Christine Inglis

Concepts of Citizenship and Identity among Recent Asian Immigrants in Australia

Theories of citizenship and, in particular, its exclusionary features in a period of globalization have particular significance for an avowedly immigrant society such as Australia with a policy commitment to multiculturalism. The nature of Australian national identity and citizenship reemerged on the political agenda in conjunction with the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations of European settlement. Debate continues as moves towards becoming a republic with an Australian head of state replacing the British monarch strengthen. As elsewhere, government is focusing attention on the need for citizenship and civics education. An important constituency in this process are the immigrants, especially those from Asia whose ancestors were the target of nationalistic exclusion critical to the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia. This article examines the views on citizenship and identity of a national sample of recent Asian immigrants to Australia. We argue that for considerable numbers an instrumental conception of citizenship underlies their approach to acquiring Australian citizenship. This ‘instrumental citizenship’ is located within their migratory experience and the political traditions of their homelands as well as within their Australian settlement experiences. For many, legal citizenship has not led to a sense of full incorporation into Australian society as indicted by their continuing perception of themselves as ‘migrants’. Reasons for this are complex and involve an interplay of personal factors as well as attitudes and experiences in Australian society whose significance varies from group to group. Such a disjuncture between legal citizenship and personal identity has implications for both governmental policies and theorization about the nature of citizenship.

Chinatown Sydney: A Window on the Chinese Community

Chinatowns have long constituted one of the most visible social indicators of overseas Chinese communities. Their origins owe as much to the enforcement of segregation by majority groups and colonial governments as they do to the desire of Chinese immigrants to maintain their cultural links to the homeland and provide for their own welfare. Yet, changes since the 19th century mean that such analyses fail to adequately reflect the new circumstances and situation of Chinese minorities in a globalizing and transnational world where the very nature of minority incorporation has been undergoing extensive change. This paper examines the changing nature and role of Chinatown among the Sydney Chinese. In doing so, it questions the extent to which the metaphor of Chinatown or the alternative model of ethnoburb to describe Chinese settlement in North America necessarily captures the reality of Chinese patterns of settlement in Sydney with its relatively large and diverse Chinese population.

The Chinese of Papua New Guinea: From Settlers to Sojourners

The renewed interest in diaspora populations in this age of globalization has inevitably led to a re-examination of the Chinese diaspora which, especially in Southeast Asia, has achieved prominence through its association with the ëAsian economic miracle.í This article examines the contemporary transformation of the Papua New Guinea part of this Chinese diaspora from a long settled, homogeneous community into a highly segmented and fragmented sojourner population. Integral to this process has been the intersection of post-colonial nationalism with the emergence of new opportunities for economic development attracting Asian and other international investors. The new sojourner Chinese population differs in significant respects from the sojourner populations associated with much nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese migration. A particular feature which emerges from the exploration of the variant patterns of Chinese migration and settlement in Papua New Guinea is the need to re-examine the nature of ìChineseî identity and frequent assumptions about the characteristics of Chinese diaspora populations. The Papua New Guinea Chinese case highlights the diversity in the way the Chinese identities related to the concept of a ëhomelandí as well as the very different ways in which segments of the same diaspora group relate to each other and to Chinese elsewhere.

Introduction: Identity in a Changing World

Since the 1970s there have been dramatic changes in the patterns of international population movements and migration. In addition to major changes in the extent of these movements associated with economic and political changes, the characteristics and forms of migration have also become much more diverse. Nowhere has the impact of these quantitative and qualitative changes associated with the new’ Age of Migration been more evident than in the Asia Pacific Region. In the traditional countries of immigration such as Australia, Canada and the United States of America whose national identities have been based extensively on their origins as ‘nations of immigrants’ the arrival of extensive numbers of non-European immigrants has coincided with political and economic changes which have led to a reassessment of the relations between the immigrant and native born populations. The rapid and sustained developments in the Asian region have generated major demands for labor in countries such as Japan and the newly industrializing countries which have been only partially met through local supply. Immigrant labor has hence become an important component of the economic growth and development for many of these countries. With the downturn in the Asian economies the repatriation and future of this immigrant labor assumes importance. While labor has usually been employed in manufacturing, building and construction as well as the service sector, there has also been the movement of often highly skilled workers to fill specific skill gaps in the labor market. Even in those countries in the region which have become prime destinations of this migrant labor, there has also been emigration as sections of the population, including the emerging middle classes take up the perceived opportunities to move, often to the traditional immigrant receiving countries on the Asian Pacific Rim. Christine Inglis

Turkish migration and workforce participation in Sydney, Australia.

The structure of labor markets and the nature of the participation in them of various social groups such as migrants has increasingly become an area of concern for planners in social welfare and migration policy as well as for those concerned with the broader theoretical questions of the nature and changes in the patterns of class relations and stratification. This article presents a detailed qualitative analysis of individual patterns of workforce participation. In particular, it focuses on the work experiences of a group of Turkish women and their husbands in Sydney, Australia.

Illegal immigration to Hong Kong.

Illegal migration from China is contrasted to that from Vietnam to highlight Hong Kongs unique place in such flows. Political upheavals in China, economic recessions and labor shortages in Hong Kong have caused waves of legal and illegal Chinese migration into Hong Kong which have been effectively contained through the vigilance of border patrols, police checks for identity cards, fines on employers of illegals, and cooperation from China. The increased numbers of Vietnamese boat people from 1988 led to a hardening in government and public attitudes, resulting in the reclassification of refugees as illegal migrants. The key difference in Hong Kongs effectiveness at stemming these two illegal migrant streams has been bilateral cooperation, which has been achieved with China but lacking in the case of Vietnam.

