Foreign help wanted: Inquire Down Under
Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2006
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — From the small town of Toowoomba near Australia’s Gold Coast, Dennis Davey is trolling the world for people to work in his 200-employee engineering company.
He has snared 15 workers from South Africa and 15 more from China. Some of the South Africans already have been poached away by the town’s mining companies, so if the latest batch of Chinese works out, Davey says, he will import at least 50 more.
“We have no choice,” he said. “We can’t find any more people.”
The future of Davey Engineering — and other Australian companies — may hinge on the efforts of Australian immigration officials such as Angus Pryor, who set up shop inside a Residence Inn in Beverly Hills this week asking Southern Californians to consider moving Down Under.
With an economy heading into its 15 th year of growth and an aging population, Australia has more jobs than qualified applicants. This year, the govern- ment expanded its annual quota of skilled migrants by 20, 000, a 20 percent increase over 2005.
“Australia is a victim of its own success,” Pryor told a small crowd who joined him for coffee, tea and visa advice Monday morning.
To illustrate the size of his problem, Pryor pulled out a 14-page list of professions eligible for work visas, including 70 jobs that get priority. Chefs, hairdressers, mining engineers and registered midwives move to the head of the line.
Many of the enthusiastic job seekers attending the Beverly Hills seminar had visited Australia. Some were married to Australians and were ready to make the leap.
“I’ve traveled throughout the world, and Australia is one of the places that I felt I could live,” said John Mendeola, a 43-year-old systems engineer from San Diego, who said he was looking for a job in Perth, his wife’s hometown.
It isn’t just Australia on the hunt for talent. Officials from the United States, Canada, Britain, Iceland, India and China are scouring the globe looking to fill job vacancies and jump-start new sectors of their economies. Some governments are using perks such as subsidized housing or education subsidies to persuade talented foreigners to relocate.
But in Australia, with a population of 20 million, the demographic time bomb is ticking loudly. By 2051, the share of Australia’s population over age 65 is projected to double to 26 percent of the total, while the percentage of those under age 15 is expected to shrink to less than 15 percent from the current 20 percent, according to the Australian government.
Migration to the more cosmopolitan cities of Sydney and Melbourne has left more isolated parts of Australia particularly desperate for workers.
Foreigners willing to work in these remote areas face fewer hurdles to obtain visas.
Pryor, a Canberra native, didn’t resort to theatrics to sell the Aussie lifestyle. The only references to kangaroos or beaches were in a series of small photos on the large posters decorating the entry to the conference room.
“Steve Irwin isn’t going to jump out of the poster and wrestle a crocodile to the ground,” he told a photojournalist. The Australian Irwin is host of the popular Animal Planet cable TV show Crocodile Hunter.
Not all Australians welcome the government’s open-door policy. In recent years, some politicians have run on an anti-immigrant platform, playing on fears of rising immigration from Asia. Some labor unions and industry associations also oppose the skilled-migrant program.
Brookings Institution economist Gary Burtless also said the global skills shortages might be exaggerated and that some employers, particularly in high-wage countries, just wanted the freedom to shop abroad for cheaper labor.
“U. S. nursing schools train more than enough nurses to fill all the openings in hospitals, nursing homes and private nursing opportunities,” he said. “But a lot of Americans drop out of the profession after a few years.”
But Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, said that in fields such as engineering, the United States and other developed countries needed to import talent or send work overseas because universities weren’t producing enough graduates to replace retiring baby boomers and fill new positions.
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