Tens of thousands of Australians are trapped overseas by the Covid border closures. At latest count, more than 34,000 Australians cannot get home to Australia. But nearly 50,000 foreigners could.
That’s how many migrants poured into Australia in the last financial year. The majority from China and India. Most of them brought in on family visas, rather than the skill stream.
The 2020-21 Migration Program was delivered at 160,052, almost 20,000 more than in 2019-20 and only slightly above the “ceiling” of 160,000 […there was] a shift in the balance of the program away from the skill stream to the family stream with only 50.7% of the program going to the skill stream. At 79,620, this was the smallest skill stream since 2004-05 [….] a record 71% of the program went to people already in Australia.
Independent Australia
Let that sink in: at the same time that 34,000 Australian citizens have been locked out of their own country by their own government, that same government has flown in 50,000 immigrants. Not because they were skilled workers, but merely because they had family members here.
Even the number of Australians who’ve been allowed to come home is exceeded by the volume of migrants who have arrived.
Since the start of the pandemic, when Australia slammed its borders to the world shut, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has helped 48,700 Australians return, a spokesperson told 9news.com.au, including more than 21,000 people on 142 government facilitated flights.
9 News
In any event, filling the immigration target was a ‘strong achievement’, at least according to Immigration Minister Alex Hawke. Because of the Wuhan virus, there weren’t enough skilled immigrants. So they filled up the gap in the 160,000 target with ‘family’ immigrants. Whether this meant that they went down the list to bring in, say, great-aunts, is not clear. Then there was the problem that over 100,000 of these immigrants were here already. But they weren’t actually labelled ‘immigrants’. Moving names from one list to another is surely a daunting exercise.
Spectator Australia
Every Australian trapped overseas should be dancing with fury. Every Australian family with members trapped overseas should be picketing the offices of their local MPs.
Oh, wait, they can’t: they’re in lockdown.
Meanwhile, it’s carte blanche for unskilled foreigners to swan in, Covid and border closures be damned.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD