Australia’s migration is more complicated than the one number politicians fixate onBy Casey Briggs and Madi Chwasta
Posted Mon 14 Sep 2026 at 4:12pmMon 14 Sep 2026 at 4:12pmMon 14 Sep 2026 at 4:12pmLoading…
As debate about how to reduce Australia’s migration intake rages, much of the conversation has focused on a single figure.
It’s known as “Net Overseas Migration”, or the NOM for short.
What’s the perfect number? Is it 225,000, or 130,000, or something else entirely?
Both Labor and the Coalition have indicated that the NOM is higher than they want right now and are developing policies to take greater control of the migration program.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has gone a step further, calling for net migration to be negative (with more people leaving the country than entering) in the next few years, before the NOM settles around 130,000 a year, although it’s not always clear that the party is using the same definition for the NOM as everyone else.
Australia’s politicians are making an already complicated policy area more confusing than it needs to be, according to some migration policy experts at least.
Meanwhile business and industry groups, along with some politicians like South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, are pushing back on how the debate has been framed around setting a target for the NOM.
Regular misunderstandings and mischaracterisations of this single number aren’t helping either.
The first step is understanding what Net Overseas Migration actually is.
A simple calculation
To calculate the NOM, you take the number of migrants arriving in Australia who are staying for more than a year and subtract the number of people leaving.
It’s the most common way of measuring how much our population is growing due to immigration, but it doesn’t count everyone in the immigration system.
For example, someone who gets a visa to stay in Australia won’t be counted in the NOM if they already live in the country.
People who come over on a short-term contract, like for a season of farm work, also aren’t captured in the NOM.
It’s a simple measure of migration flows into and out of Australia and it hides a lot of complexity in the immigration system.
One thing it clearly shows is that in recent years net migration has been at record highs.
But it comes after the biggest fall in net migration in Australian history, when net migration went negative for the first time in the post-war era.
According to net migration figures, the only year that more people left the country than 2020-21 was in 1916, when Australia shipped legions of young men off to war. World War II would’ve also had a big dip, but it was decided troops would not be counted in migration data during that conflict.
Just as the mass emigration of 1916 was followed by a surge in immigration when soldiers returned in 1919, Australia’s immigration intake roared back to life when the borders re-opened in 2022-23.
In that year, Australia’s population grew by more than 500,000, with the biggest driver being a surge in international students.
Net migration has been falling since then back toward historic levels, but not as fast as the government initially forecast, supercharging it as a political issue.
Anti-immigration sentiment has been trending up in Australia, fuelled by political leaders, and former immigration department official Abul Rizvi says he’s observed that in the community.
“The general public thinks the government has lost control of the intake … to some degree, it is an accurate perception,” he says.
“The second problem that I think has occurred is that both the current government and previous government ceased explaining immigration policy to the Australian public.”
So let’s try to understand it, by breaking down the NOM into its different pieces.
Most arrivals here on temporary visas
In 2024-25, about 570,000 people migrated to Australia, and we can divide them into four main groups.
There are Australian citizens moving home and New Zealanders moving across the Tasman, who have full rights to enter Australia but enter the country on a special visa.
Collectively, they made up about one-fifth of all arrivals.
People entering on permanent visas make up another 15 per cent.
But the bulk of people entering the country are on temporary visas.
Most permanent visas are skilled workers, followed by partners or relatives of Australian residents, along with a smaller number of humanitarian visas for refugees.
The number of people entering on permanent visas is fairly stable for two reasons: the government limits the number available each year, and most people who get permanent visas already live in Australia so aren’t even counted as arrivals.
It’s the temporary visas that have been growing over time and are having the biggest influence on the NOM.
The government currently has limited power to restrict the number of visas given in each temporary visa class.
That, along with the fact that you can’t precisely measure the NOM in real time, and the net migration figure also includes Australian citizens, means it isn’t possible for the government to just set a cap on net migration.
But Rizvi says governments can set a net migration target, rather than a hard cap, and then design policy to ensure we get close to it.
The government has targeted 225,000 net arrivals a year by 2028.
People aren’t leaving as fast as they used to
While the focus is often on arrivals, a large part of the reason the NOM is higher than usual is that people are staying in Australia for longer than they used to.
There are lots of reasons for that, including the COVID-related border shock.
Successive governments have also presided over a growing backlog of people on bridging visas.
These are visas that people hold after their temporary visa has expired while they wait for an outcome on an application for a new one.
Alan Gamlen, the director of ANU Migration Hub, says the size of the temporary population needs to be carefully controlled.
“We have millions of people who are living in second class citizenship status and that has a range of unintended consequences,” he says.
Gamlen says a big temporary population makes it harder to plan for infrastructure, while individual visa holders are at higher risk of being exploited at work and struggle to integrate into the community due to their status.
Rizvi says large numbers of the temporary cohort want permanent visas, which most were unlikely to get.
“Having large numbers of vulnerable, desperate people stuck in limbo is not good public policy,” he says.
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Focus on just one number lets politicians dodge the complexity
Experts say migrants have benefited Australia’s economy greatly, by keeping our aging population younger and filling the jobs that locals can’t or aren’t willing to do.
But for years there’s been agreement that the system needs reform.
A review commissioned by the Labor government in 2022 and chaired by former treasury secretary Dr Martin Parkinson concluded that the migration system was “overly complex” and “not fit for purpose”.
“The objectives of the program are unclear, and successive governments and policymakers have responded to challenges through piecemeal reforms which have not addressed fundamental underlying issues,” the reviewers wrote.
Maybe that will change as parties lay out more of the detail on their migration policies, but for now, Gamlen says the conversation is falling short of his expectations.
“[Parties] have been competing to name a net migration figure that they clearly don’t understand, that the public doesn’t understand, and that isn’t able to be justified in terms of the problems with migration that people actually care about,” he says.
Last month the government twice contemplated options that would bring down Australia’s overall net migration figures.
A proposal to impose new work requirements on British working holiday-makers was killed when the UK government raised concerns, and a day later Anthony Albanese intervened to guarantee that the government wouldn’t cut the number of humanitarian visas it grants each year.
The government also appears to be controlling intake in a less obvious way — rather than setting a limit on international student visas, border officials are refusing applications at record high levels.
It perfectly illustrates the difficulties here. There is broad agreement that the migration system needs some reform, but governments have to grapple with the economic, political, and diplomatic consequences of restricting individual visa classes.
It’s one thing to set a net migration target, but working out how to achieve that is a conversation that political leaders have been less keen to have.