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Winners and losers in points bid
Sydney: Under the Australian system
of immigration, points mean prizes. If you presently earn a living
as a taxidermist stuffing dead animals, you are 40 points closer
to getting the opportunity to work down under.
Better still, if you treat live animals as a qualified
veterinarian, you get 60. If you are eligible still to go on a
Club 18 to 30 holiday, you can bag another 30.
But cross the 40 threshold and you only get 15. Nudge past 44 and
you are completely ineligible for a skilled work visa.
Fluency in one of Australia’s community languages wins you another
five. A capital investment in Australia or work experience here
yields the same number.
To enter this cricket-obsessed country as a skilled migrant, the
ultimate aim is to score over a century. The current pass mark is
120 for independent applicants and 110 for family sponsors.
Then, if you pass the necessary health and criminal checks, the
way is clear to start living the Australian dream. Transparent,
fair, rigorous and designed to suit the needs of the economy. No
wonder the UK government has decided to craft its own system,
which will become operational next year, on the Australian model.
UK immigration minister Liam Byrne even went as far as to unveil
the timetable after a photo opportunity at Sydney airport, half a
planet away from Westminster.
“Migration has to support Britain’s national interest,” he said.
“A new Australian-style points system will be simpler, cheaper,
and easier to enforce. Crucially, it will give us the best way of
letting in only those people who have something to offer Britain.”
But the points system does have drawbacks. Just ask Alexander Lee,
a British IT specialist working in Sydney, who just falls short of
the number of points required.
Lee and his family love living here. His firm, which is presently
sponsoring him, thinks he does a terrific job. He has specialist
computing skills ideally suited to the needs of the Australian
economy. But his curriculum vitae is bereft of one salient entry –
a degree.
“It’s a strange position,” Lee says. “I have the necessary skills
Australia is looking for. But I’m not a graduate, so I’m about
five to 10 points short of the required number to work here full
time.”
In some instances, the points system arguably makes it too hard to
get in and sets criteria that are too rigid. As Lee’s case
illustrates, it often places too high an emphasis on paper-based
qualifications rather than on-the-job experience.
Oddly, the country’s hair salons highlight another problem with
the points system. Presently, Australia faces a chronic shortage
of hairdressers, prompting the corniest of headlines:
“Hairdressers groomed to cut shortage” and “Industry tearing its
hair out”. It has also forced some salons to close down through
lack of trained staff.
Each six months, the points system is adjusted to meet these kind
of skills shortages – hairdressing now makes the migration
occupations in demand list, the severe skills shortage list. But
there is often a time lag and it is hard to synchronise the needs
of a fast-changing economy with the kind of migrants the system
delivers.
“The system needs constant recalibration,” Christopher Brown of
the tourism and transport forum, a lobby group representing
industries which suffer chronic skills shortages, said.
“Is it hairdressers this week, pastry chefs next week, or
engineers the week after? How quickly can the points system adapt?
You have to be very nimble and fleet of foot.”
And is it a good economic move to exclude the non-skilled? The
experience of the Australian hotel and construction industries
suggests not.
“Points systems are good at attracting the upper-end skilled
workers,” Brown says. “But the difficulty for an economy like ours
is how to do we get the bulk of people to work in the lower end of
the tourism industry or the labouring end of the construction
industry.”
Admittedly, the problem is worse in Australia than elsewhere,
partly because of its remoteness.
“Everyone in the world has access to a cheap labour force,” Brown
says. “Western Europe has Eastern Europe; North America has South
America; the Gulf has the subcontinent. The problem is where does
our source of low-cost labour come from to sustain and grow our
economy?” – BBC
 
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