Anyone who thinks the current immigration debate is simply about the number of foreigners being granted legal passage to Australia each year is only seeing half the picture.

Beyond the crude numerical projections (that a growing number of Australians believe have way too many zeros) is a more basic contest that is both economic and cultural and is being played out around the globe.

This is what 2024 Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel prize-winning economist, casts as liberal democracy’s post-industrial crisis – a project that he argues has ceased to deliver on its core promise of sharing economic prosperity by vesting power in the people.

He places immigration at the fulcrum of this reckoning because it brings to the surface a disparate set of cultural questions of shared values, identity and belonging which, if not resolved, drive people into populist waves of illiberalism.

Through the Guardian Essential report, we have benchmarks on Australians’ attitude to immigration charted over more than a decade now. They show that even as the immigration debate has raged over recent months, general support for immigration remains.

What has changed is the contours of this political debate with the rise of One Nation. Where those opposing immigration were once a minority inside two major parties that broadly supported an expansive program, now they have a political home base.

One Nation’s blunt call to reduce immigration numbers resonates with voters concerned about their jobs, their access to housing, the safety of their community and the availability of........

© The Guardian