Attaining and Retaining Talent, General Years of Experience VS Employer Determination of Talent

Australian General Skilled Migration (“GSM”) key determination of talent by measure of years of experience in their use of a points test, similar to practices in European countries, has inadvertently encouraged standard migrants to enter the labor market through an unintended pathway. Public Interest Criteria 4020 (“PIC 4020”) is a policy response introduced to combat the significant increase of fraudulent documents to substantiate years of experience. The ineffectiveness of PIC 4020 was highlighted in a case study of two registered Australian migration agents who sold a “three-year working visa”, encouraging international graduate students with no alternative pathways to lodge applications onshore for GSM, which would ultimately be refused due to lack of work experience. However, the presence of long processing times for review allowed those standard migrants to re-enter the labor market. In comparison, the introduction of PIC 4020 to the alternative skilled visa stream, the “Employer Sponsored” stream where it is the employer who determines the talent, did not show such misuse of policy as the system set up for Employer Sponsored stream supports the disincentive aim of PIC 4020.  The inquiry also considers skills in terms of the business stream and why Australia is not meeting its prescribed policy objectives in attracting highly skilled individuals and argues that for the skilled migration system to work effectively there is a need to manage the migration program as a whole.