However, as Matthew da Silva and Mingming Feng report, Australia’s educational institutions have far more appetite for international student tuition than local employers have for hiring these students as legitimate employees, causing young foreigners to reconsider Australia as their educational destination of choice.

Andie Feng got what she thought was an internship at a Sydney commercial Chinese-language radio station in December 2007.

Andie is 26 and came to Australia from the Chinese province of Sichuan. She learned about the radio station through a friend.

“She took me there, [and] the boss of the radio station interviewed me. He referred me to the director to get a chance to start hosting programmes.

“During the interview, the director did not mention the salary. I just wanted to do something I liked. Money was not that important for me at that moment.”

The director told her that if she could do the internship, she would be offered a job. But she received nothing until 2009, when she got $10 in cash for hosting an hour-long program.

The Fair Work Ombudsman says that working for over a year without pay is “almost certainly” illegal.

A spokesperson says that they cannot envisage a vocational placement that permits such an extended period of continuous, unpaid, work-based training.

The case shows just the tip of the iceberg.

Another Chinese graduate seeking permanent residency, Jessica Wang*, was “totally screwed” after landing an administration and translation job at a Chinese immigration agency in Sydney.

“I was not paid for the first three days because he told me that [the first] three days were observation days.”

Jessica worked 40 hours in the first week with two days’ work paid at $7.50 an hour, and was promised a raise if she worked for the company for a “long time”.

Instead, the man almost immediately changed her job status.

“In the second week, when I went to work, he told me that he wanted to change my position to part-time, without giving me reasons. He explained, ‘We only need [a] part-time translator now’.”

Jessica’s hopes were crushed as the job had meant giving up an opportunity.

“Before the interview [for] this job, I had another job interview. But after the boss interviewed me, he wanted me to work for him straight away, which means I had to quit the other job.”

To justify the salary and her new employment status she says her boss made her feel inadequate.

“‘Why [do] you translate so slow, I don’t think you are [a] qualified translator,’ he said. But actually I did not translate slowly at all.

“I think the reason he was doing that was just to lower my salary and change my position to part-time, as an excuse.”

Jessica worked at the immigration agency for three weeks.

If no pay scale covers the type of job an employee does, they will generally be covered by the federal minimum wage of $14.31 per hour, plus a premium for casual placements.

Ming Gong, a 24-year-old graduate from China, had similar problems working as a barista at Coffee Club, a cafe inside Westfield’s Eastgardens shopping centre in Sydney’s east.

“The boss said, when I was in the training period I can only get $10 per hour, [and] after I go through the training period, I can get higher pay. But he never told me when [it was] the end of the training period.”

Over the three months she worked there, the man frequently pointed out her mistakes. “He was trying to prove that I was still in the training time,” Ming says.

“He gives me a lot of pressure. In that environment, I did not really enjoy it. I felt very depressed.”

The Restaurant Employees (State) Award stipulates that, as a casual worker, Ming should have been paid at least $18 per hour.

Australian values 101

Temporary visa holders such as Ming, Jessica and Andie must sign a values statement, included in both paper and online application forms, to confirm that they understand, among other things, that Australian society values commitment to the rule of law and a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces fair play.

But they often encounter a very different set of values.

The values statement is also included on the studyinaustralia.gov.au ^[2] website, in addition to a mere two short paragraphs about wages. University websites do not provide information about work.

The lack of relevant information hides the fact that students contribute hugely to exports.

In 2008, the industry was 12-and-a-half times more important to Australia than to the United States, and accounted for 1.37 percent of Australia’s GDP — only coal and iron ore brought in more money.

The industry contributed export earnings last year of $16.6 billion, $1.3 billion higher than 2008, but students still have little influence when it comes to making policies that benefit them.

Businesses that employ students do. The peak body for cafes, Restaurant and Catering Australia, made one of the 25 employer submissions to the Fair Pay Commission’s most recent minimum wage review.

The commission decided not to raise the minimum wage.

The grail

Conditions can improve once you secure permanent residency (PR) but the field is crowded. There were 115,000 permanent skilled migration places available for 2008-09. There were over 543,000 international students in Australia in 2008.

Last year 23 percent of students in NSW and 33 percent in Victoria were internationals.

Shu Qing Tan, 25, from the small Malaysian town of Teluk Intan, is a success story. She completed a commerce/law degree at the University of Melbourne and found a job some months after finishing her exams in 2007.

“Obviously, I can’t speak for the rest of the population, but to me it was pretty easy,” she says.

She worked part-time for six months and full-time for business publication BRW, during which time she secured PR, then at a community legal centre.

Another Malaysian, Sharinder Sidhu, 26, from Kuala Lumpur, has been “extremely lucky”. She got a casual job soon after completing a Bachelor of Medical Science, majoring in biochemistry, then found full-time work.

She graduated at the end of 2005 and, having secured PR, works in Telstra’s Human Resources Department in Melbourne.

Not all Chinese students experience bad treatment at the hands of employers. Annie Zhang completed the Bachelor of Mathematics and Computer Science in the early 1990s and since 1998 has worked in IT at Sydney University.

“To me, now, I don’t like study because it’s a struggle. We pay high fees and of course we need to work as well. Working three jobs at once and [getting] everything going was hard.”

As a student she didn’t have much choice in jobs. “Waitressing most of the time. Running around, doing different restaurants.”

Finding a “proper job” is “very hard” for people who come as international students, says Shaun Yeoh, 23.

