After US President Trump’s move to curtail H1B visas with an objective ‘AMERICA FIRST’ it means to give priority to American Citizens and Green Card Holders; following the similar path, Australian PM Malcolm Turnbell has also announced to abolish Visa under Subclass 457. This visa is again work permit visa similar to H1B.

The 457 Visa is been mainly utilized by big multinational companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS and Cognizant etc. to shift their employees from their Indian offices to Australian offices. The main objective of this used to be to recruit skilled employees from Indian market and utilize their skills in Australian Market; also second objective could be to save on cost. After this abolition, they have to explore Australian labour market to recruit skilled employees in their Australian branches and this is going to be heavy on their pockets.
The decision by Australia PM Malcolm Turnbell to scrap 457 visas is taken with an objective to give priority to skilled people who could be Australian Citizens or people who are in Australia on Permanent resident Visa. So henceforth all the skilled people who are migrating to Australia have a better chance to get a job than that of earlier. This is because of the fact that these multinational companies henceforth are unable to transfer their employees from India to Australia. So in this way, it will benefit Australians or PR holders to get job easily than that of earlier.

There is another impact of this, as a result of scrapping of visa under Subclass 457, now the main route to enter in to Australia would be General Skilled Migration Program that is PR process. As most of the people whose visa under subclass 457 is/will be cancelled, will obviously be trying to enter in to Australia on PR visa through PR process independently. As a result of this, the number of visa applicants under GSM would go up significantly. This can lead to process becoming more competitive in future.

Some people believe that the another reason for scrapping 457 visa is various unethical practices followed by some companies owned by Indians in Australia which used to recruit people from India by taking huge amount of money from them by offering jobs in Australia.

At the end of day, according to me the abolition of 457 visas will not have very serious impact on PR visa process.

Please visit Visa4you https://www.visa4you.co.in to get more information on various visa categories available.
An article by Adv. Santosh Reddy, Immigration Lawyer, Visa4you, Pune, India
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