Australian Immigration Daily News

In a case that may just be the tip of the iceberg in immigration fraud by education brokers, a court in China has sentenced a man to three years’ jail for facilitating illegal immigration to Australia, according to a report in The Australian Financial Review.

The man, identified only as Mr Li worked with this sister Ms Olive Li, a director of Sydney-based New Field International Education Group in fabricating documents required for an Australian student visa for at least 2 applicants who are now Australian permanent residents.

According to the report after the fraudulent application was lodged, Ms Li posed as the applicants during the mandatory telephone interview with Australian immigration officials as the applicants could not speak English. She then coached the applicants on how to deal with queries at the airport, found them accommodation and jobs.

The Fair Work Ombudsman has targeted take-away food businesses across Australia and ordered a total of 565 employers to supply time and wages records for assessment.

As a result of the investigations a total of 223 businesses were found to have short-changed 929 employees a total of $582,410, Acting Fair Work Ombudsman Michael Campbell announced earlier this week.

The investigations found that two out of three businesses were not fully compliant with all payslip and record-keeping obligations and close to half of them were not paying their employees correctly.

Chris Bailey, co-founder of Disrupt, has been deported because the department of immigration has found that he did not complete three months of fruit picking as part of the requirement to get an extension on a working holiday visa, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Disrupt, which started-up in Bondi, offers customers the ability to design their own surfboards using 3D printing technology. The company reportedly has a turnover of over $1 million a year. The deportation of Chris Bailey who was arrested last week after returning to Australia from the USA, where he was trying to establish an American office and manufacturing partnerships, has put the company's future in Australia at stake.

Bailey’s Disrupt co-founder Gary Elphick wrote about his partner’s deportation on LinkedIn earlier in the week: “When our COO arrived back to Sydney he was pulled aside by Border Force, subsequently held in a detention centre/prison for two days before being deported to the UK, leaving his car, house, family, and most importantly our company here in Sydney,” Elphick wrote.

As we have seen over the last year, the Minister has been (very) actively using the powers given under the Act to personally cancel the visas of non-citizens who have committed serious criminal offences and who, as a result, do not pass the character test. 

And recent decisions from the Full Court in the cases of Minister for Immigration and Border Protection v Stretton and Minister for Immigration  and Border Protection v Eden have forcefully brought home the fact that the potential grounds for challenging a cancellation decision are really quite narrow, and thus the prospects for success in contesting a cancellation are commensurately “poor”. 

In both Stretton and in Eden, the Full Court reversed decisions by Judge Logan of the Federal Circuit Court in Queensland where His Honour had ruled that the visa cancellations were essentially “disproportionate” and therefore “legally unreasonable”. Judge Logan had used a pithy analogy in describing those Ministerial decisions, equating the visa cancellations to “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut”. 

Given the increase in the number of student visa cancellations in recent months, the message from the department of immigration to student visa applicants and visa holders seems to be that although visas are granted quickly they are also likely to be cancelled easily.

In the seven months to March of this year, some 9000 student visas have been cancelled by the DIBP, according to a recent report in The Australian.  Compared to two years ago where the figures stood at between 8000 to 9000 cancellations, it is looking like student visa cancellations could hit 15,000 this year.

Student visas may be cancelled on various grounds, including plagiarism. The Australian’s report highlighted the case of Shaheryar Khan, who had his visa cancelled because he was reported to have copied a number of his assessments directly from internet sources without attribution.