Indian migration ballooned in the last two decades because of a politically motivated policy by John Howard and the Liberals to balance out the East Asian immigrants with lots of Indian immigrants.
The Howard administration expanded the 'skills' category to include cooks and hairdressers. At the same time, Australia spent money to advertise this new loophole across India to encourage migration. According to the Liberals, Australia couldn't produce its own cooks and barbers and needed to import vast numbers, mostly from India.
The whole thing was a scam to fool the Australian public into believing the skills migration cover story. Lots of Indians came on student visas and got fast-tracked to permanent residence. I lived in Melbourne at the time and saw cooking and hairdressing schools popping up all over the place. There were news reports that many of the 'cooking' schools didn't even have an oven!
It was a scam propped up by the Liberals because they wanted much closer ties with India.
lol, they still do actually, we have a lot of "Mechanic", "Hairdressing" "Chef" school here in Sydney.
Problem is, those kind of job needed to be peg with a job offer, sure, you go hire a chef, but make sure they do chef thing instead of driving Uber.
The sheer amount of immigration fraud is quite rampant back in 2010s, and well, you only need to know what to do to get your PR that way
The myth of the 'highly skilled Indian' is often repeated by Indians and the business community and their paid politicians who want increased migration.
In my experience, the Indian workers are like any other worker, including Australian workers. It's the standard Bell curve: a few smart cookies, a few dead weights, and mostly average Joes doing average work.
There is nothing that the Indian immigrants are doing (at least in tech) that couldn't be done by a local worker with six months training and a support group that the Indians usually have.
Personally, I feel that when a government cannot train its own people for 21st century jobs then it has failed its people.
That's because it is easy, instead of addressing the situation, they bump up the number and make it look good, something like "See we haave X amount of skill worker migrate to Australia" without actually having those people goes into those skill.
Another issue is our Uni system has become money corporation, they prefer international student than local, I was at UNSW back in early 2010s, there are more International Student than local student lol, because if they go international, you get chunks of money and you open up campus like crazy, you get a HECS line of credit when you gave that spot to a local. Hoping the COVID closure would teach those college a lesson, but by the way we are heading, it seems like history is going to repeat themselves.......
