Transnational Students and Mobility

Lived Experiences of Migration

Hannah Soong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317691686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As globalisation deepens, student mobility and migration has not only impacted economy and institutions, it has also infused human desires, imaginaries, experiences and subjectivities. In Transnational Students and Mobility, Hannah Soong portrays the vexed nexus of education and migration as a site of multiple tensions and existence and examines how the notion of imagined mobility through education-migration nexus transforms the social value of international education and transnational mobility.

I Transnational student-migrant nexus and mobility

DOI: 10.4324/9781315776842-1

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315776842-2

There is no shortcut here in Australia. This is not my country where I can go with my logic as if most of the doors are already opened for me to be a teacher and build a good record. Here I am starting from scratch, they don’t care about my previous qualifications, they care about my current abilities and this is how it should be and there is no other shortcut but to just push yourself now.

These words were indeed a thought-provoking assertion that Haggai (a pseudonym) made in one of the many interviews I conducted between 2008 and 2011. When I first met Haggai, he seemed quite unlikely to study abroad, let alone commence a postgraduate degree in Teacher Education in Australia. He was single, in his mid-thirties, and a lawyer for a few years before he came to study in Australia. In my first interview with him, he talked about his discussions with his parents regarding choice of degree before he left Israel ‘for good’. What led him to choose Teacher Education was the hope that, when he graduated, teaching would provide him a gateway into the migration pathway. Haggai was taking a calculated risk to pursue Australian permanent residency status; teaching, at that time of his enrolment, was ranked highest in the General Skill-Migration List.

I felt a deep affinity for Haggai’s transient state and sense of purpose for taking on this new ‘route’ despite not knowing what permanent residency might provide him. Partly, I was struck by how influential the nexus between education and migration was in connecting one’s imagination of future possibilities and actualising desire through such ‘education-migration’ trajectories. Still, our relationship grew out of an expectation of confluent imagination; we were both bound for migration trajectories in Australia. We both imagined Australia would be our next ‘home’ because we had chosen to actualise our ‘imagined future’ in a foreign country.

When I last met Haggai after he graduated from the Teaching degree, he had just signed a three-year teaching contract in another state, and was glad that he stuck to the decision to complete the Teacher Education degree. He was relieved that it was a step closer to achieving the goal of obtaining permanent residency status. Despite this relief, he was still unsure how his new ‘routes’ in Australia would turn out.

Haggai is one of the seven student-migrants whose stories will unfold in this book. I am similarly struck by how the education-migration trajectories were taken up by other international students I met when I was trying to learn what life was like for them in Australia. I found that they too were facing exceptional levels of anxiety not knowing if they could remain as migrants in Australia after their studies. At the same time, even those who sought to achieve permanent residency status rejected becoming part of a diasporic community, and instead considered their place of origin as a permanent home. Several studies in international migration through education have shown how these dynamics are still alive and well (see for example: Robertson, 2013; or Fung, 2011). This book reveals how multiple and conflicting logics of belonging and imaginings of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ contribute to new understandings of contemporary transnationalism, international education-migration nexus and identity.

In this book, such form of ‘sojourn’ to study abroad for migration purposes is said to have emerged from how they have imagined their lives by crossing transnational space (Massey, 2007). An imagination that suggests that their lives are not just mere outcomes of the ‘givenness of things, but often as the ironic compromise between what they could imagine and what social life will permit’ (Appadurai, 1996: 54). In reading this way, individuals living in modernity, including the student-migrants in this book, are now able to imagine a much broader perspective of possible lives than ever before. Such imaginations, Appadurai argues, are not simply fantasies, but real existing social practices, central to all forms of agency. While their legal status in the host country defines such international students as ‘temporary outsiders’, their lives situated within the nexus of education and migration can contribute to the conceptualisation of transnationalism in important ways.

This book elaborates on these observations of how lives as ‘student-migrants’ are caught in an age when global mobility, or imagined mobility, is becoming a defining characteristic in transnational space. While mainstream narratives of transnational and cosmopolitan student-migrants often focus on the ‘policy problem’ and their labour market integration, I turn my attention to the formation of what Lionnet and Shih, (2004), loosely termed ‘minor transnationalism’ (p. 8, my emphasis). In particular, I highlight as unscripted and scattered the disjuncture and tensions among various classed, gendered and unequally positioned subjects with desires to claim a cosmopolitan ideal within the context of the education-migration nexus. Although they are able to travel long distances for overseas studies, they do not share the same access to opportunities, relationships, information and money as well as clout over their movements; there are personal and social consequences.

Ultimately, while mobility has typically been framed as a state of flux, I argue that for these student-migrant subjects, it is actually within the state of imagined mobility that is considered a form of displacement. The concept of imagined mobility refers to the crossing of spatial-cultural-historical boundaries, between the conceptual space of the East and West, in search of modernity (Appadurai, 1996; Taylor, 2004; Venn, 2000). In arguing for the emergence of the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity, Appadurai (1996) has similarly noted that relocation, migration and mobility, whether voluntary or forced, when juxtaposed with the flow of mass-mediated images and scripts, have become a new order to strive for in defining the link between globalisation and the modern. However, this does not mean that there is anything new about the role of the imagination in the contemporary world. What is inherent is that the work of imagination, as Appadurai (1996) has entered the consciousness of ordinary people in many societies in hinging to desire mobility, as the practices and modus operandi, for future trajectories and new transnational projects (more will be elaborated in Chapters 2 and 3). This book explains these observations of mobility and its relations with the work of imagination that Appadurai refers to. It concerns the aspirations of a distinct group of transnational migrants and the wider consequences, personal and social, in embracing the new possibilities that transnationalism now offers, of global mobility and flexible citizenship.

