How Australia Already Made Immigration Popular and How to Keep It That Way

Lessons from every Anglosphere government's fumbled migration restart

As many of my readers know, Canada has done more than any other country to shape how I think about immigration done better, which is why I keep coming back to it. But the question I get almost every time I write about it is "what about Australia?" My honest answer for years was that I did not know enough to say. So when the good folks at Eureka Street asked me to write about what my research means for an Australian audience, I saw it as an excuse to finally learn about the other most successful immigration country in the world.

---

Almost one in three Australians was born overseas. This is the highest share since the 1890s, and roughly double the American figure. Although some people now believe this is too many, for decades that grand scale coexisted with exceptionally welcoming public attitudes. Australia was the rare standing rebuttal to the claim that high immigration must sooner or later provoke revolt. The past few years, however, have put that reputation to a hard test.

When the borders reopened after the pandemic, net migration surged to an all-time record, briefly adding more than 500,000 people in a single year—the equivalent of 2 per cent of the country’s population. The government has been cutting back ever since, and the intake has fallen by almost half. Meanwhile, public concern has moved the other way. In the 2025 Scanlon survey, just over half of Australians said the immigration intake is too high—the highest share recorded. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the right-wing populist party built around cutting immigration, doubled its Senate seats at the 2025 election. In a March 2026 survey, more voters said they trusted it than any other party to bring migration down.

A closer look at the same surveys, though, shows this is no simple anti-immigrant turn. The same Scanlon survey found that some 80 per cent of Australians still agree both that multiculturalism is a good thing and that immigrants are good for the economy. So, what is going on?

Australia is living through an unfortunate series of events I have already watched unfold twice. I have spent years writing about Canada, where a nearly identical sequence played out two years earlier, and about Britain, where a version of it helped produce Brexit and then Reform UK. What I see is that a long pro-immigration consensus does not collapse because voters suddenly master the arithmetic of intake targets or get brainwashed by right-wing populists. Instead, it collapses when the system objectively stops looking like something anyone designed to benefit their country.

Indeed, the long-standing Australian support for immigration rested on a visible bargain: citizens could see who was being chosen and why, and they could see that their own government was doing the choosing. In my book I call this demonstrably beneficial immigration—a set of policies that explicitly and straightforwardly serves the national interest in ways ordinary voters can see for themselves, without any elaborate explanations or justifications from the experts. The poorly managed post-pandemic surge broke the second half of that bargain, and I suspect the reaction since has had much more to do with that loss of visible control, and with the non-selective streams the newcomers arrived through, than with any particular number of arrivals.

Immigration concerns are never just about the numbers or propaganda

Political scientists increasingly describe public opinion on immigration and other salient issues as thermostatic. That is, like a household thermostat, the public signals ‘too much’ when a policy it cares about overshoots its comfort zone and ‘more, please’ when it undershoots. I find this metaphor useful, but it hides two complications, both of which are on display in Australia right now.

First, the thermostat reacts with a lag, often long after the temperature has already started to fall, which is why concern can still be climbing a few years into a decline in actual arrivals. After all, people have no way of tracking migration statistics in real time, and they respond not just to the flow of new arrivals but to the stock of immigrants already here, the people they can actually see around them. And that stock, unlike the flow, is not declining. Second, the thermostat responds to immigration issues beyond the headline number, such as particular episodes of mismanagement and abuse. Those episodes may or may not be exaggerated by the media, but they almost always register the sense that no one is in charge, sending signals of chaos and visible dysfunction.

The clearest illustrations of this dynamic come from episodes where the numbers and the sense of control point in opposite directions. Australia’s own Tampa affair in 2001 involved a few hundred people rescued at sea, but it became central to that year’s federal election. Meanwhile, Israel absorbed more than a million people after the Soviet collapse with comparatively little uproar. These two cases differ in plenty of ways, but they show that small inflows that look uncontrolled can ignite politics, while huge inflows that look orderly often pass quietly. If you want to know whether a backlash is coming, it seems like counting arrivals is less useful than asking whether voters believe their government chose those arrivals on purpose.

Note that none of this means the anti-immigration backlash is simply whatever the right-wing media makes of it. Partisans certainly try to frame every immigration episode as either orderly or chaotic, but the framing that sticks is usually the one with at least some grain of truth behind it. The relatively small-scale migrant crisis in New York City a few years ago, for instance, was a staple of right-wing coverage and led to significant backlash in arguably one of the most pro-immigration cities in the world. But it also was a genuine crisis that carried far more than a grain of truth about government dysfunction.

By mid-2023, the city was sheltering around 40,000 newly arrived asylum seekers. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had bussed nearly 8,000 migrants to New York for political reasons, part of a broader Republican campaign to show that the federal immigration system was dysfunctional. And the stunt worked because there was plenty of dysfunction to show. Many asylum seekers were barred from working legally, but New York was still responsible for sheltering them with little help from Washington. The Manhattan Institute estimated that this was costing the city more than $1.5 billion a year. In the end, even relatively cosmopolitan taxpayers reasonably felt it might not be sustainable to house tens of thousands of people they didn't invite who couldn't provide for themselves.

