Australia on track for 2023 migration boom as arrivals dwarf Treasury forecasts, ex-official says

Former immigration department deputy believes government has ‘significantly underestimated’ net migration

Australia is on track for net migration of more than 300,000 people this year, more than 25% higher than Treasury forecasts, due to a surge in arrivals, according to a former top immigration official.

Abul Rizvi, the former deputy secretary of the immigration department, said that Treasury forecasts of a 235,000-person annual boost to population from migration – the long term pre-pandemic average – have “significantly underestimated” net figures.

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British Council workers in Afghanistan step closer to UK relocation

Minister speaks of ‘progress’ on security checks, but Foreign Office clarifies no green light yet for contractors

A group of 47 British Council contractors forced to live in hiding since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan have cleared the penultimate hurdle for being accepted on to a scheme designed to relocate them in the UK.

The group was said to have passed security checks and been invited to provide biometrics at a visa centre, after which they would have to have a final set of security checks.

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Labour dismisses Rishi Sunak’s five new pledges as mostly ‘so easy it would be difficult not to achieve them’ – as it happened

Prime minister urges public to judge him on whether he delivers on new pledges but Labour says most ‘were happening anyway’. This blog is now closed

Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, has issued a statement welcoming the government’s proposal to abandon the privatisation of Channel (without actually putting it in those terms). She says the government should never have floated the plan in the first place, and that it has been a “total distraction” for the broadcaster. She says:

The Conservatives’ vendetta against Channel 4 was always wrong for Britain, growth in our creative economy, and a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Our broadcasting and creative industries lead the world, yet this government has hamstrung them for the last year with the total distraction of Channel 4 privatisation.

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‘I feel at home here’: descendants of Galicia’s emigrés return to the old country

Spain’s poor western region is welcoming back heirs of those who once left it – especially from troubled Argentina

Galicia has long been one of Spain’s poorest regions and since the mid-19th century Galicians have emigrated in their tens of thousands to seek a brighter future in the Americas. But now they’re coming back.

The Galician regional government says that returnees – the majority are Argentinians – are settling in the area at a rate of three a day. After more than 150 years of steady depopulation, in 2019 more people arrived than left, while, for the first time in its history, the reverse was true for Argentina.

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Migration to Australia set to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, report finds

Covid travel restrictions resulted in 85,000 fewer people migrating to Australia in 2020-21, the first net loss since the second world war

Australia has lost 473,000 potential migrants as a result of Covid, but net inward migration is now on track to rebound to pre-pandemic levels of 235,000 people a year, the Centre for Population has found.

The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said the centre’s 2022 statement, to be released on Friday, confirmed migration was “part of the solution” to skills and labour shortages.

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Sea rescue charities rebel against Italian anti-immigration rules

NGOs say measures including requirement to request port after first rescue could result in thousands of deaths

Sea rescue charities are rebelling against tough new anti-immigration measures imposed by the Italian government, arguing that they could result in thousands of deaths.

Ship captains risk fines of €50,000 and having their vessels impounded if they break the rules, which include a requirement to request a port and sail to it immediately after undertaking one rescue instead of remaining at sea to rescue people from other boats in difficulty.

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Setback for EU migration plans as Sweden assumes bloc’s presidency

Swedish government thought to be reluctant to alienate far-right Sweden Democrats

Hopes of a breakthrough in EU policy on migration have receded as Sweden’s government – supported by the far right for the first time – takes charge of the bloc’s rotating presidency on 1 January.

The EU has been deadlocked over plans to share the management of asylum seekers since the arrival of 1.3 million refugees in 2015 triggered a political crisis. The latest proposals, dating from September 2020, abandoned the idea of mandatory refugee quotas for member states, but they have been making slow progress through the EU council of ministers, the key decision-making chamber.

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Home Office urged to reunite Eritrean family separated as they boarded boat

Appeal for UK authorities to bring over mother who was left in France after smugglers departed shore with her three children

The Home Office is under pressure to reunite a family of Eritrean asylum seekers after smugglers forced three children, the youngest aged just five, to cross the Channel on a small boat before their mother could get on board with them.

The woman, 31, who was staying in northern France hoping to reach the UK, paid smugglers for places on a dinghy for herself and her three children, a boy aged 14 and two girls aged nine and five, to cross the Channel on 16 December. She said she believed the UK was the place where she would find safety and a respect for the human rights of her family.

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New Zealanders’ path to Australian permanent residency eased by ditching income and health checks

Move expected to help clear backlog of about 11,500 applications and could ease process for up to 300,000 Kiwis

The Australian government has lowered the bar for New Zealanders who have applied for permanent residency.

Under changes announced by the home affairs department, New Zealanders who applied on or before 10 December for a subclass 189 visa will no longer face hurdles related to income, period of residence and health conditions.

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‘Life is ebbing away’: Egyptians face peril at sea in dangerous new exodus to Europe

Poverty puts thousands into the grip of people smugglers plying a deadly trade in the Mediterranean

Youssef initially doesn’t want to remember the treacherous boat journey that took him from Egypt, then to Tobruk in Libya and finally to Italy, but he knows clearly why he left.

A young man in his 20s, Youssef is recently married and expecting a baby in a few months, and fears about the increasing cost of living in Egypt overwhelmed him. He gave in and contacted a people smuggler on the internet, using a Facebook group where those looking to migrate can post information about crossings.

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Australia’s skilled migration program needs overhaul to boost economy, report says

Grattan Institute says government should target permanent skilled visas at younger, higher-skilled migrants

A better skilled migration program could be the solution to Australia’s major economic challenges, a new report says.

A lack of productivity growth, growing debt in the federal budget and the economy’s transition to net-zero could be assisted by key reforms, the submission by the public policy thinktank, the Grattan Institute, to the federal government’s migration review has said.

