Abstract
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’.
Keywords
Introduction
Links between the mobility of international students and flows of skilled migration have affected both policy development and ‘cultures of migration’ (Kandel and Massey, 2002; Massey et al., 1998) across most OECD countries over the last decade. Many countries, including Australia, US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, France and Germany, have at different times offered pathways to permanent or temporary-skilled migration for foreign students graduating from their universities. This has largely been driven by the twin desires of nation-states to obtain highly skilled and locally trained foreign labour and to attract more of the lucrative international student market by offering post-study migration options (Gribble and Blackmore, 2012; Robertson, 2013).
What we term the ‘education–migration nexus’ is just a single iteration of policy within a larger framework of the increasingly neoliberal governance of immigration globally. These changing patterns of governance have occurred in the context of rapidly ageing populations and skills shortages in key areas in the labour markets of many receiving countries. Migration paradigms in these countries are generally shifting, to different extents, from permanent settlement and family reunion to the creation of flexible migrant labour forces targeted to fill specific skills gaps in the national economy. This requires immigration regimes that screen and select applicants on the basis of their ability to both rapidly integrate into the labour market and to create minimal burden on state-sponsored social services. Points systems, which are used in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, effectively rank prospective migrants according to characteristics that quantify their desirability as workers. This is, in essence, a biopolitical project, in the Foucauldian sense of techniques of governmentality that seek to control population and subjugate bodies (Foucault, 1978, 1997). Foucault conceives of governmentality as a modern form of multifaceted state power, in which the central object of this new form of power is the population. It is concerned with the optimization of the population in terms of its health, prosperity and efficiency. The points system facilitates this ‘optimization’ through the construction of ‘desirable’ migrant characteristics including skills and qualifications, but also language ability, cultural adaptability and biological factors such as age and health. The education–migration nexus developed because international graduates of local universities are often seen to fit the neoliberal model of the ‘desirable worker’ or even ‘designer migrant’. They are young, proficient in the local language, locally qualified and presumably already socially and culturally adjusted due to their period of residence as students (Hawthorne, 2009; Migration Policy Group, 2012; Ziguras and Law, 2006). As a result, education–migration nexus policies allow students to transition into the host country labour market after graduation as skilled migrants.
Australia provides a particularly significant case study of the ‘education–migration nexus’. It has the highest proportional rate of international students across all OECD countries—one in every five post-secondary students enrolled in Australia is an international student (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011). Student numbers showed strong growth from the late 1990s—there were 50,000 international students in Australia in 1991, compared to almost 500,000 in 2010 (Waters, 2011). Growth reached a peak in 2008–2009, however, which was followed by a sharp decline over the next four years. This decline was related to the Global Financial Crisis, and the relative strength of the Australian dollar, but also to changes to migration policies that decreased student demand. China and India remain the dominant source countries for international students, with about 20% of students from China and 12% from India (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011). Visa applications for higher education courses made up nearly half of all applications in 2010–2011, while more than a quarter were for the Vocational Education and Training sector (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011).
Globally, Australia has also been very much at the forefront of developing migration policy that allows the transition from international student to skilled migrant (Gribble and Blackmore, 2012). Australia provided some of the most liberal ‘student-switching’ (McLaughlan and Salt, 2002) policies between 1998 and 2010, allowing many former students to apply for permanent residency while remaining onshore, using the points system to grant Australian qualified applicants extra points. By 2002–2003, more than half of all successful skilled applicants for Australian permanent residency held Australia university qualifications (Hugo, 2004; Koleth, 2010), and a total of 62,175 international students remained in Australia through student-migrant pathways between 2005 and 2008 (Access Economics, 2009). This represented around 20% of all economic migrants. Research also found that permanent residency became not only a key outcome but also a key motivation for many international students who undertook study in Australia. Surveys of graduates during the heyday of the nexus revealed that 65% of international students intended to apply for permanent resident status (Tilbrook, 2007).
