Dr. Peter Varela

I'm Carrington Clarke.

And I'm Dr. Peter Varela, Research Fellow at the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute at the Australian National University.

Okay, so migration policy has always been a really, really important policy, both for economic reasons, for sort of broader nation building reasons, and for just sort of general welfare of Australians and migrants.

It's always been a really important policy.

My interest in this sort of sparks from the availability of data.

As of about 10 years ago, there was sort of a access to sort of large data sets that allowed us to track the outcomes of migrants, allowed us to see where they work, how much they earn, the occupations that they're working in, which has sort of opened up a big field of research, but also sort of big opportunities for thinking through how the migration program works that wasn't quite as easily available before that data was here.

No, exactly.

This is

one of the big outcomes of our research, that if you look at people who've studied in Australia as an international student, track them through when they get a permanent skilled visa, and look at the likelihood that they utilize those Australian qualifications in the labor market, the likelihood that they work in the jobs that they nominate through the visa process, they have almost surprisingly bad outcomes.

compared to people coming through other pathways.

And I say surprisingly, because if you'd asked me this question kind of 20 years ago, how do you get really good labor market outcomes for migrants?

I would have said, get them to study at Australian universities, get them sort of qualified with... I mean, Australia has fantastic universities.

Get them to study at the Australian...

sort of level, have them sort of integrate into the culture and the language through that process and it'll all work well.

But when you actually look at what's happened, that is not the case.

And that's sort of, again, cutting edge research.

This is where we are at the moment.

But yeah, that's an important thing that we're trying to get into the policy discussion at the moment.

So you do have to be careful not to try to have a single answer to that.

But the single answer I'm going to try to give, use the word pathways, the pathways that people follow from Australian education to a permanent visa.