Shanthi Robertson

Cash cows, backdoor migrants, or activist citizens? International students, citizenship, and rights in Australia

Abstract Since the late 1990s, the intersection of education and migration policies in Australia has shifted international students from transient consumers to potential citizens. This article analyses responses to the ‘problem’ of international students as consumers, workers, and migrants, particularly the conceptualization of their rights and protections, and the ways students have been positioned as both passive subjects and activist citizens. The article provides a theoretical review of academic, government, community, and media responses to international students in general and the consequences of the education-migration nexus in particular. It argues that discourses of human rights and consumer rights have become increasingly interconnected in these debates. This analysis adds to the emerging literature on changing conceptions of rights and citizenship in neoliberal contexts, and also illuminates the social and political consequences of the education-migration nexus in Australia. This will have resonance for countries who have implemented a raft of similar policies.

Time and Temporary Migration: The Case of Temporary Graduate Workers and Working Holiday Makers in Australia

This article provides an analysis of ‘being temporary’ in the context of two forms of migration that are of increasing significance to Australia: temporary graduate workers (TGWs) and working holiday makers (WHMs). Recent policy changes to these visa categories allow for extended periods of work and residence in Australia, primarily among young people who are seeking an overseas work/life experience or a pathway to more permanent migration. The article brings the various temporal dimensions of these migration processes to the fore, asking how time functions as both a disciplinary practice of the state and as part of the life and labour experiences of migrants. In doing so, it problematises the idea of temporariness as both a normative constraint and a qualitative experience in a national context in which paradigms of permanent settlement and full citizenship continue to dominate discursive constructions of migration. It creates a framework for understanding the key temporal aspects of TGW and WHM migration processes: temporal eligibility and migrant subjectivities; temporal constraints and differential inclusion; and the contingent boundaries around temporariness, extended temporariness and permanence. This has salience for continued understandings of emerging forms of temporary migration in wider contexts.

Lives in limbo: Migration experiences in Australia’s education–migration nexus

Like many OECD countries, Australia has, over the last 15 years, experimented with ‘the education–migration nexus’: policy frameworks that create pathways for international students to become skilled migrants. This article draws on student-migrant narratives to highlight some key aspects of migrant experience within the education–migration nexus, most notably extended periods of temporary status and the frequent need to adapt life and education goals around migration policy changes. The analysis finds that the uncertainty and precariousness inherent in the student-to-migrant process create significant tensions in the daily lives of most student-migrants, both as individuals and as members of transnational families with long-term collective migration strategies. Yet, uncertainty also resulted in some strategic responses to mitigate risk and attempts to transform waiting times into opportunities. We also argue that student-migrants represent a ‘middling’ experience of migration. Although they have access to various resources as educated and skilled migrants, they are far from experiencing a true form of elite and mobile ‘flexible citizenship’.

Returnees, student-migrants and second chance learners: case studies of positional and transformative outcomes of Australian international education

There is a clear need for new research into the work and life outcomes for graduates of Australian international education. Drawing upon divergent post-study transitions, this article aims to present a multi-faceted, qualitative foundation for the consideration of both positional and transformative impacts of international education on graduates’ post study lives and careers. We compare three divergent study and life pathways for international students via three case studies of different models of Australian international and transnational education provision. The findings show that positional and transformative outcomes were often intertwined in surprising ways in participants’ stories. The pathways that they followed after graduation were strongly influenced by their engagement with international education as a life as well as a learning experience. All three case studies also suggest that concepts of the prestige of the Western degree need further consideration.

Transnational family money : remittances, gifts and inheritance

In this paper we use the case study of professional Indian migrants in Australia to explore how family remittances function as a special kind of transnational family money. We draw on qualitative research to examine how gender significantly shapes remittances and gifts as well as inheritance in the transnational family. Transnational family money is continuous with family money in India in that money flows both ways between parents and children. Remittances and gifts differ from family money in two significant ways. First, geographic distance creates a disjuncture in the perceptions of the value and ease of earning money between remitters and the recipients. Second, money and gifts sent are seen as a medium of caring, but the money and gifts received are seen as less valuable when weighed against the physical care that is being delivered by others in the family in the home country. Our study places remittances, gifts and other forms of transnational financial negotiations within frameworks of the sociology of money and care, contributing to the cross-cultural study of money and care in the transnational family.

