Almost 43,000 people were appealing their visa rejection at the Administrative Review Tribunal at the end of May this year.
“What’s happened over the last decade is just phenomenal. It’s an extraordinary growth in undocumented workers in Australia,” said Abul Rizvi, a former department deputy secretary who now analyses immigration data.
“It started in about 2015, when there was a labour trafficking scam that took off out of Malaysia and China. That has died down. But after that, a lot of people opportunistically saw the backlog was so big and lodged an asylum application to extend their stay in Australia. Many would have been advised to do so by scam agents.
“We had a massively growing backlog which wasn’t being processed. Now, we have a massive backlog that is being processed, but the people coming out the other end aren’t departing. Unless the government invests a lot more money in dealing with the issue, I can’t see the trend changing.”
Scam agent crackdown and quicker processing needed
Rizvi said the cost of locating, detaining and deporting undocumented people was significant. “You’d have to run compliance operations at key workplaces, like farms and construction sites, and you would be checking people’s identity and visa status,” he said.
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“But the size of the immigration compliance function is so small that the odds of these people being picked up is tiny.”
Rivzi said the department needed to assess asylum claims from the back of the queue, which it had started doing. “If you lodge a weak application today, you should get a decision within 72 hours. If you go to the [tribunal to review it], they should give you a decision quickly, and you should be the person targeted for removal,” he said.
“By speeding that front end up, what you do is stabilise the situation. The incentive to lodge a weak application evaporates. You then end up with people only with strong claims applying, which is what was always intended.”
Another factor was cracking down on scam agents. Home Affairs this month said it had removed four major scam agents operating illegally in Victoria and Queensland, and had detained a further three.
The department said the seven agents had worked on 470 protection visa applications between them, charging clients more than $1.4 million despite not being allowed to provide migration advice.
A spokesperson for Home Affairs said scam agents were “providing unlawful immigration advice and charging migrants a lot of money for their services”.
“Scam agents have been misleading temporary visa holders to apply for a protection visa using false and misleading claims or have been applying for a protection visa on applicants’ behalf without them knowing what they have applied for,” they said.
“The visa is not for people who just want to stay longer in Australia to work… People who submit a protection visa application with false or misleading information face serious consequences, including large fines, possible jail for up to 10 years, or both.”
