Australia to Crack Down on ‘Significant Abuse and Misuse of Visa System’

Australian Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, and Multicultural Affairs Andrew Giles on Wednesday announced a major crackdown on abuse of Australia’s visa system, which he said has enabled human trafficking and other organized criminal activities.

“The Nixon Review has identified significant abuse and misuse of Australia’s visa system. By once again prioritizing integrity in immigration, we’re able to help protect vulnerable communities from exploitation, and make our visa system fairer for everyone,” Giles said.

The Nixon Review was launched in January 2023 by Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil, who appointed former Victoria police commissioner Christine Nixon to investigate the “exploitation of Australia’s visa system.” 

Nixon’s Rapid Review Report was published in March 2023 and declassified for public consumption after certain information that might have adversely impacted government agencies and law enforcement was removed. The report stressed the connection between immigration abuse and organized crime.

“I know from a career in policing and law enforcement that criminal organizations and unscrupulous people are always looking for ways to exploit and make money. It is clear that gaps and weaknesses in Australia’s visa system are allowing this to happen,” Nixon wrote.

“Australia’s visa system must be strengthened to resist organized crime syndicates, to ensure they don’t prey upon Australia as an easy destination to conduct their exploitative and criminal business, and to protect those who are most vulnerable,” she recommended.

Nixon said exploited persons such as “money mules and sex slaves” and the victims of “family violence and sexual assault” are unlikely to step forward because they are afraid and because they know Australian law enforcement is focused on other matters.

The Nixon report found that a huge surge of temporary visas that began in 2018, and peaking with the Covid-19 pandemic, created opportunities for systemic abuse. 

Stated more bluntly, organized crime rings took advantage of lax immigration enforcement to import sex workers, smuggling mules, and outright slaves. The criminal gangs used “broad networks of complicit RMAs (Registered Migration Agents), lawyers, education agents, and education providers” to facilitate their schemes. 

Nixon’s report was a bit delicate when it came to discussing the problem with RMAs, beyond complaining that a number of “bad actors” were able to obtain registrations and then abuse their authority to bring in migrants who were useful to organized crime. She recommended tightening certification procedures for migration agents and dramatically increasing the penalties for abuse, so crooked agents no longer view corrupt activity as “low risk and high reward.”

The Nixon report found it was too easy for immigrants with shady legal histories to establish themselves in Australia, after which they have a propensity for bringing in more migrants from the same country of origin and exploiting them, sometimes brutally. Evidently, this type of culturally homogenous human trafficking network is successful because the victims are less likely to turn against their abusive employers and seek help from the authorities.

A prominent example of the systemic flaws in Australia’s system was provided in January when famed Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic was granted a visa to play in the Australian Open tournament but was then deported because the Australian government declared him a menace to public health because he refused to get vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus.

Australian Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Djokovic was given a visa due to a “computer-generated process” even though the government had a very public argument with itself for a month beforehand and decided not to let him in. Djokovic wound up getting arrested by the Australian Border Force and tossed into a migrant detention center, to the outrage of the Serbian government and the public.

Immigration Minister Giles said on Wednesday that the Department of Home Affairs will establish a new division to handle visa and migration abuses, with about $50 million ($31 million U.S.) in initial funding.

Giles said the new division will follow Nixon’s recommendation to strengthen the requirements for RMAs, and will also “consider ways to regulate similar agents overseas out of concern that the education, temporary worker and asylum seeker visa streams are being abused to bring in people who should be turned away,” as the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) put it.

The SMH collaborated in a series of investigative reports called “Trafficked” in late 2022 that highlighted massive human trafficking abuses. These reports inspired the Australian government to create an inter-agency investigative unit called Operation Inglenook that soon brought down one of the worst human trafficking kingpins in Australia, a Chinese-born, Sydney-based prostitution boss whose presence in Australia was retroactively baffling to officials because his record was bursting with red flags.

Xie, an honest-to-goodness Chinese Triad boss nicknamed “The Hammer” by his fearful subordinates, abused the immigration system to import a legion of brutally exploited sex workers. His victims were shipped around Australia like “cattle” and held prisoner in seedy motel rooms to await their clients.

Xie somehow slipped back into Australia on a student visa after getting busted and deported in 2014. He went underground after being spotlighted by the “Trafficked” reports until he was captured and deported again last month.

Australia’s crackdown on immigration abuse is clearly motivated by embarrassment that reporters had to root out characters like Xie, instead of the government catching them, or better yet preventing them from getting into Australia in the first place.

Australia’s ABC News reported on a round of vigorous finger-pointing between O’Neil and the Labor Party versus opposition leader Peter Dutton of the Liberal Party, who had O’Neil’s job from 2017 to 2021:

Ms O’Neil blamed the previous government for a deterioration in immigration compliance, which she said allowed the system to be used to “perpetrate some of the worst crimes known to humanity”.

[…]

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton returned fire, describing Ms O’Neil as “angry” and “aggressive”.

“She is a very angry person, always very angry and very aggressive, and the negativity coming out of Clare O’Neil today and the overstated position that she has taken frankly is all about trying to provide cover for a bad prime minister,” Mr Dutton said.

“Labor’s presided over 105,000 asylum seekers over the course of the last 15 months, a record number in our country,” Dutton observed on Wednesday. Labor officials retorted that most of those asylum seekers arrived when Dutton was the minister in charge of border security.