International students will be prevented from bringing their families to Australia under Labor’s long-awaited migration plan to be unveiled on Thursday, according to reports.

The ABC reports that foreign student numbers would be left untouched but their families would be effectively banned.

There were 337,427 student visas granted in the last financial year, with 45,991 of them classed as dependents or family.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke will deliver a speech entitled The work of managing the migration program: who arrives, who stays, who leaves to the National Press Club on Thursday.

It is expected to explain how Labor will reduce Australia’s population growth due to migration, from about 300,000 in 2025 to 225,000 within two years.

It’s expected Burke will announce that Labor will target family visas for foreign students and the work rights of those on bridging visas.

Former immigration department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi said the government was paying for sleeping at the wheel while post-pandemic migration exploded to 555,000 in the year to July 2023.

“They convinced themselves … it was just catch-up and it was nothing to worry about,” he said.

“Once you’ve had such a huge wave of migration, there are flow-on consequences.”

A proposal to cut three-quarters of a million migrants over three years has been floated by One Nation, while the coalition wants to slash net overseas migration to about 170,000 a year in line with housing construction and will not support Labor’s changes.

According to Rizvi, legions of migrants now on bridging visas while their appeals lumber glacially through the Administrative Reviews Tribunal could not be cleared at the wave of a minister’s wand.

“They’ll have to be processed … what you want to do is stop the rate of appeals,” he said.

“That is, in essence, the One Nation policy: let’s do something about that big wave.

“It would be mad (for Labor) not to take sufficient effective long-term action now.”

But the political imperative to put a lid on net overseas migration was now so pressing there was no guarantee it would be done carefully, Rizvi said.

“Governments making a stupid decision is always a possibility,” he said.

This is the home affairs minister’s second run at announcing migration changes, six weeks after canning his first over cabinet disagreements.

Australia’s net overseas migration in the three months to March will be released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics about an hour before Mr Burke starts speaking.

-with AAP