It was around April this year when Meera Koramannil, a migration consultant based in Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territories (NT) state, started noticing an uptick in the number of clients of Indian origin walking into her office requesting her urgent assistance with obtaining permanent residency in Australia.
She quickly realised that most of these individuals were on Australia’s 457 visa for temporary skilled workers, and that this wave of anxious migrants was driven by significant changes in law that made the conditions for hiring them relatively more restrictive.
The changes in the 457 visa policy have been 20 years in the making. It was initially introduced in the context of Australia’s yawning skilled labour gap in the workforce. While it allowed successful applicants to find, in some cases, a path to permanent residency, this remained essentially a form of temporary migration that nevertheless soon came to “dwarf” the rate of permanent migration into the country.
“While [the 457 visa programme] has been regarded a success, it does involve a departure from the historical model of immigration in Australia... Since the end of the Second World War, when people migrated to Australia, the default was that they were migrating... permanently,” Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, told The Hindu.
On April 18, 2017, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that he proposed to “safeguard Australian jobs by abolishing the Subclass 457 Visa for foreign workers and creating a new temporary visa restricted to critical skills shortages.”
Changes galore
The most important changes included: a reduction in the list of allowed occupations for the temporary skilled visa by about 200 (from an original list of around 650 occupations), the introduction of a two-tier system of skilled migration visas, short-term (two years, renewable once) and medium- to longer-term (four years but with a different occupations list), minimum mandated work experience for some occupations on the temporary visa list including some ICT-related jobs, and in some cases assurance of a minimum salary level that would be expected to correlate to the skill level.
There is also now a heightened focus on English-language requirements, and those with salaries above A$96,400, who were exempted from some of these requirements, will now have to submit proof of the same.
All of these measures certainly have a familiar ring to them, and raise questions about whether the current global mood of tightening national borders and immigration restrictions, led by the U.S., is catching on in Australia too.
Be that as it may, Ms. Koramannil explains, the Australian government’s 457 visa reforms are by no means a knee-jerk reaction: the decision is always arrived at after extensive consultations with chambers of commerce, accounting agencies, and university experts, about prevailing skill shortages in the labour-market, she says.
Revisions not ‘dramatic’
In this context, it would also be incorrect to characterise the policy changes as dramatic for it is only relatively less-skilled occupations that count among the 200 bumped off the temporary visa list, and this would be in line with Mr. Turnbull’s remark that “Australian workers are given the absolute first priority for jobs, while businesses will be able to temporarily access the critical skills they need to grow if skilled Australians workers are not available.”
Further, there is still is a shortage of skilled labour in some regions, such as the NT. In such cases, there are understandings between the state and federal governments — known as Designated Area Migration Agreements — to waive some of the visa conditions, perhaps by allowing lower minimum scores in the English-language tests.
Nevertheless, just as U.S. President Donald Trump may have to consider ways to make American industry globally competitive and not rely purely on proposals for economic protectionism, for a long-term solution, Australia may ultimately have to do more to up-skill its local population in sectors that it considers critical and not only tinker with the inflow of skilled migration to meet its changing economic needs.