Australia will need more than 250,000 new migrants a year to raise living standards, a recent study by the Migration Council of Australia reveals.
To reap the benefits of the reported $1.6 trillion that new migrants will add to the economy of an ageing population, treasurer Joe Hockey says it will require adequate planning.
“You’d need to build more infrastructure to cope and that means government spending more money, so that’s a good debate to have and we welcome the debate,” said Mr Hockey.
It’s something that Professor Anastasios Tamis believes has been lacking for the newly arrived Greek migrants and repatriating Australian citizens.
“I don’t think the Australian government has done enough to accommodate those incoming immigrants and Australian citizens,” Professor Tamis told Neos Kosmos.
“We were not well prepared to accommodate this incoming arrival. We didn’t have the infrastructure.”
This is amongst the many topical issues covered in a book that was launched last night at the Greek Community Centre, entitled New Migration To and From Greece.
The book is compiled by the University of Crete’s Professor Michalis Damanakis, an expert on the history of the Hellenic diaspora, along with a cohort of 10 scholars and researchers, which has put together a study on the new migration trends of Greece from 2009 onwards following the financial crisis.
“The book covers the consequences of the new migration to and from Greece, and the consequences emerging from the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants settling in Greece during a period of crisis,” said Professor Tamis, co-editor of the book.
Since the crisis first struck Greece in 2009, it is estimated that 145,000 Greeks have migrated abroad and many of them have ventured down under.
Yet according to Professor Tamis, officials have found it difficult to say exactly how many have started to call Australia home.
With a large percentage of Greeks born in Australia and living in Greece from the early 1980s, upon returning with their Australian citizenship they were not recorded as Greek migrants.
Although the Intergenerational Report proves that countries like Australia can benefit from skilled and educated inhabitants of countries such as Greece seeking opportunities abroad, the Professor also highlights the negative impact this can have on the home country, referring to the movement as a ‘brain drainage’.
“Greece is experiencing a brain drainage and thousands of Greeks are leaving, which is to the calamity and misfortune of the social structure of Greece for years to come, not only the present,” he says.