Education–migration nexus policies in Australia had, however, several unintended impacts on both the labour market and the education industry. The labour market integration of former students was less than successful, particularly when it came to graduates of vocational training courses (see, for example, Birrell, 2006; Birrell et al., 2007; Christopher and Hayes, 2008). In response to student demand for courses that would yield a migration outcome, privately owned Registered Training Organizations also began to offer cheap and low-quality programs, particularly in the vocational fields on government ‘in-demand’ lists. Becoming known as ‘PR factories’, a number of organizations in this segment of the education industry became embroiled in migration-related corruption scandals (Das, 2009a, 2009b; Pollock, 2009; Simons, 2010). These issues, along with concerns about student welfare, contributed to various reviews of the governance of international education and migration and subsequent shifts in policy. The most prominent of these reviews, at the federal level, were the Senate Inquiry into the Welfare of International Students (2009), the Baird Review of the International Education Sector (2009–2010) and the Knight Review of the Student Visa System (2011).
As a result, considerable policy shift occurred from 2007, significantly narrowing the number of occupations that would provide migration points and extending waiting periods for many students who had applied for PR. Changes to the skilled migration program in 2010 favoured employer-sponsored migrants, whereas most student-migrants had previously gained PR through independent categories, and the points-test was also reformed to emphasize high-level qualifications and work experience. These changes had dramatic effects on those already on education-migration pathways. For example, while in 2006, an international student with a two-year vocational qualification in aged care or hairdressing would have had a very good chance of immediately gaining PR, these avenues were largely cut off after the 2007–2010 changes. While a detailed analysis of policy is beyond the scope of this paper, 1 we argue fundamentally that this policy environment constructed student-migration as a new type of migration pathway, and subsequently, a new type of migrant experience in Australia.
There are three main aspects of the student-migrant experience across the 2000s that set it apart from previous waves of settler migration and from other streams of the skilled migration program in Australia. First, it involved migrants spending significant time on temporary visas before PR could be achieved. The range of temporary visas student-migrants passed through included initial student visas, bridging visas while PR applications were processed and 18-month temporary graduate work visas, which were introduced in 2007. Second, throughout the 2000s, student-migration pathways were subject to rapid policy change. With points requirements often shifting and the lists of official ‘occupations on demand’ 2 also subject to change, student-migrants often found their ability to obtain PR would shift, even if their chances had seemed assured when they initially arrived in Australia. Third, for the first time since the beginning of Australia’s mass migration programs in the 1940s, the majority of those applying for permanent migration were applying from onshore, and many had been temporary residents for several years. This changed the ways PR decisions impacted on migrants’ lives in various ways. As such, this paper uses a qualitative exploration of student-migrant narratives to understand how they navigate the education–migration nexus as a specific kind of migration pathway, characterized by a ‘staggered’ journey towards permanence. It is beyond the scope of this paper to focus on the student-migrant journey in its entirety. Instead, it focuses in particular on the decision-making of migrants and lives of student-migrants mostly after graduation, when the shift from student to migrant occurs.
The paper first discusses how the experience of the nexus can be conceptualized in terms of contemporary theories of migration, particularly around ideas of precariousness, the transnational family and capital accumulation. We then discuss the methods employed in the research, before addressing the experiences of student-migrants across several key themes. We first look at how student-migrants experience precariousness and uncertainty as ‘living in limbo’. We then address how this impacts on their employment and on their relationships as members of transnational families. Finally, we address how student-migrants try to exercise agency under the constraints of nexus policy, and how they attempt to reframe precariousness and uncertainty to have positive outcomes for their goals and plans.
Lives in limbo: Conceptualizing the student-migrant experience
Migration is a process that involves interactions between the migrant as an agent who desires to be mobile and the immigration regime that acts as a gatekeeper of entrance to and membership of the state. The immigration regime sets up the criteria that migrants must meet for entrance and belonging. Entrance can be granted with the right to permanency and full membership, or, as is the case with student-migrants, the right to permanency and full membership may occur only after an extended period of temporary residency and be contingent on the migrant meeting various criteria. We primarily argue here that the migration journeys created by the education–migration nexus are ‘staggered’ migration processes, characterized by multiple ‘gates’ (Hammar, 1990) of membership that migrants must pass through to enter the nation-state. Under the neoliberal framework of the education–migration nexus, student-migrants must use their time with temporary status to ‘earn’ the right to stay permanently, by conforming to shifting state norms about desirable migrants.
