As a demographer, I remain concerned about the ageing of Australia and the resulting universal skills shortage, especially in aged care.

I therefore argue that Australia is well advised to continue its high migration approach.

That doesn’t mean that I am not aware of the challenges that come with consistently high migration intakes.

Last week, I argued that our migration system should take in more permanent and fewer temporary migrants. A previous column showing a future Australia at a zero-migration scenario hopefully made the point that foreign workers are crucial to keep the system running. 

Today, we look at the role that foreign workers play in Australia in a bit more detail.

Anyone calling for simplistic and drastic cuts to migration is likely going to create a lot of unintended harm, and will create a less productive workforce. 

As of November 2025, the size of the Australian labour force was a massive 15.3 million people. As a reminder, the labour force is made up of workers, unemployed people and folks who are temporarily away from work (parental leave, sick leave etc).

Just over a third of all workers (35 per cent, or 5.4 million people) were born overseas. 

Where would we feel a lack of migrant workers the most? In our Capital cities, 42 per cent of the workers are from overseas, while in the regions only 20 per cent were born outside of Australia. 

This brings me to my first critique of our current migration system. 

Let’s say you want to employ a truck driver in Orange or a carpenter in Horsham. Our regional economies lack access to the workers they need to become more prosperous, and our visa system isn’t helping.

A migrant truck driver doesn’t even know that Orange is a real place. They’ll only settle there if their visa is employer-sponsored.  

Employer-sponsored visas are attractive because they link migration directly to real jobs. Rather than hoping that new arrivals move to where the work is, the visa starts with an employer who has already identified a skills gap.

This is especially useful in regional Australia, where hospitals, farms, aged-care providers, construction firms and local businesses often struggle to attract workers.

A migrant who arrives with a job, a workplace network and a clear role in the local economy is more likely to settle, contribute and put down roots. 

The risk is that employer sponsorship can create too much power for the employer. If the visa depends on one workplace, dodgy operators can exploit workers through underpayment, fake contracts or by effectively selling access to Australia.

That undermines wages, hurts honest businesses and damages trust in the migration system.

Any expansion of employer-sponsored visas therefore needs strong auditing, easy reporting pathways for migrants, serious penalties for bad employers and enough worker mobility to stop sponsorship becoming a trap. 

Who relies the most on migrant workers?  

In agriculture, only 14 per cent of workers were migrants; the arts also aren’t employing too many foreigners (22 per cent).

The share of migrant workers is twice as high in logistics, finance, health, and professional services.

Let’s zoom into industry subcategories. Are you planning to grow old? Will you require aged care at some point?

In residential care services, 59 per cent of workers are migrants. In computer systems, 58 per cent are migrants and in hospitals it’s 44 per cent.

Cutting back on migration would hurt these industries massively. We need foreign workers to keep our IT departments running, our elderly looked after and our hospitals staffed.  

On the other end of the spectrum are industries that experience ongoing worker shortages but aren’t taking in nearly enough migrant workers.

I’d point to construction as the most extreme example. Everyone is aware just how big the tradie shortage is and yet only 26 per cent of the construction workforce are foreign-born. We must import significantly more construction workers from overseas. 

Another way of showing this is to look at skill levels. I explained the concept in an earlier column, but essentially we assign a number from 1 to 5 to each job.

The number indicates how much formal training is needed for workers to do their job. Skill level 1 jobs require a university degree, skill level 3 jobs a TAFE degree, and skill level 5 jobs don’t require any formal training.

We import workers to do our highly skilled jobs (38 per cent and 37 per cent) and our lower-skilled jobs (35 per cent and 34 per cent) but are neglecting the middle-skilled jobs (only 29 per cent of skill level 3 workers are migrants).

The houses and infrastructure that we need to accommodate our strong population growth is almost exclusively provided by skill level 3 workers (all trades and construction jobs fall into this category). It’s a shameful failure of our current migration system that we don’t import enough workers to provide the housing that’s so urgently needed. 

How big is the skilled visa intake?  

Australia grants about 132,000 permanent skilled visas a year, but that is not the same as 132,000 new skilled migrants physically arriving from overseas.

In 2024-25, only about 40,000 migrant arrivals entered Australia already holding a permanent skilled visa. The difference exists because many permanent skilled visas are granted to people who are already in Australia on temporary visas, such as students, temporary skilled workers or graduates. 

Now let’s look at some specific jobs to make the point that migrants are crucial and to get a feel to where the impacts of a lower migration intake might be felt first. 

We start with aged and disabled-care workers. We will roughly need to double the amount of aged-care workers over the next decade and a half because the cohort needing care is about to double by 2040.

Among young care workers, only a small share are migrants. Care jobs don’t offer significant pay increases based on seniority. For young workers, they are decently paid though and as a result a relatively large share of Australians chose to work these jobs rather than in cafes or retail outlets (often while being in the education system to secure access to higher paid jobs).

Throughout the 30s age group, migrant care workers outnumber Australian natives. In the 40s and 50s, we see more Australians in the sector again. This is largely due to women returning to the workforce after years of childrearing. Care jobs are available locally, and returning mums are seen as ideal care workers by employers.

Even historically, very Australian-dominated occupations like trucking are becoming reliant on migrant workers. In 10 years, we retire the huge bulge of truckies currently aged in their 50s.

Of this cohort only 20 per cent are migrant workers. Who will replace them?

Looking at truckies in their 30s, where over 40 per cent of workers were born abroad, a fair assumption is that the trucking workforce will very quickly diversify. Maybe these jobs will be automated? After all, self-driving technologies have made rapid progress, right?

If you talk to industry leaders in the trucking world, they will repeatedly tell you that in 10 years we will not have a single self-driving truck in Australia outside of a mining site. Truckies will still be needed and they will still be humans.

Now that you’ve gotten used to what employment charts by country of birth look like, buckle up because this one is a doozie.