Australia’s anger over housing, inequality and living costs is real, but blaming migration risks fuelling the populist politics of fear and division.

We are living through an age of disruption. The postwar consensus that liberal democracy, free markets and open societies were the ‘only game in town’ has been steadily eroded by crisis after crisis.

The September 11 attacks crushed Western hopes of a post-Cold War world united by faith in liberal capitalism. The financial crash of 2008 exposed the fragility of globalisation’s economic promises. Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis revealed its social strains. Then the COVID pandemic brought globalisation to a screeching halt and reawakened the authoritarian dream of closed borders and strong states.

Add the escalating costs of climate change, widening inequality, trade wars, artificial intelligence and a punishing cost-of-living crunch, and it becomes easier to understand why confidence in democratic governments is waning.

Against this backdrop of uncertainty, anger and disillusionment, a simple story has taken hold: it is all the fault of immigrants.

Blame and the politics of fear

When economies sputter, public services strain and communities feel fragmented, immigration becomes the symbol for everything wrong with globalisation.

It offers politicians an easy story: your housing is unaffordable because of them; your hospital is overcrowded because of them; your jobs and culture are threatened because of them.

The real picture is much more complicated. Migration generally expands economies and government revenues, while its local effects depend heavily on housing supply, infrastructure, labour protections and public investment. But complexity is precisely the problem. Faced with a spaghetti chart of interconnected crises, people gravitate towards a single, tidy explanation.

Humans are also drawn to group identities, particularly in times of insecurity. We divide the world into insiders and outsiders, then........

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