This staggered entrance into the nation-state means student-migrants exist for extended periods in various states of insecurity. They are socially insecure both in the sense that they do not have certainty about their future, and in the sense they do not, for extended periods, have access to the social support provided by the state to permanent residents and citizens. They are also legally insecure because they are deportable. Unlike traditional ‘settler’ migrants, they can spend significant periods of time in a state of uncertainty in which minor breaches of state policy can render them deportable. The inability to conform to state requirements of migrant desirability (which can shift frequently and without warning) can also render them unable to move on to the next ‘step’ on their migration journey and therefore unable to stay legally in Australia. This is what Goldring and Landolt (2011) describe as ‘precarity’—state processes in which ‘complex institutional and geographic pathways’ leave migrants vulnerable to increasingly long periods of time in which they must navigate ‘insecure migratory legal status’ (2011: 327).
Student-migrants thus occupy, for increasingly extended periods, the interstitial position of being legally resident but not legally considered to be migrants. This is a space in which they have to ‘prove’ their right to belong through the accruement of various types of capital and the performance of a particular kind of migrant subjectivity. At the same time, while living with ‘precarity’, student-migrants are still engaged with the same processes of settlement as other migrants: building networks, making friends, working, paying taxes and starting to feel at home. But the fact that they are not legally actual migrants until they achieve PR is ever present. This process of staggered entrance creates extended periods of precariousness for student-migrants and makes their experiences of migration temporally and legally distinct from the ‘settler-migrant’ experience more common historically in Australia and other settler nations.
Many scholars have noted how macro-level state and institutional forces impact directly on migrants’ practices and identities. Ong (1999), for example, notes that everyday transnational practices need to be considered as embedded in specific frameworks of power. In addition, Smith (2003: 4) notes that ‘politically constructed state policies, legitimating discourses and institutional practices are key elements through which transnational social formations are being constituted as migrant networks interact with state-centred actors’. This article is largely concerned with how the regulatory effects of the education–migration nexus ‘shape people’s motivations, desires and struggles and make them particular kinds of subjects in the world’ (Ong, 1999: 5–6). In particular, we seek to understand precisely how such regulation impacts on the lives and practices of individuals, as they negotiate their precarious status and attempt to accumulate the capital that will lead to positive migration and life outcomes for themselves and for their families.
Methodology
Migration researchers have argued for the value of qualitative understandings of migrant agency (Mountz et al., 2002). In line with this, the data from this paper was gleaned from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 35 student-migrants living in Australia from various source countries, namely, China, India, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Colombia, France and USA. All participants were seeking or had already recently gained PR through student-migrant pathways between 2006 and 2010. Nineteen were females and 16 were males. Twenty-three had Australian university qualifications, while 12 had vocational qualifications. The interviews were generally conducted as informal conversations; as an invitation to provide a narrative. The interviews were recorded and transcribed, and coding for themes was conducted with the assistance of qualitative analysis computer software. Pseudonyms for participants are used throughout this article. The objective of this approach is not to generate findings, which can be directly applied to other contexts but to obtain a detailed snapshot of the circumstances of this group of student-migrants who were at varying stages of their education-migration journey in Australia during a period when education-migration policy was in a significant state of flux. However, we posit that the examination of this case study sheds light onto new ways of understanding diverse migrant experiences, with particular resonance towards other kinds of temporary and staggered migration processes.
