The engineering profession exemplifies the flaws in Australia’s so-called “skilled” visa system.
Skilled migrants constitute approximately 60% of Australia’s engineering workforce, with slightly more than half of the engineers who obtained their degrees from Australian institutions being foreign-born.
However, Engineers Australia (EA), which earns large sums “vetting” the degrees of migrants, continues to complain of skills shortages and forever advocates for increased immigration.
This is despite around half of migrant engineers being either unemployed or underemployed in menial jobs like driving for Uber, as lamented in the November 2021 issue of Engineers Australia’s own industry magazine, Create (cover below).
“They’re working as Uber drivers, they’re working in the limited hospitality areas that are available, or they’re unemployed”, Engineers Australia chief executive Bronwyn Evans said in the above report.
The National Skills Commission Labour Market Insights to June 2022 likewise showed that approximately half of engineers who were born outside of Australia were unemployed or underemployed.
“Research shows there is a significant cohort of migrant engineers already in Australia who have long-term difficulties securing employment appropriate to their experience”, EA chief executive Romilly Madew said to The ABC in September 2022.
Yet, Engineers Australia was busy lobbying for more immigration over the weekend in The AFR:
“Engineers Australia group executive Damian Ogden said that by 2040, Australia was expected to have a shortage of 200,000 engineers, potentially undermining infrastructure and construction projects and sapping economic growth”.
“More than 60% of the profession is overseas born, and Infrastructure Australia estimates more than 40,000 additional engineers are needed to meet the country’s infrastructure pipeline”.
“Migrant engineers in Australia need to be valued for the experience they bring”, Ogden said.
Why does Australia import a significant quantity of engineers when nearly half of them wind up driving for Uber and do not even work as engineers?
Is the objective to boost the ranks of the unemployed? Is it to deny less developed countries of skills? Is it to drive down engineering salaries?
Once more, Australia’s skilled migration program has been exposed as a monumental fraud that has failed to achieve its intended objectives.
Genuine reform of the “skilled” migration system is required, not further expansion and enabling from the federal government.
