Carrington Clarke

Hey guys, we've got a special episode of ABC Business Daily for you today.

There's so much heated political debate at the moment about Australia's immigration program.

And last week I found an email in my inbox which dealt with the economic outcomes for Australia's skilled migration program and some really interesting insights into

into how migrants do, depending on which visa they get, to come over to Australia.

So if you'll bear with us, this is a special episode in a slightly different format than you're used to, but I think you'll really enjoy the chat.

So welcome to ABC Business Daily.

Peter, thank you so much for joining me on the pod.

Give me an idea of what sparked this particular piece of research.

What questions were you trying to answer through it?

I'm going to start with one of the issues that I thought was most interesting to me because it seemed to fly in the face of the accepted kind of orthodoxy, which is there doesn't seem to be a strong link between migrants studying at Australian universities

and how well they do in the labour market.

It doesn't seem to indicate that they're actually going to earn more money when they work within Australia if they came here to study first.

Can you talk us through that?

It does seem to fly in the face of what I think most people would have expected.

And I think one of the strong arguments from the higher education industry, right?

They keep talking about it's our third biggest export earner with a huge amount of money is being plowed into Australian universities by foreign students studying there.

And your research looks at just that pathway from coming over on a student visa and then getting a different type of visa to work within Australia.

And yet it appears that those people who've come through Australian universities aren't doing as well in the workforce as, say, bringing someone over on a skilled visa to start off with if they've studied overseas.

So how can we understand this?

Because