The political battle over Australian immigration is really a story of what kind of nation we want to be | Peter Lewis

Anyone who thinks the current immigration debate is simply about the number of foreigners being granted legal passage to Australia each year is only seeing half the picture.

Beyond the crude numerical projections (that a growing number of Australians believe have way too many zeros) is a more basic contest that is both economic and cultural and is being played out around the globe.

This is what 2024 Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel prize-winning economist, casts as liberal democracy’s post-industrial crisis – a project that he argues has ceased to deliver on its core promise of sharing economic prosperity by vesting power in the people.

He places immigration at the fulcrum of this reckoning because it brings to the surface a disparate set of cultural questions of shared values, identity and belonging which, if not resolved, drive people into populist waves of illiberalism.

Through the Guardian Essential report, we have benchmarks on Australian’s attitude to immigration charted over more than a decade now. They show that even as the immigration debate has raged over recent months, general support for immigration remains.

What has changed is the contours of this political debate with the rise of One Nation. Where those opposing immigration were once a minority inside two major parties that broadly supported an expansive program, now they have a political home base.

One Nation’s blunt call to reduce immigration numbers resonates with voters concerned about their jobs, their access to housing, the safety of their community and the availability of services. Immigration becomes a simple explanation for a series of complex problems.

But it is more than that: the major parties have both pushed the expansion of short-term visas to paper over failures in workforce planning and skills development, and then been too quick to dismiss those who raise questions as playing the politics of division – or worse, race.

To Acemoglu, this is the toxic sludge that has poisoned liberal democracy: the tendency of economic elites to impose first their business models, then of the cultural elites to dismiss their concerns.

In times when an economy is expanding and benefits are shared this might be a sustainable ruse; but when prices are rising, the property market is distorted and technology is upending entire industries, political blowback is hardly surprising.

A second question suggests Australia is at an inflection point where a majority now say they want to reduce immigration, with even 30% of those who say they support immigration in principle wanting to slow things down.

The most significant part of the immigration minister Tony Burke’s intervention a fortnight ago was his explicit concession that reducing immigration was, indeed, now government policy.

Burke named the specific areas where the scheme operates and showed how these would be administered: constraints around student visas, ballots for working holidays, less flexibility on family reunion. This week’s poll shows that there is strong support for all these measures.

Stuck between Labor’s technocratic management and One Nation’s nihilist populism, the Coalition is attempting to contain the issue as some sort of algorithmic trade-off between housing and immigration. Its problem is that a separate question shows that the vast majority of those who think immigration is too high say that an increase in housing would do nothing to change their opinion.

Now that the parties have staked out their positions, the real battle will commence, not one of numbers, but a story of nation. A final question shows where the respective camps are starting from.

We can see each party has a sweet spot: Labor voters are a somewhat qualified pro-immigration, Coalition voters are between a slowdown and a crackdown, One Nation firmly on the depopulation train and Greens more likely to embrace the positives of immigration.

So how to break what seems like a destructive and divisive zero-sum culture war? By recognising the majority lie in a more moderate middle, where they seek control over the pace and scale – not the existence – of immigration.

Acemoglu advocates what he calls a “working-class liberalism” that would recognise the inherent value in vesting authority in community, the constant testing of ideas and the bias towards freedom of thought and expression.

First, the government would do more to vest the economic benefits of immigration in local communities. It’s been revealing how rural communities with connections to local families have been such staunch defenders of their neighbours and workmates.

Second, he argues liberal society owes an obligation to new arrivals to afford them not just the rights of the society but the responsibilities. Ensuring those welcomed into communities reflect cultural norms should not be considered nativist or extreme, as Labor frontbencher Julian Hill pointed out in a speech earlier this year: respect for women and tolerance of free thought should be the price of admission.

Third, pathways to citizenship should be central to immigration. Simply seeing individuals as short-term guest workers in a financial transaction does nothing to deepen community ties. The proportion of non-citizens has almost doubled this century, from 11% in 2001 to 18% in 2022, with another increase expected in this year’s census. Can we really be one nation when one in five are not Australian citizens?

Finally, Acemoglu argues that immigration must be negotiated within a broader liberal democratic framework: good jobs, decent services, fair distribution of national wealth, mutual respect that starts to look like some sort of control on those who accumulated the power.

As the world seeks refuge in the nation-state, the challenge is not to convince people who want to slow down immigration that they are wrong, but to give them a real say in the nation we are building.