White People are Stealing Australian Jobs

When I first started telling people in Toronto that I was moving to Melbourne in 2011, everyone said the same thing: “It’s so racist there!” And while I’ve definitely heard the preface “I’m not racist, BUT” more than a few times since arriving, I still figure things are going pretty well. Especially for a country that relies so heavily on a multicultural working populace.

Over a quarter of Australia’s current population was born overseas. Back in 2001, Europeans still made up more than half of the incoming migrants. Now, that figure is closer to the 40 percent mark, which is more on par with the number of newcomers arriving from Asia. Add the Africans and folks from the Middle East, and this really is the first time in history that Australia’s immigrants haven’t been predominantly white.

This change in the mix of new Australians has led to a lot of noise about Asians taking over, and crucially, Asians stealing Australian (read: white) jobs. But while it’s easy to write off groups like the Party of Freedom as redneck alarmists for claiming the visa system is “skewed towards outsiders while the Aussie battler misses out time after time,” they’re actually kind of correct. However, it’s not the Asians that battlers should be worried about. A visa aimed specifically at stopgap workers is seeing a rising number of white Europeans coming in and occupying jobs that have traditionally gone to the nation's most vulnerable citizens.

The working-holiday visa is meant to target job sectors that require temporary work, employment in regional areas, and jobs with fluctuating requirements, i.e., farming, construction, and hospitality. It has no skill requirements and very few hoops to jump through in order to get accepted. You mostly have to not be a criminal over the age of 30 with TB. The result of this is a huge influx of people from European countries that have been hit hard by the recession; 2012 saw a 20.5 percent increase in visa grants from 2011 and the largest group of those were UK citizens, who received 24,135 of the grants.

A recent study released by Bob Birrell from Monash University outlines the employment concerns facing Australian youth. They note that in the current climate, nonaccredited youth are having a hard time finding unskilled work opportunities like hospitality and retail, especially in urban areas, mostly due to high levels of competition. Competition that the WHV program continues to drive higher.

The Department of Immigration and Australian Citizenship is preparing to extend the WHV program to Greece, Spain, Czech Republic, Latvia, and other European countries. Ireland, notoriously banged up by the GFC, has seen a 33 percent rise in WHV holders applying to stay here for a second year and an 18 percent increase in employer sponsored visas. Italy, another of the fucked-up European economies, saw an 79.9 percent increase in WHV grants in 2012.

While in the UK, Tourism Australia Manager Andrew McEvoy straight up admitted to be courting Europeans because of their economic difficulties. Speaking at an Eurocentric campaign launch for the visa he said, “Economic dilemmas are continuing in places like the UK and Europe, with high youth unemployment, so the idea of a sunny working holiday in Australia is massively appealing.”

But what about Australia’s young unemployed? ABS figures reveal that in lower income areas—including Melbourne’s north and west suburbs and the Sunshine coast—there are very high levels of youth unemployment. Birrell also cites figures in northern Adelaide, where there’s a 42.6 percent rate of youth joblessness due to a high demand in unskilled work—work that McEvoy aims to fill with white Europeans.

Sixty-one percent of WHV grants in 2012 were for European countries. Australians largely ignore this and news reports continually focus on the infinitely more useful 457 visa, which targets skilled workers with job offers and certainly does not flood the market with unskilled laborers who are free to move between jobs as they please.

White flight is what you call it when groups of people move away from racially mixed neighborhoods to ones of mass demographic conformity. It’s a pretty flexible term—usually it refers to small escapes from inner to outer suburbs, but it’s also been used to describe the colonialists' behavior when things in Africa stopped going their way 100 percent of the time. If the current WHV rates keep up, we’re going to have to start using it to describe what’s happening between Europe and Australia.