ORIGINAL ARTICLE Social care and migration policy in Australia: Emerging intersections? Elizabeth Adamson 1 Natasha Cortis 1 Deborah Brennan 1 Sara Charlesworth 2 1 Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Australia 2 School of Management, RMIT University Correspondence Elizabeth Adamson and Natasha Cortis, Social Policy Research Centre, Level 2, John Goodsell Building, UNSW Australia, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. Emails: e.adamson@unsw.edu.au, n.cortis@unsw.edu.au Received 14 December 2015. Accepted 16 September 2016. Funding information Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada895-2012- 1021 Abstract Migrants are important both as providers and users of paid care services in Australia, yet migration has rarely featured in Australian strategies to grow and sustain the paid care workforce. Correspondingly, Australia is rarely mentioned in the international scholarship on care and migration that has burgeoned since the 1990s. This article shows the ways that service providers, consumer advocates, unions and scholars have begun to bring migration into debates about workforce growth in two of Australia’s most significant areas of paid care: aged care and childcare. Drawing on submissions to national enquiries in both areas, we identify the actors who have sought to adjust Australia’s migration settings to respond to growing demand for care, and explain the rationales – which differ between the sectors – underlying their advocacy for change. KEYWORDS aged care, carers, childcare, migration and employment, social policy 1 | INTRODUCTION Demand for high-quality paid care services is increasing in wealthy nations. Like other countries, Australia is grappling to promote service quality and access while containing costs in two rapidly growing areas of social care: aged care and childcare (National Commission of Audit, 2014; Com- monwealth of Australia, 2015, 2016). This paper is concerned with the extent to which Aus- tralia’s migrant intake could provide the labour needed to support workforce growth in these care industries. Whereas other wealthy countries have managed growth by promoting flows of overseas workers into the paid care workforce, this has not been an explicit policy aim in DOI: 10.1002/ajs4.1 78 © 2017 Australian Social Policy Association Aust J Soc Issues 2017;52:78–94