Assessing immigration policy success in Australia

Immigration is an area of public policy ripe for potential characterisation as either policy success or failure. Given that it is a complex area of policy, it is often politicised, and there are different stakeholders with varying views of what constitutes 'success' and 'failure'. All these factors suggest that a policy's success or failure will in some instances change over time and can be open to subjective opinion. In this article, we focus on particular aspects of this story-how the temporal dimension of determining policy success and failure can influence our assessment of policies. We assess one policy that has been evaluated as a success, particularly in a global context: Australia's selection of skilled immigrants and the subsequent incorporation of these migrants as permanent residents. We then consider a policy area that is more accurately considered a policy failure-namely, the historical management of asylum seeker backlogs and its effects upon the occasional misuse of certain visa processes by visa applicants-and we outline how this issue grew over time. This supports the fundamental argument that the assessment of success and failure is temporal in nature and that the endurance of policy is crucial in determining its characterisation. Furthermore, deviation from the original policy intent over time will be an additional measure of policy failure, and this will vary according to implementation challenges.Points for practitioners The assessment of policy as 'successful' or a 'failure' is temporal in nature. It is hard to be successful over the long term. The quality of data available to policy-makers will influence the ways in which the relative success of policy is adjudged. Administrative datasets can provide more detailed insights for policy evaluation than shorter term surveys. Qualitative studies are of value in adjudging success. Immigration is a policy domain where the evaluation of success will depend upon the perspective of relative stakeholders as there are strongly affected interests in this area with differing views on what constitutes 'success'. Immigration policy success shifts over time, dependent upon the interaction with other policy areas such as border protection, enforcement policies and their funding, as well as higher education policy.