Temporalities, materialities and connecting locales: migration and mobility in Asia-Pacific cities

ABSTRACT In this introduction, we argue that paying attention to the heterogeneous and multi-directional characteristics of mobilities in the Asia-Pacific can generate new conceptual and empirical insights for research on migration and mobility, transnationalism, and intercultural encounters. We note that temporality and materiality are productive lenses for connecting research across diverse urban locales, and to understand the changes these locales experience as a result of emerging forms of mobility. We also draw out three key themes that emerge from the analyses presented by papers in this special issue, and which link the papers as a collection. First, the collection challenges conventional ways in which migrant and non-migrant subjects are classified and researched, by working within the conceptual space opened up by arguments against ‘migrant exceptionalism’, on the one hand, claims for the centrality of the ‘figure of the migrant’ on the other. Second, the papers implicitly or explicitly unpack the temporal, spatial and material consequences of migration and mobility in terms of how aspirations manifest materially and through affective encounters. Third, the collection as a whole signals the analytic power of connecting seemingly distinct sites and scales in and through which migration and mobility take place.

Education, real estate, immigration: brokerage assemblages and Asian mobilities

ABSTRACT Mobilities of people and capital from Asia to Australia now encompass policies and practices that link immigration, citizenship, international education and real estate investment in complex and entangled ways. These mobilities are mediated by ‘brokerage assemblages’ that cut across state, non-state, human and non-human actors and processes. This article’s primary contribution is to establish how assemblage thinking can be productive for understanding how such complex and interconnected mobilities are mediated. It then illustrates the potential of this approach with a preliminary empirical analysis of a selection of online content that forms part of the brokerage assemblages that link, facilitate and create education, immigration and real estate mobilities from Asia to Australia, primarily from China. We focus on online materials that circulate through three key platforms: (1) a major online investor portal based in Hong Kong and Shanghai that targets transnational investors and brokers (2) a smaller Australian-based property portal utilised by Australian real estate brokers and (3) one mainstream and one industry specific Australian media outlet. We use assemblage thinking to show how forms of information are coded and recoded across different platforms not only to represent, but also to constitute, the links between education, real estate and migration mobilities.

The Temporalities of International Migration: Implications for Ethnographic Research

Transformations in both time and space are central to theoretical understandings of modernity and globalization (see, for example, Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1999; Urry, 2000). This chapter is specifically concerned with understandings of time in terms of the empirical study of contemporary international migration processes and, in particular, in terms of ethnographic methodological approaches. I argue that, in the context of a complex and globalized modernity, temporalities of migration are increasingly recognized as heterogeneous and dynamic. While circular, temporary and staggered mobilities have always been a part of global migration circuits, modern transportation and communications technologies have facilitated increasing temporal heterogeneity, and new modes of temporariness are becoming institutionalized in new ways (Rajkumar et al., 2012). In particular, although Western Europe has an extensive history of guestworker-type temporary migration (see, for example, Castles et al., 1984), traditional ‘settler’ receiving societies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand have only recently begun to shift from the policies of permanent settlement that dominated postwar mass immigration schemes to more-temporary or ‘staggered’ migration programmes.

Contractualization, depoliticization and the limits of solidarity: noncitizens in contemporary Australia

Abstract This paper seeks to analyze a particular form of noncitizenship – arising from legal long-term temporary migration – that is increasingly significant to the contemporary Australian context and to understand some of its consequences. It argues that traditional pathways of permanent settlement and full citizenship are being disrupted by new temporary migration schemes that create ‘middling’ noncitizen subjects who experience ‘patchwork’ rights and statuses across complex and diverse migration pathways. Through a close analysis of policy narratives and discourses, as well as of the existing literature on the social conditions and emerging solidarities of these noncitizens, the paper shows the various ways that noncitizenship is depoliticized and citizenship contractualized in Australia. These entwined processes of depoliticization and contractualization have intimate effects on the lives of noncitizens, and also limit and constrain the emerging solidarities that seek to challenge their exclusion. The analysis has a number of implications for the ongoing study of contemporary transformations in citizenship in other ‘immigrant democracies’ globally.

Friendship networks and encounters in student-migrants’ negotiations of translocal subjectivity:

This paper explores the complex intersections between place, friendship networks and encounters, and the development and negotiation of ‘translocal subjectivities’ for student-migrants living in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on qualitative research with student-migrants of various nationalities, the paper explores how student-migrants narrate encounters with friends and the formation of different friendship networks in relation to place at two significant stages of their migration journey: during initial arrival and ‘settling in’ in Melbourne, and during return visits to their hometowns and cities. This analysis uses the concept of ‘translocal subjectivities’ (Conradson and Mckay (2007), Translocal subjectivities: Mobility, connection, emotion. Mobilities 2: 167-174 to highlight how encounters with friends shape senses of self that are both multiply located and transformed through transnational mobility; and how specific urban localities, materialities and social practices are involved in the negotiation of the ‘translocal’ self.