Last year, the Albanese government signed two migration pacts with India that opened the path for decades of high immigration into Australia.
These pacts, among other things, provide:
- Five-year student visas for Indians.
- Indian graduates of Australian tertiary institutions on a student visa can apply to work without visa sponsorship for up to eight years.
- Australia will recognise Indian vocational and university graduates to be “holding the comparable AQF qualification” for the purposes of admission to higher education and general employment.
These agreements are particularly harmful because India is known for churning out degree shovelware and fake qualifications whose holders will now be permitted to work in Australia under mutual recognition.
As usual, the Coalition supports the sell-out of Australia’s sovereignty, with leader Peter Dutton fully endorsing the Albanese government’s migration pacts with India:
“There is a strong bipartisan support between the two major political parties in Australia when it comes to nurturing migration with India”, Dutton said in a speech to India’s Jindal Global University last year.
“When Prime Ministers Modi and Albanese met in Sydney in May, they finalised a Migration and Mobility Partnership Agreement”.
“That arrangement will facilitate a greater two-way flow of students, of graduates, of academics and business people”
“It’s an initiative I welcome wholeheartedly”, Dutton said.
These agreements, along with the Free Trade Agreement signed in the last days of the former Coalition government, have already thwarted the government’s proposed migration crackdown.
“Nearly 50,000 Indian students now in Australia will escape a key measure in the federal government’s clampdown on international student visas because of a Morrison government agreement with India that guaranteed the conditions applying to post-study visas for Indian students”, The Australian reported in December.
“Indian education agents are already exploiting the loophole with promotion campaigns to make Indian students aware that they can partially avoid the Australian visa crackdown”.
“These two measures could not be applied to Indian students because of a commitment in the Australia-India free-trade agreement signed by then trade minister Dan Tehan in April 2022, just before the Coalition lost the May 2022 election”, the article stated.
With the Indian diaspora fast becoming Australia’s largest migrant cohort, they are becoming more politically powerful. This means that they will continue to warp Australia’s migration system to benefit themselves.
“The more-than-one-million-strong Australian diaspora of people drawn from Punjab all the way to Fiji is on a roll. Indians are now the largest foreign-born population group apart from British people”, The AFR reports.
“I think the Indian diaspora will prove to be the most politically influential diaspora in Australia since the Irish”, noted Australia’s former top diplomat, Peter Varghese.
“They come from a very competitive world with so many competing for limited resources. So, they have a natural competitive streak and understand that politics is part of making your way in a new society”, Former high commissioner to India John McCarthy said.
Meanwhile, India’s former high commissioner to Australia, Navdeep Suri Singh, has been caught paying slave wages to his imported Indian staff:
“The former Indian high commissioner to Australia has been ordered to pay a penalty of almost $100,000 to a former domestic worker, who he had paid less than $10 a day for more than a year’s worth of work”, the ABC article says.
“They were in every sense egregious and exploitative in their effect of depriving Ms Shergill of any semblance of a work and life divide”, Justice Raper said.
“The circumstances of this case fall within [the] definition of slave-like conditions”.
“The Indian Ministry of External Affairs has argued an Australian court does not have jurisdiction in the matter, accusing the worker of being motivated by a wish to stay in Australia”.
It’s the usual story: migrants exploiting other migrants of the same nationality.
The migration deals signed with India further erode Australia’s ability to control its borders and will very likely increase the flow of migrants into Australia seeking work and residency.
Through its various Indian FTA and migration agreements, our treasonous federal government under both Labor and the Coalition has deliberately eroded Australia’s sovereignty.
For what purpose? And why hasn’t Australia’s union movement pushed back?
