With 6 million people or 27% of the population born overseas Australia has – apart from the city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong – the highest proportion of overseas-born residents of any country in the worldi. This reality is so entrenched, so normal, so much a part of our daily lives, that we rarely stop to consider how migration works and how it might be changing; to ask whether migration today is the same as it was ten, twenty or thirty years ago.