This was published 1 year ago
Brought to Australia as a ‘student’, Henry was made into a slave
By Michael Bachelard, Nick McKenzie and Amelia Ballinger
Yongge “Henry” Qi was enrolled to study in Australia; instead, he was put to work for a pittance.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
If you believe what it says on Yongge “Henry” Qi’s visa, he came to Australia to study. But he never went to the marketing and communication course he was enrolled in, and it was fanciful to think he could: the only English words he knows are “yes” and “no”.
Instead, when he landed, Qi went to work in a suburban car window tinting factory. There for long hours, seven days a week, he did the work of two or three people, and was fed the sometimes rotten scraps from his employer’s table.
When Qi complained about his conditions, his boss confiscated his passport. At one point, the factory he was living in was renovated and, he says, he went without a shower for a month.
Qi’s ordeal is another example of the industrial-scale rorting of Australia’s student immigration system exposed by this masthead and confirmed in two recent federal government reports.
His student visa was arranged by NewStars, the largest Chinese migration agent registered with the federal government, which boasts that it has assisted more than 30,000 migrants.
A series of WeChat messages shows his employer drove the conversations with the NewStars agent to arrange Qi’s visa and student enrolment. The employer was posing as Qi’s sister.
An investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes can also reveal that influencers on Chinese social media apps with hundreds of millions of users are luring people to Australia with false promises of permanent residency.
An online advertisement promoting immigration to Australia touting high wages and no English requirement.
Through a translator, Qi said he was lured to Australia by his employer with the promise of free accommodation, food, air tickets and a comfortable salary, but he ended up being treated like a slave.
“He was controlled, he had no freedom, he couldn’t do whatever he wanted. That’s slavery to me,” says Sean Dong, a migration lawyer who blew the whistle on Qi’s treatment.
“At my lowest, I couldn’t express my feelings, so I punched the wall,” concedes Qi in Chinese, as Dong interprets for him. “I kept punching the wall. And I didn’t know what to do, just punching the wall.”
The misuse of education visas is one of the rorts that have allowed criminals to traffic large numbers of people into the country to be exploited. A recent report by former police chief Christine Nixon also showed “grotesque” abuses of the visitor and asylum visa systems.
The Albanese government has withheld Nixon’s report despite a promise to release it in May, and there has not yet been a response to it from Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, who has described the migration system as “broken in fundamental ways”.
The Home Affairs Department has said it will not comment on individual cases for privacy reasons. In a statement, the department said it was highly successful at protecting Australia from immigration threats apart from “isolated exceptions”.
But O’Neil said she had inherited a migration system which was “completely broken, not delivering for employers or workers and subject to rorting and exploitation”. She told The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes Home Truths investigation that her response to the Nixon report would be part of a “systemic reform ... to build a migration system which protects workers and delivers for the national interest”.
The place where Henry Qi lived for a time in the factory of his employer.
Fed leftovers
Between December 2021 and last September, Qi was paid about $5 per hour for his work in the Melbourne car window tinting factory. He said he had been lured by the employer with promises of a job that was “paid well” and that he was told Australia was a “relaxing environment” to work in.
Instead, he started by living in the employer’s house, and doing the jobs of two or three people between 9am and 9pm. For food, Qi said through Dong, “they sometimes give him the leftovers that have gone bad, so he once had diarrhoea for three days”.
Later Qi lived in the factory where, he said, “I was by myself.” His employer brought him lunch and dinner which “usually felt very un-fresh”, he said.
“They feed me leftovers, and they ask me to do things that are not related to work,” Qi said. “I have to work seven days. I only get rest when there’s no job lined up.”
When the factory was being renovated, all he had for living quarters was a bed, a desk and a coat hanger. His longest workday was 16 hours, from 9am to 1am the following morning. He did not go to authorities to seek help because of his lack of English.
“I was scared because there’s no way to say ‘no’ because they threatened me because I have $12,000 cash on me. They said if I don’t give up my passport, they will call the police [and say] I steal the money from them.”
He has since given a statement to the Australian Federal Police.
‘A path to cheap labour’
Qi says he did not know that NewStars was his migration agent. In response to questions, NewStars produced documents showing Qi knew he was coming to Australia on an education visa.
However, they conceded they had never spoken directly to him. Despite trying a number of times, they were “unable to be answered”, according to a written statement from the migration agent.
The statement said that, since the woman claiming to be his sister had provided all the requisite documentation, “we were also satisfied that [she] had full authority acting on behalf of Mr Qi”. It was only later, when Qi’s lawyer approached NewStars for documentation, did they realise “that they are not in biological relationship”.
The migration agents’ code says an agent must not deal with a client through an intermediary unless they can verify the person’s identity.
“Qi didn’t know who his agent was, and to me, that’s obviously a representation issue,” said Dong, a senior lawyer at immigration law specialist ProActive Legal.
“It was facilitated. To me, that’s trafficking. He speaks almost zero English, just simply ‘yes’ or ‘no’. He should never have been offered a place in a school and because of that, he shouldn’t have gotten a visa.”
According to the law, as a student who was not attending classes, Qi was in the country illegally and not able to work.
Dong said conversations on Chinese social media app WeChat were pitching a fantasy of Australia to thousands of people at a time and permanent residency if they worked “well” for two years.
“That’s false,” Dong said. Qi was not performing a job considered in demand by Australia, and he did not speak English.
Ethnic Chinese Tiktokers based in Australia were also luring people in with false claims.
One popular Tiktoker blatantly advertises student visas as the best option, but they add: “You don’t have to study, you can just come here on a student visa, but work on full-time basis because the cash cannot be tracked and says you can stay here for 7 to 10 years.”
“Usually people do it under the table,” Dong said. “But it’s so direct on the social media channel: I was shocked.”
Lawyer and advocate Sean Dong (left) with Qi in Melbourne. Credit: Luis Ascui
Dong said other common scams were to bring people to Australia on visitor visas and then have them falsely apply for asylum. These people could then keep working as they appealed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which has a years-long backlog of cases, and then to judicial review.
“The whole process takes years, five, six years. That’s quite possible,” Dong said. “They’re trafficked to Australia … stay here, work for a few years … That’s the whole plan. When this is organised at a larger scale, that’s corruption in my opinion.”
Participating employers see it as a “path to get cheap labour”, he said.
The Nixon report, commissioned after this masthead’s Trafficked series, found this kind of rorting was rife, and that “abhorrent crimes” had been permitted as the Home Affairs Department and its enforcement arm, Border Force, focused on “seemingly higher law enforcement priorities such as illicit drugs, tobacco and unauthorised maritime arrivals”.
Despite the security-focused rhetoric when the Australian Border Force was brought into being in 2015, the Nixon report found it had “limited legislative powers to effectively investigate visa and migration fraud and the exploitation of temporary migrant workers”.
Her report also found the department had allocated too few personnel to the task.
Since her report, Australian Border Force has started a month-long program of 250 “strikes” searching for evidence of unscrupulous behaviour by businesses at the expense of migrant workers.
The visa refusal rate had increased from 4.5 per cent in 2019-20 to 7.7 per cent because of better risk, integrity and intelligence systems.
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