Findings
Lives in limbo
One of the most prominent findings in the data was that the stress borne of uncertain migration outcomes was a very significant aspect of the student-migrant experience. This has been reflected to some extent in some of the earlier literature on student migration (Baas, 2010; Robertson, 2013) and certainly in previous studies of other forms of staggered-migration processes. High levels of stress and anxiety can be inherent in the wait for residency to be approved, which is often exacerbated by the fact that migrants are trying to settle into the host country and establish a life without knowing if their stay will be permanent or temporary (George and Ramkissoon, 1998). Student-migrants have usually been residing in the country for several years while studying and have to an extent already established themselves and put down roots. As such, their anxiety is also related to the thought of having to uproot themselves and start again in their country of origin.
Many participants already felt ‘settled’ in Australia after several years on student and temporary visas, and most had also invested a significant amount of time and money into the education-migration journey. As such, the uncertainty of whether they could ultimately stay or may have to return to their countries of origin-engendered significant levels of anxiety. The anxieties surrounding these uncertainties are clearly articulated by Rafael: That was the most unsettling thing. It was just the fear of having my life broken up and not knowing whether things would continue as they were and having to deal with the reality of going back to a country where I personally don’t feel that I belong to anyway to a situation that I’m unfamiliar with because I hadn’t been back to the country in six years. It was just too much to deal with. I couldn’t deal with it.
Another prominent aspect of ‘living in limbo’ was the nature of the relationship between the student-migrants and the Australian immigration regime and their shifting understandings of risk. The student-migrants we encountered seldom had a nuanced perception of the risks of embarking on education-migration pathways, particularly prior to their arrival in Australia. While the Australian government did not explicitly guarantee a migration outcome for international students, most student-migrants initially felt certain that, if they met requirements, they would be successful in gaining PR. Although most institutions at the higher end of the market, such as major universities, did not market courses directly to students on the basis of migration outcomes, smaller providers, particularly in the vocational sector, often used ‘PR pathways’ as a marketing tool. Students’ expectations about achieving migration and work outcomes when they decided to come to Australia were often largely framed through information from education and migration agents, both in Australia and in their home countries, from the success stories of peers, and occasionally from implicit or explicit marketing from educational providers. They began their journeys with a sense, however, intangible, of a ‘contract’ between themselves and the state, in that if they contributed money for their education and qualified with skills positioned as ‘in-demand’ in Australia, they believed that they more or less had a guarantee of achieving PR. The sense of shock most student-migrants felt at the policy changes is a testament to this constructed sense of contract.
Once in Australia, frequent changes to the points test and to the list of qualifications and occupations that made students eligible for permanent immigration meant that the regime became characterized as the source of a great deal of migrants’ fear and anxiety. This often manifested itself as anger or frustration with the immigration process and a deep sense of disillusionment and distrust of the government. For example, Rajesh’s view was that ‘the government is using a cheeky way to get the students’ money; we are not trusting anymore the Australian system’. Many felt that the requests made by the government were unreasonable: ‘It’s just stupid things where, you know—asking you to sit an English test. What the hell is that for? I’ve been here for how long. And I have two degrees. Like that’s kind of insulting in a way’ (Rahti). This distrust ran very deep for most student-migrants. Some were concerned that even permanent resident status would not be safe in the future, which led them to consider citizenship as their ultimate goal to ‘secure’ their status in Australia.
The sense of ‘living in limbo’ that is inherent in the waiting times and temporary statuses created by the education–migration nexus keeps student-migrants in prolonged states of anxiety and constructs them as outsiders on several levels. It limits their ability to commit and engage on the level of their personal social relationships and identities, but also impacts on their relationship to the state: one that was almost universally characterized by distrust, frustration and fear.
Navigating the labour market
Having temporary status, whether a bridging visa or a temporary graduate visa, also made finding satisfactory employment very difficult for student-migrants, despite their qualifications. Temporary graduate visas were introduced by the government in September 2007, in the wake of new work experience requirements needed for students to gain points from the Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL). These visas were a means to facilitate a better transition for student-migrants into the labour market, providing them with 18 months of temporary residency with full work rights to gain the English skills and the work experience that many now needed to obtain PR. However, the vast majority of our participants found that employers were not keen to hire staff with temporary visas, despite the fact that they had full legal work rights. Employers and recruiters told them time and time again that they simply would not be considered for jobs because of their visa status. Not having access to more highly paid positions or internal promotions were other constraints of temporary visas for those that did manage to find employment in their field.
