Australia need not fear foreign workers: we remain in control

As of 2024, international students comprised 18.5 per cent (824) of the 4453 students who commenced medical studies.

Foreign-trained nurses also make up about 32 per cent of Australia's total nursing workforce, while Aged Care and Allied Health services in Australia rely heavily on overseas professionals.

With around 50 to 58 million of the 168 million international migrant workers in 2022 being highly-skilled occupations, with Western trained professionals only making up a fraction of the global migrant workforce, Australia must compete with other Western nations to attract such workers.

The same competition with Western countries is also evident with regards to attracting international students with around 6.9 million students studying outside their country of origin in 2024 with China and India dominating numbers.

With India producing 90,000 medical and over one million engineering graduates annually, Australia's emphasis upon skilled migration has resulted in 68 per cent of arriving Indian migrants since 2006 already holding a bachelor's degree or higher, nearly double the rate of the Australian-born population.

Given that Australia is not alone in its heavy reliance upon foreign workers to fuel its economy, it is worth noting how Australia is both similar and different to other nations with regard to how they treat their foreign workers, as indicated by a comparison with Singapore, whose current population of 6.1 million includes 1.9 million foreign workers and non-residents.

Both Singapore and Australia do have examples of foreign worker exploitation, mostly towards low-skilled workers.

A May 2026 publication titled Inside Australia's Hidden System of Migrant Worker Exploitation by the Migrant Justice Institute found that two thirds of 9,963 valid survey responses during the 2023-2024 year were paid less than they were owed under the Fair Work Act.

Around a quarter of respondents were short-changed by at least $10 per hour, and over a third paid below the National Minimum Wage, not taking into account award rates and penalty rates for after-hours work or casual loadings.

Of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, which employs 38,000 Pacific Islanders on farms, abattoirs and aged care, a 2025 report by the RMIT Business and Human Rights Centre observed that workers in the meat industry were being exploited with little ability to report workplace abuse given their stay here was tied to a single sponsor employer.

Many earned less than colleagues on other visa schemes, despite often doing the most physically demanding work; were forced to work unpaid overtime; and experienced illegal wage deductions through employers or labour-hire firms frequently deducting inflated costs for accommodation, uniform, equipment, and transport directly from workers' pay checks.

In December 2024, a coroner inquest found that one Filipino worker (Jerwin Royupa), who died while working at a NSW winery in 2019, was owed more than 200 hours' worth of pay after just 5 weeks of work after being paid just $134.92 per month to work 10 hours a day for six days a week with his pay to be withheld for the first six months to offset the cost of bringing him to Australia.