Infrastructures of insecurity: Housing and language testing in Asia-Australia migration (original) (raw)
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Stuck between the Global North and South: Middling migrants in Australia and Singapore
Journal of Sociology, 2022
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The regional migration and settlement of migrants and refugees is an issue that concerns a wide range of actors beyond the migrating subjects themselves. These include policy makers involved in the management of migration, state governments seeking to address regional labour shortages and demographic decline, so-called host communities responding to newcomers, and local businesses in demand of compliant labour. These diverse agents tend to share a general interest in the attraction and largely also the retention of migrants or refugees. A closer analysis reveals the diverse expectations of migrants and refugees that inform the concerns of non-migrant, non-refugee actors with migrants’ and refugees’ settlement and mobility. This paper explores regional migrant and refugee settlement, relevant policy rationales and the existing research on these forms of settlement with a focus on interests and perspectives on regional settlers held in the so-called host society. It suggests that these interests and specific perspectives on the ‘stranger’ are indicative of a currently prevailing understanding and governmental framing of a multicultural Australia based on migration management.
The figure of the temporary migrant is one which puts into question the forms through which public sphere sensibilities on mobility, belonging and sociality are forged. This article argues that the temporary migrant can be a site of anxiety resulting from the perceived complexity of flows of mobility in a trans- and/or post-national context in which migration is not necessarily always permanent, social mobility does not occur within the site of the nation, and close kinship networks may be spread across multiple regions of the globe. The article investigates the 2012 case of politician Teresa Gambaro’s claims that temporary migrants in Australia on 457 visas required hygiene training, including the wearing of deodorant in order to integrate into the national community. The question raised by these statements is why permanent migrants bodily, food and other cultural practices are more readily incorporated into Australian liberalmulticulturalism, while temporary migrants’ bodies are made a site for practices of shaming. It is argued that a ‘networked’ understanding of mobility rather than a migrational, transnational or globalizational perspective opens opportunities for a more ethical response to temporary migrants co-habiting as temporary members of a (national) population.
Since the proclamation of a mobility turn in the 2000s, scholars have populated the field with invaluable insights on what it means to move, and what the politics of movement are. One particularly useful thread revolves around the issue of infrastructures, which have generally been taken to mean the manifest forms of moorings and fixities that help order and give shape to mobilities. Yet, while significant inroads have been made in delineating the morphologies of transport infrastructures, mobilities research has been relatively reticent about the organisational structures, orders and arrangements that give rise to another key mobile phenomenon of our time — international migration. In this editorial introduction, we lay down some groundwork on the productive and political nature of infrastructures that likewise affect and inform the way (im)mobilities are contingently created and parsed in migration. Looking through the prism of East and Southeast Asia and its migration infrastructures, we take advantage of the ‘new’ infrastructural configurations in an emerging empirical context to point to some directions by which mobilities researchers can more rigorously interrogate ‘migration’ as another socially meaningful and specific form of mobility that exceeds a mere displacement of people or change in national domicile.
HOUSING AND MIGRATION: MARGINALISING THE MARGINALISED.
Migration in India has been a historical process which has re emerged as a strong force shaping cities and urbanisation. Urban poor and migration are closely interrelated. This paper reflects on the linkages of urban poor migrants and their housing concerns with specific focus on women and children, who are considered to be the most vulnerable. Furthermore, the paper investigates whether housing policy concerns of the urban migrants has been addressed or they still remain invisible in the eyes of urban policy makers.
This paper uses qualitative interview data to examine the perceptions of migration intermediaries concerning their professional dealings and relationships with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), drawing on the work of Groutsis et al. (2015) who argue that the shift from government to governance has resulted in a greater reliance on (largely unregulated) private intermediaries within migration processes. The premise of this paper is that the mechanisms of network governance, as they operate at the level of everyday praxis within Australia's migration industry, need further investigation, especially through the perspectives of the intermediaries themselves, as pivotal stakeholders operating within these networks. This paper thus seeks to understand how the workings of network governance are experienced at the meso-level. I argue that from the perspectives of migration intermediaries, network governance of the migration advice sector is characterised by contested relationships at various levels intensified by continued negotiation over law, regulation, and professional legitimacy.