Why did everyone try to copy Australia’s immigration system?

Let’s consider what Australia actually did on immigration and what made it exceptional. Canada originally invented the famous points-based system in 1967, scoring would-be immigrants on achievable traits like education, skills, and language ability rather than ascribed traits like race or country of origin. Australia adopted the idea but pushed it further by building a capped permanent program, set at 185,000 places this year—all combining points-tested selection with employer-sponsored, state-nominated, and family routes, while reserving roughly 70 per cent of places for the skill stream. Its signature route, the Skilled Independent visa, requires no employer sponsor at all. Since 2012, hopefuls register an expression of interest in a system called SkillSelect, and the government invites the strongest candidates to apply. The innovation was apparently good enough that Canada itself borrowed it back for its Express Entry system in 2015.

Britain, meanwhile, spent the last two decades trying to copy the Australian brand without doing the actual hard work of adapting any substance underneath it. Politicians from Gordon Brown to Nigel Farage to Boris Johnson have kept promising an ‘Australian-style points-based system’, and as Madeleine Sumption and Peter Walsh have shown, British governments have been introducing and modifying points tests since 2002. The appeal, as they argue, was probably always more symbolic than practical: ‘Australian-style’ served as political shorthand for control, with focus-group participants associating the phrase with boats turned away at gunpoint by the Navy—something that has nothing to do with how a points test works. By the post-Brexit version of 2021, Sumption and Walsh conclude, the points had become ‘purely cosmetic’, shoehorned onto a traditional work permit system driven by employer sponsorship, the opposite of how Australia picks its skilled migrants. The rebranded system then presided over the largest migration wave in British history, peaking at 944,000 in a single year, roughly three times the pre-Brexit level. Voters unsurprisingly noticed the gap between the label and the delivery, and Reform UK has been collecting the proceeds ever since.

Meanwhile, the harder half of the bargain has always been control at the border and immigration law enforcement, including boat turnbacks and offshore processing under Operation Sovereign Borders. Researchers at the Kaldor Centre have specifically called offshore processing ‘cruel, costly and ineffective’, crediting whatever deterrence the package achieved to turnbacks rather than the detention camps. But the political record of these hard and uncomfortable policy decisions is difficult to ignore. Governments of both mainstream parties concluded that visibly stopping unauthorized arrivals was the price of sustaining one of the world’s most generous legal intakes, and for two decades the polling largely bore them out.

There is a more general lesson here that governments keep relearning—even in a liberal democracy, some migrants need to be stopped and deported. When the state visibly cannot do it, the politics only get uglier. Germany ended 2025 with about 232,000 people legally required to leave the country but fewer than 23,000 actually removed all year, and the far-right AfD, feeding on exactly this gap, now polls ahead of the governing center-right.

Canada, for what it is worth, has long run the Australian formula with quieter machinery, pairing its large legal intake with credible enforcement. In 2025 alone, for instance, its border agency carried out more than 23,000 removals with hardly any political drama to show for it. American readers, meanwhile, have watched the opposite sequence, where years of visibly lost control produced a mandate for an enforcement campaign that has since gone far overboard—all the way to the point where federal agents shot and killed two American citizens protesting ICE operations in Minneapolis this past January. When a government stops removing people in an orderly way, the eventual thermostatic correction tends to be harsher than anyone intended.

The pandemic shock no Anglosphere government handled well

Like virtually every other government in the world, Australia closed its border in March 2020. But it also closed it harder, recording in 2020-21 its first annual net migration loss since 1946. This radical closure did something remarkable to public opinion. In the 2022 Scanlon survey, fielded a few months after the border reopened, only 24 per cent of Australians said the intake was too high—the lowest reading ever recorded. Canada, Britain, and the United States recorded their own all-time lows in numbers and opposition around the same time. But when migration later restarted, the record surge had not yet appeared in the data or in anyone’s suburb. So the lagged thermostat everywhere called for more migration.

Australia famously began reopening later than much of the rest of the world, lifting restrictions in stages from November 2021 until most travelers could return in February 2022, all straight into an economy short of workers. In hindsight, this rebound overshot everything you could imagine—a record 538,000 net arrivals in 2022-23, more than double of the pre-pandemic pace. Meanwhile, Canada grew by a record 1.27 million people in 2023, its fastest rate since 1957, and Britain hit its 944,000 peak the same year. The United States, for its part, was living through what David Leonhardt of the New York Times called the largest immigration surge in US history with net migration averaging some 2.4 million people a year and the foreign-born share of the population surpassing its previous record from 1890.

To be fair to the policymakers all across the world, restarting a stalled migration system amid desperate employer demand, collapsing university finances, and major visa backlogs was genuinely difficult. In hindsight, basically no English-speaking government got it right. Yes, these surges were not inevitable but clear policy choices. But it is also true that these choices were all made by governments under pressure from business while simultaneously betting that the unusually positive public would not mind. Their mistake, of course, was not realizing that this positivity, while genuine, was a lagging—and effectively thermostatic—indicator.

