A new study finds that contrary to recent remarks by Australia’s Citizenship and Multiculturalism Minister Alan Tudge, refugees and new immigrants are having a relatively easy time integrating.

The study was funded by the Australian Research Council and the findings are the first to result from a three-year study of settlement outcomes of recently arrived refugees in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.

The study found that refugees and new immigrants are integrating particularly well in regional areas, reports the Guardian.

Tudge recently said that migrants who live together “largely communicate in their mother tongue [and] are slower integrating,” but “the research found that refugees were welcomed by their new communities, found it ‘easy’ to get along, and felt a strong sense of belonging to their new homes,” the Guardian reported.

Additional information about the study’s findings is available here.

Australia’s policy on refugees has come under fire

Australia’s policy of placing refugees and asylum-seekers on Pacific Islands in harsh conditions has come under increasing fire in recent years.

Protests against the policy occurred last month in Australia.

“Thousands protested in cities across Australia on Saturday to mark five years of a policy under which asylum-seekers and migrants have been turned away and detained on remote Pacific islands,” the New York Times reported.

“Messages were read aloud from those still languishing in deteriorating conditions on the islands, years after being detained,” the Times reported.

“The policy that was introduced in 2013, to expel people – the ‘Fortress Australia’ policy that they [the government] put in place – that has to go,” rally organiser Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition said at the protest in Sydney, reports Al Jazeera in a July 21 post on its website.