I’m not sure why you find this surprising. Why do you assume that the australian authorities should track down and update immigration laws and regulation of all the other countries in the world. Especially since they can change every other day. If they did so, not only it would be time and money consuming, but most probably the informations they would gave would be filled with errors and innacuracies.
It’s already difficult enough for them to keep up with their own regulations.
You’re always expected to check the requirments with the authorities of the country you intend to visit, never with your own country’s authorities. There’s nothing sinister that the australian government is trying to hide. They just do what their counterparts in any other country are doing : telling people they aren’t competent to answer this kind of question.
Because the US does it. It’s the link in the OP. And it has the contact information for the consulates of each country so you can contact them yourselves. The UK does it too (under Entry Requirements, and I just picked Turkey at random). The government tracks tons of random crap about other countries, why would you assume they wouldn’t do this?
If you want to know whether you need a visa to enter Australia, why in God’s name would it occur to you to ask the American government? Any information they could give you couldn’t possibly be more accurate or reliable than the information that the Australian government could give you, and could easily be less so. And there is no reason why they should take responsibility for doing this at all.
The surprising thing, to my mind, is not that Australia refuses to tell its citizens the visa/migration laws of other countries, but that the American government does so.
The questions remains - why does Australia require a visa from Americans, Brits, Canadians, etc when other rich western countries are all visa-free to one another? As I understand it, Australia requires visas from all countries’ visitors except New Zealand.
Obviously, there’s a historical or legal reason for this. The Australian govt seems to have recognized the anomaly a while back when they allowed people from other rich western nations to download self-issued visas on-line.
That’s what I would have guessed. In the past when I went from the US to Canada via Detroit/Windsor, the Canadians didn’t even expect a US passport. And my understanding is this is same on the US side for Canadians. This situation likely results from the huge, unguarded land border between these 2 countries. There are a lot of places where people casually cross the border just to shop on the other side, etc. because what they want is easier to obtain on the other side of the border. If either side starts demanding entry visas, a lot of people will be pissed off. And enforcement would be a nightmare. Both countries seem to have decided that making casual travel between the two difficult isn’t desirable.
Australia’s geographic situation makes it possible to impose the kind of migration controls that few other nations can even dream of imposing.
And, historically, Australia has a national obsession with the idea that the rest of the world wants to migrate in large numbers and swamp the country (read: people with black hair and brown eyes will come to outnumber those with fair hair and blue eyes).
This is frequently a matter of political controversy. The 2001 federal election, for instance, was heavily influenced by a kind of national hysteria about people attempting to come to Australia and seek asylum or refugee status. For the aforementioned reasons of geography, the numbers of people who actually succeed in making this journey are small, and most other developed countries deal with considerably larger numbers without the sky falling in. But a significant proportion of Australians seem to get very anxious about this and about migration control generally, and this results in (among other things) a tough visa policy.
So Australia is genuinely worried that black Americans want to migrate to Australia in large numbers? I’d have thought this would be more a worry for Canada then the US. Although Canada does have that nasty problem of a huge land border with the US, whereas it ain’t easy to slip into Australia. Canada may have considered erecting a huge wall along the land border with armed guards, but tossed the idea as impractical.
He was talking about Asians actually, and the historical and irrational fear of the “yellow hordes sweeping down from the north”. While he has valid points about Australian historical racism it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand about Americans needing visas.
No, no, no. Not black Americans. It’s just a general atttitude that there’s lots of people out there whose one object in life is to come and live in Australia, so they have fairly strict travel/migration controls, and they apply them pretty universally. They don’t see any particular need to drop them for the US. They’ve made it fairly easy for US nationals to get Australian visas so, as far as they’re concerned, what’s the problem? Historically, they’ve made an exception for New Zealand, with whom they operate a highly reciprocal arrangement. New Zealanders can not only travel to Australia without visas, but reside their permanently, work there, etc, etc. (And vice versa.) In the absence of that kind of deal, they don’t see any reason to allow visa-free travel into Australia for anyone. They’ll make it more or less easy to get a visa, depending on their perception of risk, but the basic requirement for a visa is pretty universal.
I think it does. My point, I guess, is that while Australia could dispense with visa requirements for Americans without jeopardising their national security, it’s not their instinct to do so. I think the Australian tradition would be to look for a positive reason to <i>dispense</I> with visa requirements rather than a positive reason to <i>have</i> visa requirements. Strict migration control is a long-ingrained part of government culture.
As it was for all nations at one time, but most of them grew out of it. Australia doesn’t need visas from NZers for instance, so I don’t believe it is a general thing here any more. But I have to admit being puzzled as to what the rationale is, exactly.
I think the reverse is the case. Until comparatively recently, most nations imposed minimal travel restrictions. Prior to 1914, for instance, it was generally possible to travel throughout Europe without even possessing a passport, or identity documents of any kind. It’s only when international travel became relatively cheap, and therefore large numbers of people started to engage in it, that movement control became an issue.
Australia had fairly tough - and openly racist - movement control from fairly early on, because large (relative to the existing population) numbers of people did travel to Australia. The openly racist aspect of Australia’s migration policies was finally abandoned in the 1970s, but the culture of being concerned about migration remains (and, I believe, still often has a racist subtext).
There’s no particular concern about migration from the US; it’s more that, because of the broader culture, Australians implicitly think of a visa requirement as being the norm, and the lack of such a requirement as being exceptional, requiring (among other things) a particular need to justify it. And there is no <i>need</I> to dispense US citizens from visa requirements, since the existing requirements do not pose a practical barrier to travel to Australia for US citizens.
A few years ago I wanted to visie Australia, so I went to the consolet if S.F.
I thold the lady behind the desk, what would I need to visit, and she said “Is there anything we should know about you?”. Like what I says. “well” she said “do you have a criminal reccord?”. I said I didn’t think you still needed one.
I didn’t go to Australia.
Spelling and grammer subject to channge without notice.
NZ has been hassled from time to time by the Aus govt for what they see as our lax immigration policy. Once someone has NZ citizenship (it may even be permanent residency) they can then skip across the ditch. Sometimes this is seen as a back door into Aus.
Aus may have stricter visa requirements then NZ because they have had more immigration (other then Brits) then we have had for much longer. NZ really only started getting serious amounts of immigarants (again other then Brits) in the 60’s, when Polynesians started immigrating here. Aus had large numbers of European immigrants much earlier then that.
NZ probably takes more immigrants now (as a percentage of population) because the govt has actively sought immigrants. Maybe that is why they let people have a look-see without a visa.