“A lot of my friends, some of them even graduated more than a year, they still can’t find a job,” he says.

Shaun was born in Malaysia and is a naturalised Australian. He has completed a bachelor’s degree in nanotechnology at the University of Technology, Sydney. He sources clients for Hugh Denison Consulting in Sydney and works weekends at Coles while studying Japanese at TAFE.

Some of his friends come from China and “don’t have very good English”, he says. “It is very hard to impress the interviewers if your English is not good.”

“I think I can do pretty well in a translation job in a government agency,” says Jessica Wang. “But [I’m] not sure [about a] journalistic job because I was not born here. It is hard for international students to have the same language level as local students.”

Another obstacle is the ‘bridging visa’, an instrument that allows foreigners to “remain lawful” if they do not hold a “substantive visa”, according to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

“Some of them already submitted [applications for] PR, but it takes [a] long process, about six to 12 months, a long queue,” says Shaun.

But people on a bridging visa still need to eat and pay rent.

“I tried to register [with] recruitment agencies,” says Andie. “But I found there is one option which is the visa type. I am holding [a] bridging visa. There is no option for me. Only PR or citizen[ship] or student visa.”

Jessica hasn’t tried to get a job at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, her ideal among Australia’s workplaces, as applicants need a visa entitling them to work for the duration of the job.

Edwin Telzer, 30, says companies need to weight up the risks involved in hiring a student on a bridging visa.

“Are they ready to take that gamble and hire an international student who’s got a bridging visa and doesn’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow? Most companies would not take the risk.”

In July, Edwin completed a master’s degree in environmental engineering. He has a bachelor of civil engineering degree from India and works four days a week at Coles.

“It is not something that I love, but I’m forced to [do it] because I have to pay my rent.”

“It is a financial crisis worldwide, so you can’t actually be fussy,” advises Shu Qing Tan. “You have to be a bit more flexible.”

Trying to achieve what you want to achieve

“It is a hard period of time being on a bridging visa, being in a period of uncertainty and not knowing where to go and what it is you want,” says Shu Qing, who secured PR in March.

“Treat it as a period of soul-searching and endurance testing,” she advises.

Shu Qing will start with a big-four financial institution next year as a graduate employee.

“In fact I don’t even know that my grad job actually will be an ideal job, but I’ve had some fun and interesting times, learning about myself and figuring out what works best for me.”

She has no regrets about staying.

“I developed my own sense of identity which I would not have developed had I studied in Malaysia, for various reasons. I grew closer to an environment which I believe has contributed to my formative years, and an environment which has made me believe in the person I am right now.”

Annie Zhang also doesn’t regret emigrating.

“I was a very brave person, taking a challenge. And travelling around the world seemed to be a very good idea, and trying to do everything by myself seemed to be really attractive.”

Sharinder Sidhu came to Australia to “experience something else”.

“It wasn’t like I have to stay in Australia and get permanent residency,” she says. “I had a chat with my parents, saying, ‘If I get a job, I would love to stay in Australia a lot. But, if not, I’ll come home. It’s fine.’

“I just ended up getting a casual job which had full-time hours and I just wanted to get into HR, and I did it.”

Early familiarity with English leads to better outcomes

Research shows that language proficiency is a stumbling block for graduates seeking a “proper job”, particularly those from places where English is not used in secondary school.

“At the university level it is not lack of familiarity with the labour market (especially for accountants) but rather lack of English language communication skills that is the problem,” says Dr Bob Birrell of Monash University in an email.

In a 2008 study, Dr Birrell and co-author Ernest Healy show that students from mainland China and Hong Kong have a particularly low level of English.

The study looks at how shortages of qualified jobseekers in the workforce cannot be filled by tertiary-educated international students who are vigorously recruited by universities.

It finds that some firms ask for proof of English-language proficiency on the basis of a far higher test result than is required for university admission.

For example, to apply for a job at Ernst & Young, a leading accounting firm, graduates must have minimum International English Language Testing System (IELTS) scores of 8 for listening, 8 for speaking, 7.5 for writing and 7.5 for reading.

The popular IELTS scores people in four bands, where a score of 9 indicates native competency.

“The analysis does not remove the possibility that employer prejudice is involved in the employment difficulties of overseas students,” states the report. “Some employers may be using the cloak of poor English skills to mask prejudice towards overseas students.”

But Immigration Department figures demonstrate the mismatch that can exist between what graduates seeking permanent residency want and their English competency.

The proportion in 2006-07 who achieved the level 6 IELTS score required to gain 20 points toward PR, was a dismal 55 percent among those from mainland China. The figure for Hong Kongers was equally low at 56 percent.

For Malaysia and Singapore, where English is used for secondary education, the figures were 81 percent and 98 percent, respectively.

The experience of Ju-En Tan, 25, from Singapore, shows the advantage of being taught in English at secondary level. Ju-En studied medical science at the University of Sydney, where she is again enrolled, this time in medicine.

“I think it has made it a bit easier to assimilate, I guess,” she says. “You don’t stand out as much. You’re not too different from people at uni and that kind of makes it a bit easier, I think.

“I guess, being able to speak English really helps because then people are friendlier.”

* Name changed to mask the person’s identity.

Matthew da Silva ^[4] writes feature stories to fulfil a dream after working in communications and technical writing roles for two decades. He grew up in Sydney, lived in Japan for nine years and now lives on the Sunshine Coast, in Queensland. He blogs daily at Happy Antipodean ^[5].

Mingming Feng assisted with research for this article.