Australia's New Migrants

International Students’ History of Affective Encounters with the Border

Maria Elena Indelicato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472480484
• eBook ISBN: 9781317177241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Émigration et immigration

This book offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of the tropes employed in the categorization of international students living and studying in Australia. Establishing the position of migrant students as 'subjects of the border', the author employs various models of emotion in an analysis of the ways in which public debates on migration and education in Australia have problematised international students as an object of national compassion or resentment in relation to other national concerns at the time, such as the country's place in the Asia-Pacific region, the integrity of its borders and the relative competitiveness of its economy.

Applying an innovative methodology, which combines the breadth of a diachronic study with the depth afforded by the close analysis of a diverse range of case studies – including the protests staged by Indian international students against a spate of violent attacks, which led to their labelling as 'soft targets' in national discourses – Australia's New Migrants constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which emotions shape national collectives' orientation towards others. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and education with interests in migration, race and emotion.

1 Becoming ‘illegal’

Compassion, multicultural love and resentment¹

I emphasise that Australia is in a precarious position by reason of the fact that as a white people we are surrounded by Asiatics. Therefore, we must increase our population as quickly as possible. I believe that if we fail to increase our population to the maximum within the next twenty years we shall lose this country altogether … It is our duty to welcome migrants and to educate them to the Australian way of life so that, should the necessity arise, they will be prepared to fight alongside us. We must get the best people of the world to migrate to this country.

(Grant cited in Stratton 2009b: 2, emphasis added)

To be ‘surrounded’ conveys a spatialised and temporalised feeling of vulnerability. As a nation, it amounts to being enclosed in a space with no alternative but to fight to survive. It conjures a threat that is as pressing as yet to come: if we fail to fight back in the present, the nation will be lost in the future.² The feeling of vulnerability is amplified by the qualitative and quantitative specification of the threat: ‘a white people’ against many ‘Asiatics’. To be one people against many others homogeneously marked as different further accrues a feeling of isolation that can only be countered by multiplication: to become more and the same. Migrants must then be sought, welcomed into the nation and made to become ‘a white people’ by means of education to ‘a white people’s way of life’. Yet this act of inclusion is not open to all migrants. Some are pre-emptively designated as the best people to include, while others – those marked as ‘Asiatics’ for instance – are excluded from taking the nation as an object of racial identification and pride. For those who are excluded, only one position is left: that of an enemy that must be contained, if not defeated. The border is thus construed as an important site to contain the threat of the other, to manage migration so that one people remain the same, untainted by threatening differences. To protect the border is to protect the nation. To protect the nation is to preserve racial homogeneity. Nevertheless, Senator Grant delivered this speech in 1949, only one year before Australia opened its border to those same ‘Asiatics’ who were pre-emptively construed as a threat to the nation (Kendall 2008: 56). In 1950, Percy Spender, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, announced that students from a variety of South and South-East Asian countries would be allowed to come and study in Australia as a means to foster goodwill among its neighbouring countries. The inclusion – albeit temporary – of these students troubles the concomitant projection of the Australian border as a barrier erected to exclude those deemed threatening or undesirable, highlighting moreover a seeming contradiction in how ‘Asiatics’ were publicly positioned vis-à-vis ‘Australians’. This chapter addresses such ambiguities by tracing the most contemporary technologies of international students’ governance back to the establishment of the Overseas Student Program in 1951.

The first and second sections of this chapter examine the historical circumstances leading to the creation of the Overseas Student Program in 1951 and show how the decision to allow South and South-East Asians to study in Australia occurred in the context of their positioning as an object of national compassion. The third and fourth sections analyse the transformation of the Overseas Student Program into a ‘trade’ in 1985 alongside the first crisis that hit the new-born industry of international education in 1989. This analysis demonstrates how these two events led to the positioning of international students as ‘consumers’ from whom the nation could benefit financially. The final section traces the construction of overstaying international students as ‘illegal immigrants’ while examining the metaphors ‘jump the queue’ and ‘backdoor entry’ as points of affective conversion from compassion to resentment. As articulated within these two metaphors, resentment is explored as a technology of affective truth and differentiation: ‘genuine’ students who deserve to stay versus ‘bogus’ students who should be prevented from entering. In the process, this chapter shows how international students have been the subject of multiple discourses and economies of value. Sitting at the crossroads of contradictory national interests and discursive positionings, the history of the regulation of international students’ presence in Australia exemplifies the impossibility of using a single approach to understand the conditions of their exclusion/inclusion in the territorial and socio-cultural borders of the nation.

