The Migration Institute of Australia released a statement following revelations on 60 Minutes and in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald regarding the role played by “migration agents” in an alleged sex trafficking ring.

As a member of the MIA, we wholeheartedly support these comments and reprint them here to spread the message.

Unscrupulous visa scam operators – 60 Minutes investigation into sex trafficking

While the Migration Institute of Australia (MIA) abhors the organised crime and sex trafficking operations exposed in the 60 Minutes, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald media reports this week, the MIA wishes to correct the false impression of the migration profession put forward in these stories.

The MIA condemns the media’s use of the term ‘migration agent’ as an all-encompassing term for legally registered migration agents, unregulated education agents and those illegally providing immigration assistance in Australia.

Despite media reports, Registered Migration Agents are one of the most highly regulated professions in Australia. It is an offence to provide immigration assistance in Australia without being legally registered as a migration agent or as a lawyer or exempt person. However, the current penalties for doing so are ineffective and perpetrators are rarely prosecuted.

The MIA has called for these penalties to be increased and the criminalisation of these activities at various appearances before parliamentary enquiries, yet successive governments have been seemingly unwilling to tackle this problem.

The MIA refutes Queensland Detective Inspector Brad Phelps assertion that the police force is powerless to address the underlying migration fraud in these cases. There are established protocols for dealing with this by referral to the Office of the Migration Agents Regulation Authority and the Australian Border Force.

Registered Migration Agents are stringently regulated by the Office of the Migration Agents Regulation Authority (OMARA) and the Authority actively sanctions and bans the very small percentage of registered migration agents (statistically less than 1% over time) who breach their professional and ethical obligations.

It is in fact legislative loopholes and lack of resourcing that hamper efforts to combat migration fraud. This can be traced to several factors including a general downgrading of previous governments funding to this area.

The OMARA is only able to sanction legally registered migration agents operating in Australia; it is the watchdog for the well-regulated profession. The OMARA has no power, apart from referral to the Australian Border Force, to take action against any case involving those who operate outside the legal registration system including education agents and unlawful operators who term themselves ‘migration agents’ and those operating offshore with jurisdictional impunity

The Australian Border Force (ABF) in turn has limited means for investigation and prosecution as identified in the ABF’s own submission to the Inquiry into the efficacy of current regulation of Australia migration and education agents in 2018. This submission detailed the barriers to prosecuting migration fraud, including insufficient funding that meant only the most serious cases of migration fraud could be investigated. In addition, the ABF identified the limited administrative actions that could be taken to address unregistered and unlawful migration practice, its limited powers to enter premises and seize evidence, and the evidentiary requirements for prosecuting such fraud.

The MIA has long urged previous governments to take a stand against education agents who patently breach the Migration Act 1958 in providing migration assistance with impunity while not registered as migration agents. Education agents are not regulated in Australia yet support the international education sector that was Australia’s third largest export and was contributing close to $40 billion per annum to Australia’s economy pre-COVID.

Corrupt operators of private Registered Training Organisations (RTO) lacking integrity are complicit in perpetrating this fraud, as detailed in the media report, by not complying with the reporting obligations for the registration of course for international students.

The MIA welcomes the current governments moves to introduce legislative reforms to combat migrant worker exploitation and has identified that student visa holders, as well as student visa fraud, are central tenets of this exploitation.

The Migration Institute of Australia calls on the government to:

• increase the financial resourcing to the Australian Border Force for the specific purpose of investigating migration fraud at all levels
• undertake urgent review of the processes that prevent the Australian Border Force from effectively prosecuting migration fraud
• implement recommendations for more stringent penalties for migration fraud and illegal provision of migration assistance and the criminalisation such conduct
• increase regulation of the international education sector, course offerings and education providers
• introduce stringent regulation of education agents operating in Australia and those providing service offshore to Australian education providers, in the same manner as Registered Migration Agents
• conduct an audit of the operation of all private Registered Training Organisations providing CRICOS approved courses to international students, to identify and deregister those operating fraudulently.
• implement protections against migration fraud by only accepting visa applications lodged by legally registered migration agents and legal practitioners or the visa applicant directly.

The MIA reminds consumers to only obtain migration advice and assistance from Registered Migration Agents or legal practitioners experienced in immigration law. The MIA’s ‘Find a Migration Practitioner’ provides a list of its members who meet not only the highest professionals and ethical regulatory standards, but also the additional standards of the MIA’s own Members’ Code of Ethics and Practice.