Half of all recent refugees who have settled permanently in Australia are on unemployment benefits, 44% can’t speak English, and one in five have a long-term health condition.
According to official data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) this week, the cohort of asylum seekers – called “humanitarian migrants” by the ABS – who arrived since 2017 have had far worse settlement outcomes than previous streams.
New figures on long-term health conditions show that humanitarian migrants are more likely to have a long-term health condition than family and skilled migrants – 22% reported one or more compared with 20.1% for those who arrived on family visas, and 16% for skilled stream visa recipients.
The most commonly reported long-term health condition for humanitarian migrants was diabetes, which affected 6%. This disease was also the top condition for family migrants, affecting 4%, while asthma was most common for the skilled cohort, also affecting 4%.
Of the most recent humanitarian migrant arrivals aged 15-64, only 25.6% earn any form of income, including from investments and superannuation, a figure which includes the 5.9% who earn unincorporated business income. For all permanent humanitarian migrants, 49.1% earned some form of income.
During 2019-2020, the last financial year for which data is available, 30.8% of humanitarian migrants were receiving unemployment payments compared to 13% of the Australian population, but for the most recent arrival stream the figure was 49%.
In 2021, 89% of all immigrants spoke English proficiently, but this figure dropped to 70.8% for all humanitarian migrants and 55.8% for those who had arrived in the previous five years.
The data does not include the tens of thousands of so-called refugees with permanent visa applications still awaiting assessment, the 100,000 whose visas have been rejected but who are appealing and refusing to leave Australia, or those whose applications have been determined since 2021.
The Labor government expanded Australia’s humanitarian visa quota in 2023, with the changes including the allocation of 26,500 dedicated places for Afghan nationals over a five-year period backdated to July 2021.
Home Affairs data shows that in May this year 335 individuals were given onshore permanent protection visas, including 83 from Myanmar, 44 from Malaysia, 29 from Iran, 21 from Yemen, and 19 from China.
A total of 1,870 were rejected, including 341 Indians, 211 Chinese, 139 Fijians, 131 Sri Lankans, and 95 from the Philippines.
Another 300 Indians, 219 Chinese, 135 Fijians, and 127 Indonesians were among the 2,067 people who applied for protection visas in May while already in Australia.
Header image: Immigrants demand permanent protection visas at a protest in Sydney last year (Facebook).
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