Australia Turkey Connections: Traders, Foes and Citizens

Contacts between nations range from high-level, formal inter-governmental contacts to less formal everyday contacts involving their respective populations. The intensity and duration of such contacts vary as do their underlying nature and location. This chapter outlines three phases in the relations between Australia and Turkey and their peoples. While the focus is on the contacts and relations involving individuals and their local communities, these are extensively influenced by the wider context provided by international politics and relations.

Editorial: Focus on Japan

In July this year thousands of international sociologists will be travelling to Yokohama in Japan to attend the 18th World Congress of International Sociology. In more than half a century of its existence it is the first time that the International Sociological Association has held its World Congress in East Asia. This is despite the economic and sociocultural importance of the region and the fact that Japan has one of the world’s largest and longest established communities of sociologists. The Japanese Sociological Society founded in 1924 today has some 4000 members. Despite this, knowledge of Japanese sociology outside Japan is extremely limited. The World Congress will do much to overcome this gap through the development of personal contacts and by providing opportunities to learn about the work of our Japanese colleagues. For many of the participants at the Yokohama congress this will be their first visit to Japan. For them, and for many others who are not able to participate, it may involve their first encounter with Japanese society and sociology. To contribute to the development of a fruitful dialogue with our Japanese colleagues I am very pleased that in this and the next issue of International Sociology we are able to publish a number of significant articles which variously examine the development of sociology in Japan and a variety of key issues relevant to understanding contemporary Japanese society. In organizing these articles I am particularly grateful to my Japanese colleagues Shujiro Yazawa and Koichi Hasegawa for the help they have given me in contacting their colleagues. The first article in this issue, by Yoshio Sugimoto, is entitled ‘Japanese society: Inside out and outside in’. It provides a masterfully succinct and coherent overview of the changing perceptions of Japanese society among the international social science community since the end of the Second World War. In doing so, it highlights the links between popular images of Japan, paradigms of Japanese society and the major domestic and international structural changes affecting Japanese society. This constitutes an important contribution to developing an understanding of Japanese society from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, as Sugimoto continues to show by discussing the tensions confronting the development of sociology in Japan. Family is typically seen as the cornerstone of social life and institutions. Images of Japanese society and, in particular, Japanese gender relations are all too often shaped around images of the beautiful and compliant geisha. In our next contribution, ‘Leaving the West, rejoining the East?: Gender and family in Japan’s semi-compressed modernity’, Emiko Ochiai outlines the changing nature of gender relations in Japan and discusses the impact of modernity in a wider comparative perspective by setting the Japanese experience against developments in a number of industrialized and more recently industrializing Asian countries. The final 529853 ISS0010.1177/0268580914529853International SociologyEditorial research-article2014

Book review: Patricia Hill Collins and John Solomos (eds), The Sage Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies

Despite the predictions common in much nineteenthand twentieth-century social theorizing that race and ethnicity would decline in importance in the modern era, we are today all too well aware of the continuing international importance of these social formations. Indeed, as the media constantly remind us, ethnic and racial diversity is linked to social conflict in many different regions of the world. Given that the patterns of ethnic and race relations are significantly influenced by their sociohistorical context, even in a rapidly globalizing world where national boundaries are increasingly porous, an important question for scholars is what commonalities exist between these patterns and the ways in which social scientists seek to understand them? The title of this book, the impressive array of authors and its length encourages the hope that it can make a major contribution to answering this question. Certainly such an ambition is evident in the two major objectives which the editors identify for this handbook. The first is to ‘map out the field of race and ethnicity as an evolving, dynamic and relevant field of scholarly debate and research ... [and secondly] to provide an overview of the key debates in this field of scholarly study, the core changes that we have seen over the past few decades and at least a partial account of how the field is likely to develop and expand’ (p. 1). To achieve this objective the Handbook is organized in four main sections where the authors typically provide a valuable historical analysis of the debates in their respective areas of concentration. The first part of the Handbook is concerned to locate the theoretical and historical foundations of the field of race and ethnic relations. Here the chapter by Knowles draws on US, British and, to a lesser extent, other English speaking sources to provide a helpful overview of the evolving debates and paradigms addressed in these sections of the academy. The next chapter, by Feagin and O’Brien, begins from the work of Du Bois to explore the role of race and ethnicity in the United States. This is followed 477965 ISS28210.1177/0268580913477965International Sociology Review of BooksReviews: Ethnicities and migration 2013

Independence, Incorporation and Policy Research: an Australian Case Study

At the end of the twentieth century the model of sociology as an objective, value-free social science, which had been so successfully institutionalized in the academy over the last century, is increasingly under challenge. One of these challenges consists of pressures for greater ‘relevance’ by governments and the public who are major financial sponsors of the universities and academic enterprises. For some, ‘relevance’ signifies that sociological research serves the interests of the state and dominant social groups by providing legitimation and support for their actions and policies. For others, ‘relevance’ means that sociology addresses issues of major social importance and identifiable social ‘problems’. Pressures for relevance also come from those outside the mainstream. For those disillusioned with society, and outside the dominant majority, ‘relevance’ becomes a call to redress the injustices they face. In the contemporary world, ethnic and racial minorities are increasingly gaining a voice and pressing their claims for a critique of society by academics, including sociologists. Sociological research on migration and ethnic and racial diversity hence faces numerous conflicting pressures influencing both the research and its status.