Becoming 'Overstayers': The coloniality of citizenship and the resilience of Pacific farmworkers (original) (raw)
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Irregular Immigrants in Australia and the US - Rights, Realities, and Political Mobilisation
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International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy
In Australia, past and present, Pacific Islanders have been labelled as undesirable others, included to temporarily fill labour shortages as required, controlled while resident in the country and removed when no longer deemed necessary. Pacific Islanders’ experiences in Australia reveal the inception, continuity and durability of differential inclusion produced by border control mechanisms. This paper traces Australia’s history of deporting Pacific Islanders over more than a century: from indentured labour and blackbirding, colonial occupation of Pacific Islands and the White Australia Policy, to more recent patterns of selective inclusion, such as the labour mobility schemes, to the disproportionate effects on Pacific Islanders of modifications to the criteria for deportability introduced in 2014 with the amendments to Section 501 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). By tracing the past–present circular border policies, this paper argues that the high number of Pasifika New Zealanders ...
Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2013
Border crossing is increasingly adopted as a security-seeking strategy by individuals, families and communities, while the nation state struggles to reconcile demands for mobility with border control politics. This article reports findings on Samoan-born Australian residents from a research project that examines aspects of temporary migration in the Asia Pacific. In the early stages of the fieldwork, the majority of Samoan-born residents encountered by the researchers were found to have arrived in Australia as New Zealand citizens who were entitled to stay indefinitely on Special Category Visas. This seemingly secure legal status seemed to place this group outside the research parameters. However, it became apparent that entry via a privileged migration channel did not necessarily ensure that human security needs were met. Looking at this group revealed much about the contrasts between temporary and permanent immigration status. Identified sources of insecurity arising from the group's long-term 'denizen' status included socioeconomic marginality, the pressures of maintaining transnational families, and concerns about young people and the law. While human security provides the conceptual starting point for the article and the wider research, the findings illustrate the importance of mobilising both citizenship rights and human rights to support the security-seeking projects of mobile populations.
Known in Vanuatu as blackbirding , the process of recruiting, negotiating with, bribing, and sometimes kidnapping men and women from (predominantly) Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, to come and work on cane fi elds and cotton plantations was only discontinued in the early twentieth century. Many of the labourers settled in Australia, intermarried with local European settlers and indigenous Australians. Today, their descendants are referred to as Australian South Sea Islanders (ASSI). Over the last century, ASSI people have experienced great hardship and discrimination as the Government and unions continued to restrict access to work and social services. By framing the interactions between ASSI and Vanuatu as a conscious attempt to redress the legacy of blackbirding , this study takes a novel approach to the informal and community-led instruments of transitional justice. This chapter argues that people come to terms with their past in ways that are rooted in their own local histories and experiences. Transitional justice is informed by history-telling and the creation of collective memories through cultural expression. The research concludes that transitional justice processes can assist the ASSI diaspora to advocate for the Australian Government to participate more meaningfully in this process.
Anxieties about a Porous Border: Australian Government Responses to Melanesian “Boat People”
Australian Historical Studies, 2024
Starting in 1969, small groups of West Papuans have occasionally crossed the Torres Strait to Australia and sought its protection. In public discourse, these arrivals have figured as part of a narrative about Australia’s relationship with Indonesia. By contrast, in the public discourse about border control, which focuses on attempted travel across the Indian Ocean and distinct ‘waves’, they have been treated as a footnote, at most. In this article, we closely examine the Australian government’s response to West Papuan ‘boat people’ over time to demonstrate that, unlike in public discourse, border control considerations have loomed large in the government’s response. We argue that, in order to understand Australia’s approach to border control, we should see West Papuan asylum seekers in the context of border control policy and not only as a problem in Australia’s relationship with Indonesia.
Labour Lines and Colonial Power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Labour Mobility in Australia
Labour Lines and Colonial Power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Labour Mobility in Australia, 2019
Since 1979, Jon has worked as an economic anthropologist with Kuninjku-speaking people in western Arnhem Land, looking at economic transformations in situations in which there are limited formal labour markets. Much of his research has focused on Indigenous employment issues nationally and, especially, the workings of Indigenous specific programs like the now defunct Community Development Employment Projects scheme. Tracey Banivanua Mar was a historian of colonialism and a Pacific Islander scholar of Fijian (Lauan) as well as Chinese and British descent. Tracey's research interests included colonial and transnational indigenous histories with a concentration on Australia and the western Pacific. She published widely on race relations and the dynamics of violence in Queensland's sugar districts during the era of the Queensland-Pacific indentured labour trade, and nineteenth-century histories of Australian South Sea Islanders. At the time of her death in 2017, she was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow (2014-15), working on two ARC projects examining the myriad strategies and interconnected networks established by indigenous peoples during the nineteenth century as they negotiated the effects of colonialism. Lucy Davies completed her PhD at La Trobe University in 2018. Her thesis examined how Papuans' and New Guineans' travels shaped Australia's administration of Papua and New Guinea from the beginning of the twentieth century to independence. In 2012, she was a National Archives of Australia/Australian Historical Association postgraduate LABOuR LINES AND COLONIAL POWER xii scholar and, in 2014, a National Library of Australia summer scholar. Her honours thesis examined the regulated trade of Papuan and New Guinean domestic workers to Australia in the mid-twentieth century. Ruth (Lute) Faleolo is a PhD candidate with the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre and Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland. As a New Zealand-born Tongan and Pasifika academic, she has a passion for the empowerment of indigenous and migrant communities through social, economic and cultural development. Ruth has a background in both education and social sciences qualitative research. Her PhD research focuses on the wellbeing of trans-Tasman Pasifika migrants of Samoan and Tongan descent in Auckland and Brisbane. Her research seeks to capture the voices, perceptions and experiences of these migrants using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates indigenous research methods. Daniel Guinness is an anthropologist interested in the changing social relations and performances of masculinities in the context of globalised neoliberal labour markets, particularly those involving sporting migration. He has undertaken ethnographic field research in Fiji, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and France. His postdoctoral research was funded through the European Research Council as part of the project 'Globalization, Sport and the Precarity of Masculinity', and was undertaken at the University of Amsterdam.
