As the immigration debate rages, the people who will really pay are Victorians

September 17, 2026 — 5:00am

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There is no one so needed yet so unloved by Australian politics than foreign students.

Whenever the national discussion turns to immigration, it soon focuses on the hundreds of thousands of young people who every year fly here from across the world and invest life-altering sums of money to study at our universities.

This is fair enough. The big driver of population growth in Melbourne and Sydney is temporary migration and foreign students are the biggest category of temporary visa holders.

The problem with the conversation is that it rarely pauses to consider who these people are, the circumstances in which they live and what it is they bring here and take home with them once their studies are complete.

They are talked about, at best, as little more than widgets; units of production within an export industry that for 40 years has bankrolled public universities underfunded by successive federal governments.

At worst, they are scapegoated and demonised as visa-hopping chancers looking to squeeze through a backdoor to permanent residency and steal jobs and houses that would otherwise go to Australian-born kids.

Over the next five days, this masthead will publish “Immigration Nation”, an investigative series examining how Australia’s most successful public policy turned sour. It explores the complexities of our immigration system, the human stories at the heart of it and the facts and fallacies that punctuate an emotive debate.

The easiest thing when considering all this is to not think of foreign students as........

© The Age