Skilled migrants welcome in Australia - Immigration specialist

“The Australian Government gives priority to state and employer sponsored applications when processing applications for permanent residency (PR)”, said immigration specialist and lawyer, Susantha Katugampala.

Migration is a much debated topic at election meetings, due to boat loads of people arriving in Australia seeking asylum.

The public and the Australian government is of the view that political asylum is not needed for people from Sri Lanka since the conflict is over, peace has dawned and minorities not discriminated.

Katugampala said that the arrival of boat people has interrupted the normal procedure of work as most asylum seekers don’t qualify for PR. There is high demand for engineers, accountants, IT professionals, as well as professionals in the fields of Medicines, science and research.

He said that the skilled occupation list was reduced from 440 to 196 in July.

In the category of state sponsored skilled migration there are 490 occupations listed and people qualifying under this category can apply for PR with a lesser number of points.

The Australian chamber of commerce promotes skilled migration and Governor Reserve Bank of Australia Glenn Stevens said that Australia survived the global economic crisis due to the effective policies in skilled migration since with new migrants comes new buying power. Katugampala said that Australia survived the global economic crisis as it always took precautions.

He said that with the labour party coming to power in 2007 immigration policies were tightened. The situation became worse due to the global financial crisis.

In January 2009 the Australian government reduced and freezed immigration applications and in March last year they started priority processing of applications for jobs in demand.

Last month the government decided to seize and cap about 14,000 immigrant applications lodged prior to September 2007.

SG