CANBERRA, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- More than half of Australia's temporary migrants choose to settle in the nation's two largest cities, data has revealed.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Thursday released the inaugural Australian Census and Temporary Entrants Integrated Dataset.
According to the data, 51 percent of the 1.5 million temporary residents in Australia at the time the data was collected in 2016 resided in either Sydney (27 percent) or Melbourne (24 percent).
The largest group of temporary residents were New Zealanders in the country on a subclass 444 special category visa, which allows citizens of New Zealand to live and work in Australia for as long as they want.
"By combining 2016 Census data and temporary visa information from the Department of Home Affairs, we now have a comprehensive picture of where groups of temporary residents live, the countries they come from, what work they do, what they earn and if they are studying," Myles Burleigh, director of migration statistics for the ABS, said in a media release.
"For example, what we see in this new data is that in 2016, 81 percent of temporary residents lived in capital cities, compared with 67 percent of all Australians."
"Outside capital cities, the most popular areas were regional Queensland with 10 percent and regional New South Wales with 4 percent."
The date revealed that students were the second largest group of temporary residents (30 percent). Almost two thirds of students settled in the two biggest cities with 34 percent in Sydney and 31 percent in Melbourne.
