Oct 27, 2008

What are my student visa conditions?


Every international student studying at UniSA will have specific conditions applied to their student visa. Did you know that there are nine “Mandatory Conditions” which are applied to ALL student visa holders and another seven “Discretionary Conditions” which may or may not be applied to you?

Many student visa holders will have a visa label stuck into their passport which will list your visa conditions on the right hand side such as “8101-No Work”. It is important to note that these conditions are those that applied to you at the time your visa was granted and that if that was some time ago your visa conditions may have changed. An example of this is if your visa was granted before 26th April 2008 and you have applied for Permission to Work since your commencement of study and it has been granted, the 8101 condition will have been removed and replaced with “8105-Work Limitation” which allows students to work up to 20 hours a week during periods of study.

If you were granted an “e-Visa” your visa conditions should be listed in the documentation you received when your visa was granted. There is no difference between student visa conditions between e-Visa and Visa label applicants. Each student visa is assessed individually and conditions applied on a case by case basis.

If you do not comply with one or more of the conditions of your student visa Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) will consider you to be in “breach” and your visa may be jeopardised. The best way to avoid being in breach is to know what visa conditions apply to you.

A list of all student visa conditions are available at the DIAC website.

If you are unsure and would like to know which visa conditions apply to you than you should contact DIAC directly on 131 881 (Mon - Fri 0900-1600 AEST)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Is this true that every student visa issued after 26th april 2008 holds the work permit by default unless its stated on it "No work"????

Damien Wright said...

DIAC's literature does state that any student visa granted on or after 26th April 2008 will automatically have work permissions applied however I have found several cases where the visa was issued after this date but work permissions have not been applied. The cases I recall were of students from DIAC Student Visa Assessment Level 4 countries (China, India) who had applied for their visa's before 26th April, and had them granted after this date. The variation is likely due to the large amount of discretion each DIAC assessing officer has at each mission accross the world. DIAC's directive may be that work permissions on visa's granted after 26th April is automatically to be applied however it is still up to the individual assessing officer to do so. I believe this issue will only occur during the crossover and it will not be an issue for students arriving for SP2, 2009. If anyone wants to know if work permissions have been attached to their visa feel free to come in to see me. Damien