‘Back door’ to Australia: ‘Asian’ invasion and the Colombo Plan

International education has a history predating its commercialisation in English-speaking countries such as Australia, the UK, Canada and New Zealand. Only in the 1980s were full-fee payment schemes introduced for students pursuing their tertiary studies overseas (Chandler 1989: v–xiv). Previously, international students had largely travelled as scholarship recipients, and the conditions of their acceptance in sponsoring nations were those of European colonial tutelage across the world (Harris 2002: 32–35; Walker 2014: 328–334). This movement increased significantly in the aftermath of World War II, mostly as a consequence of the implementation of an international aid program by members of the British Commonwealth in 1951. Popularly known as the Colombo Plan, this program was born out of the Commonwealth Meeting of Foreign Affairs in the city of Colombo in 1950. There it was discussed as a proposal for the UK, Australia and New Zealand to assist war-impoverished South and South-East Asian countries by means of economic aid and the transfer of technological skills. Further elaborated in a successive meeting of the Commonwealth Consultative Committee on Aid to South and South East Asia in May of the same year in Sydney, this proposal established two schemes: the Capital Development Program, which was comprised of economic investments into the development of ‘agriculture, power, and communications’, and the Technical Co-Operation Scheme, which offered ‘technical equipment, a supply of technical experts, and the training of students in sponsor countries’ (Auletta 2000: 50). Following, the Australian federal government launched its Overseas Student Program in 1951.³ Through this program, thousands of students were allowed to enter Australia over the next three decades to facilitate a transfer of knowledge and technological skills to war-impoverished countries in the Asia-Pacific. But contrary to the public emphasis on its humanitarian aspiration, the program always encompassed two types of international students: sponsored students who were entirely funded by the Australian government and private students who paid reduced fees (Nesdale et al. 1995: 4). Because both groups were allowed to study in Australia to improve the living conditions of their countries of origin, they were both considered recipients of Australian humanitarian aid (4). Historically, the number of private students who came to study in Australia under the Colombo Plan was far greater than the number of sponsored students. For instance, from 1951 to 1967, the number of private students rose from just over 1,500 to 10,000 (Megarrity 2005: 34). These students were predominantly ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong and were mostly enrolled in secondary schools and universities (34).⁴ Compared to them, the number of sponsored students and trainees who came to study in Australia from 1951 to 1965 was less than 5,500, the vast majority from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Ceylon, along with a few from Burma, Brunei, Cambodia, Korea and Afghanistan (179).

At that time, the Immigration Restriction Act – popularly known as the White Australia policy – was enforced to prevent non-European migrants from entering the country. The White Australia policy was introduced in the very first sitting of the new-born Australian Federal Parliament in 1901,⁵ yet it was not the first piece of legislation promulgated to prevent undesirable migrants from entering Australia. As Myra Willard has documented at length, this policy has a history going back to the mid-1800s, when the governments of the colonies of Victoria (1855), South Australia (1857), New South Wales (1861) and Queensland (1877–78) passed legislation aimed to reduce Chinese migration through exceptional restriction and taxation (1970: 21–33). This was in spite of England’s diplomatic and commercial interests in the ‘East’, as well as China’s opposition (33–36) to the policies. By 1886, all the Australian colonies had agreed to pass uniform legislation for the restriction of Chinese migration with the exception of the Northern Territory (68). In the Northern Territory, Chinese migration was encouraged to help develop tropical agriculture and settlement by the government of South Australia, which was then in charge of its management (65–66). By the late 1880s Chinese migration had decreased throughout the colonies, yet the colonial state governments decided to move from a policy of restriction to one of virtual exclusion of all Chinese (69–73) based on the fear that Chinese migration ‘was assuming a new and dangerous form’ (70). That is, the formation of a colony in the only Australian territory scarcely populated with white settlers: in the Northern Territory in 1888 there were between 5,000 and 6,000 Chinese and only 700 adult Europeans (72).⁶ To pre-empt this ‘threat’, the government of South Australia was pressured into ‘closing the door’ to Chinese migration, which it did by passing similar restrictions in 1888 (73), while the rest of the colonies committed to pass legislation that effectively excluded all Chinese from entering Australia (90).⁷ By the early 1890s, this commitment was extended from the Chinese to any and all migrants whose race was deemed ‘coloured’ (99–118). In a bid to avoid diplomatic objections from the governments of China, Japan and Indian British subjects, the British government accepted the principle of exclusion provided that the Australian colonies disguised the racial rationale underpinning their forthcoming legislations. It suggested following the Natal model.⁸ Accordingly, the colonies introduced the ‘Education Test’ as an effective measure to reject any migrant deemed undesirable without specifying either race or class as criteria of exclusion (111–113).⁹ Thus, by the beginning of the new century, all the elements of the White Australia policy were set in motion. Previous colonial technologies of migration regulation (i.e. number restrictions and ad hoc taxation) had paved the way for this federal legislation that was as racially exclusive in its effects as it was raceless in its form.