In the past decade, conflicts have forced millions of people out of their homes. Ordinary people with ordinary lives, like me and you, have been forced to leave everything they once knew behind in the hope of finding a new safe country they can call home. Asylum seekers are so desperate at times, that they have even had to make the tough decision by getting on a boat to the nearest safe country – risking their lives, and in some cases that of their children. In the European context the nearest safe country may be Greece or Italy, but in other regions, Australia seems the nearest safe haven. Australia has signed and ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention, thereby agreeing to respect the rights and obligations that flow from this document. After all, a fundamental principle of treaty law is the proposition that treaties are binding upon the parties to them and must be performed in good faith (pacta sunt servanda). The reality, however, seems in strong contrast with this principle, as asylum seekers who have tried to reach Australia’s shores have been detained in offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island (Papua New Guinea). Under the notorious turnback policy, some boats have even been turned back, which has led to many deaths. Australia has continuously maintained that its policies are in line with international law, but is this true? And what happens when a state does not fulfil its obligations under international law? This thesis critically analyses whether Australia’s immigration policies are in line with international law, and if not, who can be held responsible. The thesis goes into both international human rights law (chapter 3), public international law (chapter 4) and international criminal law (chapter 5). The originality strength of the thesis lies in its attempt, not only to qualify the facts as human rights violations and/or international crimes but to also attempt at establishing responsibility. Supervision and grading (8.5/10) by Professor C.I. Fournet
New Zealand's 'overstaying Islander' : a construct of the ideology of 'race' and immigration
2021
This thesis examines the development of a 'race ' /immigration ideology within New Zealand and attempts to explore the processes through which this ideology has expressed and reproduced itself in New Zealand's past. In order to determine this process, this thesis analyses , as a case study, the causes , patterns and consequences of the politicisation of Pacific Island immigrants in New Zealand during the 1970s. Pacific Island immigrants were negatively categorised according to traditional New Zealand beliefs about 'race' and the immigration of ' alien' peoples, and the stereotypes that arose out of this process justified racist immigration campaigns in the 1970s. The targeting of Pacific Island migrants through these immigration campaigns, and the deliberate scapegoating of Pacific Islanders in the 1975 general election, compounded and entrenched existing negative stereotypes thereby This 1. 2. 3. 4.
The Changing Political Economy of Australian Immigration
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 2006
Immigration has been a significant and controversial part of Australian history since 1947, but the nature and composition of Australian immigration and the policies and philosophies of immigrant settlement have changed considerably over that time, particularly in the last few decades of globalisation. The aim of this paper is to assess the changing political economy of Australian immigration in two senses. First, the paper presents an overview of the major changes to the dynamics of the Australian immigration experience that have accompanied globalisation. Second, the paper investigates how the political economy of Australian immigration developed in the 1970s differs from a political economy of contemporary Australian immigration. The paper argues that the traditional political economy emphasis on immigration as providing a reserve army of unskilled migrant labour must be replaced by a version of political economy that not only includes labour across all permanent and temporary categories but that also has a stronger focus on immigrant settlement and migrant lives, including debates about national identity. In order to do this, the paper argues, it is important for traditional political economy to draw on new sensibilities and insights about the contemporary immigration experience that emerge from interdisciplinary insights drawn from disciplines outside the traditional political economy foundations.
The state and the welfare of immigrants in Australia
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1989
Post-war immigration to Australia has been accompanied by two processes associated with the development of Australian capitalism -the urbanisation process and the "proletarianisation" of the immigrant population. These processes brought with them major social problems and the potential for social conflict. The welfare system provided a means to control the immigrant population, which failed to assimilate effectively into Australian society, as had been expected by the immigration planners of the 1940s. The government policies shifted from "assimilationism", to "integrationism" and then on to "multiculturalism" and most recently, "mainstreaming". In each case the basic economic contradictions of Australian society provide the context for welfare policies directed towards ethnic minorities.