One only needs to take a stroll through the Australian universities during term time to see the migration link. One could be in China or India. But here is research that goes far beyond such crude empiricism from 2019, Bob Birrell, Overseas Students are Driving Australia’s Net Overseas Migration Tide.
https://tapri.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Overseas-students-are-driving-NOM-final-18-April-2019.pdf
“There is widespread awareness that overseas students are a large and growing presence in Australia. But few observers would know that by 2017-18 overseas students were the largest contributor to Australia’s very high level of Net Overseas Migration (NOM). According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimates, overseas students comprised 104,987 of the overall level of NOM of 236,733 in 2017- 18. That’s 44 per cent of total NOM. Overseas students holding higher education visas were the dominant source of this contribution to NOM. (See definition of NOM on pp. 1-2.) Nor would many observers be aware that, over the six years from 2011-12 to 2017-18, overseas students were by far the largest growth point in Australia’s NOM. Their contribution increased from 25,700 in 2011-12 to 104,987 in 2017-18 . In the absence of the increasing contribution of overseas students, Australia’s NOM would have declined to around 150,000. Reductions in NOM over these years from New Zealanders and those on temporary work visas (among others – see Table 2) were swamped by the rising tide of overseas students. The student share of NOM in 2017-18 of 104,987 was far greater than that attributable to movements of those holding permanent residence visas – which was 68,850 in 2017-18 (see Table 1). Yet almost all the recent debate about the size of NOM and the Coalition government’s proposals to deal with the scale of NOM has focussed on the permanent resident component.
