Students left with unwanted skills
RANJOT Sandhu feels angry and disappointed. A year ago he came to Melbourne from India to study for a diploma in hospitality management at a private college. He planned to apply for permanent residency when it was finished.
A federal government crackdown on international students using trade training as a path to residency means students like Mr Sandhu no longer automatically qualify.
If students find their occupation is no longer in demand, they will have to apply for a temporary 18-month work visa to get work experience and then find an employer willing to sponsor them as a skilled migrant in their area of study.
The new skilled-migration list, to be released mid-year, is expected to favour professionals such as nurses and teachers, rather than groups such as cooks, accountants and hairdressers.
Standing with a group of fellow students outside his college yesterday, Mr Sandhu said finding employers for the thousands of hospitality and hairdressing students at Melbourne colleges was unrealistic; most would have to go home.
''No one is offering a job in commercial cookery,'' he said. ''We plan our future according to the rules, but when we come over they change them.''
The work international students manage to find is invariably in low-paid, unskilled positions, like car washing and factory work, he said.
Asked if permanent residency was their main motivation for studying in Australia, the students nodded. It was an option made available to them by the government, one pointed out.
Gurpinder Grewal, also a commercial cookery student, said many students believed the federal government had tightened the rules because it was facing an election, and was embarrassed by issues of violence against Indian students.
Chinese international student Ricky Lu is studying an advanced diploma in hospitality at a private college, at the cost of about $20,000.
Mr Lu was worried his subject area would be taken off the skilled list, but said he would channel his energy into his part-time job as a kitchen hand at a Japanese restaurant in the hope that it would sponsor him.
If that failed, he would try to find another avenue to temporary residency: ''I'm 30 years old, I'm not young any more, so giving up and going home is not good for me.''