The Australian government has announced it will no longer refuse to grant visas to foreign students who admit their goal is to settle in Australia.
The change is scheduled to come into effect in March and has been welcomed by the tertiary education sector, a major beneficiary of mass immigration.
Former Immigration Department official Abul Rizvi told The Sydney Morning Herald there was no point pretending that students were not using student visas as a pathway to stay in Australia long-term, and said the current rule resulted in Home Affairs wasting time trying to work out if visa applicants were lying.
“I actually think the government should go further, and say one of the primary objectives of the international student program is to recruit future Australians because that’s what it does. Why not just say it?” Mr Rizvi asked.
Phil Honeywood, the head of the International Education Association of Australia, said the current system was failing, and students were gaming the system.
“It’s been easy for education agents to counsel students to give the right answers,” he said.
Home Affairs is now rejecting a record number of student visas as Labor tries to overhaul the immigration system, but immigration is still at historic highs with 90,000 more immigrants arriving in Australia between July and November 2023 than during the same period a year earlier.
Mr Rivzi said the student visa rejections were the result of the government trying to reduce numbers due to backlash against mass immigration.
But Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan described Labor’s efforts as “too little, too late”.
“Labor issued a record 577,295 student visas last financial year, which helped drive annual overseas migration to a record 518,000 people as part of their Big Australia. Meanwhile, Australians endured housing shortages, rent hikes and a cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by population growth,” he told the publication.
