“…migration should not simply be about bringing in workers in to fill gaps, it should be about helping people put down roots, to join in the life of our country towns and suburbs. To make a home, to raise a family, to join our Australian family – strengthening our economy and our great multicultural society.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Jobs and Skills Summit, 2 September 2022

The rise of temporary migration

Thirty years ago Anthony Albanese’s statement would have restated migration orthodoxy. Australia rejected the ‘guest worker’ model of Germany or Singapore or the Gulf states. Most long-term migrants were permanent residents on arrival, with pathways to citizenship. While over time policy moved from assimilation to multiculturalism, the expectation that most ‘join our Australian family’ was a constant.

But from the mid-1990s temporary multi-year visa migration became more common. Major categories included international students, skilled workers and later temporary graduate visas. Working holiday visas and the long-standing open border with New Zealand also increased non-tourist resident numbers. Their total population peaked at 1.7 million in 2019 but fell to 1.2 million during COVID border closures before starting to recover.

Permanent migration is now typically a two step process. In 2018-19, before COVID, 68 per cent of primary applicants for skilled migration were already in Australia; the 85 per cent in 2020-21 will probably come down with reopened borders. Including partner and family migrants 65 per cent of permanent migrants were onshore applicants in 2020-21.

The problems of temporary migration

Temporary migrants freely choose Australia, but life is not easy for them. They are vulnerable to exploitation in the labour market. They pay taxes but are ineligible for most government benefits (although from mid-2021 they did get disaster payments.) Temporary migrants could never vote and have had other political rights reduced.

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A Grattan Institute report released last night calls for big changes to the criteria for gaining permanent residence. While recognising that migration and higher education links may have benefits for Australia, the report questions giving permanent migration preference to former international students through points for Australian and regional university degrees, the professional year, and use of skills shortage lists. Instead they recommend permanent residence priority for employer-sponsored people earning more than $80,000 a year.

Major changes to PR rules would make international students nervous. And whatever the general merits of Grattan’s proposal, after Job-ready Graduates and border closures now probably isn’t the time to inflict another big problem on the higher education sector.

But reading the Grattan report (which I saw in draft) highlighted to me that I did not know how many former international students eventually achieve PR. The work for this post was an only partially successful attempt to remedy this situation. I’m not a migration expert and I may have missed or misunderstood things, but FWIW my key findings are below.

Total numbers of former international students with permanent residence

Counting former international students with PR is not a straightforward exercise, since there are many direct and indirect routes to permanent residence. A 2018 Treasury paper based on detailed immigration data identified 5,500 routes from a temporary visa, of which student visas are the largest category, to a permanent visa.

Taking all of these routes into account, of the 1.6 million people who had arrived on a student visa between 2000-01 and 2013-14 the Treasury paper calculated that 16 per cent, or about a quarter of a million, had achieved PR.

This number, however, is not consistent with an earlier Productivity Commission analysis, which on my reading of the relevant chart gets us to 300,000 international student conversions to PR just counting arrivals between 2000-01 and 2005-06.

The ABS Characteristics of Recent Migrants survey estimates how many people who first arrived on a student visa in the last 10 years have achieved PR or citizenship (a further step on from PR). The 2013 and 2016 surveys show growing numbers of former international students with PR or citizenship. By 2019, however, the numbers had fallen back below the 2013 level.

All the ABS numbers in the chart are below what we might expect from the Treasury or Productivity Commission figures. Policy changes a decade ago made it harder to transition from a student visa to PR just by holding a qualification in an area of alleged skills shortage. So an underlying downward trend is quite possible. There are, however, important differences between the ABS numbers and earlier statistics.

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As the latest OECD Education at a Glance publication confirms, Australia is a high tertiary education attainment country. But large-scale migration makes it hard to interpret Australian figures – what is the result of policies aimed at educating Australian citizens, and what is due to our commercial international education industry and skills-based migration program?

Although demand driven funding increased the annual number of people completing bachelor degrees, on my calculations using the ABS Education and Work survey additional citizen graduates of Australian universities account for slightly less than half of the increase in graduate numbers since 2013 — 406,000 additional Australian or New Zealand citizen graduates of Australian universities and 421,000 extra graduates who hold degrees from overseas universities or are non-citizen holders of Australian university degrees.

The chart below attempts to break the numbers down a bit further, although the categories are not straightforward.

Education and Work separately identifies people on a student visa, which it puts at 142,000 in 2018 (80 per cent with overseas degrees). I have deducted these from the other non-citizen categories. As postgraduate international enrolments have been growing more quickly than undergraduate in recent times, I expect this category to grow in future years.

In Education and Work, the ABS continues its irritating standard practice of not identifying permanent residents, who are entitled to a Commonwealth supported place and to remain indefinitely in Australia. There were 36,000 domestic students with PR in 2017. This means the ‘non-citizen with an Australian degree’ category is a mix of them (after they graduate) and former international students on temporary or permanent visas. With increasing numbers of completing international students getting 485 visas, I expect that this will be a growing category.

What I find most interesting in this data is the very large number of people with overseas degrees – more than a million in total. About 45 per cent have have taken out citizenship. Most of them would be the product of Australia’s skilled migration program, although there were also 58,000 New Zealand citizens, who can come to Australia without going through the usual visa system, with an overseas degree.

On right-hand side of the second chart I have a column ‘migrant citizen with an Australian degree’, representing just over 700,000 people, that in the first chart appears in the ‘domestic’ time series. Most of them, I think, would have been domestic students (just under half arrived in 1996 or earlier), but some largish proportion would have been people who arrived as international students and subsequently became citizens.

In 2018, 68 per cent of degree holders in Australia were Australian or New Zealand citizens with degrees from Australian universities. But because we cannot identify the former international students in this group, it is quite likely that more than a third of all degree holders in Australia acquired their qualification with no assistance from Australian higher education policy.