Australia’s current migration challenge is less about record arrivals than delayed departures and altered temporary visa pathways, according to a new report from the Australian National University’s Migration Hub.

The report, titled ‘Can Australia Achieve a Migration Soft Landing?’, says that Net Overseas Migration (NOM) is falling from its post-pandemic peak, but remains above normal because departures have not fully recovered.

Co-authors Professor Alan Gamlen and Emeritus Professor Peter McDonald say that much of the current debate over migration is misleading.

“Much of the public debate treats the current level as the result of unprecedently high immigration. That framing is misleading. Arrivals have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels,” Professor Gamlen said.

“The continuing elevation is now mainly because departures remain suppressed or delayed,” he said.

The report says that permanent and citizen movements are relatively small and stable, while temporary migration is the main source of volatility.

“Departures among temporary skilled migrants have not normalised in the same way,” Professor McDonald said.

“This is likely to reflect several overlapping mechanisms: the structural lag from lower arrivals during the pandemic, onshore temporary-to-permanent transitions, and further temporary visa extensions.”

The authors argue that Australia can achieve a migration soft landing, but only if policy focuses on the mechanisms that are actually keeping NOM elevated.

The report says that a soft landing requires a defensible settlement strategy: deciding who should be allowed to stay permanently, who should remain temporarily and for how long, and how the state can fairly and lawfully ensure that those with no ongoing entitlement to stay actually leave.

“The task is not simply to push NOM down. It is to bring the migration system back to normal without creating unnecessary disruption for employers, education providers, migrants, communities or enforcement systems,” Prof Gamlen said.

The report also examined state-level NOM.

“The recent pattern is broadly shared across the states. Queensland and Western Australia, for example, do not appear from the NOM data alone to have received an exceptional overseas migration shock relative to the broader national pattern,” Prof McDonald said.

 “Their recent experience of population pressure may therefore require a wider explanation than overseas migration alone.”

The report suggests that the political geography of migration attitudes might instead be a response to population pressure resulting from Net Interstate Migration (NIM).

In a recent article, Prof Gamlen argued that Australia needs to reset the conversation over migration.

“Migration debates often begin in the wrong place. They ask how many migrants a country should accept, which migrants should be prioritised and how quickly they should arrive,” he wrote.

“These are important questions, but they are not the first question. The first question is more basic: what is migration for?

“The answer is not simple, because migration serves more than one purpose. It’s a tool of economic management. It’s a response to demographic change. It’s part of how countries remain connected to the world. But it is also something deeper: an expression of the human condition itself.

“People move. They always have. Long before passports, visas and border agencies, humans moved in search of safety, opportunity, family, knowledge, trade, love and freedom. Movement is one of human history’s defining features.

“The challenge for governments is not to abolish migration. The challenge is to manage migration well enough that it supports prosperity, protects human dignity and sustains social cohesion,’ Prof Gamlen wrote.