Sukhdeep Kaur sits in her living room in Melbourne, phone in hand, day after day, waiting for her mother, Ranwant, to call from Ludhiana in India. The phone rings in the evenings – when the time difference and her mother’s cancer treatment schedule allow them to speak.
Sometimes Ranwant is crying. Often she asks to spend time with her daughter before her health deteriorates further.
“She is 75 years old, she is calling me every day to see her,” Kaur tells Guardian Australia. “She’s asking, ‘I want to see you while I am alive.’”
But, Kaur says, “I can’t leave to see her.” If she does, she won’t be able to return to Australia for three years.
That’s because Kaur is on a bridging visa.
Kaur and her family have lived in Sunbury, in Melbourne’s north, since 2015. She and her husband, Jaswinder Singh, applied for ministerial intervention in early June 2023 so they could stay in Australia after her employer sponsor failed to lodge a permanent residency application on Kaur’s behalf.
She has been in limbo since then, unable to visit her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in seven years. Experts say her experience is shared by many migrants on bridging visas waiting for ministerial intervention applications to be considered.
‘Mental torture’
Every three months Kaur has to apply to extend her bridging visa to stay in Australia. It has been extended six times since June 2023.
“Every time we were prepared, everything [packed] to go if they do not accept,” Kaur says. “You never know if they will kick you out and ask you to go back within 24 hours. Every three months they are giving that mental torture.”
Ministerial intervention applications can be lodged after visa applications have been refused at the administrative appeals tribunal. Applicants often have compelling cases, says Joshua Strutt, the chief executive of the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre.
Strutt has had clients who applied for ministerial intervention because they had a child who was an Australian citizen and they wanted to remain in Australia so they were not separated. Others had failed to secure a protection visa but say they cannot return to their home country due to changes in circumstances there.
It can take months or years for an intervention application to be considered, Strutt says. In the meantime, applicants are granted short-term bridging visas and must reapply for a bridging visa to lawfully remain in Australia.
“People are generally spending a long time on a bridging visa,” Strutt says. “It can lead them into quite dire situations depending on what restrictions are attached.”
On her bridging visa, Kaur can work but not travel. If she left Australia to visit her mother the visa would end and government policy would prevent the minister from considering her intervention request. The energy and money she has invested over 10 years in trying to become an Australian resident would be wasted.
The travel restriction is incredibly tough for Kaur and her mother in India, who is going through chemotherapy. Her husband, Singh, was also on a bridging visa. He has an elderly father in India who has diabetes and has no other children to care for him.
“We can’t leave them dying,” Kaur says. Singh, therefore, made the difficult decision to leave Australia.
“He is very sad … he is struggling with the mental stress,” Kaur says. “But he has to see his [father] alive and to take care of him.”
Singh left Australia for India on 14 September.
Before departing Melbourne airport he was “taken aside by immigration officials, placed in a private room and subjected to having his photographs and fingerprints taken,” Kaur and Singh’s daughter, 22-year-old Ravneet Garcha, says.
He was then told he would be barred from returning to Australia for three years.
The news, while not unexpected, was “delivered in a way that left my father feeling humiliated and emotionally shaken”, Garcha says.
“It’s heartbreaking because my father is not leaving for a holiday. He is being forced to leave behind his life, his home and his family here in Australia to go back and take care of his dying parents overseas. The system, however, has shown no compassion.”
A spokesperson from the home affairs department speaking generally says the minister, Tony Burke, could intervene “in individual cases if the minister thinks it is in the public interest”.
“What is in the public interest is a matter for the minister to determine.”
Requests are assessed on a case-by-case basis and timeframes “vary due to individual circumstances”, the spokesperson says.
The class of bridging visa an applicant is eligible for is determined by the person’s circumstances at the time of the application, they say.
“Certain conditions are mandatory and must be imposed by operation of law. Other conditions are discretionary and may be imposed if the delegate is satisfied it is consistent with the purpose of the visa grant, taking into consideration the individual circumstances of the applicant.”
‘My life depends on the minister’
Some bridging visas carry no work or study rights for applicants who are waiting for a ministerial intervention decision. Without financial security, migrants are left open to exploitation by employers, as well as potential abuse in relationships, Strutt says.
“They don’t have the resources to support themselves,” he says. “They feel trapped in a relationship relying on someone else because they don’t have access to work.”
Bridging visas also carry a stigma, he says.
“There is this uncertainty that surrounds bridging visas. Even if they do have work rights … it makes people scared to employ people on bridging visas. It makes it really hard for people to integrate into the community, and feel like they are part of the Australian society.”
For Kaur, an immense feeling of sadness lingers. “My life depends upon the minister,” she says.
“We are just breathing. We are not living. We are dying inside.”
