Australian Immigration Daily News

As my colleague Jerry Gomez has pointed out in his post in the Migration Alliance blog on 12 January 2016, there were a record 580 visa cancellations on character grounds in FY 2014 - 2015. 

The table that Jerry has included with his post reflects that some of the countries where the visa holders originally came from are places where there has been a history of war or civil or political conflict.  These countries include: Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Fiji and Vietnam. 

So, it is natural to wonder, when one looks at that table, how many of the people who had their visas cancelled on character grounds may have originally entered Australia as “refugees”.  

When it comes to Australian immigration, skilled workers and technicians are at an advantage. An example of this can be seen in the Skilled Occupations List (SOL). Individuals with specialization in any of the fields, mentioned in SOL, will not require any work experience when applying for skilled migration to Australia.

This year, the government has introduced a number of laws and regulations to benefit engineers who wish to migrate to the country. These rules affect immigration process for engineers at three different fronts, which are explained as under:

China’s middle-class have defied the economic slump their country is facing with a record number of tourists visiting the land down-under over the last year.

Tourism Australia managing director John O’Sullivan attributes this record growth to the shift in marketing away from targeting traditional group tours and focussing instead on China’s rapidly emerging middle class.

“Tourism Australia’s marketing, distribution and partnership strategies are all now geared towards targeting this new breed of young, independent traveller with the desire and the financial means to explore our country,” Mr O'Sullivan recently told Travel Weekly.

The following email has been received by Migration Alliance from the DIBP:

Dear colleague or stakeholder

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection continues to invite people who arrived in Australia as irregular maritime arrivals (IMA) to apply for Temporary Protection visas (TPV).  Invitations to apply for TPVs are being sent to people according to the order in which they arrived in Australia, although priority is also being given to those in immigration detention. Applicants need to wait until it is their turn to apply for a Protection visa. The Department is currently inviting people who arrived from 14 November 2012 to 30 April 2013 to apply for a Protection visa.

She spoke no English when she first went to kindergarten as a little girl in Wollongong, several years after her Italian parents migrated to Australia. But she went on to graduate as a lawyer from the ANU and in 2005 became a Senator for the state of New South Wales.

Last year, against the odds, Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells was appointed as the Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs in the Department of Social Services by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in his drive to have more women in Cabinet.

The Senator is described as perhaps the Liberal Party’s most vocal spokesperson for conservative multicultural views. Speaking to Jana Wendt in an SBS news feature recently, the Senator stated her conservative core beliefs – traditional marriage, family values, hard work – with a twist in the tail. These same beliefs, she insisted, are common to many migrant families. Based on years of interaction with such groups, she stated bluntly that the immigrant community was essentially conservative.