Immigration news

Census figures recently released by the Australian government show that over a quarter of Australians were born outside Australia.

The Australian government has carried out a census every 10 years since 1911. The most recent was conducted in 2011. Analysis shows that 26%, or 5.3m Australians, are immigrants and a further 20% have at least one parent who was born overseas.

The analysis also shows that an increasing number of new Australians come not from Europe, the traditional origin of most Australian immigrants, but from Asia, in particular from China and India.

The Financial Times has reviewed a new book warning of the dangers caused to the US by its immigration policy. Vivek Wadhwa, who came to the US as an immigrant himself, says that the US is losing its pre-eminence as a destination of choice for immigrants because of an immigration policy that is hostile to immigrants.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has made it much harder for applicants to get H-1B and L-1 visas since 2008 and this is disproportionately affecting Indian applicants.

The National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), a think tank based in Arlington, Virginia, says that its analysis of USCIS figures shows that the tougher line is affecting Indian applicants particularly hard and that the tougher line is damaging the US economy.

The world-renowned Economist magazine has published a scathing attack on the UK government's immigration policy. It says that the government's policies on legal skilled migration and on international students coming to the UK are damaging the UK's prospects in a competitive world.

When it came to power in 2010, the Coalition government headed by the Conservative Party leader David Cameron pledged to reduce net inward migration from around 260,000 per annum in 2010 to 'tens of thousands' annually by 2015. So far, it has had little success.

The latest figures from the US government's Department of Homeland Security show that 1,062,040 people obtained their 'green cards' properly known as lawful permanent residence in the USA last year, 2011.

Of these, 90,712 came from Europe. 13,443 came from the UK with a further 1,533 coming from the Republic of Ireland. The UK was the European country from with the most new green card holders. Twice as many came from the UK than from Germany, which came second out of the European Countries.

Statistics recently released by the United States Department of Homeland Security tell a remarkable story of the rise of India as a business power in the US and in the world at large. The Department has recently published the 2011 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. It shows Indian citizens gaining more visas in certain categories than the citizens of any other nation on earth. Only seven years ago, the story was rather different.