A six-year-old boy is set to be separated from his mother due to a 14-year wait for a visa.
The family says the age of a child should be taken into account during the processing of parent visas.
A migration law expert says governments must make tough decisions on immigration driven by economics.
A northern NSW family is pleading for special consideration from immigration authorities to prevent the separation of a six-year-old boy from his mother.
Kenyan citizen Leah Wambui Sore came to Australia on a visitor visa in January to be with her son, Thanasi.
She has now been told her extended tourist visa expires on December 1, and she must leave the country.
Meanwhile, her application for a 143 contributory parent visa has been lodged, but the waiting time for it to be assessed is more than a decade.
Thanasi has no understanding of immigration caps or migration policy; he just knows he wants her to stay.
Thanasi was born in Kenya and lived there with his mother until the age of four, but has Australian citizenship courtesy of his father, Daniel Kuzeff.
In 2024, Ms Sore, Mr Kuzeff and his partner made a collective decision to relocate Thanasi to live permanently in Australia.
Ms Sore said she made the decision to let her son go for the opportunities and life he would have here.
"It was a big sacrifice, but something any mum would do," she said.
"All I'm asking for is to look at this case differently and allow Thanasi to grow with both mum and dad and family around.
"Please don't make him have to choose between me and his life here."
Between 2022 and 2025, she applied once for a student visa and four times for a tourist visa to come to Australia, being granted one in 2025 after an appeal through the Administrative Review Tribunal, which noted "these cases are about real people".
She said the prospect of another separation from Thanasi weighed heavily on her.
"How do you explain to a six-year-old boy that you're packing your bags and you don't know when you are going to be back?"
Mr Kuzeff said young Australian citizens were missing out on spending their childhoods with both parents due to a gap in migration policy.
He said the age of a child should be taken into account during the processing of parent visas.
"His childhood is happening now," Mr Kuzeff said.
"I just hope there can be some thought about this type of situation, that there is a pathway when a young Australian child is involved.
Mr Kuzeff said the family opted to spend $50,000 to apply for a 143 contributory parent visa for Ms Sore because it best suited their situation.
The Department of Home Affairs website states the final processing time for this class of visa is estimated to be 15 years, while the wait time for a parent or aged parent visa is 33 years.
Sydney University professor of public law and immigration law specialist Mary Crock said the waiting times reflected the government's immigration priorities and the volume of applications.
"Governments are setting the numbers according to what the statisticians are telling them with how much the parents are going to cost the country, what is going to work in terms of the overall balance," she said.
"Sometimes you'll get a government that says, we're all for families … another government will come in and say we are the hard-nosed economists here and so we want more plumbers, more people who can build houses. That's exactly what they're saying at the moment.
In May, the federal government set its annual permanent migration program at 185,000 places, unchanged from last year.
About 28 per cent of those places are allocated to family visas designed to reunite family members and provide pathways to citizenship.
Of those 52,460 family visas, about 7,000 are set aside for parents and priority is given to migrants already living in Australia.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the department said citizenship of a child did not, in itself, provide an automatic pathway to permanent residence for a parent.
"The department recognises the importance of family unity and the interests of Australian citizen children," they said.
"Decision-makers are required to consider all relevant legislative requirements and information provided in support of an application when assessing visa matters."