Last week I argued that any plausible Australian government will continue the current high migration approach. Today we will explore the basic makeup of migrants coming into Australia to gain a deeper understanding of the topic.

What did an average year of migration into Australia look like in the last decade? Let’s not worry about the country of origin for today and focus only on the type of visa that migrants have when arriving in Australia.

News stories tend to only report net overseas migration numbers. A typical non-pandemic year sees more people coming into the Australia than people leaving the country.

Australia tends to record positive net migration. As a rule of thumb, two thirds of national population growth come from net overseas migration and one third comes from natural increase (more births than deaths).

The commonly reported net migration numbers of around 215,000 new migrants per year underplay the large number of arrivals.

On average in the last decade 485,000 people came to Australia from overseas every year. About 270,000 people made the move into the opposite direction, resulting in the net growth of 215,000 migrants.

The chart below tells the story quite nicely. The line on the bottom shows the number of people leaving Australia. The line on top was spoken about a lot last year. It shows overseas arrivals rose slowly throughout the 2010s, took a nosedive during the pandemic, just to reach a record high of 737,000 in the 2022/23 financial year.

That spike was often discussed in very polemic terms. We are mad for allowing so many migrants into the country especially in times of a national housing shortage, it was claimed.

If we average out migrant arrivals and compare the four years since the pandemic with the four years prior (see the dotted lines), we realise that we take in fewer migrants now (454,000) than in the past (527,000).

So why did 2022/23 see such extraordinarily high migrant arrivals? Compared to........

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