Migrants need a long-term well-considered strategy if they want to have a realistic chance of obtaining permanent migration to Australia. Rising costs, tougher rules, a stricter enforcement regime and a tight job market could easily derail poorly considered migration plans. With the government preferring temporary visas and forcing tough competition in the capped permanent visa program, engaging professional migration advisers must surely become an part of astute applicants plans.

Statistics indicate that government policy now prefers temporary immigration over permanent migration according to a recent academic article by Professor Jock Collins on www.theconversation.com. He points out that Australia is steadily shifting away from being a country that wanted immigrants and their families and subsequent generations to stay and become part of nation building to a country that prefers temporary migrants.

The OECD’s latest report on global migration indicates that trends in Australian immigration in the past two decades strongly suggest that Australia can no longer be regarded as a settler immigration nation. 2012-13 immigration data shows that 190,000 arrived under the permanent immigration program (or 192,599 when Trans-Tasman migrants are included).

In the same year, 725,043 – or 766,273 including Trans-Tasman migrants – migrants arrived on temporary immigration visas. This included 258,248 on working holiday visas, 259,278 on international student visas and 126,350 on temporary work (skilled) visas.

“This shift of Australia from a settler immigration nation to a temporary migrant nation has been the biggest change in nearly seven decades of post-war immigration history,” notes Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School at University of Technology, Sydney. “Yet, remarkably, there has been virtually no debate about it other than understandable concerns about abuses of workers under the temporary 457 visa and of some working holiday makers by unscrupulous employers or agents” says Prof Collins.

With permanent migration quotas amounting to about a quarter of the temporary migrant visa grants (excluding tourists), the figures roughly translate to mean that for every 4 hopeful temporary entrants, only 1 will have a chance of getting permanent residency.

MRT-RRT end of year shutdown

The offices of the Migration Review Tribunal and the Refugee Review Tribunal (the tribunals) will be closed over the Christmas and New Year period. Offices will close from 5.00pm on Wednesday, 24 December 2014 and will reopen from 8.30am on Friday, 2 January 2015.

During this period applications for review can continue to be lodged using the tribunals’ online lodgement facility or by fax.

This morning I visited Mark Robinson SC at his chambers on an unrelated matter.  Whilst we were talking, he showed me a fascinating paper he had written called "Australia’s Papua New Guinea Response to the Boat People Crisis – Legal and Constitutional Perspectives".

Mark Robinson SC  presented the following paper to the ANZAPPL National Conference 20 November 2014.

The paper speaks on an epic constitutional challenge in the High Court of Australia that was argued and determined this year concerning the constitutional validity of Australia’s handling of the “boat people” refugees.

Morrison has dangled new concessions in a desperate bid to reintroduce the temporary protection visa and has hooked the votes of 3 senators. But with Labor, the Greens, Jacqui Lambie and John Madigan opposing the bill, the votes of Senator Ricky Muir and 2 Palmer United Party senators are still needed to bring back the TPV.

Late breaking news indicate that that Morrison’s latest attempt to get the TPV legislation through the senate may succeed with indications that PUP senators and their ally Senator Muir will support the bill. The immigration minister wants to reintroduce the TPV which in essence offers limited asylum period to refugees but dissallows permanent residency. The opposition is insisting that the 30,000 asylum seekers living in limbo in Australia receive the possibility of a permanent visa.

Morrison latest concessions include the following:

• increase the annual humanitarian intake of refugees from 13,750 to 18,750 over the next four years if the bill currently before the Senate is passed. But the increase will only happen once the "legacy caseload" of the 30,000 asylum seekers who arrived under Labor has been cleared.
• stop the transfer of about 1500 boat arrivals from late last year, including 460 children, to Nauru. They will be taken into the legacy caseload and have their applications processed.
• asylum seekers would be offered work rights. Currently some 25,000 asylum seekers who are on community bridging visas do not have work rights.
• introduce a five-year Special Humanitarian Enterprise Visas., These visas are designed to encourage refugees to live and work in regional areas of acute labour shortages. If at the end of the visa, the refugee has not drawn on welfare benefits for three and a half years, they can apply for onshore visas.

Labor supports the use of Special Humanitarian Enterprise Visas if they can lead to permanent visas for asylum seekers but continues to have concerns about the legislation, and remains firmly opposed to TPVs and the parts of the bill that entrenches boat turn backs.

Labor immigration spokesman Richard Marles said Mr Morrison's bargain plea was "politics at its worse", saying the minister could have taken all children off Christmas Island months ago, rather than hinging his decision on the Senate passing the bill.