Although it is unimaginable today, the border between the United States and Mexico has remained relatively open until the 1960s. Migrants from Mexico crossed it by the thousands, engaging in seasonal and cyclical work, returning to their families at the end of each season, or when the rhythms of life demanded it.

Beginning in the 1960s, a wave of protectionist sentiment propelled the introduction of laws and policies aimed at regulating travel across the southern border. Again research shows that the measures have had little overall impact on the number of people making the newly illegal journey. By this point, Mexican workers had become part of their communities in the United States, and seasonal migration had become a reality in both countries.

Instead, the restrictions resulted in the creation of a large and ever-growing population of undocumented Mexican workers, prevented from asserting their rights and easier for employers to exploit because they posed the threat of forced expulsion by the state.

Then as now, there was no necessary correlation between governments’ anti-migrant rhetoric and overall migration figures. Indeed, migration restrictions always serve dual lens: exclude and push back some, while ensuring the unequal inclusion of the vast majority.

The same lens can be applied in Australia to the Labor Party’s populist attempts to reduce migration flows. Take for example the much-publicized cap on the number of international students. Adjustments to planning levels have already limited the annual number of students to 270,000. The Albanian government’s attempt to legislate this cap was intended to provide it with a solid legal basis, as well as an opportunity for political demagoguery.

But in real terms, the cap simply sets the number of students enrolled at the pre-pandemic peak. Commenters have noted that it also works based on opaque calculationswhich exclude students from certain sectors from the count. Perhaps more accurately, the cap works alongside the expansion of new and existing temporary visa programs, such as the PALM scheme for the workers of the Pacific, or the lamentably named Visa MATES for Indian graduates.

It remains to be seen whether restrictions on student visas will reduce temporary migration levels in the long term. The most immediate and tangible effect of the cap will be to impose a state of perpetual uncertainty on temporary migrants already in Australia. Applied at a planning level, the cap will mean that student visa applications will be continually postponed rather than refused, leaving applicants stuck with interim bridging visas, subject to restrictions on their ability to work.

Bridging visa holders face some of the most difficult working conditions. They are excluded from the formal economy due to their precarious status and pushed into care and service sectors where wage theft and unsafe conditions are the norm. The ability of bridging visa holders to assert their rights is also limited by the current political context, in which temporary migrants are blamed for a number of problems. social and economic illsfrom real estate pressures to inflation.

The way out of this political impasse does not consist of convincing voters in the abstract of “benefits” of migration or by appealing to their benevolence. It is by convincing ordinary workers that immigration restrictions hurt them undermining the conditions of their visa-holding colleagues and protecting their boss’s exploitable and disposable labor supply. There is nearly 3 million temporary migrants in Australia at present, constituting almost 10% of the active population. For most of us, temporary migrants are part of our workplaces – and our lives.

Compassion is no substitute for common cause. That’s what we saw at the recent Woolworths picket, as 1,500 workers, including many on temporary visas, went on strike against the country’s largest supermarket chain. A kitchen strike was created by refugees on transitional visas as a gesture of solidarity with union members who supported their hundred day camp outside the Interior Ministry offices earlier this year.

Being distracted by sleight-of-hand changes in migration levels or reducing the rights of some will ultimately harm the living conditions of us all.

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