Most participants, both those on temporary visas and those who had recently gained PR, were significantly under-employed. Hannah, for example, who had a Masters in Accounting and many years of work experience in large corporate firms in China, was working casually as a bookkeeper in a small business. Hualing, an experienced high school teacher who had a Masters of Education, was working part-time as a Chinese language tutor in a private language school. Others were reduced to taking on unskilled and low-wage positions simply to survive financially. The following stories reveal how the class identities and social positionings of student-migrants were challenged by having to take on unskilled work as skilled graduates: I was working at a nursery because I couldn’t get an engineering job … [It was] mind numbing … I was just packing plants or some s*** and I just decided I can’t do it and I just can’t, I can’t keep doing this … I don’t want to end up age sixty-five serving lollies, burgers or driving a taxi and being an engineer and qualified with experience, no f*** that. (Jaime) In my country I had a driver, a few vehicles, a secretary and here I am working as a personal care assistant in health care. (Ashwin)
Our other main argument around employment and capital accumulation is around the context dependency of capital and the radically different values ascribed to student-migrants’ skills and qualifications across home and host contexts. Most participants had originally undertaken the education-migration journey as a means to accumulate more flexible capital in a global labour market, believing that an Australian qualification, work experience and permanent residency would allow them greater flexibility and transnational mobility in their future lives. These desires generally reflect the literature on the link between international education, migration and capital accumulation (Dustmann and Weiss, 2007; Ong, 1999; Waters, 2006). However, as their journeys progressed, student-migrants often found that the ability of their qualifications to get them the requisite number of immigration points had to be weighed against the actual value of their skills in both the Australian local labour context and the context of their home country, in case they have to return.
A minority of participants, usually those who had completed university rather than vocational courses, did see their Australian education and experiences as capital that could transfer to their advantage if they returned home. Tina, for example, who studied a business degree, stated ‘people like us who’ve got some foreign experiences in foreign companies—that will be very valuable in China’. These participants saw that their skills could actually be more valued ‘back home’ than in Australia. For these migrants, the quest for residency was more about the opportunity to gain valuable overseas work experience or to increase their family’s migration options for lifestyle reasons. As Hannah noted, ‘Actually I could get a much better job in China than here. China is better for work, here is better for life’.
In contrast to this, however, a larger number of participants believed that the qualifications and skills obtained would be of limited value in the home country in terms of finding secure and well-paid employment. This was particularly the case for those who had done vocational qualifications like cookery, hairdressing or community welfare, solely for the purposes of gaining migration points. Rajesh pointed this out: ‘The community welfare [qualification] is only for Australia: there is no need for it in our country’. Even some participants who had completed postgraduate level professional qualifications in fields such as engineering and education lamented the fact that the professional context and skills required were vastly different in Australia compared to their home countries, meaning that if they had to return, labour market reintegration would be a significant challenge.
Thus, although notions of social capital in the context of education/immigration are valuable (Waters, 2006), it is critical to highlight that social capital works differently in different contexts and that the accumulation of transferable capital can be complex. While the social capital being acquired by student-migrants may be valuable for migration purposes or job prospects in Australia, it may not be useful back in the home country. For the most part, desires for flexible accumulation of capital remained unrealized for the majority of participants, who began to understand during their staggered migration journeys that their value as labour capital was very much context-dependent. Australian migration policy made specific trade and care qualifications temporarily desirable to the state. This, however, ultimately limited student-migrants from joining the class of elite and mobile migrant workers who could move seamlessly between different national contexts—the kind of migrant class described, for example, in work by Ong (1999, 2006), Beaverstock (2002) and Colic-Peisker (2010). International students are often described as ‘semi-finished human capital’ (Khadria, 2001; Majumdar, 1994), but the policies that directed students into narrow training paths for migration points often left their potential as mobile capital unrealized. Student-migrants were instead stuck somewhere in between the two class extremes of the transnationally mobile: the disenfranchized low-skilled wage labourers and the globetrotting professional elites.
