Canada-style student visa cap feared in Australia

A milestone in Australian population growth elevates the risk that Canberra will impose a Canadian-style cap on student visas, an immigration expert has warned.

Abul Rizvi said data revealing explosive growth in Australia’s resident population would put pressure on the government to adopt measures like the UK’s banning of visas for students’ family members, or Canada’s newly announced provincial-level caps on student admissions.

“I’m worried that the government will…panic and do something [as] equally silly as the UK or Canada, rather than having a sensibly thought through approach to manage this,” Dr Rizvi said. “I think the most likely blunt instrument is a cap.”

Dr Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of Australia’s immigration department, said caps were “indiscriminate” and sowed chaos. “It sounds like a simple thing to do. If you dig into the issues, it’s actually very complicated. It affects all sorts of different people in different ways that are completely unmanaged.”

The estimated population Down Under reached 27 million on the afternoon of 24 January, according to a tweet from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), following the biggest growth spurt on record.

The milestone, recorded on the ABS Population Clock, came decades earlier than anticipated. Australia’s first Intergenerational Report, published in 2002, predicted that it would take 40 years for the population to exceed 25 million.

Population Clock estimates now suggest the tally will pass 28 million in 2025 and 30 million in 2030.

Comments on the ABS tweet captured the mood in some quarters. “No one wanted this,” said one respondent. “That sort of growth rate seems excessive and unsustainable,” said another. “Why are you celebrating the demographic destruction of our nation?” asked a third.

Dr Rizvi said that, on the figures available so far, the net increase in permanent and long-term temporary residents – including students – was 90,000 higher this financial year than over the equivalent period of the previous year. He said the “alarm bells would be ringing” in government corridors.

“I suspect the government is in panic mode in terms of getting net migration down. And I suspect their main mode…of responding is to crank up the refusal rate for students. I think in 2023-24 Australia will refuse more student visa applications than in any year in history by a long, long way. If you track student visa refusals for the last 20 years, 2023-24 will look like the Eiger.”

Department of Home Affairs data suggests this might already be happening. Immigration officials reject between one-sixth and one-third of applications lodged overseas for visas to undertake higher education in Australia, and every second application for vocational education visas.

The rejection rates are far higher for key source markets India and Nepal, with close to half of the applications for higher education visas – and sometimes all of the applications for vocational education visas – spiked each month.

Dr Rizvi said he suspected that immigration officials had been instructed, probably not in writing, to “refuse as many as you can”. This was an “unsustainable strategy” to contain population growth, not just because it was unfair to visa applicants.

“That massive level of refusals soaks up huge amounts of resources, because to do a visa refusal is far more costly than doing a visa approval. You just can’t keep putting pressure on the overseas post to keep cranking up refusals on the basis of very subjective criteria.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com