Migrants in Australia express gratitude but fear political exploitation amid migration debate

Barbara Dervodel is grateful for every single day she has lived in Australia.

Ten years ago, she and her husband, Jure, migrated from their native Slovenia.

Settling in Mandurah, a coastal community 70 kilometres south of Perth in Western Australia, the now 34-year-old said the migration process was challenging "but worth every difficult moment".

The couple came to Australia in 2017 after completing their Masters degrees in science. They spent a year on working holiday visas, fell in love with the country and after five years got permanent residency.

"We are proud Australians now," Ms Dervodel said. So too is their two-year-old daughter.

But the happiness she feels is tinged by an unsettling feeling.

She is not alone. Many migrants, who contacted the ABC's Your Say project, feel the same.

They do not want to become political fodder as the two major parties and One Nation squabble over migration numbers.

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American by birth, Australian by choice

Annaliese Claydon was born in America. After 14 years and a long, emotional journey, she became an Australian citizen on Australia Day this year.

"I am an American by birth and an Australian by choice and I would like to do anything I could to help my beloved adopted country avoid sinking into the mire of right-wing nonsense that is tearing my original country apart," she said.

"If people knew more about how hard it is to get a visa, how migrants are forced to be separated from their families and elderly parents and how petrifying it is to ask for help when you are on a temporary or a permanent visa, they might think differently about their support for One Nation."

Ms Claydon now lives in Hobart and is a historian and adjunct researcher at the University of Tasmania.

She first came to Australia in 2011 to attend a conference in Sydney, tacked on a side research trip to Hobart and met her now husband there.

Originally from Alaska, she moved to Australia in 2012, applied for a partner visa, married, had a baby and finally, after 14 years, was granted citizenship.

It was, she said, a torturous process during which she endured postpartum depression, struggled without her family but was too scared to ask for help for fear that her visa and residency would be jeopardised.

In the context of the current migration debate, she worries about those now in her former position as a temporary resident.

"I worry about people being made to feel like aliens in the homeland they have chosen."

Misinformation and myths

Alan Gamlen, director of the Australian National University's Migration Hub, was blunt: "A lot of the migration debate is being driven by misinformation and myths."

Professor Gamlen said it was a myth that Australia's housing crisis results from excessive migration. He also said it is a myth that migrants are stealing jobs or "lazing around on benefits".

Professor Gamlen argued that we need a better migration debate, informed by an independent arbiter like a national migration institute, and that our politicians are fixated on the wrong number.

"We're talking about net overseas migration (NOM), which is an abstract figure: arrivals minus departures that nobody really understands.

"And political parties are kind of plucking net migration target numbers out of the air without any clear rationale for why their number is better than the other guys," Professor Gamlen said.

Net overseas migration was 305,000 in 2024-2025, down from 429,000 the previous year but still elevated from pre-COVID NOM of 241,000 in 2018-2019, according to the Australian Government's Institute of Health and Welfare.

The federal government has forecast it to drop to 295,000 for the 2025-2026 financial year.

Professor Gamlen said the NOM was the wrong statistic to focus on.

"If we treat net migration as the problem, we're supporting the false conclusion that all migration is the problem. That is clearly not the case."

Temporary migration

According to Professor Gamlen, the issue is temporary migration — where people are living in Australia on visas, including students, working holiday visas, and temporary skilled workers — and this has "mushroomed", roughly tripling in size after it was deregulated in the early 2000s.

"We have a temporary program where people can come in on one visa and then jump around onto lots of different visas, so we don't really know how long they're going to be in the country. And we don't know if they will ever leave or become permanent," he said.

According to the Department of Home Affairs, the number of people in Australia on temporary visas, including New Zealand citizens, has grown from 1.75m in 2012 to almost 2.9m at the end of July this year.

However, Professor Gamlen said this number included crew and transit, visitors and New Zealanders, and in an immigration debate, the better comparison excluded those numbers.

He estimated that temporary visa holders excluding these groups had tripled since the early 2000s.

Professor Gamlen said "putting a target on all migration is an extremely blunt instrument" and instead, the country needed a "coherent national population policy" that focuses on regulating the size of the temporary migration program while balancing economic needs and community values.

"In 10 years time, if we get migration policy right … We have a migration program which is large enough to offset our problem of aging, but not too large that it loses social license and makes people feel that the world around them is changing too fast."

Regional migration

Regional Australia Institute CEO Liz Ritchie agreed that planning was key to sustainable population growth, which is vital for regional communities.

New research from the RAI reveals migration accounted for 46.2 per cent of regional population growth in 2025.

The Regional Population Planning report found the largest migrant cohort arriving in regional Australia was aged between 25 and 44, bringing much-needed workers and families to the regions.

The report called for a national regional population settlement strategy.

"Current government projections assume that four in five of the 13.4 million additional Australians expected over the next 40 years will settle in our capital cities," Ms Ritchie said.

"Rather than planning for ever-larger capital cities and a future dominated by megacities, we should be looking at the regional communities that are actively calling for more people and more investment.

"We need a national regional population settlement strategy."

Challenges of moving regional

Settling in regional Australia has been challenging for medical laboratory technician Faris Al-Hilli, who arrived in Australia with his wife and two children in February 2022, on a skilled migrant visa.

Under the system, Mr Al-Hilli had to spend at least two years in a regional area, so the family moved to Murray Bridge, in the Murraylands region of South Australia, about 80km south-east of Adelaide. The town is recognised as a welcoming community for migrants.

But without any local experience he found it difficult to find work in his trained profession in biomedicine and instead worked for just over a year in a mushroom factory. He then worked as a hydrotherapy pool attendant.

Finally, in 2024, he secured a job as a laboratory manager at a local school. For 17 years, in his native Iraq, he had worked as a university tutor and he would love to return to a similar role in the future.

Mr Al-Hilli said the issue he faced as a skilled migrant was the difficulty getting a job without "local" experience.

"It's a contradiction," Mr Al-Hilli said. "I was a little bit surprised. I thought when they accept the skilled immigrant they recognise the skills."

He faced a similar challenge finding a place to rent. Without a rental history the family did not stand a good chance with real estate agents, eventually securing a house directly through an owner.

National regional plan

Ms Ritchie said migration pathways should be a core element of a national plan to support regional communities to attract the workers, skills and families they need to grow.

"If Australia is serious about getting the full benefits of migration, we need a much more deliberate conversation about where new migrants can contribute most, and where communities have the capacity and opportunity to welcome them," she said.

The report argued that directing a greater share of overseas migration to regional Australia could "help address workforce shortages, strengthen local economies and support more sustainable population growth, but only if governments plan for it".