Abul Rizvi admits immigration is a ‘Ponzi scheme’

Former immigration department bureaucrat turned influencer, Abul Rizvi, was interviewed this month by Joseph Walker.

In the interview, Rizvi said the quiet part out loud and explicitly admitted that slowing population ageing comprised about “80%” of the motivation for the 2001 changes, which massively increased Australia’s intake of migrants, especially international students.

Until spending about a week reading up on Aus immigration policy and then interviewing Abul Rizvi (a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration) in late Jan, I hadn’t realised that probably the dominant rationale of Aus immigration policy over the past couple of… pic.twitter.com/ybU9Vh9KCi

— Joseph Noel Walker (@JosephNWalker) February 17, 2025

WALKER: And so back in the late 90s, early 2000s, when you were advising Ruddock and Costello and then persuading Howard to, you know, implement the changes that we did, how much of that decision was about slowing the rate of population aging? Was that the main motivation?

RIZVI: Probably 80% was demography. It would have been 80% demography and it would have probably been 10% pressure from universities – we need a way of making money and we can’t fund ourselves unless we can make money. And so we had to open up the international education program. It just happened to be the case, that was the best way to also increase the migration program in a manner that it contributed skills to Australia, it contributed export income to Australia, and it slowed the rate of ageing and it was a budget benefit. Put all that together and it was too attractive for any government to refuse.

For more than a decade, the Productivity Commission (PC) debunked the myth that immigration can overcome population ageing. For example:

• PC (2005): “Despite popular thinking to the contrary, immigration policy is also not a feasible countermeasure [to an ageing population]. It affects population numbers more than the age structure”.
• PC (2010): “Realistic changes in migration levels also make little difference to the age structure of the population in the future, with any effect being temporary“…
• PC (2011): “…substantial increases in the level of net overseas migration would have only modest effects on population ageing and the impacts would be temporary, since immigrants themselves age… It follows that, rather than seeking to mitigate the ageing of the population, policy should seek to influence the potential economic and other impacts”…
• PC (2016): “[Immigration] delays rather than eliminates population ageing. In the long term, underlying trends in life expectancy mean that permanent immigrants (as they age) will themselves add to the proportion of the population aged 65 and over”.

Put simply, any demographic dividend from immigration can only be temporary since migrants also grow old. And when they do, they will add to the pool of elderly Australians in the future, thereby requiring an ever-larger intake of migrants to ameliorate population ageing and an ever-larger population—classic ponzi demography.

High immigration also has negative impacts on economic and social infrastructure, congestion, housing affordability, productivity, and the natural environment.

Former head of the PC, Gary Banks, said it best in 2021 when he shredded Treasury’s Intergenerational Report, arguing that the case to reboot Australia’s mass immigration program post-COVID did not stack up economically or socially. Instead, Banks recommended a level of net overseas migration (NOM) of only 90,000 annually:

Treasury’s budget forecasts envisage net immigration getting back to its previous annual peak of 235,000 by 2025… One has to question whether, federal budget repair aside, attempts to revive immigration to the extent forecast would be sensible from a national interest perspective. While Treasury is perhaps understandably bullish, the Productivity Commission has provided a more nuanced assessment. This suggests that, under realistic assumptions, immigration does little for either participation or productivity nationally in the long term, with income gains in per capita terms small and largely skewed to migrants themselves.

Moreover, while highly skilled migrants are good for the economy, and sectors like mining in particular, and should be encouraged, the average skill level for the intake as a whole in recent years has not been high.

When externalities such as congestion and housing affordability are taken into account, I’d suggest that the optimal level of net immigration for Australia could be closer to Treasury’s forecast in the first IGR of 90 000 than the latest one. Where it ends up is unclear. But what is clear is that immigration policy is too important to be devised primarily on fiscal grounds or in relative seclusion.

Technocrats like Abul Rizvi never acknowledge the downsides of endless mass immigration. They myopically focus on slowing population ageing and juicing the federal budget.

Rizvi also likes to use the work of “Australia’s greatest living demographer” Peter McDonald to justify running a high immigration program to alleviate population ageing.

