The past five decades have witnessed immigration on a scale the globe has never seen before, and countries around the world are convulsing with anti-immigration sentiment. Australia might be an island, but it's no different.

This is a dangerous moment, investigative journalist Eryk Bagshaw argues. Immigration has become a scapegoat because successive governments have lost control of policy levers, and infrastructure has failed to keep up. At the same time, whole swaths of the economy are dependent on temporary migrants.

Bagshaw visited migrant communities both old and new to work out what has gone wrong and what Australia must get right.

Further reading

• ‘You can’t put everything on immigration’: The suburbs at breaking point 
• The moment Australia’s immigration program went off the rails