Earlier this week, the Hon. Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Scott Morrison announced that the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has ‘suspended’ its immigration programme for visa applicants coming from ‘Ebola affected-countries’, including the humanitarian intake.

Specifics on the process for how pending applications from ‘affected countries’ will be dealt with, and the time for when this suspension may be lifted are unknown.

At this stage, we do not have any clarification on what “non-permanent or temporary visas” actually means, as these are apparently now being “cancelled” or “refused”. An except from Minister Morrison’s address to the parliament on Monday, says that he was

temporarily suspending our Immigration program, including our humanitarian program, from EBV-affected countries, and this means we are not processing any application from these affected countries

According to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Global Enterprises Group believes, as at the date of this post, ‘affected countries’ refers to: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, whose situation continues to worsen and has had more than 4800 deaths. If you are in the process of sponsoring a visa applicant from any of these countries, we encourage you to contact us to discuss further.

Global Enterprises Group will continue to update our clients as further news is made clear.