Accretive
Official figures show that migration into Australia last year included 35,000 workers who were sponsored by employers, 32,100 skilled independent visas, 31,000 visas nominated by states and territories, 34,000 regional visas and 40,000 partner visas.
One wonders what’s happening in those states and regional categories? Who is getting how much in their brown paper bags and for what?
It’s a paradox. As immigration increases so does the economy because it’s a services-driven beast.
But they’re onto us these immigrants. They flock to the usual handful of cities where there’s more opportunities for work and new business, and also less discrimination.
So housing in these cities get squeezed.
Now it’s a political issue and the coalition claims they’re going to drastically cut immigration, putting them at odds with the business sector.
Worse case scenario; the economy stalls, consumption drops, inflation spikes as vendors attempt to recover profits by increasing prices, housing defaults go through the roof, the banking sector collapses and the economy is a wipe out.
My view is that it needs a reset anyway to flush away all the bullshit propped up by government pandering to any fuckwit with a keyboard and a brain fart.
Back to immigrants. My observation is that, yes, they do have drive and they often start businesses that help drive consumption and therefore the economy.
However they generally don’t like unmanageable business risk and therefore their businesses are in the services sector where their only risk is that the economy tanks.
If they work hard then they reap the benefits of their labour, so long as the economy stays flush.
You don’t see them, for example, jumping into tech startups where you can work hard and not make a mistake, and still not be successful.
Hence immigration is in my mind prosaically accretive to the economy. It either exists or it doesn’t, and we’d cope either way.
I guess I’m one of the few people who uses “accretive” as a financial pejorative. All I see is “boring”.
offshore westerly 