When delivery driver Deepanshu Singla began to think he and his colleagues were being underpaid, his first instinct wasn't to raise the alarm.

"You don't want to upset things too much, [so] I tried to let it go," the Indian migrant said.

But over many months, the $3 dollars an hour he was missing out on quickly grew to more than $2,000 in lost wages.

"The first thing I felt was, 'why didn't anyone complain?' Because obviously it was something happening that wasn't legal," he said.

According to the Migrant Justice Institute, which advocates for the fair treatment of international workers in Australia, Mr Singla's experience is not isolated.

A report it released prior to the pandemic found three-quarters of migrant workers earned less than the minimum casual wage, and a quarter earned less than half the minimum wage.

"It is very clear that as more migrants now start to come in with the borders [open], and incentives for more skilled and unskilled migrant workers, that the levels of exploitation are going to go right back up to where they were before [the pandemic]," Laurie Berg from the Migrant Justice Institute said.

"It is monumentally unfair that the consequences for [migrants], if they come forward and report exploitation, are actually worse than the consequences for employers," the institute's executive director."

A senate inquiry earlier this year found wage theft to be 'systematic' in workplaces across the country, and according to the Fair Work Ombudsman,...

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