Degrees-for-visas a 'powder keg' issue

From The Australian:

ATTACKS on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney may have been only the beginning of the social conflict to be played out as thousands of foreign students stay on with full work rights and compete for jobs and housing, researcher Bob Birrell warns.

"We're just on the threshold of dealing with all the social, immigration and other issues that arise from allowing this juggernaut (the overseas student industry) to go unchecked," said Monash University's Dr Birrell, who is an influential critic of the degrees-for-visas market.

In the latest People and Place journal, he said the federal government had made it much harder for foreigners who emerged from Australian universities and colleges with poor English and no work experience to win visas as skilled migrants.

Many ex-students given these visas in the past had not secured the jobs they were supposedly trained for, leaving Australia with skill shortages.

But Dr Birrell said news of the visa crackdown was taking a while to move through the "recruitment grapevine" and the government had sent a mixed message by allowing about 40,000 former overseas students with little chance of winning permanent residency to stay on temporary or bridging visas with full work rights.

These ex-students would be ripe for exploitation.

"Employers in the hospitality industry will be able to take their pick of the thousands of former students desperate for such work where this is associated with a promise of an employer nomination for a permanent visa," Dr Birrell said.

Indian students had come under attack as enrolments boomed, pushing them into less affluent suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne where they competed for jobs and housing with youth from low-skill migrant backgrounds, Dr Birrell said.

"This has created a powder keg situation as the newcomers find themselves soft targets for youth gangs," he said.

Dr Birrell said it could take a few years to defuse the situation because many students were yet to graduate, thanks to a dramatic growth in numbers leading up to a tightening of the skilled migration rules.

From 2005 to 2008, a qualification in cookery or hairdressing "virtually guaranteed" a permanent residency visa, leading to a massive growth in enrolments, especially of Indian students attending private colleges, he said.

He predicted legal conflict, as ex-students turned to the courts to secure the permanent residency status they had enrolled for. "It is unlikely they will leave Australia without a fight," Dr Birrell said.

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