Professor Alan Gamlen, Director of the ANU Migration Hub, has authored a paper explaining the 2024 Net Overseas Migration Surge. It’s essential reading.
“A recent surge in net overseas migration (NOM) has become a hot topic in the wash-up of the 2024 Budget. Politicians and media commentators are linking the surge with soaring housing costs” the paper starts. The Koala agrees and has been covering this topic closely.
Recent reports from the Property Council and the Go8 universities appeared to have dispelled this link. The Treasurer too has made reference to the fact that migration’s impact on housing is “at the margins at best”.
So, this latest report from the Director of the ANU Migration Hub is important.
Here are The Koala’s takeouts from the report:
- Net Overseas Migration (NOM) is calculated by subtracting overseas departures from overseas arrivals. Arrivals – Departures = NOM.
- People often confuse NOM with permanent migration, which is just a small, capped part of NOM. NOM also includes flows the government can’t cap, like people departing and Australians returning home. So NOM is bigger than just permanent migration.
- Public discourse has traditionally focused on the smaller permanent migration figures, and people are unused to hearing much about NOM. They are now hearing the larger NOM figures without really knowing what these figures mean, which is causing some misplaced concerns.
- The root cause of the NOM surge is that the COVID-19 pandemic drastically reduced all migration flows – both in and out of Australia. To understand the disruption, we must examine three key trends: migrant arrivals, migrant departures, and net overseas migration.
- Wait a minute, did you just say arrivals have been way lower than expected? Then how come we have a migration surge? Good question. The answer is: departures.
- However, departures did shrink during COVID, because the Coalition Government extended temporary visas. That meant fewer people on temporary visas departed from Australia.
- These extensions have not all expired yet. As a result, departures are still at historic lows (Figure 2). From June 2020 to June 2023, there were 334,000 fewer migrant departures than previously expected.
- When we add the small recent arrivals rebound to the prolonged shortage of departures, we get the recent NOM surge. We expected NOM to be at 286,000 – instead it’s up to 518,000.
- But here’s the thing: the current NOM up-spike is still way smaller than the NOM down-spike that happened during the pandemic (Figure 3). On the whole, we got 352,000 fewer people through net migration than we previously expected we’d have gotten by now.
- Over the past four years there have been way fewer arrivals, way fewer departures, and way less NOM than we previously expected we’d have by this time. We’ve had a lot less migration, not more.
- There is a temporary NOM spike because arrivals have recovered faster than departures. Departures haven’t recovered yet because of visa extensions granted by the Coalition during the pandemic.
- It’s highly likely the NOM surge will naturally subside over the medium term. This is because departures will rise as pandemic-era visa extensions expire. Meanwhile, arrivals will fall after they catchup from the pandemic.
The Koala congratulates Professor Gamlen and thanks him for his contribution.
The paper can be found here and is recommended for those interested in NOM and its fluctuation over recent years.
