Country Resource - Australia
- Population........................................................................26,461,166 (2023 est.)
- Population growth rate .............................................................1.19% (2023 est.)
- Birth rate..................................................12.23 births/1,000 population (2023 est.)
- Death rate................................................6.76 deaths/1,000 population (2023 est.)
- Net migration rate...............................6.39 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2023 est.)
- Ethnic groups*..............................English 33%, Australian 29.9%, Irish 9.5%, Scottish 8.6%, Chinese 5.5%, Italian 4.4%, German 4%, Indian 3.1%, Australian Aboriginal 2.9%, Greek 1.7%, unspecified 4.7% (2021 est.)
* Data represent self-identified ancestry, with the option of reporting two ancestries
CIA World Factbook
Immigration has driven economic and social development in Australia for more than two centuries. Even as more than one-fourth of the country’s population is foreign born and Australia ranks third among top refugee resettlement countries worldwide, controversy surrounding its hardline treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat has cast a shadow on its reputation as a welcoming country, as this article explores.
Recent Activity
A number of countries in 2015 redesigned their immigrant investor visa programs in response to questions about their economic benefits or allegations of fraud. The reforms have in some cases made such programs far more costly and encouraged investment in higher-risk assets. Applications for such visas have fallen signficantly in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as policymakers may have overestimated demand.
In 2014 governments in Europe, North America, and Australia reacted to significant mixed flows of humanitarian, economic, and family-stream migrants with a range of new policies. These came as some migrants presented themselves to authorities for processing rather than trying to evade U.S. or European border controls, with the knowledge that backlogs and little political will for the removal of vulnerable populations might allow them to stay for extended periods.
The U.S. and Australian governments have long grappled with unwanted entries by unauthorized migrants and would-be asylum seekers. Both nations undertook efforts in 2012 to reform immigration detention policies and procedures that have generated significant scrutiny and criticism.
For two decades, Australia has experimented with different asylum policies in response to an increase in refugees and asylum seekers entering the country. A look at the country's challenges in managing a hotly contested political and public debate.
For economic and political reasons, more governments are turning to visas to admit select groups of highly skilled immigrants (especially in high-tech and high-growth fields) to their countries to boost entrepreneurship and enhance job creation. A look at the challenges, opportunities, and increasing popularity of these entrepreneur visa programs.
Public backlash against the detention systems of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States mounted in 2011 with allegations of unacceptable living conditions, abuse, prolonged detention, and government waste.
As violence flared from Afghanistan to Iraq to Mexico this year, hundreds of thousands fled over land and by boat in search of safety. Asylum seekers' main destinations—Europe, Australia, and Canada—were not new, but the governments in these countries took a harder line in 2009.
The global recession has caused countries that once welcomed foreign workers by the tens and hundreds of thousands — particularly Spain — to rethink generous immigration policies as unemployment rates have risen.
Over the past year, long-standing discussions and negotiations have resulted in several new information-sharing initiatives that seek to boost security while facilitating travel for legitimate travelers.
Prove you can fit in here. That is the challenge many countries placed in stark terms this year by implementing citizenship tests or increasing language requirements. In the case of Australia, the government decided to do both.
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As technological developments—from automation to artificial intelligence and machine learning—reshape the world of work, governments face the challenge of updating how they attract, select, and retain economic-stream immigrants. This report, concluding a series on building migration systems for a new age of economic competitiveness, lays out the key considerations for "future-proofing" immigrant selection systems.
Since the mid-1990s, Australia has moved away from a focus on family reunification to place greater emphasis on workers coming via temporary and permanent channels. The evolution of the country's points-based model for selecting economic migrants and move to a predominately employer-driven system offer lessons for other countries that seek to develop a tailored and targeted immigration selection system.
National systems for selecting skilled foreign workers have evolved in two directions: Points-based systems in which governments select economic immigrants based on labor and human-capital considerations and demand-driven ones that rely heavily on employer involvement. This report explores these two models—and their convergence—and offers tips for designing selection systems that are flexible, transparent, and effective.
This report dispels the perception that flows between Australia and the ASEAN region are headed in one direction: to Australia. Using unpublished administrative data, the authors sketch a complex picture of skilled Australian emigration to ASEAN, significant temporary movements of skilled workers in both directions, and close connections between the two regions even after migrants permanently return to their country of origin.
Employer-sponsored immigration and subnational visa programs are the two major routes to channel new immigrant arrivals toward particular destinations where their labor is thought to be in high demand. This report assesses regional nomination programs in Australia and Canada, and the efficacy of employer-sponsored immigration in meeting the needs of cities and regions.
This report provides an overview of the global trends in the recognition of foreign credentials, and describes new and flexible ways that governments can recognize the qualifications of immigrants.
This report examines the advantages and disadvantages of two fundamentally different approaches to economic migrant selection—demand driven and employer led systems and human-capital-accumulation focused and government led systems, best illustrated by “points systems,” which apportion numerical values to desirable human-capital characteristics.
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