New ABS data show high employment, qualifications and earnings among skilled migrants and their accompanying families. The findings raise questions about calls for deep cuts to Australia’s permanent skilled migration program.

With the current raging immigration debate, this week the ABS released comprehensive data on the settlement experience of permanent migrants. This data gives the best insight into the settlement experience of migrants in different permanent visa streams compared with the Australian population as a whole. Permanent migrants are contributing to Australia much more than the media (and some politicians) would tell us.

The data confirms that skill stream migrants, including the accompanying family of skill stream migrants who have been much denigrated in the public debate, are settling very successfully with high levels of employment, low reliance on government support and high levels of English.

The data is drawn from a combination of the Census, the Person Level Integrated Dataset (PLIDA), which draws on data from a range of government agencies (including the ATO), and the Australian Census and Migrants Integrated Dataset (ACMID), which contains data on people who were granted a permanent skilled, family, humanitarian or other permanent visa and arrived in Australia between 1 January 2000 and each Census night.

It is notable that Australia’s immigration system changed significantly from 2001 onwards.

In 2021, 59 per cent of permanent migrants had taken out Australian citizenship. It was 4.2 per cent for permanent migrants who had been in the country five years or less and 77 per cent for migrants who had lived in Australia for more than 10 years.

Humanitarian migrants are most likely to take out citizenship (89 per cent after 10 years). Skill stream migrants are more likely to take out citizenship than family stream migrants.

Educational qualifications

Some 71 per cent of permanent migrants aged between 15 and 64 had a post-school qualification, compared with 56 per cent for the whole of the Australian population. Eighty........

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