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Illegals go free

Herald Sun (Melbourne) - 21 August 2002

Dear Sir/Madam

The letter to the Editor in the Herald Sun ('Some illegals go free', 21 August 2002) requires correction.

The Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs supports tourism to Australia in numerous ways, while at the same time ensuring immigration integrity is maintained.

The news on visitor visas for people from higher immigration risk and emerging tourism markets is exceptionally good:

  • Globally, 97.94% of all visitor applications are approved;

  • visa grant numbers in markets such as China and India continue to grow strongly;

  • the global non-return rate has reduced to 1.85% of all Visitor visa arrivals, and

  • the rates and absolute numbers of Visitors applying for refugee status has dropped to 0.15%.

This success is due to the ongoing cooperation between DIMIA, the tourism industry and communities in Australia.

The introduction of a range of innovative measures, such as the Electronic Travel Authority, which caters for 85 percent of all short term visitors to Australia, and the Approved Destination Status arrangements with China have also contributed to the success.

The Department continues to identify opportunities for the provision of enhanced visitor visa processing arrangements.

The distribution of the discussion paper on the development of a new methodology for determining risk is another step in this ongoing process.

Whatever fine tuning is done you can be assured that the methodology for measuring risk will remain objective, transparent and publicly available.

It should be noted, there were an estimated 6273 unlawful citizens in Australia from the United Kingdom and 5142 from the United States (as at 30 June 2001).

However, when looking at overall number of arrivals from these countries, the overstayer rates were 0.20 percent (for the U.K.) and 0.25 percent (for the U.S.) amongst the lowest rates of all nationalities coming to Australia.

Stewart Foster
Director, Public Affairs
Dept of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs