Australia to crack down on student-dominated ‘guest worker’ scheme

Australia will toughen entry requirements for international students to make sure they are not “pretending” to come for study, home affairs minister Clare O’Neil has announced.

Canberra will also tighten the “points test” that governs eligibility for permanent residency, and raise the minimum threshold on foreigners’ earnings before they can shift from student to temporary skilled visas.

But Ms O’Neil has also promised to give all temporary skilled workers the opportunity to apply for permanent residency, and to provide “faster, simpler” immigration pathways for overseas students with the “special skills and capabilities that we need”.

The plans are part of a draft migration strategy outlined by Ms O’Neil at the National Press Club in Canberra. She also released the final report from a comprehensive migration review headed by Macquarie University chancellor and former chief civil servant Martin Parkinson.

Ms O’Neil announced the review during last September’s Jobs and Skills Summit, along with extensions to post-study work rights and a boost to Australia’s permanent skilled migration intake. The review found that immigration outcomes for students reflected broader problems in a “broken” and “outdated” migration system that was unnecessarily complex, rife with worker exploitation and incapable of meeting Australia’s future or even current skill needs.

She said that the immigration system, traditionally dominated by permanent settlers who had spurred economic growth in the 20th century, had “morphed into a guest worker programme” of temporary migrants in increasingly low-paid jobs. Many were international students, who comprised the largest component of the temporary migration programme and more than half of the people who eventually obtained permanent skilled visas.

This arrangement was not providing skilled workers capable of tackling national challenges such as caring for an ageing population, building “better sovereign capabilities” or transitioning to a “net zero economy”, Ms O'Neil said.

The first action under the strategy involves raising the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold – a minimum salary requirement for people seeking sponsorship as temporary skilled migrants – from A$53,900 (£28,600) to A$70,000 from July. Ms O’Neil said that the current figure, which has not changed for a decade, was in the bottom 10 per cent of Australian full-time wages and allowed a “growing share” of ostensibly skilled recruits to be “funnelled into low-wage jobs”.

Next will come an overhaul of the points test, which delivers permanent residency to about 100,000 former international students and other applicants each year. Ms O’Neil said the scheme was not working properly. “The bar is set too low…the test rewards persistence, not the skills we need for Australia’s future.”

And in a third tranche of reforms, Ms O’Neil will work with education minister Jason Clare and skills minister Brendan O’Connor to lift entry standards for international students, tackle exploitation of graduate workers and “ensure that students who are here to study are actually here to study”.

She said: “We’re...talking about making sure that the international student education system is doing what it says on the label. I know the university sector and the training sector are with me here. We’ve got to make sure this is a system with integrity. Otherwise we degrade not only the experience of students…but our reputation internationally.”

Ms O'Neil said the aim of the strategy was not to reduce international enrolments, but conceded that it could have that effect. She added that the government intended to roll out the reforms quickly but “carefully”, promising details of the new entry standards “in the coming months”.

“This is a really important sector to our country,” she said. “We’ve got to [guard against] adverse effects that we could have predicted if we’d taken our time.”

The International Education Association of Australia said it supported any move to improve integrity, but noted that some people could be disadvantaged by midstream changes to the rules. “The devil is going to be in the detail,” said chief executive Phil Honeywood. “These are important first steps to achieving meaningful, transparent migration outcomes. We have to overcome logjams whereby graduates wait years for permanent residency.”

He said state and territory government “buy-in” would be crucial to the strategy’s success, as would “effective communication” to convince employers “how easy it is to employ international students”.

Immigration expert Abul Rizvi said the proposals were “sensible”, but students already working towards permanent residency might be aggrieved by changes to the points test. “The direction of the reforms…makes sense [but] there are some thorny transitional issues,” he said.

The strategy also proposes a new bureaucracy to identify labour market shortages, a rationalisation of visa categories and rules, and strengthened regulation of migration agents.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com