The literature on the outcomes of international education does reflect our participants’ experiences to some extent, in the sense that experiences of capital transfer across borders are mixed. Although many international student returnees have enjoyed access to greater employment opportunities and increased pay (Cannon, 2000; Demir et al., 2000; Wieers-Jenssen, 2008), knowledge learned overseas is not always directly applicable to situations in home countries (Cannon, 2000; Johnsrud, 1993; Robertson et al., 2011). Yet, these studies usually only take into account students who return to their countries of origin. For student-migrants, the balance of capital accumulation is made more complex because of the uncertainty over whether they will stay or return. It is difficult for them to ascertain what the best choices are. This is because migration capital (in the forms of qualifications that provide immigration points) is entirely mutable in the face of rapid and often unexpected policy change, and labour market capital (in the form of both qualifications and skills gained from working and studying in Australia) can have different value in the different contexts of stay or return.
Investment and obligations within the transnational family
International students are most often studied as individuals, and their acculturation and adaptation are studied in terms of their individual experiences as young and often single people (see, for example, Baas, 2010; Kell and Vogl, 2008; Sawir et al., 2008). What these approaches have overlooked, however, is first that many younger student-migrants are migrating as part of a longer-term family strategy for mobility, and second that many older student-migrants, particularly those undertaking postgraduate qualifications, often have spouses or children, either with them in Australia or in the home country. Student migration understood through the framework of the transnational family brings to the fore the ways that families consider migration of individual family members as a collective strategy for the economic or social advancement of the family as a whole (Yeoh et al., 2005).
The participants we interviewed spanned varied ‘types’ of transnational family formation. Some of our participants typified the ‘split household’ model. Several of the Chinese women in the group had left their children and husbands in China while they completed their masters or doctoral degrees in Australia. Some of the young Indian and Bangladeshi men had returned home to marry, but left their new wives living with their extended families when they came back to Australia. Once these student-migrants achieved residency, they planned to have their families join them. Increased waiting times and policy changes were particularly distressing for these migrants, because they meant more time away from their spouses and children. They also worried about the ultimate arrival of their families, including how their children would adapt and whether their partners could find work. Shanshan was concerned about becoming the sole breadwinner when her husband and son joined her, given that her husband did not speak much English. Tariq’s wife had never been outside of Bangladesh before, and he was concerned she would struggle and feel isolated without her family. Tina had been a newlywed when she left her husband in China to pursue PR and was worried about the impact of the long waiting times on her marriage: We have been separated for one and a half year. If we have to be separated another one year, I think there are really some problems. That something will happen … Because we are so young and we do not have some basis, of being together in the same place.
Other student-migrants with families had brought their spouses and children with them while studying, but this also added additional stress to the wait and the uncertainty around residency. Sunee’s two young daughters, for example, had completed four years of schooling in Australia while their mother completed her PhD, and Sunee had been concerned about how they would adapt back into the Thai school system if her residency application was unsuccessful. Gayesh, who was interviewed when the civil war in Sri Lanka was still raging, was anxious about the possibility of having to take his young children back to such a politically unstable environment if his residency application failed.
The younger group of student-migrants who did not have spouses or children, however, also positioned their family back in the home country in as an integral part of their staggered migration process. With permanent residency often sought out as a collective objective of the transnational family, parents or extended family had often provided financial support for the myriad costs of the education-migration journey: course fees, the costs of migration agents and of the PR application itself and often also living expenses when participants had difficulty finding sufficient work. Nuclear and extended families had also often sacrificed ‘in kind’ for the education-migration project as an undertaking of the transnational family. In the split-household families, for example, grandparents had often taken on child-rearing responsibilities, and several participants also spoke of the increased burden on their siblings and in-laws in caring for their elderly parents in their absence. Families were expecting a return on their various financial and care investments in the education-migration strategy in terms of eventual increased earning capacity of the student-migrant family member in Australia or opportunities for family migration once residency was achieved. When these outcomes were not forthcoming or became increasingly delayed and uncertain by policy changes, the relationship between the student-migrant and their family overseas often became strained. The anxieties of ‘living in limbo’ were therefore often intensified through obligations and expectations within the transnational family.
