Sydney, Melbourne mull banning migrants

canberra — Starting a new life in Australia might not come with views of the Sydney Opera House or surfing at the city’s Bondi Beach with the government considering a ban on some immigrants from settling in big cities.

Minister for Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population Alan Tudge said on Tuesday that his government wants to cut the number of immigrants moving to Sydney and Melbourne in a bid to reduce congestion in Australia’s two biggest cities.

Tudge said placing conditions on visas that force immigrants to stay in less popular centers for several years would increase the likelihood that they would settle in those places permanently. “Nearly every visa has conditions attached to it, so it wouldn’t be unusual to have a geographic attachment to a particular visa,” Tudge told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Australia is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, but has long had a high proportion of its population — currently 25 million people — living in cities. Around two in every five Australians live in Sydney and Melbourne alone.

The government is considering banning immigrants from settling in Sydney and Melbourne for five years, The Australian reported.

Tudge would not say how immigrants might be punished if they strayed from where they were supposed to live or whether they might be deported. “We haven’t outlined all of the precise details just yet,”

he said. Australia has the fastest population growth of any advanced Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development country other than Canada, growing 1.6 percent a year. But the population of Melbourne grew last year by 2.7 per cent, the population of the southeast corner of Queensland

state around Brisbane and the Gold Coast grew by 2.3 per cent, and Sydney grew by 2.1 per cent.

The main driver of population growth in Sydney and Melbourne was overseas migration, with 87 percent of skilled migrants to Australia and almost all refugees gravitating to those cities. —