International student appeal backlog doubles in five months and ‘will only get bigger’

The backlog of international students contesting their visa refusals has doubled in five months to surpass 20,000 for the first time, creating a headache for the federal government as it struggles to meet its migration targets.

More than 3500 foreign students challenged the Home Affairs Department’s decision to refuse them a visa between October 14 and November 30. In that time, just 313 cases were finalised, leaving a backlog of 21,471 cases in the Administrative Review Tribunal.

This is roughly double the 10,905 cases that were waiting to be dealt with on June 30.

Data shows most students whose visa appeals were finalised in the latest six-week period were successful.Credit: Penny Stephens

The bottleneck means student visa appeals are now taking a median time of 46 weeks to run through the system, allowing applicants to stay in Australia for almost an extra year while their cases are finalised.

It will add fire to a political debate about international students extending their stays in Australia after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton controversially called them “the modern version of boat arrivals” this year. The federal government also wants people on short-term visas to leave the country so it can lower overall migration numbers.

But most students have been successful in their appeals lately, indicating their visas are being rejected on subjective grounds as the government cracks down on visa applications.

Immigration expert and former department official Abul Rizvi said Australia was wearing the consequences of the post-COVID international student boom.

“People look for ways of extending their stay. Governments try to clamp down on that, but it’s really difficult,” he said.

“This [backlog] is unprecedented, and it’s going to get a lot bigger. The time cases take will just get longer and longer because, at the current processing rate, the tribunal will never be able to catch up.”

In the latest six-week period, 67 per cent of department decisions to reject student visas were set aside by the tribunal.

Rizvi said the system was prone to “being gamed a bit” but the success rate suggested Home Affairs was using highly subjective criteria to reject student visas.

“The department is concluding ‘you’re not a genuine student’, but the tribunal decision maker is telling them their decision is not well-based and their judgment doesn’t have merit,” he said.

“That means people do get their student visa, and then will continue to look for ways of extending their stay.”

The review tribunal, which considers decisions made by the government and public service, is the new body that was set up by Labor in October to replace the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

The 3557 student visa refusal cases lodged with the tribunal in its first six weeks of operation are just shy of the 3893 appeals for student visa refusals lodged throughout all of 2023.

The data continues a trend observed throughout 2024: the federal government’s rejection of more than 20 per cent of student applications – the highest refusal rate in at least two decades – has led to a growing number of appeals, prolonging people’s stay.

It’s a difficult dynamic for the Albanese government, which has been trying to reduce net migration numbers under political pressure but has been thwarted because fewer migrants are leaving the country.

International students are a key element of that challenge, although upward pressure on net migration is also coming from New Zealanders escaping their weak economy and working holidaymakers drawn to Australia’s strong jobs market.

Rizvi said it meant the government would keep struggling to meet migration targets.

“The student visa boom, the working holidaymaker boom, combined with the strong labour market, means that people aren’t going home,” he said.

“Treasury’s forecasts for net migration assume all these students and working holidaymakers can somehow be driven out of the country when they don’t want to leave.”

Immigration looms as a heated federal election issue as both Labor and the Coalition have vowed to bring down the migration numbers while painting the other as ineffective in managing the system.

Labor will keep using the visa processing system to crack down on foreign student numbers after its attempt at introducing student caps was tanked by the Coalition. Meanwhile, the opposition has promised deeper cuts to migration if elected but has not said how it would achieve them.

Rizvi said governments had dealt with previous visa booms by increasing the size of the migration program when other attempts at driving people out of the country didn’t work.

“The problem is that the politics of this has shifted so much that it’s no longer an option,” he said.

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