Heat on immigration department over 64,000 unwanted residents

As the debate over Australian citizenship goes on, a newspaper has reported that more than 64,000 people are living in Australia illegally, having overstayed their visas.

The Courier Mail‘s report said that at least one person had successfully evaded immigration authorities for more than 40 years,  and that as many as 20,000 of the 64,000 people were believed to be working illegally in Australia.

Most had come into Australia legally on visitor visas, while another large chunk arrived on student visas, with Malaysians reportedly the worst overstayers, followed by Chinese, Americans and Britons.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Peter Dutton pointed out that the number of overstayers was less than 1 percent of the 6.5 million people who visited Australia every year.

But the embarrassing numbers for the immigration department come as Dutton wages multiple battles on immigration, asylum and citizenship, with a powerful immigration tribunal overturning the government’s attempts to take tough stance on the issues, while critics accuse the government of not being tough enough.

The government last week introduced legislation that will give the minister the power to overrule the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), which hears appeals against government decisions, including those on immigration.

The laws will allow Dutton to set aside an AAT decision to grant citizenship to an individual if he believed the person was unfit to be an Australian; he currently has the power to overturn AAT decisions on visas but not citizenships.

The legal change is part of an overhaul of citizenship rules that include the introduction of a tougher English-language test and a longer wait before a citizenship application can be submitted.

It also comes as the media closely follows Dutton’s battles with the AAT on specific visa cases, including that of an Indian-born man living in Australia on a visa, whom Dutton’s department attempted to deport after the man pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting a female passenger. The deportation was blocked by the AAT.

The tribunal’s predecessor also reportedly blocked an immigration department decision to reject a visa application in 2013 from a man who two years later went on to rape a female passenger while working as an Uber driver.

Meanwhile, the government has come under fire from former prime minister Tony Abbott and others, who’ve linked Australia’s asylum program to terror attacks in the country.

“We’ve had three terrorist attacks in Australia and all three of them involved either people claiming to be refugees or the children of refugees,” Abbott told 2GB this month, saying that Australia needed to be less accommodating of hardline Islamists.

The issues of citizenship, asylum and terror have been a hot topics after it emerged that the men behind recent terror attacks in the UK were British citizens. 

Do you think Peter Dutton is doing the right things on immigration?