AdvertisementOpinionTechWorkThe invisible migrants reshaping Australian workJoel PearsonMay 10, 2026, updated May 08, 2026 ShareThe biggest disruption to Australian jobs is arriving through the login screen. Photo: PexelsPauline Hanson has spent thirty years warning that foreign workers threaten Australian jobs. She now leads a party polling at historic highs, with One Nation reaching 25 per cent in the latest Essential poll. So, where is her policy on the largest foreign workforce ever to enter the Australian economy – AI immigrants?Four days before Christmas, Katherine, a 24-year-old medical receptionist at a clinic in Sydney’s Inner West, was called into a meeting with three colleagues. Management told them phones would now be routed to a “natural computer AI”. Emails would be filed automatically. Patients would receive a generic computer-generated reply. With their six-month probation almost up, the four young women were let go and, adding insult to displacement, asked to help configure the systems replacing them. Katherine called her father afterwards. He works in tech, heads IT for an insurance fund and was livid. Her younger colleagues had never been let go from a job before. They sat in the room together, stunned, not quite believing this was how working life could go.Katherine’s story, first reported by News Corp in May 2025, is not an outlier. It is the shape of things to come and it exposes a gaping hole in the political debate about protecting Australian workers.The immigration debate in Australia, as in most wealthy democracies, rests on a labour market argument wearing cultural clothes. Too many people competing for too few jobs. Downward pressure on wages. Disruption to established communities. Whatever you think of the framing, the underlying logic is economic – new entrants to the workforce reshape bargaining power, career ladders, and wage floors.One Nation has built its entire platform on this logic. According to RedBridge polling, 78 per cent of One Nation voters believe the next generation will have a worse life than their parents. They are voting on economic anxiety as much as cultural grievance.So, here is the question that should be put to Hanson, to Angus Taylor, to Anthony Albanese – why are we restricting human arrivals while waving through the largest incoming workforce in history?Because the most consequential new worker arriving in Australia is not a person, it is an AI agent. Not the chatbot that drafts your child’s homework while you watch. I mean systems already operating inside organisations that can take a task list, plan the steps, execute them across multiple software tools and produce finished work, all while you sleep. This is administrative labour, professional support labour and increasingly the early layers of professional judgement, all compressed into something that works without sleep, without salary, without limit.A human arrives needing housing, schools, transport, healthcare and community. They work eight to 10 hours a day. They have rights. They spend their wages locally, pay taxes, raise children who become future workers and citizens. An AI agent needs none of this. It crosses the border at the speed of procurement. It arrives as part of a subscription plan. It is labour without any of the social infrastructure that normally accompanies a new workforce.Dario Amodei, CEO of US AI company Anthropic, recently warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and push unemployment to 10 to 20 per cent. The US Federal Reserve has flagged that graduate employment has “deteriorated noticeably”. Oxford Economics found the damage concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science – precisely where AI capabilities are advancing fastest. In Australia, the Productivity Commission has acknowledged the transformative potential of AI, with chair Danielle Wood noting that harnessing generative AI is now central to reversing the country’s worst productivity slump in 60 years. A tech executive recently told the New York Times his startup employed a single data scientist to do work that once required a team of 75.When an Australian company hires an Australian worker, that salary circulates within the Australian economy. It pays rent, groceries, childcare, and taxes. A dollar paid in wages ripples through the local economy multiple times before it settles. When that same company subscribes to an AI service, the money takes a different journey. It flows directly offshore, typically to a handful of American technology corporations – OpenAI, Microsoft, Google or Anthropic. The subscription fee that replaced Katherine’s salary does not buy groceries in Marrickville. It does not pay rent in Parramatta. It exits the Australian economy entirely, every month, automatically by direct debit.Scale this up and the implications are severe. If AI displaces a significant fraction of Australian white-collar work, we are not simply losing jobs. We are engineering a structural current-account drain, a systematic transfer of what was once domestic wages into the revenue lines of foreign technology giants. The productivity gains stay with the companies. The labour savings become Silicon Valley’s subscription revenue. Australia keeps the unemployment.Why does one form of labour competition attract intense political attention while another, far larger, attracts almost none?Our threat-detection systems evolved to respond to things we can see. A boat on the horizon. A queue at the border. A face that looks different from ours. Politicians have understood this for centuries. The most effective fear campaigns are always built on things we can picture easily. Good luck trying to imagine an AI agent arriving in Australia. There’s no boat. No airport. No face. An AI agent enters the workforce through a procurement portal, a subscription agreement, or a software update pushed overnight. It is labour that arrives without ever arriving.People will march in the streets over a hundred asylum seekers, but shrug at a million jobs repriced by invisible software.Hanson has built a political movement on the vividness of human migration. But she has nothing to say about a threat that is harder to see and vastly larger in scale. Her silence is not strategic, it is a failure of imagination shared by almost every politician in the country.Here is what serious policy would look like. If a company fires workers because AI can do their jobs, the public should know. Quarterly. By law. Mandatory disclosure is the simplest first step and the one hardest for any politician to argue against. If foreign AI is extracting value that once circulated as Australian wages, tax it. A digital services levy on AI subscriptions, with revenue directed to worker transition funds. And if AI absorbs junior work, redesign the entry-level before it disappears. Require employers to create pathways for young workers to build judgement and progress.None of this will happen while we pretend AI is not a labour market issue. The Albanese government is silent. The Coalition, silent. One Nation, for all its noise about foreign workers, has nothing to say.If protecting Australian workers is the mission, then every politician who claims that mantle needs to answer a simple question, ‘where is your policy on the coming AI workforce?’.Because the biggest disruption to Australian jobs is not arriving by boat or plane. It is arriving through the login screen. And we don’t even have a firewall.Professor Joel Pearson is Deputy Director of Human Readiness at the UNSW AI Institute, and an ARC Future Fellow at the University of New South WalesWant to see more stories from The New Daily in your Google search results?Click here to set The New Daily as a preferred source.Tick the box next to "The New Daily". That's it.Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Work Share Follow The New DailyAdvertisementMore Opinion >OpinionWrap fund v industry super: Compare & contrastOpinionThe invisible migrants reshaping Australian workAustralian PoliticsQuestions about Liberal relations with One NationAustralian PoliticsThis fury is generational – and it won't be ignoredOpinionA budget amid global chaos and Farrer byelectionOpinionCould return of 'ISIS brides' have been blocked?Donald TrumpAustralians ready to break up with Trump’s USOpinionA decade of dog-whistles and lost votersAustralian PoliticsA tragedy in a tent – and still our poorest must pay