Australia now has a record amount of temporary visas holders due largely to an explosion of bridging and graduate applicants from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
In the first quarter of this year, Australia saw an unprecedented total of 2,541,651 temporary visas on issue. This is around 120,000 higher than the same time last year and over half a million more than the first quarter of 2020.
The number of bridging visas reached a record high of 379,800, primarily driven by former students trying to avoid returning home, and graduate visas numbers also broke records, with 222,190 on issue as of March 31 – an increase of around 22,000 on last year’s record, and a rise of over 100,000 since the start of 2020.
This record growth in graduate visas overwhelmingly stems from a wave of South Asian applicants, Macrobusiness reported.
Between the first quarter (Q1) of 2020 and Q1 this year, the number of graduate visas on issue to Indians had grown by 138%, to Nepalese it had grown by 140%, to Pakistanis it had grown by 93%, and to Sri Lankans it had grown by 172%.
Economist Leith van Onselen noted in another Macrobusiness article that “South Asian students tend to covet Australia’s generous work rights and permanent residency above education quality”.
A 2022 Grattan Institute survey found that “opportunities for permanent migration” are particularly important for South Asian migrants, with almost half choosing it as a key reason for coming to the country.
“Post study work rights” were seen as even more essential, with almost three quarters of this group ranking it as one of their main reasons for moving to Australia. This is much higher than other cohorts, with only around a third of Chinese students, for example, ranking it as a key priority.
Australia allows international students and graduates to bring family members with them, with spouses entitled to work up to 48 hours a fortnight, and higher education expert Andrew Norton found that one in five graduate visas now to go to the partners and children of primary applicants.
This is even more acute among South Asians, with more than one in three graduate visas issued to applicants from India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka going to family members.
Mr Norton warned that it was “very likely” that many in the South Asian graduate visa cohort were exploiting the system by creating a path to permanent residency family members.
He also predicted the number of family members of South Asian students will surge along with enrolment numbers.
“The really big increase in new overseas student enrolments were in 2023 and 2024 and that will flow through to a big increase in people applying for 485 visas”, Mr Norton said.
“So if they started a two-year-master’s degree at the beginning of 2023, they will have graduated by the end of 2024. We will start to see pretty significant numbers will start to apply now and in the coming months.”
Ex-Immigration Department official Abul Rizvi has warned that many immigrants are only able to remain in Australia as they are on bridging visas awaiting the appeal of their onshore visa refusals at the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART).
This has led to an unprecedented number of administrative appeals at the ART, a vast bureaucratic backlog, and accusations of widespread abuse within Australia’s immigration and administrative systems.
Mr van Onselen added that applicants can “rort the system” as they are able to contact “the immigration industry to set the Administrative Review Tribunal process in motion”.
“The system then allows “temporary” visitors to extend their stays for years, allowing them to work and possibly transition to permanent residency.
“The fact that Australia permits international students and graduates to bring their spouses and children with them, effectively converting them into de facto work and residence visas, is truly astonishing.”
Header image: Anthony Albanese and Narendra Modi at an event in Sydney (Facebook).
