Labour Migration and Rejection from Jobs

So currently my life has involved a lot of rejection; that is job rejection. Going on various job interviews for internships and graduate jobs only to hear back a week later that it I did not get the job. I don’t have a lot of words to describe this feeling of rejection other than it sucks, it makes you question yourself, your skills, your abilities, your future, your previous decisions, pretty much everything. So how to take this rejection, well my dad uses the word resilience’s, definition; the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness, an individual's ability to properly adapt to stress and adversity.

But it would be really easy to blame someone else….

Like every good arts student I have over my university life looked at labour migration, I viewed it as an important part of my history; my grandparents like many others in this country were not born here and migrated from elsewhere. What I didn't really consider was that it would impact my future, or impact it in a negative way, I was going to travel, obviously, maybe even live in another country for a while but this was a positive of open borders, and a distant future. Not something that would have a practical impact on things in my life, like my ability to get a job.

The immigration policies of a country represent more than just how many lives the country can support, they are a reflection on how generations have understood and represented ethnicity and national identity. Expressed in the selection or exclusion of certain groups of migrants throughout history. National borders have acted as filter, separating out the unwanted and wanted flow of migrants. So how would I construct Australia’s migration policies today, in 2014 when I’m thinking about my future and my job prospects? I have always believed that we should have more open borders, that Australia has a duty to accept refugees, to help people searching and wanting a better life, those people were my grandparents 60 years ago. We are so lucky in this country, we should accept other people to come and experience this amazing country (not to go all nationalistic on everyone). I believed that those people who equated their ability to getting a job or losing a job to foreign workers were naïve, and downright wrong. But I am no longer just a arts student, I am also a economics student, I get to draw nifty graphs in international economics on how an influx of labour from a country whose workers’ wages are lower, in turn lowers the wages in their destination country. Nifty equations where it’s quite reasonable for countries that have an abundance of cheap labor to manufacture goods and those countries that don’t shouldn't. It’s an easy equation it means those industries should not exist in a country such as Australia, or at least not to the extent that they do, this has meant a lot of people lose their jobs, true, just look at the car industry. It is the fun world of outsourcing; fun fact 60% of jobs in the USA (I’m not sure about Australia) are non-tradable that means they need to be provided locally, which means that 40% of jobs are tradable, they can be provided at long distances, due to the ease communications; the internet. Some of these jobs everyone knows, call centers are prime examples, but they are plenty more emerging in the future.

This prompts a little personal reflection; is the University degree I studied for trade-able? Are my skills better suited to be provided in another country? We now live in a world of economic transformation spear headed by the buzz word, globalisation, with “border free economic spaces”, driving people’s desire to migrate, while at the same time there is an increasing trend to make people illegal through a process of re-bordering. Governments have essentially transformed migration into a complex web of legality regulating migration at an all-time high, including Australia. Would I feel more secure if Australia restricted its migration? To know that the jobs I am applying for will not be overseas in 5 years time available to people who are far cheaper than me? It is ridiculously tempting to fall into this line of thought, this suspicion of the foreigner, the other person, in the other country stealing my job. However despite my lack of any internship or graduate job currently I still do not believe it is an acceptable line of thought. Resilience in my case is not just about applying to another job despite the rejection; it’s more about not falling into the temptation of blaming others. I could go into a lot of detail on Australia’s immigration policy from 1901 to present but I've been informed to not give the readers one of my arts essays. So in short I believe that we should accept people from other countries, it gives us a richer society. We have the ability to support more people and we should.  That in the end those others are just people, there should not be an us and them mentality as they deserve the same opportunities as I do, even if those opportunities are in Australia.  Also despite the gloom and doom of economics in the end all the equations and graphs conclude that trade between two countries, even in labour, is always good, that sure some people lose, but on the whole everyone wins. 

-MRouge-