Close Reading

India business owners here have been charging upwards of $10,000 for the promise of a permanent residency. Many of these people are human trafficked after the fact in a cruel and fraudulent arrangement. We need to do what America is doing and clean house, but maybe a bit more nicely than they are.

The problem in Australia was less about cheap labor (although our farmers are still exploiting backpackers and anyone else they can dupe) and more about fake students who have come here to work illegally and get PR. Award wages mean nothing to many Indian business owners in Australia and the education agents in India continue to lie to prospective students who want to come here. Journalists who try to track the shonky operators down are met with thinly veiled hostility in the rare cases that they find the people behind the scam.