Centurion

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news...804-11fcf.html

Net migration this year falls sharply.

ABCDiamond

Immigration in this report includes all visas that are over 12 months. Temporary and permanent.

The numbers of 457 Business Visas and 1 or 2 year Student visas may have dropped. Personally I wouldn't count temporary visas as migrants, when talking Immigration numbers.

However, the actual Migrant numbers of 'Permanent Visa' holder arrivals for the last few years were:

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Buzzy--Bee

And this includes people like us who transitioned from temporary to permanent visas during 2010, so I'm not convinced we should genuinely count as new immigrants.

BB

ABCDiamond

Good point. The arrivals figures alone don't count the onshore PR changes.

The only figures that will really count are the IMMI visa number stats, and the latest release shows these numbers:

Migration Program Statistics
2005-06 142,930 actual
2006-07 148,200 actual
2007-08 158,630 actual
2008-09 171,320 actual
2009-10 168,700 Planned
2010-11 168,700 Planned

The numbers have dropped from 2008-09, but still higher than previous years.

Student Visas
2007-08 278,184
2008-09 320,368
2009-10 269,828

A substantial drop in these ones, compared to 2008-09, but only a slight drop to 2007-08.


457 Visas:
As at the year to date May 2010, the total number of primary Subclass 457 visa applications lodged is 32 per cent lower than the same period last program year.
34,710 applications to May 2010 compared to 51,350 to May 2009.

Buzzy--Bee

Sorry mate, I didn't explain myself fully enough. We were on temp visas and had to leave the country for a few days to be awarded our offshore PR visas. So we count as "new" PR arrivals, when we had already lived here for 2.5 years. I bet there's a lot of people in those figures in this situation who are not really new immigrants for any statistical purpose apart from the number of PR visas granted.

BB

rinkerdink

Is it any wonder when they effectively stopped processing applications and froze new applications for a few months in 2010 and this on top of 3+ rule changes

paulry

With that in mind It would be interesting to know if there is a larger bottleneck of applications in 2010 compared with other years.