A clear majority of Australians want less immigration, but it’s not clear exactly what that means.
In the lead-up to the last federal election, the Liberal-National opposition seemed to get confused between ‘net overseas migration’ and ‘new permanent residents’, and now One Nation seems to be mixing up ‘net migration’ with ‘migrant arrivals’.
To be fair, the system is painfully complex, and the politicians wouldn’t be the only ones who are confused. Hence this article.
Immigration debates tend to focus on the numbers, but there are four broad issues that need to be considered:
Quantity = how many migrants should we accept?
Quality = which people should we prefer?
Duration = how long can they stay for?
Integration = what should we expect from them?
The standard narrative is that we should only discriminate on skills (#2), migrants should have a clear pathway to citizenship (#3), and that we should prioritise multicultural diversity over integration (#4). I think all of these positions should be challenged, but polite society has shied away from those debates, so the focus has been on raw numbers.
Migration numbers
Most of the commentary about migration looks at the ‘net overseas migration’, but that is not the only measure of people movement into Australia. Indeed, there are four ways to look at this issue:
- Overseas arrivals and departures (OAD), which looks at all movement of people in and out of the country, including both residents and visitors.
- Net overseas migration (NOM), which looks at the arrival and departure of residents, which is defined as somebody staying for at least 12 out of 16 months (the ‘12/16 rule’).
- New permanent migrants (PRs), which looks at the number of people who are given the right to live permanently in Australia each year, which comes with most of the benefits of citizenship, except for voting and getting a passport.
- New citizens, which is the number of PRs who are ‘naturalised’ and become full Australian citizens, with the right to vote and get a passport.
The last year for which we have complete data is 2024-25, so the remainder of this article will look at the numbers for that year.
Overseas Arrivals and Departures (OAD)
According to the ABS there were 21.8 million arrivals and 21.5 million departures in 2024-25. These were mostly tourists and includes people who took multiple trips, so it can be somewhat misleading, but we can learn something by looking at the difference between arrivals and departures.
The net figures show that there were 322,160 more arrivals than departures for the year. This number is slightly higher than the official ‘net overseas migration’ (discussed below) because it counts the increase in both residents and visitors currently in Australia.
The ‘visitor’ category is often excluded from the immigration debate, since visitors by definition do not stay for more than a year. Besides tourists and people in transit, the other main types of visitors includes people doing short-term contract work (such as the PALM scheme referenced by David Farley) and short-term working holiday makers. While these visitors do not stay in Australia long-term, the total number of these short-term visitors in Australia at any point in time is slowly increasing.
Net Overseas Migration (NOM)
Unlike the OAD, the net overseas migration (NOM) number only considers people who pass the 12-16 month residency rule. In 2024-25 there were 568,400 new residents arriving in Australia and 262,600 residents departing, which gave a net increase of 305,800 for the year.
To put this into context, since the second world war, the NOM averaged around 100k per year, before jumping up to over 200k in the early 21st Century, crashing during the Covid shutdown, and then shooting up to record levels in recent years.
The size of the NOM has since become a political football. Labor has promised to bring it back down to 225k, while the Liberals aim to get down to around 170k (linked to new housing availability), and One Nation’s current policy is 130k. It’s worth noting that the NOM target from all three parties is higher than the average for most of the 20th Century.
The One Nation policy has been particularly contentious in recent days. Their policy from last year was to bring the NOM down to zero, with new arrivals set to the same level as departures. Then earlier this year their position was effectively a negative migration level of roughly -200k, before eventually settling on their current policy of +130k. Some immigration hawks have felt betrayed.
Unpacking the 2024-25 numbers in more detail, the main categories of migrants were:
Students: 157k arrivals – 49k departures = 108k net increase
Working holiday: 78k arrivals – 25k departures = 53k net increase
Visitors who stayed: 56k arrivals – 18k departures = 38k net increase
New Zealanders: 53k arrivals – 15k departures = 38k net increase
Skilled temporary: 46k arrivals – 10k departures = 36k net increase
Skilled permanent: 40k arrivals – 5k departures = 35k net increase
Family permanent: 24k arrivals – 5k departures = 20k net increase
Refugee permanent: 15k arrivals – 0 departures = 15k net increase
Existing PRs: 8k arrivals – 8k departures = 0k net increase
Other temporary visas: 26k arrivals – 46k departures = -20k net decrease
Australians: 64k arrivals – 81k departures = -17k net decrease
Looking forward to the coming years, it is expected that roughly 330k existing residents will leave Australia each year. If we factor in those departures, that means the Labor policy amounts to 555k new arrivals, the Liberal policy translates to 500k new arrivals, and the One Nation policy equates to 460k new arrivals.
Permanent residency (PR)
While the NOM attracts most of the political attention, another crucial immigration statistic is the number of people who are accepted each year as a permanent resident, who receive most of the rights and benefits as Australian citizens and can soon upgrade to being citizens.
The total number of new permanent residents for 2024/25 was 207k, which was split between:
Skilled permanent = 132k
Family permanent = 53k
Refugee permanent = 20k (+2k previous applicants that were eventually approved).
Only 80k actually entered Australia as PRs in 2024-25, with the clear majority already being here with a temporary visa, and a few having received PR status but not yet arrived. The most common visas that upgrade to PR are the skilled temporary, graduate, student, and provisional family visa (included in ‘other’).
None of the main parties have a policy to significantly change to the PR system. Before the 2025 election the Liberals proposed to cut the level down from 205k to 154k, though that target was often confused with their then-target of 160k NOM. Since then all parties have remain silent on changing the PR quota.
Citizenship
The final element of migration is how many people are naturalised into being Australian citizens. In 2024-25 the total number was just over 163k, with most of those people originally coming from New Zealand, India, Britain, and Southeast Asia.
The requirement to become a citizen is to have been a resident for at least four years, including one year as a PR, not be a criminal, pass a test, and make a pledge.
The main differences between a citizen and a PR is that a citizen can have an Australian passport, can be involved in Australian elections, and get quicker access to welfare payments.
Which number really matters?
The correct measure depends on what you are trying to achieve. The mainstream debate tends to focus narrowly on the NOM, but depending on your goal it may be that net arrivals or new PRs or new citizens is a more relevant metric.
This article is mostly descriptive, but to finish with an opinion, I think that NOM is the wrong priority and we need to seriously re-think our approach to PR and citizenship. Specifically:
In the UK there is currently a debate about removing their equivalent of PR entirely and replacing it with a renewable time-limited visa. That is worth considering in Australia.
I’d also challenge the assumption that new migrants need to have a path to citizenship. By importing millions of new voters every decade, we are fundamentally changing the nature of our democracy.
If PR and citizenship became much harder to get, that would naturally decrease the number of people who use temporary visas as a pathway to permanency. The people who still do come would need to either prove their ongoing value to the country or leave.
As hinted at the beginning, I also think we need to open up a genuine discussion about who we want in this country and what we expect from them. This includes considerations of culture, and not just vague references to abstract values.
But enough about me. What do you think should be the focus of our immigration system, and what changes would you make?
First published on the Death & Taxes Substack.