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Channel deaths: desperate call from boat raised alarm for rescue operation

Skipper of fishing vessel tells how his crew spent two hours pulling 31 people from the freezing water

Four people died and more than 40 were rescued after a desperate call to a charity warned that a boat carrying asylum seekers including children had capsized in the Channel on Wednesday morning.

An unidentified man on the sinking vessel, in a recording obtained by the Guardian, asked at 2.53am for the alarm to be raised to save his family who were in the icy waters.

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‘You could see the panic’: how the Channel small boat incident unfolded

Experts said lessons appeared to have been learned from previous incidents as teams scrambled into action after dinghy capsized

The emergency call came through at 2.53am. “Please help me bro, please, please, please. We are in the water. We have a family.”

The unidentified man, on a stricken dinghy, used WhatsApp to contact the French NGO Utopia 56, a humanitarian association, which works to support migrants in the camps in northern France.

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PMQs live: Rishi Sunak quizzed by Keir Starmer over nurses’ strikes

Latest updates: prime minister faces Labour leader ahead of industrial action by nurses on Thursday

Yesterday Mark Harper, the transport secretary, claimed that public support for the rail strikes was declining. Today Ipsos has published some polling that backs up this claim, although support for the RMT has not collapsed, and public opinion is still divided. It puts support for the strikes at 30%, down from 43% in September. And opposition to the strikes is at 36%, up from 31%.

Yesterday Savanta published polling showing a similar trend. It said that net support for the rail workers on strike was +21 in October (those supporting them, minus those not supporting them), and that now it was down to +13.

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Rishi Sunak says changes to asylum system should lead to ‘vast majority’ of Albanian applications being refused – live

Prime minister makes statement in Commons, saying he wants to abolish backlog of unprocessed asylum claims by end of next year

The Conservative MP Adam Afriyie has been made bankrupt after a judge in a specialist court heard how he owed around £1.7m, PA Media reports. A bankruptcy order was made against Afriyie, who represents Windsor, at an online hearing in the insolvency and companies court today by judge Nicholas Briggs.

This story, by my colleagues Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason last year, explains the background to this case.

We completed our enquiry into the impact of the ending of freedom of movement on the adult social care sector in April and submitted the report to government and parliament. We recommended that care workers continue to be eligible to apply for a health and care worker visa and made some additional recommendations for changes to the immigration system to ease the burden on social care employers and migrants.

However, our main recommendation was that a minimum rate of pay should be established for care workers at a premium to the statutory minimum wage where care is being provided with public funds. We suggested that this should initially be set at £1 per hour above the national living wage but expected a more substantial premium to be needed to properly address the crisis in social care recruitment and retention.

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Melilla border crush: Amnesty criticises ‘unlawful force’ and lack of first aid

Group says Moroccan and Spanish police failed to provide even basic first aid for hours after deadly crush at enclave

The “widespread use of unlawful force” by Moroccan and Spanish authorities contributed to the deaths of at least 37 people who perished during a mass storming of the border fence between Morocco and Spain’s north African enclave of Melilla in June, according to a report.

The Amnesty International report also accuses Moroccan and Spanish police of failing to provide even basic first aid to those injured in the crush as they were left “in the full glare of the sun for up to eight hours”. It says Moroccan authorities prioritised moving corpses and treating security officials above the needs of injured migrants and refugees.

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Jeremy Hunt fails to quash claims Treasury vetoed pay offer that may have averted rail strikes – UK politics live

Chancellor did not contest claim when asked whether his department blocked a pay rise of around 10% for rail workers

Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has refused to quash claims that the Treasury vetoed a pay offer that may have led to a resolution of the rail strike.

Last month the Daily Telegraph claimed that the Department for Transport wanted to offer rail workers a rise worth between 8% and 9% over two year, but that it was prevented from doing so by the Treasury.

There is unanimity across the government in that it wants high inflation to be temporary, and I think there is understanding that that is essential for the very people who are feeling most angry about their situation.

We have to be really careful not to agree to pay demands that have the opposite of the intended effect because they lock in high inflation.

So if we make the wrong choices now, we won’t have that 3.7% of inflation in January or February of 2024 and this will change from being a one-off problem, to being a permanent problem, which will be the worst possible thing for people working in public services. That is why it’s generally a very difficult issue.

I would urge everyone to boycott Netflix and make sure that we actually focus on the things that matter.

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Australian government overturns decision to cancel citizenship of man on death row in Iraq

Home affairs tells Ahmad Merhi’s lawyer the law used to strip him of Australian citizenship was invalid with almost 20 other cancellations also voided

The Department of Home Affairs has overturned a decision to cancel the citizenship of a former Sydney man on death row in Iraq after it ruled the law used to strip him of his Australian citizenship was invalid.

The department has now revealed that 18 other Australians had their citizenship illegally revoked.

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UN refugee body criticises ‘errors’ in asylum report backed by Braverman

Organisation questions use of ‘illegal’ to describe asylum seekers in report calling for radical crackdown

A report partially endorsed by the UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, calling for a radical crackdown on those seeking asylum has been criticised by a UN body for “factual and legal errors”.

Braverman wrote the foreword to the report by the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies that says “if necessary” Britain should change human rights laws and withdraw from the European convention on human rights in order to tackle Channel crossings by small boat.

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Paraglider crosses border from Morocco into Spanish enclave and disappears

Spanish authorities hunt for person seen landing near border fence in Melilla and running off

Spanish authorities are looking for a person who used a paraglider to cross over a border fence from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Melilla in what appears to be the first use of the method to migrate into European territory.

Footage obtained by El Faro newspaper shows a person landing near the fence and then running off, leading officials to suspect the individual was trying to reach Europe.

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