Percentage of Australians born overseas at highest level since 1893

The share of Australians born overseas has surpassed 30% for the first time since 1893, after record migration in the year to June 2023 pushed the figure out of its Covid-induced plateau.

Australia drew in an additional 500,000 foreign-born residents, taking the total to 8.2 million out of the 26.6 million in the country in June, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics latest data, released on Wednesday.

The 494,000-person boost to Australia’s overseas-born population signals immigration’s full recovery from pandemic-era border restrictions, after the figure grew by only 155,000 in the preceding year.

The sharp increase amounts to a 6% rise in the total number of residents born overseas, more than double the annual increases observed in the decade before the pandemic.

The Indian-born population grew the most, rising by more than 90,000 to take the diaspora to almost 846,000 in total by June 2023.

The south Asian nation has narrowed the gap with England, which remains the biggest source of Australia’s overseas-born residents (962,000 residents), after peaking a decade ago with a contribution of more than 1 million.

China remains the third-largest source of overseas-born residents, ticking over to more than 655,000 residents, after pandemic border restrictions saw the total slip below 585,000 in 2021.

The steadier growth in the Indian diaspora compared with China’s reflects Australia’s shifting diplomatic relations, according to Dr Aude Bernard from the Queensland Centre for Population Research.

“[China] really started slowing down with Covid … but this was overlaid by the geopolitical tensions, which means that there was growing concern,” she said.

“It’s gone the other way with India – we’ve seen a deepening of the relationship between Australia and India.”

Indian people have increasingly come to Australia in search of work as India’s population growth surpasses its job prospects for tertiary-educated people, according to University of Melbourne associate professor Val Colic-Peisker.

“There’s a lot of people who study at universities and come out and they just don’t have great opportunities … and then they choose to emigrate,” she said.

Bernard said the uptick was mostly “recuperation migration” making up for the pandemic-era border restrictions. “If there hadn’t been Covid, the share of people born overseas would probably be similar today,” she said.

Colic-Peisker said this was because Australia needed more workers to fill skill shortages in sectors such as construction and medicine.

“[Labour] is the point of the whole immigration program. Australia, without importing labour, is in crisis almost immediately.”