With numbers rising, public opinion began moving back toward negativity within a year, each on its own country’s clock. Even the United States has followed the same logic in its own convulsive way. The share of American voters telling Gallup they wanted less immigration want from 28 per cent in June 2020 to 55 per cent in 2024. Then it fell back to 30 per cent in 2025 and 29 per cent earlier this year, as border crossings collapsed—and the Trump administration’s crackdown made the sense of border control unmistakable, whatever one thinks of their methods.

Where exactly the Australian plan broke down

For someone who wants immigration to succeed, it would be convenient to explain Australia's backlash as an overreaction to anti-immigration propaganda from the far right. I don't think that explanation holds up very well once we look at where the increase came from. Australia's celebrated points-tested program stayed capped throughout. The surge came through uncapped temporary migration, especially international students, and the government's own reviews subsequently documented serious problems with these pathways.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is much room for well-managed international student and temporary migration pathways. If anything, temporary routes in particular are often unfairly derided, even by pro-immigration advocates, as second-class or abusive compared with permanent pathways. But it is also true the Australian government’s own Parkinson Review warned in 2023 of a growing “permanently temporary” underclass. This is basically the direct opposite of what their system built on selection has been promising for many year. The other Nixon Review, published the same year, found systematic exploitation of the student visa route, with non-genuine education providers and unscrupulous agents selling visa access rather than education in so-called “ghost colleges.”

Underneath all the individual scandals, however, there is a glaring policy design Australia had bolted an uncapped stream driven by provider revenue onto its famously selective system, effectively outsourcing migration decisions to institutions that are paid per enrolment. International education had become an export worth more than $50 billion a year, and institutions from strip-mall colleges to sandstone universities had a direct financial stake in maximizing the immigration numbers. Students also need somewhere to live. So, when you have a housing shortage every additional renter is visible to regular voters. This is true even when the more careful research eventually concludes that immigrants are not necessarily at fault.

In the end, Australia’s experience here fits a common Anglosphere-wide pattern all too well. Canada too let its private colleges balloon until its own immigration minister called them “the diploma equivalent of puppy mills” and imposed an emergency cap. Britain’s failure took a subtler form—its official review found no widespread abuse, but universities had become financially dependent on international fees to subsidize research and domestic teaching. So their enrollments (plus a boom in accompanying dependents) exploded accordingly without much voter consent.

In each country, gatekeeping drifted from the state to institutions with a revenue incentive, and in each country the public eventually refused to treat the result as chosen migration. To its credit, Canberra has since largely conceded the diagnosis. The December 2023 Migration Strategy brought a tougher genuine student test, integrity legislation aimed at the worst providers finally passed in late 2025. As a result, the latest international student enrollment numbers now run under a national planning level—steered through visa-processing priorities rather than hard caps—that sets their scale openly in advance.

How to keep immigration popular

The cautionary experiences of Canada and Britain now offer Australia at least two distinct lessons in what not to do. The Canadian lesson is about honestly acknowledging mistakes and overreach, but also about not slamming the brakes so hard that the population starts shrinking. Though, of course, it is true that braking that hard can buy some short-term political relief.

But it can also come at the cost of the system’s long-term growth. The British lesson, promising an Australian-style system while running something else entirely and ignoring the thermostatic nature of public opinion, is the fastest known route to a Reform-style party. Both would be strange things for Australia to import, given that both countries effectively spent years trying to import Australia’s success.

There is an American lesson here too, and it is simply that the more conservative Australians with legitimate concerns about immigration should resist the temptation to elect anti-immigration populists. No matter how bad the current elites seem and how much the populists promise, the results are almost always worse. On immigration specifically, the Trump administration has, to its credit, largely stopped illegal border crossings. But it has also cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, hitting skilled and other popular streams hardest—all while offering no constructive solution for the millions of unauthorized immigrants already in the country.

The permanent program remained capped and largely uncontested through the crisis, and surveys still find Australians favoring skilled migration, with most not even wanting student numbers reduced. The backlash was about the streams that were neither planned nor capped nor selected.

There is a lot of hard policy design work to be done here, but extending the permanent program’s design logic to student and temporary migration, by setting their scale openly and in advance, is something that both immigration advocates and restrictionists should agree with. I am not holding my breath this might actually happen soon. But it is also worth remembering that Australians arguing bitterly about the right number are still arguing within one of the most open, yet selective systems on our planet.

Australian public opinion will probably lag the recovery, just as it lagged the surge. The good news is that Australia enters this fight with an advantage over the United States and most other immigrant-receiving countries like Germany, since it—just like Canada—already made immigration popular by design once. The bad news is that keeping it popular is not easy, since it means running the temporary streams the way it has always run the permanent ones, all the interest group pressures notwithstanding.

But the goal of keeping immigration popular is absolutely worth it. The government just needs to make sure that anyone—whether on the left or right—looking at the system can once again see immigration working in their national interest.

A version of this piece first appeared in Eureka Street on August 14.