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President Obama told a news conference on Tuesday 27th November 2012 that he intended to reform the US's immigration system. He was speaking at a joint press conference with the Mexican president elect Enrique Pena Nieto.
The Australian immigration minister Chris Bowen has defended the Australian government's policies on the treatment of asylum seekers. He told MPs on the left wing of the Australian Labor Party, of which he is a member, that it would be wrong to allow those awaiting asylum decisions to be given the right to work. He also defended the government's policy of sending those who attempt to make the journey to Australia from Indonesia by sea to processing camps on Nauru and the Papua New Guinean island of Manus.
The UK's chief inspector of immigration has issued a report on the UK Border Agency's management of the Tier 4 student visa system. The report is broadly positive. However, it speaks of 'a significant failing' in the UKBA's systems for dealing with notifications made under the Sponsorship Management System. A backlog of 150,000 notifications dating back to March 2009 had been allowed to accumulate. This raised concerns that 'thousands of students had retained leave to remain when they should not have done so.'
At a meeting of Canadian provincial and territorial government ministers last week, the provincial leaders called for increased powers to set their own immigration policies similar to the system currently in place in Quebec. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty told a press conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia 'we want greater flexibility. We want to become masters of our own destiny when it comes to the immigration file.' He continued 'Nobody understands our needs and our capacity to accommodate and our capacity to develop new Canadians, so that they can contribute to their fullest, than the provinces themselves.
One of the UK's most senior judges has criticised solicitors in immigration cases for making meritless last-minute applications for injunctions which are unsupported by any proper arguments. He also criticised them for a failure to tell the court, as they are required to do, of any reasons why the court might want to refuse their applications. He warned them that, in future, similar failures would see them being reported to the Solicitor's Regulation Authority.
President Obama has been re-elected and will be inaugurated as president again in January. But, in the last days of the President's first term as president, there is some hope that legislation will be passed that would see 55,000 more green cards being granted to science graduates every year.
The STEM Jobs Act will, if it becomes law, take the 55,000 permanent resident visas (known as green cards) currently distributed every year in the 'green card lottery' and give them instead to PhD and Masters graduates from US universities who have degrees in the STEM subjects; Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.