A new student refugee visa program has seen the first students arrive in Australia.

The first of 20 refugees come to Australia as part of the new Refugee Student Settlement Pathway (RSSP) have arrived in Melbourne.

RSSP is a pilot program designed to give refugee students the opportunity to migrate to Australia on Special Humanitarian Visas.

Participants are part of Australia’s existing Humanitarian Program allocation of 20,000 people for 2024-25.

Refugees registered with UNHCR who fit the age criteria and live in Malaysia, India or Thailand and were eligible to undertake qualifications in fields such as nursing, civil engineering, technology, business or economics, were able to apply as part of the initial cohort.

Among the first students to arrive is Osamah, who, with his family fled Yemen in 2017, due to the war that broke out over a decade ago and has displaced more than 2.5 million people.

“The necessities to live were absent since the war started, there was no running water, no electricity,” Osamah said.

“We lived in the capital, and when the Houthis took over, we had to first move to another city, and then we had to move to a third city, but my parents decided it was no longer safe for us due to many reasons and we had to flee Yemen.

“The only option we had was Malaysia,” he said.

Having arrived in Malaysia as a 16-year-old with his parents and his three older brothers, the family had lived with uncertainty about their futures.

As a refugee, he and his family stayed in their temporary home of Malaysia on what he said was akin to a tourist visa.

“Since there is no such thing as refugee status in Malaysia, you can sign up to be a refugee with UNHCR, but you don’t really have any rights in Malaysia, you cannot work, you cannot study in public or private schools, you cannot have a normal life, you cannot even leave Malaysia, if you leave as a refugee you will most probably be blacklisted, you cannot come back,” Osamah said.

He said his family could not return to Yemen, but were also “without a final destination where they could settle”.

While he was lucky to have the financial support from another family member for him to eventually go to university and study Biotechnology, being unable to officially get a job in Malaysia meant he was not able to put his degree to use.

As his fellow Universiti Malaya alumni moved out into the workforce, Osamah was unable to.

“I couldn’t really go on with my life, everything was on hold, but now I know that I have an opportunity,” Osamah said.

“I know if I put in the work, then I will get back the effort.”

“We left Yemen looking for a better place, a place that we can call home, and Australia is now that place,” Osamah said.