that Home Affairs isn’t just handing over responsibility for visas. It will be outsourcing the platform and the end-to-end processing of visa applications. However, the department will still maintain strict control of the underlying risk algorithms that will be used to make decisions. In short, it will continue to maintain the integrity and security of Australia’s visa system.

Public servants in the Department of Home Affairs have always played a critical role in processing visa applications. These staff have immense experience in managing our national visa and migration risks.

The new system will remove the requirement for these valuable public servants to process low-risk applications and free them to focus their efforts on high-risk cases. There’s been no suggestion that public servants won’t continue to play a critical role in the processing of complex applications and long-stay visas.

Arguably, it would be wonderful if the government had the resources to purchase, maintain and upgrade its own systems. And it would be even better if every visa application could be assessed by a highly skilled Home Affairs official. However, neither of those approaches is practicable.

The new visa reform framework is an innovative 21st century approach to the border security challenge. It engages with the latest thinking in both technology and private–public partnership. That said, continued public discourse and analysis of each phase remains critical to the development of an effective and efficient visa framework. Transparency and accountability should be central tenets throughout the development of the new system.