However, before he became a cookie-cutter ANU shill for mass immigration, McDonald argued in a 1999 parliamentary research paper that it is “demographic nonsense to believe that immigration can help to keep our population young”. McDonald also stated that “annual net migration above 80 000 become increasingly ineffective and inefficient in the retardation of ageing” and recommended “a population of 24-25 million within 50 years”.

There is no question that immigration, at least the first 80 000 immigrants, provides a worthwhile reduction in the extent of ageing of the population. However, immigration cannot ‘solve our ageing problem’. Substantial ageing of the Australian population over the coming decades is absolutely inevitable. To illustrate the lack of power that immigration has in relation to our age structure, we investigate the levels of immigration that would be required to maintain the proportion of the population aged 65 and over at its present level of 12.2 per cent. In doing this, we maintain the fertility and mortality assumptions of the standard but allow annual net migration to change.

To achieve our aim, enormous numbers of immigrants would be required, starting in 1998 at 200 000 per annum, rising to 4 million per annum by 2048 and to 30 million per annum by 2098 (Table 6). By the end of next century with these levels of immigration, our population would have reached almost one billion… The problem is that immigrants, like the rest of the population, get older and as they do, to keep the population young, we would need an increasingly higher number of immigrants…

It is demographic nonsense to believe that immigration can help to keep our population young. No reasonable population policy can keep our population young…

Levels of annual net migration above 80 000 become increasingly ineffective and inefficient in the retardation of ageing. Those who wish to argue for a higher level of immigration must base their argument on the benefits of a larger population, not upon the illusory ‘younging power’ of high immigration…

There is an upper limit to annual net migration. We argue that there were difficulties in the late 1980s when net migration rose for just two years to over 150,000 per annum. While it is not possible to be prescriptive, a sustained net migration level of 120 000 per annum is at the high end of what Australia seems to be able to manage.

Australia’s population officially breached McDonald’s “24-25 million” limit in 2018, 31 years early. This was courtesy of a mass immigration program that was around 2.5 times larger than McDonald recommended in 1999.

It’s also worth noting that McDonald’s and Temple’s later 2010 modelling justifying high immigration only looked at the impact of immigration on per capita GDP while ignoring all other pertinent issues:

At the same time, increases to migration add constantly to the population and this increases the burdens associated with the provisioning and servicing of a growing population. This gives rise to the question of balance. At what point do the disadvantages of increased population outweigh the advantages to the economy of increases in immigration? This is a very large question and is beyond the scope of this report. Instead, this report examines one component of this question. Is there a point where further increases in immigration lead to substantially lower marginal increases in the growth of GDP per capita? (p. 19, emphasis added).

Per capita GDP is a poor measure of well-being, as it overlooks crucial issues such as environmental degradation, depreciation of natural resources, escalating inequality, and deterioration in individuals’ quality of life due to factors such as traffic congestion and living in smaller and more expensive housing.

But even on this measure, Australia’s per capita GDP and productivity performance have been poor since immigration was ramped up. This suggests that McDonald’s 2010 modelling is wrong about immigration raising per capita GDP.

Tellingly, the final paragraph of McDonald’s and Temple’s 2010 report concluded with the following warning that if infrastructure doesn’t keep pace with population growth, then both productivity and living standards will suffer:

While this report argues that immigrants will be important to the construction of productive infrastructure in Australia, if increased immigration proceeds without investment in new infrastructure, especially urban infrastructure, the result could be reductions in productivity through increased congestion and inefficiency. Thus, a plan relating to Australia’s future levels of immigration must be coordinated with policy for urban infrastructure especially housing, transport, water and appropriate energy supply. With constant fertility and net migration at 180,000 per annum, Australia’s population would rise to 35.9 million by 2050. This is a large increase and most of the additional population would be settled in the existing cities all of which are already under strain from infrastructure shortages. (p. 45)

Given the unambiguous failure of Australia’s infrastructure to keep up with mass immigration, and the unambiguous worsening of traffic congestion (among other liveability indicators), surely this nullifies McDonald’s claims about the benefits of mass immigration?

Again, Australia’s productivity growth has collapsed in concert with the increase in immigration.

Abul Rizvi has shown a lack of judgment and rigour by focusing on the temporary impacts on population ageing and using the myopic and contradictory research of Peter McDonald to advocate for high immigration.