In December, the Morrison Government announced reforms to visa arrangements to ensure a “rapid return of international students”.
The reforms included:
- granting a two year Temporary Graduate visa to Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector graduates; and
- extending the temporary graduate visa from two to three years for masters by coursework graduates.
Shortly afterwards, the Morrison Government doubled the number of hours international students could work each week to 40 hours, effectively turning student visas into low-skilled work visas.
Now business lobby, the Committee for Sydney, wants international students to be offered four-year working visas and a pathway to permanent residency when they graduate, claiming this could help Australia’s shortage of skilled migrants. It also wants the government to make it easier for businesses to import ‘skilled’ migrants:
Committee for Sydney chief executive Gabriel Metcalf… said one of the biggest priorities for the federal government needed to be improving the flow of skilled migrants into Australia to ensure Sydney was able to grow after two years with closed borders.
The Committee wanted to see automatic working visas for university graduates, which Metcalf hoped would also make Australia a more desirable choice for overseas students.
“If you were to ask most major businesses today, they would say the number one thing holding them back is the labour shortage,” he said.
“These would be people who’ve spent four years getting to know Australia so they know if they like it, they will have gotten the chance to work on their English skills.
“The solution that is right in front of our eyes is the people who Australia has done a great job of educating. Allow them to remain.”
The committee would also like the use of occupation lists for skilled migrants to be changed to make it easier for businesses to find people they need though the introduction of a wage-threshold test for employer- sponsored permanent visas.
The Committee for Sydney’s proposed reforms would inevitably lead to tens of thousands of poor students from developing nations (e.g. the Indian sub-continent) undertaking mouse courses in order to work and gain permanent residency.
It would turn international education into a bigger import industry, as even more students would come to Australia to work as much as possible in order to send money home to their families.
We have already witnessed widespread immigration scams with students from Nepal and India. Many international students already only study in Australia to gain working rights and permanent residency. The proposed reforms would make the rorting so much worse.
The above visa reforms are further proof that ‘international education’ is really a people-importing immigration industry rather than a genuine education export industry. Student visas are really just low-skilled work visas in disguise, designed to provide employers with cheap labour and to suppress wages.
If work rights and permanent residency were scaled back, the whole international education industry would collapse.