Student-migrants and their families reflect the current literature on transnational families in the sense that the strategic adoption of a transnational structure and form by families is closely linked to economic objectives as well as social mobility and reproduction (Yeoh et al., 2005). However, when it comes to experiences of waiting in limbo and dealing with uncertainty in their lives, many student-migrants explained that they cannot talk about the reality of their daily lives to their family back in the home country. Karinne pointed out, ‘My parents think it’s simple. Because I don’t want to worry them I am evasive’. Other realities of student-migrants’ lives, such as the jobs that they do while waiting for residency, are also sometimes kept hidden from the families. Ashwin felt the need to keep such aspects of his life hidden because his mother would be ‘shattered’ to learn the truth about his unskilled employment. This indicates that in some cases, the burden of uncertainty is faced alone by the student-migrant, without the support of transnational families who are not fully aware of the situation.
Reframing limbo and exercising agency
Despite the many challenges and impediments faced by student-migrants, the importance of individual agency and developing coping strategies was a very clear theme in participants’ narratives. First, student-migrants exercised their agency through the constant adaptation of their pathways and choices in order to keep up with policy change. Participants were often strategic in the type of course they chose and were also willing to change courses in response to changes to the government’s priority occupations lists. Students whose attempts to achieve migration through education pathways were entirely thwarted often looked to alternative pathways to residency, such as applying for partner visas if their partners or spouses had PR or were more likely to gain PR. A few participants were even considering submitting fraudulent partner visa applications or undergoing ‘marriages of convenience’ in order to achieve their migration outcomes.
Despite often feeling subject to the whims of the immigration regime, student-migrants also exercised strategic agency in their dealings with governmental processes, finding ways around bureaucratic or legal hurdles. This was often achieved through the hiring of migration agents and lawyers by educating themselves on their options or by relying on the advice and experiences of other student-migrants in their social circle.
The most common strategy, however, particularly in dealing with the status of being ‘in limbo’ was for participants to come to a level of acceptance about their precariousness; consider how best to use the waiting period and devise plans for if their residency outcomes were not achieved. Periods of high anxiety about residency outcomes usually preceded the acceptance phase. Manisha, for example, recounted her initial distress when she found out that hospitality had been taken off the skills list, and she would not be eligible for PR unless she got employer sponsorship, ‘when I found out I hit this brick wall; I just kept thinking oh my God, what do I do now. I was really depressed’. Like many others, however, Manisha dealt with her disappointment by repositioning herself towards her problems and developing a resilient attitude, ‘it didn’t happen, life moves on; you can’t wallow for long. There are bigger problems out there’. She also began to take steps towards finding employer sponsorship, by speaking to the hotel where she was on work placement about developing a career path that could lead to sponsorship eligibility.
Although the uncertainty of residency outcomes remained an ongoing concern, once participants came to a level of acceptance about an extended phase of uncertainty, the lengthy waiting time was often reframed as an opportunity to explore other paths to residency or to gain work and life experience. In this context of uncertainty, student-migrants also reposition themselves in relation to their initial goals of residency. The focus is on transforming the period of being in limbo into something valuable. Emma explained, ‘We’ll work and save as much money as we can. Afterwards what happens, happens’. Robbie also pointed out, ‘It’s like the delay is good in a way; [it] buys me some time’. The ability to perceive the positive side of waiting in limbo demonstrates the high adaptability of student migrants to changing conditions. This again demonstrates their ‘middling’ experience, in that although they are negatively impacted by precariousness, they still perceive themselves as having resources and options to gain value from the experience. Kavi, for example, intended to work and save while his fiancée enrolled in her masters degree in Australia. As he explained, ‘we will be developing ourselves in these two years; so you are not really just sitting and waiting for nothing’. Optimism that their efforts and sacrifices will eventually pay off was a recurrent theme. None of the migrants we interviewed had genuinely considered giving up their journey to residency, although many had friends who had given up and returned home. As Manisha remarked, ‘It’s not gonna happen now but I’ve got all this time; it does help that the longer you are in the country, the better your chances are’.
