The Migrant Presence

Australian Responses 1947-1977

Jean I. Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367719838
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000248081
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This classic work in Australian sociology examines the way in which Australian institutions have responded to the influx of migrants of non-Anglo-Saxon origin. Until the end of the sixties, the typical Australian reaction was that these migrants could be, and were being, assimilated into the mainstream of British-Australian society and culture. At the end of the sixties, both the assimilationist philosophy and the claim of successful and effortless absorption came into question, and migrants of non-English speaking background began to be defined as problems. Now, in a third phase, migrants themselves are rejecting the notion that they are, above all, problems or people with problems. Instead they are asserting their rights and dignity as legitimate minorities in an ethnically plural society. The author goes on to trace in detail the response of the institutions of education, health, and the trade unions to 'the migrant presence'.

'Well written, well presented, well documented and challenging.' - C. A. Price, The National Times

'Well written, sympathetic to the point of anger and should be included in any course on Australian society or public policy. an invaluable contribution.' - James Jupp, Politics

1
Definitions

The modern states that emerged following European expansion into the new world all passed through phases when established social arrangements were stretched, strained, changed, overturned or replaced in the face of new situations created by high rates of immigration of people of diverse cultural origins. Although Australia was never in fact a truly homogeneous society in terms of the ethnic and cultural origins of its people, the institutional arrangements that had been consolidated by the time the population reached seven million in the middle of this century were based on assumptions of an essential and continuing homogeneity—and, when the Commonwealth Government sponsored a large-scale immigration programme at the end of the Second World War, the Labor Minister for Immigration, A.A. Calwell, reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to the principle ‘that our population shall remain predominantly British’. ‘It is my hope’, he said, ‘that for every foreign migrant there will be ten people from the United Kingdom’ (Aus., House of Reps., Pari. Debates, Vol. 189, 1946: 508). Like the Liberal ministers who followed him, however, Calwell authorised immigration agreements that raised the ‘foreign’ element well above the level of ‘safety’ which political rhetoric advocated.

Now, thirty years later, the total population has doubled, and, of the four million who are first- or second-generation immigrants, over half are of non-British origin. This book is about some institutional changes that have occurred, been considered, attempted or resisted in response to the presence of these non-British elements in the Australian population. While there is no implication that change goes in one direction only—that is, from increased population differentiation to structural change—my focus here is on the analytically distinct situation that arises when the population of an established society becomes rapidly more differentiated in a short span of time. There may then develop new structural arrangements which stimulate further differentiation, as, for example, when a community forged from newly arrived immigrants influences the government in favour of further migration from their home country. But ensuing developments of this kind are outside the scope of this study.

Migrants and ethnics

I am not concerned with the non-British migrants who have come from English-speaking countries such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States, so the population elements to which the discussion refers are better described as of ‘non-Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘non-English-speaking’ origin than as of ‘non-British’ origin. While a good case can be made for saying that all of us—Aborigines and whites, old and new—are ethnics (as ultimately we are all of migrant origin), I find it more useful to reserve the term ‘ethnic’ for groups and cultures of non-Anglo-Saxon background. By coupling ‘ethnic’ with ‘minority’, I try to convey the social and cultural distance between the majority, culturally dominant groups of Anglo-Saxon origin and the other groups. Aborigines are clearly an ethnic minority in these terms, but I trust that the context will ensure that ‘ethnic minorities’ are here understood to include only people of recent migrant origin (that is, immigrants and their Australian-born children).

Like ‘ethnic’, the term ‘migrant’ is used in countless different ways, and why it has different connotations in different contexts is an important sociological question in present-day Australia. But in one form or another—‘migrant’ or ‘immigrant’—it has a legal status that ‘ethnic’ lacks.¹ The relevant Commonwealth powers derive from Section 51(xxvii) of the Constitution, which provides that the Parliament has power to enact laws with respect to ‘Immigration and emigration’. Enid Campbell and Harry Whitmore note that ‘A considerable body of law, much of it conflicting’ has developed over the extent of the immigration power (1966: 105). The issues with which the courts have been concerned are extremely complex (see Campbell and Whitmore, 1966; Bartholomew, 1966; Lane, 1972; Lumb and Ryan, 1974; Jakubowicz and Buckley, 1975; Coper, 1976). For our purposes they may be subsumed under four headings: whether the immigration power extends only to the act of entry or covers persons ‘who have been immigrants’ (Justice Higgins, 1923, quoted by Bartholomew, 1966: 173); whether the power extends only to persons who arrive with the intention of settling or to visitors also; whether an Australian-born person or British subject seeking to enter the country can come within the Commonwealth immigration power; whether there is a point in time at which an immigrant becomes a settler and so moves beyond the Commonwealth power of deportation. On this last and most fundamental question, two opposing answers have been put to the courts and the question remains open. The wide view was first expressed by Justice Isaacs in 1923 in the aphorism, ‘once an immigrant always an immigrant’ (Lane, 1972: 130 n.61). The narrow view is that the Commonwealth’s power over immigrants ends when they have become ‘absorbed into the community’ or have established their ‘real home’ in Australia. Although there are no accepted criteria for what constitutes absorption or residence, the narrow view appears to be the favoured one (Lane, 1972: 131; Coper, 1976: 351).

