Assess the contribution migrants have made to Australia's social, cultural and economic development from 1945 to the present day.

Subject  > History Term Papers  > Australian History

Since 1945, more than 6 million people have come to Australia as new migrants. In 2003, this means that Australia is gaining a migrant every five minutes and 50 seconds. Today, nearly one in four of Australia's 20 million people were born overseas. Migrants have had an affect on all aspects of our society, including our social, cultural and economic development. They have made Australia a different and more populated place as well as a better one. After the Second World War, an immigration program was introduced to increase the population and boost economic strength. The aim was to bring in mainly British immigrants, but in fact a growing proportion came from Eastern and Northern Europe, and then from ...

... economic level, political and business leaders have tried to transform an economy based on the primary sector (agriculture and mining) to a producer and exporter of modern industrial goods and sophisticated services. This has required better education and training of the workforce, and a shift in priority from low-skilled to highly-skilled immigration. At the same time Australia has moved away from the fairly stable full-employment economy of the period 1945-72: there is now an underlying level of unemployment of nearly 10 per cent (especially for low-skilled workers). Immigration levels fluctuate according to the economic conjuncture, eg. high immigration in the late 1980s, low immigration in the early 1990s and a gradual increase over the last

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