How Donald Trump's drastic decision this week will have sweeping immigration consequences for Australia

Daily Mail​

29-05-2025

Donald Trump 's ban on new international students could lead to a wave of students coming to Australia who would have otherwise picked prestigious universities such as Harvard or Yale, a leading higher education expert says.
The US President has stopped all student visa applications in a bid to force universities to better tackle anti-Semitism and political extremism on campus, in a move also designed to free up more places for Americans.
But the move could have consequences for Australia - already the world's largest education provider per capita - claimed Professor Andrew Norton, a higher education expert at Monash University.
'If they can't go to those top American universities, they may decide that Australia is the next best option,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
Education is Australia's fourth biggest export, behind iron ore, coal and natural gas and international, fee- paying students are a lucrative source of revenue for universities.
Trump's decision could give universities even more choice in who they selected, but would be unlikely to create a fresh wave of migrants, given Labor is seeking to cap the number of new annual enrolments to 270,000 with Senate approval.
'I'm saying, probably not an increase in numbers but possibly an increase in quality,' Prof Norton said.
'We've not necessarily got the most academically ambitious students - they may go to Harvard or other universities like that.'
Donald Trump 's ban on new international students could lead to a wave of students who would have picked prestigious universities such as Harvard or Yale coming to Australia instead, a leading higher education expert says
It is understood university chancellors met in Canberra on Wednesday, where fears were expressed about potentially being swamped with applications from international students who would have otherwise gone to the US.
In the US, international students are only legally allowed to work on campus in jobs related to their field of study.
In Australia, they can work 30 hours a week and if they are a studying a masters degree, they can bring a spouse to Australia with working rights.
To get a student visa, an overseas applicant needs a Confirmation of Enrolment to prove they have enrolled at an accredited Australian university.
More than half - or 55 per cent - of overseas students come from China, India , Nepal, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Australian universities have long favoured overseas students, who pay fees upfront unlike local students, who pay off degree through a Higher Education Loan Program.
Salvatore Babones, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Sydney, said international students were often enrolling to study in Australia to get work visas, giving universities a lucrative revenue stream.
'If they need to make some money, they can just give out more visas, get some more students in - it's become morally corrupt,' he said.
Prof Babones said led to students coming to Australia on student visas just to earn some money to send home.
'Their goal is to be in Australia earning money, delivering for Uber Eats or driving Ubers,' he said.
This was more common at less prestigious universities outside the Group of Eight - the University of Melbourne, Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University of Adelaide, Monash University and UNSW Sydney.
'Once you go below the Group of Eight, they're fundamentally work visas,' he said.
'Universities are empowered by the government to give out visas - it's relatively easy to get a visa to be an international student at a public university; it's very difficult to get a visa to be an international student at a language school.'
International students make up half of the University of Sydney's enrolments but for some degrees such as communications and business, that rises to 90 per cent.
'Masters degrees are now dominated by international students and if you want to create a new masters program, you have to present a business case to your university of how you would attract international students,' he said.
'The reason is not that Australia has such fantastic post-graduate education - the reason is that masters students can legally work 30 hours a week during the semester; they can work full-time out of the semester.
'More importantly, for masters students they can bring their families so partners of masters students can work full-time.'
This had seen Nepalese students make up eight per cent of enrolments, making it the third biggest source of Australia's international students after China and India.
'Nepal's a poor, mountainous country in the middle of nowhere,' he said.
'Why are there so many thousands of Nepali masters students in Australia? Because they can bring their family. By paying for a single masters degree, they get two people access to the Australian labour market for four years.
'It's simply a low-wage work scam - there's no way that Nepal can afford to send so many students here to do masters degrees; they borrow the money in Nepal - a lot of it's loan sharking.'
Prof Babones said a reliance on overseas students led to diminished teaching standards, with Queensland University of Technology last year admitting in its annual report that 46 per cent of international students had dropped out.
'This diminishes the pedagogical environment, it kind of makes a mockery of the mission of the public university - the point of having an education program here in Australia is not to service clients from China,' he said.
'The purpose is supposed to meet Australia's workforce needs and to meet Australia's educational needs but it's reached now, ridiculous proportions in some ways.'
Australia was last year home to 1.1million international student enrolments - from high school to universities and vocational education.
That figure included those who switched courses or degrees, and counts some students multiple times.
Maurice Newman, a former Macquarie University chancellor, said Trump was simply trying to open up more places for local students, as Australian universities continued to favour more international students for the revenue stream, particularly from China.
'Clearly, you get more money from foreign students which makes it likely some places for Australian students will not be available,' he said.
'When I was at Macquarie, what I was trying to do was reduce our dependence on foreign students - it's just putting too many eggs in one basket.
'What President Trump is looking to do is to open up more places for Americans to go to Ivy League and prestigious universities, which for the time being appear to have been overlooked for higher paying, presumably foreign students.'
David Llewellyn-Smith, the chief strategist with MacroBusiness, said universities were relying on revenue streams from overseas students to cope with a shortfall in federal government funding.
'The government should put a lot more money into universities and they should put a cap on foreign students like Donald Trump is doing,' he said.
'A bunch of our university foreign intakes are way too high and it's dramatically changed the way the universities are taught.
'You're debasing education quality to make a dollar for those universities, which in the long run doesn't deliver you the kind of high quality and sophisticated workforce you need for a productive economy - in the long-run you're actually doing yourself harm.'
The large influx of overseas students made up a large proportion of the 437,440 migrants who came to Australia on a permanent and long-term basis in the year to March, worsening the housing crisis.
'These are the externalities that the universities don't want you to talk about - there are huge costs to all sorts of things,' he said.
But Prof Norton said universities were now voluntarily restricting their overseas intake, given the large numbers who arrived in 2023 and 2024, as Labor tried to legislate with the Greens a 270,000 annual cap on new enrolments.
'The total number will stay high even if the commencing numbers start to decline again, because we've just got this huge stock of people,' he said.
'The universities fear what might happen next and we have seen drops in visa applications for this year and I think it's because the universities are voluntarily holding back rather than going above the so-called indicative cap.
'We may not be able to capitalise on the fact that people who want to go to the United States won't be able to go to the United States.'