As the immigration debate rages, the people who will really pay are Victorians

There is no one so needed yet so unloved by Australian politics than foreign students.

Whenever the national discussion turns to immigration, it soon focuses on the hundreds of thousands of young people who every year fly here from across the world and invest life-altering sums of money to study at our universities.

This is fair enough. The big driver of population growth in Melbourne and Sydney is temporary migration and foreign students are the biggest category of temporary visa holders.

The problem with the conversation is that it rarely pauses to consider who these people are, the circumstances in which they live and what it is they bring here and take home with them once their studies are complete.

They are talked about, at best, as little more than widgets; units of production within an export industry that for 40 years has bankrolled public universities underfunded by successive federal governments.

At worst, they are scapegoated and demonised as visa-hopping chancers looking to squeeze through a backdoor to permanent residency and steal jobs and houses that would otherwise go to Australian-born kids.

Over the next five days, this masthead will publish “Immigration Nation”, an investigative series examining how Australia’s most successful public policy turned sour. It explores the complexities of our immigration system, the human stories at the heart of it and the facts and fallacies that punctuate an emotive debate.

The easiest thing when considering all this is to not think of foreign students as people at all.

If this sounds harsh, you need only revisit one of the more shameful episodes of our pandemic response, when then prime minister Scott Morrison stared down the TV cameras and told more than 500,000 international students living in Australia to go home.

This was April 3, 2020, when Australia had entered a pre-emptive lockdown to give hospitals and public health systems extra time to get ready for what was coming. There were only 5000 known cases of COVID-19 in the country and 21 people had died from the virus.

Foreign students, as young people living in close-quartered accommodation who mostly work in highly casualised service industry jobs to support their studies, were a vulnerable cohort who deserved careful consideration in our public health response.

Instead, they were treated as a nuisance and told to bugger off. Some had been living here for years.

Morrison didn’t suffer politically for delivering this callous message. Perhaps this is because people were too busy hoarding toilet paper to worry about someone else’s kids locked up in shoebox apartments across town.

Or perhaps, Morrison’s words tapped into a deeper resentment.

In 2022, when the pandemic eased, Australia reopened its borders and the universities needed a new intake of foreign students restore their finances, the International Education Association of Australia commissioned a public relations group to road-test a proposed marketing slogan: “International students are worth our welcome.”

The blunt response expressed in focus groups was they aren’t.

The IEAA quietly swapped the slogan for another one appealing to self-interest: “International students help Australia thrive.”

This is the argument Victorian Premier Ben Carroll should be making, alongside Opposition Leader Jess Wilson, as foreign students are pummelled back and fourth in the latest game of immigration Pong being played between federal Labor, the Coalition and One Nation.

There aren’t any votes in it but Carroll as a former education minister and Wilson as a Liberal leader aspiring to serve as Victoria’s next premier and treasurer should understand the importance of international education to the economic fortunes of this state.

According to Global Victoria, there are 322,000 foreign students enrolled in Victoria. Together, they contribute about $18 billion in export revenue. They also contribute to Melbourne life in ways we only appreciated after they went home. With apologies to Slim Dusty, there is nothing so dreary as a university town without students.

As a global study destination, Melbourne is in world-class company. It is ranked fourth behind Seoul, Tokyo and London on the QS list of the world’s best student cities, with Sydney ranked sixth.

This should be a source of enormous state pride. Instead, it is a source of grievance fuelling public support for One Nation, a party whose immigration policies would kill stone dead the state’s largest export industry and leave us all immeasurably poorer.

IEAA chief executive Phil Honeywood, who this week attended a series of global meetings about international education in London and Glasgow, says Australia’s student trade is being convulsed by the same social and political forces being felt in Canada, the UK and Donald Trump’s America.

For the past two years, the federal government has employed bureaucratic delay to frustrate and slow the number of people coming into Australia to study. This has reduced the number of students issued visas from the post-pandemic peak of 577,000 to a little over 370,000 last year.

Honeywood is a former state Liberal MP who served in the Kennett government. He agrees the temporary migration system needs reform but says clear distinctions have to be drawn between people who come here to study and people who come here on student visas primarily looking to do paid work.

Genuine students, including those who apply for temporary graduate visas to gain professional experience while they are here, are not the problem.

“The situation you’ve now got is that if you’re a genuine student, you’re treated like a pariah by our Home Affairs Department,” Honeywood says. “You’re treated like a pariah by the wider Australian community.”

This is where international students, and the Australian universities that rely on them to pay for important research and subsidise the cost of domestic student places, need more and better advocates.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas made a start on this a week ago. It is time for Carroll to find his voice.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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