The Australian government claims that its emphasis on skills in the migration program has paid off, with recent migrants achieving superior labour market outcomes to previous cohorts, and contributing more to the ‘productive diversity’ of the Australian workforce. Such sentiments are supported by most contemporary scholars of migration. Their conclusions stem from the adoption of a human capital approach where migrants’ labour market outcomes are seen to directly reflect their individual skills and other attributes, as opposed to social and institutional practices such as discrimination or exclusion. In this article we subject the prevailing ‘success story’ about skilled migration to scrutiny, and point to alternative ways of interpreting the empirical evidence (namely, longitudinal survey data) as well as alternative ways of explaining the incorporation of migrants in the Australian workforce.

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Considerable mythology surrounds the issue of workers' compensation and much of it focuses on migrant workers from non-English speaking backgrounds. In the context of massive employer pressure to reduce the costs of workers' compensation (to employers), and recent legislative changes aimed at achieving this in most states, it is important to explore the nature of migrant workers' experiences of compensation and the social reasons affecting their compensation outcomes. This article discusses these issues in the course of presenting some of the findings of a year-long study of migrant workers in the NSW compensation system recently undertaken by the Centre for Multicultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. It concludes that the popular derogatory stereotype of the malingering migrant worker misrepresents reality. It operates powerfully as an ideology; that is, a set of ideas which draws on aspects of reality to advance sectional interests: in this case, those of employers and insurance companies.