Despite their often limited resources, these student-migrants’ experiences are in many ways situated within Ong’s (1999: 6) framework of flexible citizenship where it is ‘the cultural logic of capitalist accumulation, travel and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions’. The response of student-migrants to new conditions of uncertainty can be understood within that framework, despite the financial, social and identity costs described earlier. Ong’s (1999) notion that responses to changing conditions are formed within socially constructed meanings may help in understanding this way of coping as being the result of a particular structure of meaning-making. For instance, stories about friends who had succeeded in getting residency or support from migration agents and lawyers may engender such constructions.
Conclusions
The main findings discussed in this paper relate to the experiences of precariousness in staggered-migration processes and the subsequent impact on migrants’ lives, work, agency and positioning within the transnational family. Since 1999, Australia has experimented with various policies that allow international students to apply for migration when they complete their education. While policies initially facilitated a relatively easy transition from student to migrant, subsequent policy changes meant that students who aspire to become migrants have faced increased periods of waiting and uncertainty as visa-processing times have increased, and the ‘points system’ used to assess skilled migrants has changed frequently. This has left significant numbers of would-be migrants on temporary visas for extended periods of time, and some uncertain whether their goal of permanent residency will ever be achieved. This paper thus argues that the ever-evolving ‘policy experimentation’ (Hawthorne, 2010) with education-migration pathways has led to a staggered form of entrance into Australia for student-migrants, who can spend many years on a series of temporary student, graduate and bridging visas as they work towards their ultimate goal of permanent residency. While there has been a significant amount of literature on the limitations of the policy in fulfilling its intentions of bringing highly skilled, socially acculturated and English-speaking migrants into areas of skills shortage in the labour market (Birrell, 2006; Birrell and Rapson, 2005; Birrell et al., 2007), there has been little research that delves into how this staggered-migration process actually impacts on the migrants themselves, and how they manage the waiting and uncertainty that are inherent in the process. This article has used student-migrants’ narratives to show that the state’s quest for the accumulation of human capital often comes into conflict with migrants’ own desires for migration, education and work outcomes. State policy is dynamic and constantly recasts the attributes potential migrants need to have. In Australia, this created a context in which uncertainty and uncertainty became key characteristics of the education-migration pathway.
Several key themes were uncovered in the interview data. The first is that the staggered and uncertain migration process has significant impacts on the lived experience of individuals. The state of limbo unsurprisingly produces a high degree of stress and anxiety, resentment and fear of the immigration regime and has financial and interpersonal impacts on the transnational family. The second significant finding is that these migrants sit somewhere in between disenfranchized transnational wage labourers and elite ‘flexible citizens’. Although they are often highly educated and from the upper classes in the home country, once in Australia, as workers, they suffer from under-employment and often work in low-skilled jobs. In essence, student-migrants are ‘middling transnationals’ (Yeoh et al., 2003): they are driven by desires to be flexible and to become mobile knowledge workers but they do not always have the resources to achieve these goals. Various financial and visa constraints often force them into a labour market position that does not reflect their qualifications, experiences or aspirations.
Finally, following Ong (1999), this paper has also attempted to unravel the cultural logics of the agency of individual migrants, in examining how their desires for mobility respond to the broader political processes that enable and constrain their ability to achieve their goals. It has shown how student-migrants, despite positions of vulnerability, find ways to strategize and cope as their desires for mobility, flexibility and capital interact with the desires of the state. These findings are significant because along with student-migrants, other forms of temporary labour migration are increasing rapidly in Australia, as well as other countries that have historically championed a ‘settler-citizen’ migration paradigm, such as Canada and New Zealand. These student-migrants’ experiences of agency and uncertainty within a framework of precariousness thus provide some insight into how new forms of temporariness may be transforming migrant experience.