After moving to Australia from Bulgaria with her husband almost 10 years ago, Sonya Chuhovska is now planning to move back.
Amid increasing prices for everything from food to energy and especially housing, some immigrants like Ms Chuhovska are deciding they would be better off returning to their motherland.
Ms Chuhovska said the cost of living was a part of the reason she and her husband made the decision to leave but the decider was being able to buy a house without a mortgage.
“In Bulgaria, you can buy a house which is in a good state for about $50,000 [in a less developed suburb],” she said.
“That’s quite a good incentive for [moving] instead of being stuck here paying a mortgage all your life, which feels quite heavy.
“It’s a lot more freedom.”
Ms Chuhovska and her husband have been sharing a rented house in the Melbourne suburb of Flemington with another tenant for the past two years.
She said they were only paying $450 per week and felt lucky their landlord had not increased their rent but the place was old and small.
“There’s no dishwasher,” she said. “There’s no air conditioning.”
Apart from property prices, she said the general cost of living was much lower in Bulgaria as well.
“Salaries are lower in Bulgaria … but my husband works in IT and he could maybe get a job from another European Union country and work remotely, so he will get a good salary,” she said.
“Then you will live quite well, especially if you’re not paying rent.
“I want to start my own business in Bulgaria … it’s a developing country so business is kind of booming now.”
As she is now a dual citizen of Bulgaria and Australia, Ms Chuhovska said the couple was not “burning the bridges”.
“We can always come back,” she said.
Choice of country ‘a fluid state’
Zhang Renjie is another immigrant who has decided his family would be better off returning to their motherland.
The 42-year-old, who has his own foreign trade business, came to Australia in 2001 and brought the rest of his family over in 2008.
But this month the whole family is moving back to his hometown, the south-western Chinese city of Chengdu.
Mr Zhang said that he could continue to run his business from China and for the same income afford a much better quality of life, in part due to lower wages and interest rates.
“We can get a nanny to take care of the children, drive better cars and rent a very good furnished apartment,” he said.
Mr Zhang said that as the cost-of-living crisis continued, leaving Australia was a frequent topic of discussion in the Chinese community.
“Quite a few of my friends moved back to China already,” he said.
“Migrants’ choice of living can be in a fluid state … it depends on the overall [economic and political] environment of the country.
“For example, I know the recent federal budget disappointed a lot of Chinese migrants [by proposing a reduction in migration].”
Mr Zhang said he knew he was in a special situation.
“We can work from anywhere, and our income won’t be influenced by moving away, but it might be different for those whose job is physically based in Australia,” he said.
“We will re-evaluate our decision around 2032 when Brisbane Olympics happen and have a look at the economic situation in Australia again.
“We will also consider moving to Singapore or UK in the future.”
Bali a better option
Some other migrants, like Tiger Xiong, are choosing to leave Australia but are not heading back home.
Ms Xiong came to Melbourne as an international student after the pandemic to escape the high-pressure working conditions in China.
She had hoped to be able to support herself after graduating but discovered this was harder than she expected due to the high cost of rent, transport and food.
“I would buy things that are near expiry date or on sale,” she told the ABC.
“My roommates at the time would even pick out things that were still usable or eatable from the rubbish bin.
“All of our furniture was picked up from the street.
“My family in China lives a typical middle-class life … it would be hard to achieve that standard here.”
As the cost of living continued to increase, she finally decided to take an exit after graduation.
But rather than going back to China, she moved to Ubud in Bali, where she met her partner.
“I pay around $300 per month for a house with a big yard here, which was the rent for one week when I was in Melbourne,” she said.
“A lot of people work as digital nomads here.”
Ms Xiong said she liked that young people were less materialistic and more interested in exploring spirituality in Ubud.
“What I’ve always wanted is work and life balance — the pacing of life in Bali is not something achievable in Australia,” she said.
She said she still liked a lot about Melbourne and would have stayed longer if it was not so expensive.
“I haven’t decided to migrate to Bali permanently, because things like medical and social services are less developed here,” she said.
“But for now, Bali is the right place for me.”
Implications of potential migrant brain drain
According to the ABS, 22,100 permanent visa holders left Australia in 2022-23, the third-highest number in the past decade.
The net migration of people born in China dipped slightly in the June quarter of this year with the number leaving — which includes international students — up from 18,630 in the December quarter to 24,720 in the June quarter.
Associate professor Anna Boucher, a global migration expert from the University of Sydney, said there would be a relationship between skilled immigration and access to housing.
“Whilst migrants are more educated within Australia, they have less access to property, less intergenerational wealth — which drives property purchases in Australia — and less liquid assets,” she said.
It does seem unlikely Australia will run out of people wanting to come here.
The latest Boston Consulting Group Decoding Global Talent survey released in April found Australia was the most desirable destination for global professionals looking to move countries for work.
Dr Boucher pointed out that while immigration was expected to fall it had been relatively high in the past couple of years and the government was actually taking steps to stem the flow.
However, she said that if Australia did become a less attractive destination compared to other places — due to high cost of living or other reasons — there was a risk the country could miss out on, or lose, more highly productive migrants.
“There’s always going to be more skilled migrants who want to come here,” she said.
“But the government might have to lower admission standards, or might not retain people for as long — which goes against the premise of skilled migration, which is permanent settlement.
“It’s not good for employers to have migrants who stay for a while and then leave either the job or the country, because you’ve invested in their training and their upskilling.”
She said some migrants would be sensitive to changes in cost of living, but a lot of countries were dealing with high inflation — not just Australia — and this did have flow-on effects for housing in other countries too.
“Migrants might leave thinking, ‘Oh, it’s going to be so much better somewhere else’ — and then it’s not,” she said.
“That’s also I think a risk in that ‘grass is always greener’ kind of calculus of migration decisions.”