“They’re susceptible to being underpaid because they’re on visas,” Boucher said. “A lot of migrants are on temporary visas, so sometimes those visas can be used to pressure migrants to engage in suboptimal employment by the employer.”
The second driver is simple complexity. Boucher said neither employer nor employee is always aware a breach of immigration or employment law has occurred, particularly as legislative change accelerates.
“Because what we’re seeing in legal practice is you’ve got a lot of changes happening to the Fair Work Act and the Migration Act, new forms of intersection, but changes in HR personnel, and they’re not necessarily keeping track adequately of the particular migrant’s visa journey,” she said. “And that’s where sometimes breaches can occur, not only of employment law but also of immigration law.”
The third factor, Boucher said, sits alongside – and sometimes compounds – the other two: discrimination. “We still know that there are some instances of racialised treatment of migrants in the labour market,” she said. “That still exists. We still see complaints before, for instance, the Human Rights Commission.”
Her research found a high rate of intersection between underpayment and race discrimination, meaning a single case can involve visa pressure, genuine confusion over entitlements, and bias all at once – which makes the root cause difficult to isolate.