For years, one stubborn number has hypnotised Australia's migration debate.
Population growth due to migration, or net overseas migration (NOM), has consistently refused to co-operate with the government's targets, allowing the coalition and One Nation to club Labor over the head with it.
The government's new magic figures are 245,000 net overseas migrants in the year to July 2027 and 225,000 per year thereafter, with sweeping changes announced by Immigration Minister Tony Burke on Thursday.
Most foreign students will no longer be able to bring their relatives, backpackers will jostle for many fewer second- and third-year visas, and people who stay longer than they're allowed will be more firmly shown the door.
Despite years of blow-outs, the latest report is apparently glowing: a tally of about 292,000 migrants in the year to March 2026 - fewer than expected - dropped about an hour before Mr Burke took to the lectern at the National Press Club.
But that was down to ratcheting up the refusal rate on student visas to an almost 10-year high of 24.2 per cent in the year to July 2026, unrelated to the measures announced on Thursday, former Immigration Department Deputy Secretary Abul Rizvi told AAP.
"If they continue the high refusal rate in conjunction with all of the changes they'll make, they'll probably get there," he said about whether Labor could hit its targets.
But Mike Pezzullo, once the department's top bureaucrat, said it was not clear the government had done enough and stressed the impediment of potentially having to scoot around parliament to affect the changes.
"They might have to hit it (net overseas migration) again, and I can't see where other measures would come from short of legislating them," he told AAP on Friday.
Stalled negotiations between Labor and the coalition have doomed the migration reforms' chances in the Senate, although coalition immigration spokesman Jonathon Duniam insists their door remains open.
A plan to detain some visa overstayers has also raised the heart rates of asylum-seeker groups, who leapt to comparisons with the US's heavy-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
But, decked in coats and ties, Australia's immigration compliance officers were not stormtroopers, Mr Rizvi said.
"We didn't have ICE-like officers just breaking down doors and entering schools and hospitals and dragging people out," he said, describing a pre-2015 system Mr Burke said he wanted to revive.
"Most of (the visa over-stayers) were not put in detention."
Mr Pezzullo warned cracking down on Australia's roughly 77,000 unlawful non-citizens would land a drop in an ocean of more than one million temporary visas issued annually.
That figure nudged Australia towards becoming a guest worker economy, possibly making even minor changes to migration settings disastrous, he said.
"It's very hard to unwind that," Mr Pezzullo said.
"The only way to achieve NOM without tanking universities and elsewhere is to get departures to increase ... you might have to hit that legislatively."
