OVERVIEW OF MIGRANT TAXPAYERS IN 2011-12

Permanent migrants who have arrived since 2000

On Census night 2011, there were 1.3 million permanent migrants who had arrived in Australia since 1 January 2000; 716,793 (56%) through the Skill stream, 418,553 (33%) via the Family stream, and 138,355 (11%) arrived under the Humanitarian stream (ABS, 2013).


Graph 2 illustrates the trends in migration levels of the Skill, Family and Humanitarian visa streams since 2000. Migrants who enter Australia are predominantly skilled.


Permanent migrant taxpayers

The 2011-12 Personal Income Tax and Migrants Integrated Dataset (PITMID) included 969,478 migrants aged 15 years and over on 1 July 2011 (the start of the financial year) that had been granted a permanent visa since 1 January 2000 and had submitted a tax return for the 2011-12 financial year.

• Almost two-thirds of migrant taxpayers held a Skill stream visa (61%), while 29% were Family stream migrants, 5.1% on a Provisional visa and 4.8% were Humanitarian migrants.
• Migrant taxpayers reported $53.4 billion in total personal income in 2011-12, an increase of 17% on 2010-11. The majority of this income was reported by migrants from the Skill stream, followed by those in the Family stream.
• Most migrant taxpayers’ personal income was Employee income ($49 billion or 91%). This represented a 16% increase compared with total Employee income in 2010-11.
• The number of migrant taxpayers in 2011-12 increased by 11% compared with the number of migrant taxpayers in 2010-11 (869,508).

	2010-11				2011-12
	No	%	$ m	%	No	%	$m	%	Median $	% Change
Skill	542 096	62.3	33 177	72.4	593 541	61.2	38 042	71.2	51 261	5.0
Family	245 853	28.3	10 328	22.5	279 290	28.8	12 256	22.9	35 366	5.7
Humanitarian	37 911	4.4	1 087	2.4	46 317	4.8	1 464	2.7	28 465	13.5
Other permanent	693	0.1	33	0.1	741	0.1	38	0.1	43 213	6.3
Provisional	42 959	4.9	1 215	2.7	49 433	5.1	1 617	3.0	31 974	20.3
Total	896 508	100.0	45 840	100.0	969 478	100.0	53 426	100.0	43 178	5.2

Note: Income data for 2010-11 has been adjusted by CPI.


Median incomes of migrant taxpayers

• The median Employee income of migrant taxpayers in 2011-12 was $43,734, an increase in real terms of 5.4% from 2010-11. This was slightly higher than the median Employee income for all Australian taxpayers at $43,405.
• Migrant taxpayers with a Skill stream visa had the highest median Employee income ($51,992), followed by migrants from the Other permanent and Family stream.

The following graphs present the median Employee income and median Business income of migrants by visa stream for the 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 financial years.

Migrants with a Provisional or a Humanitarian visa had the lowest median Employee incomes, with $31,532 and $27,150 respectively.


By contrast, Humanitarian migrants continued to have the highest median Business income in 2011-12 ($14,402), though they recorded a slight decrease of 5.2% on 2010-11.


References

Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013, Understanding Migrant Outcomes - Enhancing the Value of Census Data, Australia, 2011, Canberra.

Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC), 2013, Australia's Migration Trends 2011-12, Canberra.

Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), 2015, Historical migration statistics, Canberra.