A spate of assaults puts off foreign students

THE Australian state of Victoria is host to 45,000 students from India. On January 2nd one of them, Nitin Garg, was stabbed to death in Melbourne, the capital, in the latest and most violent of a series of attacks on Indian students in the city. Victoria’s police say they have no evidence these crimes are racially motivated. But they recorded 1,447 robberies and assaults against Indians in 2007-08, a figure seized upon by the Indian media as proof that their countrymen are being targeted. In response to what the Australian press has dubbed “the curry bashings”, India’s government has issued an advisory urging its nationals to take extra care in Australia’s second-biggest city. The row has become so shrill it threatens to damage Australia’s third-biggest export earner, after coal and iron ore: education, which brings in about A$17 billion ($16 billion) a year from foreigners.

Applications for student visas from India have gone into free-fall—down by 46% between July and October compared with the same period the previous year. Almost a fifth of Australia’s 630,000 full-time international students hail from India, and the attacks have also received publicity in other big markets such as China. As it was, Australia had been getting a bad press thanks to the collapse of a number of private colleges offering cheap vocational qualifications to foreign students. These had flourished at a time of chronic skills shortages, when hairdressing and catering qualifications opened up a fast track to permanent residence in Australia. But immigration rules have since been tightened. …