Getting residency via the kitchen door

Another day, another immigration racket. From The Age:

Cooking up a foreign storm

John Masanauskas
April 01, 2009 12:00am

TOO many foreign cooks are spoiling the broth for locals seeking jobs in hospitality, says a Monash University study.

New figures show that the annual number of overseas students who did cooking courses in Australia and then gained permanent residency had more than tripled to 3250 in just two years.

This compares with only 2300 Australians who completed cooking apprenticeships in 2007.

The Monash report, to be released today, says many of the private operators that are providing the one-year courses have poor standards and are an easy route for immigration.

Thousands of students, mainly from India, attend cooking schools in Melbourne as part of an international student boom worth $11 billion to Australia.

So competitive is the industry that overseas students are stopped on city streets and offered laptops and discounted fees to change schools.

In leaflets obtained by the Herald Sun, agents for the schools boast of their success in getting residency visas while offering weekend classes with no exams.

The Monash report, The Cooking-Immigration Nexus, was written by migration experts Dr Bob Birrell and Dr Ernest Healy, and labour market researcher Bob Kinnaird.

The authors said that despite the Rudd Government's moves to tighten the skilled migration program, it was failing to stem the rising tide of foreign students trained as cooks in Australia.

While cooking had been removed from the list of critical skills needed here, foreigners with minimal work experience could still be sponsored by employers, they said.

"Employers have an incentive to take advantage of the relatively low wages and conditions former overseas students will accept in return for a permanent residence sponsorship," the report said.

The report is published in the latest issue of People and Place, the journal of Monash's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

These permanent residency visa factories masquerading as "cooking schools" are just another example of the kind of niche businesses that comprise Australia's flourishing "immigration industry". It is a parasitic, largely unregulated "industry" infested by unscrupulous people who specialise solely in the sale of Australian permanent residency and, thus, citizenship. Much like those small, impoverished Pacific Island states which openly sell their citizenship to foreigners, Australia is allowing its citizenship to become a commodity that can be bought, except that the price is actually lower in Australia compared to those Pacific Island countries. Moreover, in those Pacific Island nations, the Government actually profits for the sale, compared to the situation here where it is some shady "migration agency", "cooking school" or even university which makes an easy buck by crassly and shamelessly providing a pathway to Australian citizenship.


UPDATE

Popular columnist Andrew Bolt has picked up on this story over at his blog. Some of the reader comments are worth reading.