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Comment by RachelF | Hacker News Reader

Australia also relies on migration to keep wages down. This was paused during Covid, so there is more supply of people now.

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This person will never be convinced, but for anyone else reading, Australia (and Canada, and America) uses migration to ward off a population time bomb [1] not to “keep wages low”.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS/australia/birth-ra...

EDIT: sorry didn’t meant to be dismissive of the person above, but usually this topic hits way too personal for people to change minds online (see: comments below). For any passers by genuinely curious exhaustive data reviews are available [2].

Tl;dr: Immigration does not depress wages.

[2] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...

Isn't this confusing cause and effect? Fewer people are having children because it is harder than ever to afford a family, not because the locals have decided passively not to continue on.

Immigration absolutely depresses wages - if you import more supply, what happens to the price? That doesn't require advanced economics to understand.

So in response to people being unable to afford kids, we depress wages to make it even harder to afford kids. Got it.

I assume Australia is not courting five year olds to apply for visas and are instead trying to plug a gap in a population older than that. Even if everyone started having kids tomorrow that gap would still exist.

They are the same thing ... wages are lower than they would be without migration.

Whether you count them as low or high, they are lower

I don't get it, what's the bomb?

Population decline. Which in itself may not be a problem but has all sorts of interesting economical consequences.

You get an aging population requiring care, with less people to both physically and financially/economically fund them.

You also move from always having to build new houses and infrastructure to suddenly having excess housing and infrastructure that isn't needed. Not only does that eliminate a whole bunch of jobs and related economic activity but also drives prices down, etc.

I am sure this is an absolutely terrible summary but you can google population bomb, population decline, etc, for much more informed takes. But basically for the last 100 years the entire world and economy has run on an ever-inflating path and that could change at both a country and world level.

After a period of decline, it'll eventually fall off a cliff and weird economic after effects happen.

Try reading https://longnow.org/ideas/the-heresy-of-decline/

Fascinating website, thanks for the link.

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