Some theorists have described issues surrounding the prevalence and reality of social imaginaries as ‘frequently travelled’ (Calhoun, 2002) or ‘flexible’ (Ong, 1999) or ‘tourists’ (Bauman, 1996). Although the purpose is sociological, I also hope to illuminate the obscure processes that lead to how their individual lives are shaped by such imaginations. It is the subtlety of analysing and illuminating these processes, which have drawn me away from strictly sociological literatures towards human geography, anthropology and philosophy and particularly towards phenomenological ideas of how social imagination impacts individual’s consciousness. Such writing is concerned with providing insights into how, through the complex nexus with equally complex histories and cultures, phenomena can come to have a personal meaning, which may not always be transparent to consciousness. So, against this backdrop, this book does not emphasise much on the neoliberal modes of international education-migration nexus models. Rather the focus is upon the involvement in a spatial-cultural-historical milieu within which individuals such as these ‘student-migrants’, as quintessential transnational outsiders, discover themselves as mobile subjects to meaning.

Though appearing confident, independent, resourceful and highly focused in what they wanted to achieve, they are found to be confronting their future in a mix bag of pain and gain. This is because embedded within their struggles were their uncertainties with the ongoing policy changes and debates that swing the Australian education-migration nexus like a ‘political pendulum’ (The Observatory of Borderless Higher Education, 2011), fluctuating between tightening and relaxing access to migration for international students. It is the not knowing if they can reach their goal that poses the greatest challenge and precariousness. This did not just apply to the stories of the seven student-migrants revealed in this book; for a large number of international students studying in Australia, as told by Marginson et al. (2010) and Robertson (2013), the journey to reach the goal of residency status to most transnational student-migrants was long, costly and risky.

However, this book departs from how scholarship on migration and diaspora led us to think of displacement as a result of a physical departure from ‘home’. Rather this book builds on these observations and in turn think of the complicated education-migration nexus as articulations of fluctuating emplacement in a world where neither locality nor ‘home’ could be assumed as stable points of anchorage (Ang, 2001; Chu, 2010; Gilroy, 1992; Urry, 2010). Such experiences of fluctuating emplacement are highlighted as moving between imaginations of ‘fantasy and nostalgia’, ‘roots and routes’ and ‘desire and adaptation’. Yet, the choice to embark on this journey did not come in a void.

The seven student-migrants in this book came from China, India, Japan, Sri Lanka and Israel. Most of them were in their mid-twenties, with some years of working experiences back in their home countries, well-travelled and of middle-class background. While they viewed that studying to be a teacher in Australia would provide them a pathway to become a migrant teacher, I found that they were facing exceptional levels of personal and parental pressure to succeed in the host country. For some, they were the focus of heavy emotional and financial investments of their parents, they were expected to eventually find a teaching position and apply for residency in the host country. In so doing, this would provide them the financial capacity to either send remittances back home or provide for their elderly parents’ retirement. For others, education-migration was a gateway to experience living in a world of global interconnectivity; a world as they had imagined it (Appadurai, 1996).

Still, to build and maintain such imagined global community (Anderson, 1991) through education-migration nexus demands a lot more from the migrant individuals. First, in order to enter the destination country, proof of sufficient funds were required to pay for tuition and living expenses to the bureaucrats in the embassy. For some of the student-migrants in this book, to get such proof of sufficient funds required them to use up all their savings from previous years of working, as well as borrowing money to top up, either from local banks, or for some, having to resort to borrowing from their parents’ retirement funds or extended families. That is just the first entry point they had to meet. Upon arrival with student visas, they were not only required to pass all the courses, but also had to rise to other challenges during their sojourn such as passing the requirements of their teaching practicum experiences in local schools. Once they have completed their teacher education, in order to extend their education-migration journey, they would have to fulfil another set of criteria from the State Teacher’s Registration Board to be successful in their final applications for permanent residency. During this whole process, they were involved in meeting ongoing transnational obligations to, as well as gaining emotional support from, family and friends in their home countries.

As I continued to meet and interview them in cafés, library and tutorial rooms over a period of two years, I realised that central to the nuanced analysis of their journey as student-migrants was my own experience. As a first generation Singaporean Chinese-Australian migrant, I too have ‘left’ my family and friends to migrate to a foreign country in search of a better (or different) life with a keen goal of providing a good education for my children. Over the years of trying to find my ‘routes’ in Australia, I have also found that like many diasporas and migrant families, their search for better opportunities through education for their children was a major pull to live in Australia. So, rather than choosing to undertake tertiary education for migration purposes, what many migrant families (mostly from Asian-background) have chosen is to migrate for their children’s educational purposes (Waters, 2010).

Although I came to Australia as a permanent resident, our individual trajectories remain embedded in a complicated web of regulatory systems that concurrently limit and enable us to become skilled migrants. For instance, even though my teaching qualification and experience met the requirements set by the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship, I still had to enrol in a Teacher Education undergraduate programme when I arrived in order to be qualified as a local teacher. Despite being granted residency to live in Australia, my currency as an experienced teacher in my home country was not as valued in the host country. This was when I realised that having permanent residency did not guarantee you security in livelihood. In hindsight, I realise that I might have underestimated the obstacles student-migrants encountered before leaving their home countries in order to migrate through education. In order to overcome the huge obstacles, they needed a convergence of three aspects: (1) the heavy financial and emotional commitments invested in their desired trajectory by themselves and families; (2) the agency – the limited but real capacity of individuals to overcome and reshape structural constraints; and (3) the aspiration to migrate – that was already widespread among international students at the time of my r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Transnational student-migrant nexus and mobility
• Part II Understanding the mode of consciousness of a transnational individual
• Part III Lived episodes and interpretations
• Appendices
• References
• Index