By Lisa Macdonald
Last week federal cabinet approved a 6000 cut in the migrant intake for 1997-98. While the number of refugee and humanitarian places will stay at 12,000, the number of non-humanitarian places will fall from 74,000 to 68,000. The biggest reduction (from 6000 to 1000 places) is for parents under the family reunion program.
In announcing the cuts on May 21, the minister for immigration, Phillip Ruddock, also flagged plans to legislate to give himself more control over the program and to require that only Australian citizens be allowed to sponsor family members and tougher guarantees of financial support from sponsors.
The latest cuts, coming on top of an 8500 cut last year, will hit Asian migrants hardest. Asian communities are the main users of the preferential family reunion part of the program, and confront many more barriers than non-Asians to sponsoring immigrants under the skilled migrants category.
Ruddock claims that the cuts are necessary because of persistently high unemployment. As well, parents arriving under the family reunion category are very expensive, he said, being "heavy users" of publicly funded services like Medicare and nursing care.
Labor immigration spokesperson Duncan Kerr supports the cuts. Some migrants "are taking jobs that really should be filled by Australians", he said. Independent MP Pauline Hanson, too, welcomed the cuts, saying they were a recognition by the government of "the widespread community support" for anti-immigration views.
Ruddock vehemently denies that Cabinet's decision had anything to do with the electoral support Hanson is winning away from the Coalition parties. However, the cut not only breaks from the Coalition's pre-election policy of keeping immigration levels "about the same" as in 1995-96, but also contradicts Ruddock's statement seven months ago: "Often raised as a basis for objection to migration is the misconceived idea that immigrants cause unemployment and take the jobs of other Australians".
In fact, Hanson's more extreme expressions of racism and national chauvinism — in particular her calls to stop all Asian immigration — have carved out more political space for the Coalition to move faster and further in its own racist agenda, revealed 13 years ago when John Howard made his first public call for reduced Asian immigration.
With this move, the Coalition also hopes to win back some of the electoral ground it has lost, particularly in National Party heartland, to Hanson's One Nation party.
Some sections of big business — represented by the Housing Industry Association, the Australian Chamber of Manufactures, the Real Estate Institute and the Master Builders Association — have condemned the cuts, arguing that a higher level of immigration is necessary for economic growth because it will drive demand and satisfy skills shortages always present in the labour force.
These voices do not, however, represent a unanimous view among capitalists, the rest of whom seem content to wear a relatively small cut in the migrant intake because it both leaves the skilled migrant category intact and contributes to the maintenance of racist sentiments, which can be used to deflect mass discontent and anger at the austerity drive away from the government and big business.
Hanson is very useful to the capitalists as a stalking horse for their parties of government. But she is also a loose cannon for them, as evidenced in her calls for an end to Asian immigration and to foreign investment. In so far as the latest cut to immigration enables the Coalition to win back some of the electoral support it has lost to Hanson and ensure "stable government", while still meeting the immediate economic and political needs of big business, they will support it.