Australians Say Cap Migration to Curb Housing Prices

Australian left-wingers are alarmed by a May 30 poll showing most Australians favor caps on migration “until [Australians] have sufficient affordable housing.”

The Guardian poll of 1,138 Australians was released May 30, and showed 53 percent of left-wing voters want to “Cap immigrant numbers until we have sufficient affordable housing.”

That “cap immigrant numbers” goal was also backed by 70 percent of the voters for the center-right party, and by 44 percent of Green Party supporters, whose strongest supporters are younger people.

That obvious political opportunity is being exploited by the opposition conservative coalition and its leader Peter Dutton.

“Of all the problems [Prime minister Anthony] Albanese government faces as it enters its second year, housing looms as the most wicked: both devilishly complex and capable of unleashing the nation’s darker angels,” said an alarmed article by pro-migration columnist and PR executive Peter Lewis. He continued:

The opposition [center-right] leader, Peter Dutton, seemingly flagged in his budget-in-reply that he intends to exploit the systems failure that is our housing market to drive an immigration panic, just as Australia reopens its labour market in earnest after the pandemic pause.

The phrase “reopened its labor market” understates the case: Australia’s left-wing government has just expanded migration and has invited an unlimited migration from Indian college-graduate “students” into the white-collar jobs and homes needed by Australian graduates.

The invited Indians likely will accept very low wages and cramped living in the hope of staying permanently in Australia, just as India’s H-1B temporary workers in the United States undercut American graduates.  The deal also threatens many Australian professionals because it also treats low-grade Indian credentials as equal to higher-grade Australian credentials.

In exchange for India’s cheap labor, Australian investors will be allowed to sell more raw materials to India.

The deal means that the Australian left-wing party will soon face even more significant public opposition as more migrants displace more young and old Australians from decent housing in the coastal cities.

Housing prices are already very high because both left-wing and right-wing governments have long allied with real estate investors and employers to import 7.5 million migrants. “The price of a typical house in Sydney has multiplied by 17 times in the past 40 years, almost three times faster than wages,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported in November 2021.

Immigrants now account for 30 percent of Australia’s population, and they dominate any of the coastal towns that will produce the nation’s next generation of leaders and professionals. That 30 percent share is twice the immigrant share in the United States — and it is pushing young Australians away from the coastal cities.

In the United States, the establishment has worked hard to hide the reality that housing prices are being deliberately spiked by federal immigration policy, especially under President Joe Biden.

For example, GOP leaders ignore the huge inflow of migrants into the housing owned by their real-estate donors in New York and other cities. Major media outlets ignore the impact of migration on housing prices.

Breitbart News has extensively covered the explosive issue, and Sen. J.D.Vance (R-OH) is spotlighting the problem amid massive pushback from the real-estate sector. “Biden’s border crisis is a war on affordable housing,” Vance tweeted on May 24. 

Immigration’s impact on housing is also angering voters in Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K., where the incumbent Conservative Party is heavily influenced by the construction and real estate industries.

But the chief of Australia’s center-right party, Peter Dutton, is needling the issue as he tries to regain a majority in the next parliamentary elections.

In mid-May, Dutton slammed the far-left Labor government’s plan to expand migration “massively by 1.5 million people over five years,” according to a May 11 report in the Guardian.“The Albanese government’s Big Australia approach will make the cost-of-living crisis and inflation worse,” Dutton said.

The government “proposing to bring in almost 6,000 people per week … will make a bad situation worse,” he added.

The “doomsday scenario for the [left-wing] government is that these [rival green and conservative] groups unify, driving Australia into a cycle of nativist distrust anchored in the economic disenfranchisement of younger people,” Lewis lamented. “Thanks to Dutton and his cynical modus operandi, that moment may be closer than we realise,” he wrote.

One answer, said Lewis, is a “freeze on rent increases.”

In the United States, pro-migration activists want to divert the public’s rising opposition by offering a huge wave of housing construction — much of which will be built by migrants who are replacing discarded American construction workers.

Council on Foreign Relations

The progressives who call for more housing do not want to debate — nor do they show any care — whether ordinary American families will be able to buy homes with living spaces and locations similar to the homes bought by their parents before the elite established their policy of extraction migration.