Cooking courses raise overseas enrolment by eightfold

Lashing out at Australia’s skilled migration programme that has 'Cooking' as an eligibility for acquiring permanent visa, a new study released today has sought for its removal, saying it leads to an eightfold rise in overseas students enrolment.

The study of Monash University— The Cooking-immigration Nexus— has claimed that such a skill was resulting in the danger of a “race to the bottom” in wages.

It dubbed the current system as a mess and asked government to remove ‘cooking’ from the list of eligibility criteria for employer-sponsored permanent visas, a 'Sydney Morning Herald' report said.

“Permanent residence is extremely attractive to people from low-wage countries,” Bob Birrell, one of the study's authors and co-director of the Monash Centre for Population and Urban Research, said.

"People who are desperate for that (permanent residence) prize are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that, and the current system is almost an incitement for them to go to employers and undercut the going rate, and of course for employers to exploit this as well," Bob added.

Between 2004 and 2008, the number of overseas students enrolled in cookery courses rose from 1019 to 8242, the study revealed.