CAIRO: The Foreign Ministry has appealed to Egyptian students studying in Australia to respect the terms of their visas to avoid the tightening of travel regulations in the future. Assistant Minister for Consular Affair Mustapha Guindy urged students to not stay beyond the expiration of their visas to avoid arrest and deportation. Guindy added that the Egyptian embassy in Canberra had informed the ministry that DIMIA, the Australian department of immigration, had tightened the procedures for granting student visas for Egyptian applicants as of last September. This was a direct result, Guindy continued, of an increase in the level of non-adherence by Egyptian students to the stipulations attached to the student visa. The spokesperson for the Australian embassy could not be reached for comment by press time. Australia has the third largest number of international students in the English speaking world after the US and UK and generates12.5 billion Australian dollars annually. Egypt, along with eight other countries including Jordan had been pushed up the "immigration risk scale of DIMIA, which categorizes applicants from their nations and thus tightens or relaxes visa conditions. A DIMIA spokesperson said that the status of these nine countries had been changed "to combat increased levels of immigration risk. The Australian department of immigration assesses each country on a selection of criteria such as visa overstay, document fraud and asylum claims.
