Immigration news

Australia launched a multi-million dollar global tourism campaign in Shanghai on 4 June targeting Chinese visitors.The Australian government announced they will spend AUD$170 million over the next three years to boost tourism. Australian Tourism Chief Executive Andrew McEvoy said the government chose Shanghai to launch the "Nothing Like Australia" campaign; Australia is popular among wealthy Chinese people.

US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that, as of 1 June 2012, it has already received 55,600 H-1B visa cap-subject petitions out of the 65,000 available visas. Additionally, they have already received 18,700 H-1B visa petitions for foreigners with US advanced degrees out of the 20,000 available visas. This means that on 1 June 2012 there were only 9,400 visas left under the H-1B regular visa cap and 1,300 for the H-1B visa advanced degree level visa cap.

UK immigration's plans to continue including foreign students in the net migration numbers has a "terrible" effect on the Norfolk and Norwich economy, the University of East Anglia (UEA) has said.Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of the UEA, said the university's 2011 group of non-EU students will be worth £35.6m over the duration of their courses in tuition fees. He claimed that a reduction in numbers would leave the Norwich university a "much-diminished enterprise" and would significantly impact the city as well.

The British High Commission has announced that visa applications from Jamaicans wishing to visit the UK this year are up over 30 percent compared to the same period last year.The British High Commission processes around of 11,000 visa applications per year in Jamaica.While this increase could be attributed to the upcoming Olympic Games in London, Deputy high commissioner to Jamaica, Graham Glover said that under 10 percent of UK visa applicants have said that they have Olympic tickets and will be spectators at the Games.

As the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations take place this week, we thought that now was a good time to take a look at the UK's immigration history over the past 60 years. The country has changed dramatically since Queen Elizabeth was crowned in 1952. Over sixty years there have been substantial changes in immigration policy. Despite tighter immigration controls over the last sixty years hundreds of thousands more immigrants have moved to the UK.

Several US pro-immigrant organizations are urging the Obama administration to implement a new procedure that would allow undocumented immigrant spouses and children of US citizens to remain in the country while their immigration application is processed.