Shylock, The argument that migrants provide a pool of low cost labor before moving up the social ladder to allow for the next wave of migrants to do the same seems true to me. I have seen taxi drivers go from being being predominently Anglo to Italian to Vietnamese to African. Ditto market gardners.
This does keep the price of low skilled services and therefore the wages required to attract people to do these things low. Recent migrants seem willing to work hard in these jobs as a social stepping stone. However I am not sure its a good thing.
The second generation of all races seems unwilling to work hard in the same jobs so we are in a perrenial cycle of importing low cost labour while the children of previous migrants would rather be on social security.
Perhaps migration is masking some underlaying workforce problems in; 1)Paying and giving too little respect to some jobs such as waiters, taxi drivers and gardeners. Perhaps we should pay more and expect a higher level of service in return. 2)There is a huge pool of workers on various forms of social security that won't take these jobs under current conditions.
In any case I think these things should be considered as part of the royal commission into Australian population policy which would have their recommendation subjected to approval by referendum. Bacci
