Migrants who have been granted permanent humanitarian visas are the most entrepreneurial when compared with all permanent migrants in Australia but have the lowest income, new statistics reveal.
For the first time the Australian Bureau of Statistics has released data on how much migrants are paid and how they earn it, categorising them as skilled migrants, family migrants or humanitarian migrants.
On average, skilled migrants earned a median wage of $43,593 and were from Britain, India, China, South Africa and the Philippines. Family migrants, who have been reunited with family members in Australia earned a median wage of $30,000 and humanitarian visa holders, earned a median wage of $27,000.
Skilled migrants were most likely to be sponsored by companies and make their money from an employer, while family migrants mostly earned their money through investments, and humanitarian migrants were largely self-employed.
While humanitarian visa holders comprised only 4 per cent of the migrant taxpayers, they were more than 10 per cent likely to own their own businesses, the figures showed. People from Sudan and Sierra Leone earned the most income within the humanitarian category, while a third of that cohort were were living in NSW.
The figures were collated from 2009 to 2010 and developed by the Australian Taxation Office, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the department of Social Services.
Jennifer Dobak, from the National Migrant Statistics Unit at the ABS, said this was the first time the bureau had been able to look at the visa groups in such depth.
"What we didn't know, was the way that migrants earned their money. What is interesting is when you look at the family migrants, the larger proportions are earning through other income and through investment."
"Across all the migrant groups income tends to increase, and its very interesting the picture it paints for humanitarian visa holders," she said.
The statistics only included figures on permanent migrants, excluding people on temporary visas such as 457 or students visas who have been under particular scrutiny lately after the 7-Eleven franchise chain was exposed in Australia for grossly under-paying staff on student visas. Under the Abbott government, 13,750 people are granted a humanitarian visa a year.