Yet the scope of Australian migration policies had changed drastically in the decades leading up to the formation of the Australian colonies into a federation in 1901. Up until the late 1880s and 1890s, migration policies were employed firstly to restrict and subsequently to exclude the entrance of a single ethnic group – the Chinese – due to the fear of being slowly but implacably either invaded or drastically altered by their presence. The White Australia policy conveyed more than a commitment to preserve Australian territorial and cultural integrity. By extending the principle of exclusion from just the Chinese to all those populations deemed ‘coloured’, the White Australia policy morphed into a state project of racial exclusion to create a racially homogenous nation and identity. The use itself of adjectives such as ‘coloured’ and ‘white’ signals how race had become the criterion according to which exclusion and inclusion in the nation was established in the new-born Australian Federation. The White Australia policy also represented a projection of Australia’s imperialist ambitions by means of association with a new ‘transnational political identification and a subjective sense of the self’ for the Anglo-European settlers scattered around the world – that is, whiteness (Lake 2005: 229). It is not by chance that as the Federation was born, ‘dreams of an Australian sub-empire in the Pacific’ materialised in two requests that Prime Minister Billy Hughes put to the Paris Peace Conference of 1918 under the guise of national security concerns. The first was the creation of an Australasian Monroe Doctrine for the Pacific; the second was the annexation of the formerly German Papua New Guinea to Australia (Oakman 2010: 6–7). The passage from the exclusion of a single ethnic group to all those deemed ‘coloured’ thus reveals the ‘racially configured’ nature of Australia as it became a nation-state independent from British control as well as its aspiration to stand on equal footing with other ‘modern, competitive, and above all expanding nation-states’ (Lentin 2004: 430).¹⁰

Imperialist aspirations were further advanced in the aftermath of World War II whereby – with the exception of Japan, which was most feared for its military prowess – Asian countries were characterised discursively as an indistinct and overpopulated whole, whose geographical proximity to Australia was considered a concrete threat to the integrity of the Australian territory (Burke 2006: 36). Overpopulation and geographical proximity constituted the fundaments of the infamous rhetoric of ‘Asian invasion’ by which the Australian government had legitimised the expansion of the migration program to ‘white’ migrants historically deemed less desirable than the Anglo-Celtic ones: Southern and Eastern Europeans and Levantines (Stratton 2009b: 2). Once again, territorial anxieties clustered around the Northern Territory, whose bounty of ‘unoccupied’ land lent itself to renewed fears of settlers’ dispossession at the hands of their ‘Asian’ neighbours. For instance, as news spread that the Northern Territory was suitable for growing rice, the then-secretary of the Rice Association, Taylor Douglas, conveyed popular anxieties thus:

Thoughtful Australians have always been concerned about our great empty spaces in the North-West. This vulnerable, uninhabited land is a national danger area… . It is certain that the existence of the tremendous rice-growing areas of the Northern Territory will be headlined in the newspapers of the East, and especially in the South-West Pacific area… . What can be done to protect the so-called ‘back door of Australia’? There is only one effective method of protecting it: Fast development.

(1950: 2, emphasis added)

This passage aptly illustrates how the emergence of the metaphor of ‘back door’ of Australia had by this time crystallised past and present settler colonial anxiety of territorial and racial vulnerability as interspersing in the geographical space of its natural border with South-East Asia, where white settlement had had a long history of failure.¹¹ The reference to ‘fast development’ is here ambiguous. On the one hand, it evokes fears of dispossession by means of reference to the doctrine of terra nullius – that is the principle in European international law that ‘discovered’ land could be claimed as new dominion when appearing both scarcely populated and uncultivated.¹² In this sense, the suggestion to encourage ‘fast development’ amounted to that of averting the risk of invasion by means of further settlement: cultivation of the land and transferal of white settlers.¹³ On the other hand, it gestures towards an acknowledgment that economic development among the nations looking with envy to Australian ‘uninhabited land’ was to be the only effective measure to secure Australia’s position in the region. This second stance was not exclusive to Australian governmental circles but common among the Western nations involved in the Colombo Plan: UK (1950), New Zealand (1950), Canada (1950) and the United States (1951).¹⁴

Decolonisation and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 had made economic development of the region contingent on containing the expansion of communism, which was then regarded as the highest threat to the political and economic interests of the Commonwealth nations in the region (Oakman 2010: 36–72). In this time of rapid political change, Australia saw the potential to fill the void left by the fading British Empire and to become the new ‘moral’ leader of the region (14–15) while improving diplomatic and trade ties with Asian-Pacific countries (178–217). That these nations resented the racially exclusionary migration policies of Australia was a problem the Australian government attempted to resolve by means of soft persuasion – that is, through the education of the future leaders of Asian-Pacific nations. As William Macmahon Ball, a professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, stated upon his return from a goodwill mission to South-East Asia:

Burdened by their newfound independence … Asian leaders recognised their need for outside economic and technical assistance. […] To win the friendship and goodwill of the students ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of figures
• Introduction: where I come from: emotions, race and the border
• 1 Becoming ‘illegal’: compassion, multicultural love and resentment
• 2 Failing to be(come) ‘ideal’: multiculturalism, whiteness and the politics of resentment
• 3 ‘Think Before You Travel’: urban violence, risk management and the territorialisation of the Australian public space
• 4 ‘Is Australia racist?’: interpretive denial and the politics of anger
• 5 Feeling like an international student: racial grief, compassion and national sentimentality
• Conclusion: fantasies of multiculturalism: whiteness, emotions and the border
• Index