Labor’s new migration rhetoric doesn’t bode well for sensible policymaking

When Angus Taylor announced the opposition’s proposal for deep cuts to migration last week, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke called it “a war on the skilled migrants who Australians need”.

Just like after Pauline Hanson’s “monoculture” speech, Labor ministers were quick to go on the attack. But their eagerness demonstrates the rhetorical bind the government finds itself in: comfortable defending migration and multiculturalism, but also desperate to cut through with voters who think migration is too high.

Burke’s long-delayed National Press Club address in September was an effort to solve this dilemma by giving ministers a migration crackdown they can feel comfortable with. The new message: migration is good for Australia but has stayed too high because of a new villain: people “visa hopping”. This is a new name for a longstanding cohort of migrants who stay in Australia for extended periods across multiple temporary visas.

Not so long ago, Labor saw these people very differently — and its rhetorical shift is not a promising sign for sensible policymaking.

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In the government’s new rhetoric, people “visa hopping” are doing the wrong thing: extending their stay longer than they should and thwarting Australia’s visa system. Burke announced major changes that will make it harder for international students to extend their stay in Australia, and an expansion of immigration detention to enforce departures for those whose visas expire. Speaking to a conference of migration agents in early October, Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs Julian Hill made the point even more sharply, speaking of temporary migrants who “believe they have some God-given right to hop around from visa to visa”.

There are some important facts underlying this narrative. Since the pandemic, temporary migrants have been staying in Australia longer than government forecasts expected. The number of temporary visa holders in Australia has been trending upwards for years, while the number of permanent visas available stays static — leaving more migrants uncertain about their future visa options, or stuck in years-long application queues.

But one phrase in Hill’s speech hints at a very different way of approaching this issue: a reference to this population as the “permanently temporary”. That term gained currency from Peter Mares’ influential 2016 book Not Quite Australian: How Temporary Migration Is Unsettling the Settler Society, referring to people kept in limbo on temporary visas by an unfairly designed migration system.

In 2020, Kristina Keneally, as Labor’s shadow home affairs minister, called this “a new and damaging form of social and economic exclusion”. And in government, Labor’s actions matched its words. Reforms ensured every temporary work visa holder sponsored by an employer would have a pathway to permanent residence. A direct pathway to citizenship ended the indefinite limbo faced by thousands of migrants from New Zealand. More than 25,000 refugees on temporary protection visas were moved to permanent visas, ending the farcical ritual of three-year renewals.

In 2023, then-immigration minister Andrew Giles touted the government’s achievements in addressing “the growing number of those permanently temporary in Australia” by more broadly promoting “permanent residency”. But this month we had Hill now speaking proudly of having “taken strong steps to wind back permanently temporary visa holders”. These were no longer victims of a mismanaged system, but culprits. The Coalition has taken the cue, with its new policy aiming to virtually eliminate bridging visas, which are held by people who wait years for the government to decide their visa applications.

Harsher rhetoric does not make all of this bad policy. If net migration is to be reduced, the student visa system — which at its peak accounted for approximately 40% of all migrant arrivals in Australia — is a sensible place to look. Restrictions on student visa transfers started under Giles, and even the phrase “visa hopping” originated in a dry and technocratic review of the migration system published in 2023.

But the shift to language that focuses on migrants’ behaviour, instead of the design of the system, is a backward step. For one, it is unfair: governments of both parties have spent years trumpeting their efforts to close visa loopholes, so a migrant would understandably believe they have every right to apply for a visa still open to them. More importantly, though, this perspective does not support clear or productive thinking about migration policy. Migrants seeking to extend their stay in Australia is not a new phenomenon, and it is not one the government can lecture its way out of.

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Visa hopping has increased within the rules set by government, and largely because of deliberate government choices. Yes, temporary visa holders have stayed in Australia longer than forecasts expected — but not, with very few exceptions, longer than they are legally entitled to. A major loosening of post-study work visas in 2021 and 2022 enabled tens of thousands of students to stay longer. A temporary visa designed to help people stranded in Australia during the pandemic was inexplicably kept open until early 2024, providing a barely regulated pathway for repeated visa extensions.

In some cases there is less deliberate government choice and more simple neglect. A blowout in processing times for protection visas has enabled exploitation in exactly the way observers warned about well before the pandemic. A previously niche training visa has been overwhelmed by a huge increase in applications, many of which were eventually refused — but thousands weren’t, and it is not those migrants’ fault if the legislated criteria for the training visa are not what the government wants them to be.

Labor’s new migration rhetoric seems to imply that migrants have broken the visa system by refusing to follow unwritten rules. This kind of thinking encourages tough-talking lectures and the theatre of immigration compliance as a substitute for actual policy design. The government needs to take a cue from its own record and see “visa hopping” not as something nefarious but as a sad consequence of policy missteps that it should get on with fixing.