Nepal’s emergence as Australia’s biggest source of offshore students has fanned fears that the visa programme has been subverted as an “unsponsored work permits” scheme.

Immigration expert Abul Rizvi says ballooning numbers of successful student visa applications from the Himalayan nation suggest that lax rules may be luring migrant workers Down Under on a study pretext.

This could trigger an explosion in labour hire fraud and the exploitation of foreign workers caught in “immigration limbo” because they lack the credentials to qualify for permanent residency. Meanwhile, Australia could “lose higher-performing students to other nations because of the trashed reputation of our international education industry”, Dr Rizvi warns in the journal .

He blames the former government’s suspension of caps on international students’ working hours. “We are now seen as desperate to attract students more interested in work rights than the quality of education.”

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In March and April, the latest months for which statistics are available, Nepal generated more than 1,000 more applications for visas to study in Australia than the traditional top source market of China – which has almost 50 times Nepal’s population – and some 3,000 more than its other giant neighbour, India, which is normally Australia’s second top market.

Nepal is also experiencing a much higher “grant rate” – the proportion of visa applications decided in the applicants’ favour – than it has for most of the past decade. The rate has soared to 92 per cent this financial year after hovering well below 80 per cent.

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By comparison, grant rates for India and Pakistan stand at 78 per cent and 63 per cent, respectively.

Like its subcontinental neighbours, Nepal is normally considered a “high risk” country for non-genuine visa applications. When its grant rate last climbed above 90 per cent, in 2013-14, immigration officials subsequently unleashed a mid-2015 crackdown that saw every second application rejected.

Dr Rizvi, a former Immigration Department deputy secretary, said it was difficult to know why approval rates had diverged between Nepal and its neighbours. He said officials could be applying less rigorous scrutiny to Nepalese applicants’ evidence of their genuine study intentions.

While he was particularly concerned about the grant rate for vocational education and training (VET) visas – currently 87 per cent for people applying from Nepal, compared with just 14 per cent for India – Nepalese approval rates for higher education were also at historical highs.

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Sydney-based education agent Ravi Lochan Singh said visa statistics had been skewed by a processing backlog. He welcomed the growing numbers of Nepalese higher education visas but said the “very high” grant rate for private VET applicants was “not sustainable in the long term”.

Mr Singh said Nepalese and Indian student visas were managed by different processing teams, with the former handled in Delhi and the latter mostly in Perth.

̽����Ƶ asked the Department of Home Affairs, which administers student visas, why Nepal’s grant rate had changed so dramatically and whether appropriate scrutiny was being applied. A spokesperson said all applications were “considered on an individual basis”.

Consultant Claire Field said Australia’s international education sector was emerging from Covid “into a new and quite different reality”. She warned of unintended consequences from the suspension of limits on international students’ working hours and Western Australia’s A$10 million (£5.7 million) “” for overseas agents who enrol their clients in the state’s institutions.

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“There are complex issues at play in the sector in Australia right now,” she said. “The government needs to be focused on ensuring the integrity of the sector as it rebuilds post-Covid.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com