From an examination of the diverse routes by which the judges reached a common decision in a 1975 High Court case, M. Coper concludes that ‘the case does little to resolve the controversy about the width of the immigration power’ (1976: 358). In this case a more complex conception of the wide view appeared: although Justice Jacobs accepted that absorption into the community places a person beyond reach of the Commonwealth’s immigration power so far as deportation is concerned, that position does ‘not preclude the making of laws relating to the special needs or special characteristics of immigrants which would apply even after an immigrant had become absorbed into the community’ (quoted by Coper, 1976: 354). The implication of this view is that ‘once an immigrant always an immigrant’ applies indefinitely so long as it is in a person’s interests to claim immigrant status, but that immigrant status cannot be imposed to his disadvantage once he has become a settler.

The legislation covering the migration power is contained in the Migration Act 1958–1973. Separate legislation, the Australian Citizenship Act 1948–1973, derives from the Commonwealth’s power under Section xix of the Constitution to make laws with respect to ‘Naturalization and aliens’. The two Acts are not precisely complementary and, in Geoffrey Bartholomew’s words,

The High Court … keep distinct the test of immigrant status from that of citizenship but without resolving the ambiguity … as to what constitutes the criterion of immigrant status, although subsequent cases … have tended to accept the ‘absorption into the community’ test … (1966: 177)

The courts, says Bartholomew, ‘have shown no disposition to assimilate the tests for citizenship with those of immigrant status’. Indeed, the High Court has ‘expressly asserted that possession of Australian citizenship did not prevent a person from being an immigrant and therefore liable to deportation’ (1966: 176).

The Migration Act legislates in terms of aliens, immigrants who have been in Australia less than five years and immigrants who have been in the country five years or more. Even though immigrants can acquire Australian citizenship within three years of arrival, they remain subject to deportation under the terms of the Migration Act for a further two years. Aliens (persons who are not British subjects, Irish citizens or protected persons) may be deported at any time and it is in respect of aliens that the question, ‘when is an immigrant no longer an immigrant?’, remains particularly significant. Andrew Jakubowicz and Berenice Buckley argue that the Migration and Citizenship Acts as they stand give excessive power to the Minister, through his absolute discretion over whether an application for naturalisation is approved and through his right to deport aliens no matter how long they have been resident in Australia (1975: 62–3). Both Acts allow so much ministerial discretion that variations in the criteria used to distinguish ‘immigrants’ from ‘members of the Australian community’ in fact arise in large measure from administrative decisions, rather than from legislation or decisions of the courts.

Although persons who have gained citizenship by naturalisation acquire substantially the same legal status as Australian-born people once the five-year period of residence is up, they may still have to face special administrative requirements to provide proof of citizenship when, for example, they apply for government employment or re-enter Australia from overseas. Whether naturalised or not, immigrants are peculiarly subject to control by the state in that their freedom to establish a family unit is limited by the state’s power to decide what other family members may join them as settlers in Australia.

Taking the legal status of ‘immigrant’ as a starting point, I shall use the term—mostly in the shorter version ‘migrant’—to refer to residents who, by virtue of their not being Australian citizens by either birth or descent, belong to a category of persons whom the state can control, direct or provide for (to their advantage or disadvantage) in some specific way.

Since ethnic minorities in Australia are overwhelmingly of recent (that is, post-Second World War) migrant origin, I shall often use the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘migrant’ (of ‘non-Anglo-Saxon origin’) interchangeably, but it will become clear that sometimes the ethnic or culturally distinct aspect, and at other times the migrant aspect, is salient.

A document

The most immediate way to convey how I have approached the writing of this book is to give an example of the mode of analysis that has formed my main research procedure. The example is a passage from a document of a kind very different from those that have provided most of my material, but there are good reasons why I have chosen it. The passage occurs in Dorothy Rabinowitz’s remarkable book, New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust Living in America (1977). It describes a New York court room where hearings are being conducted in connection with the proposed deportation of a woman previously, in Austria, convicted as a war criminal, and now facing additional charges brought by the United States Immigration Service. The witness had been an inmate of the Maidanek concentration camp where the woman, Hermine Braunsteiner, was a Vice-Kommandant. He is describing an incident in which Hermine Braunsteiner, he says, whipped two women to death.

Could the witness tell how long Hermine Braunsteiner beat the two women, and how many blows of the bullwhip she gave them? Maybe twenty minutes, maybe less; he had not counted the number of blows. The camp inmates did not need too many blows to be killed.

‘Did the other women between the wires come to help the two women?’ Mr Barry asks.

‘How will they come to help?’

Several times more Mr Barry asks the question: ‘And others, they never came over to help the other two?’

‘What are you talking about, help? She would kill all of them. I don’t understand you.’

‘They never came over to help?’

‘How could they help?’

‘But they didn’t?’

Twice more Mr Barry asks whether the other prisoners had come forward to aid the women who were being beaten.

The witness peers into the very mouth of his examiner during the course of these inquiries, as if seeking, by intense concentration on their source, to fathom them. Not that he does not recognize the intent of the questions, which suggests that Maidanek was a place like any other in the world: that it housed a society like any other, composed of people who might choose between one form of behavior and another, and who could, if they but would, intervene when they saw their fellows victimized.

‘You just watched also? And the others never came over to help?’

For a long moment he says nothing, until, in the struggle between fury and propriety that the questions have produced in him, propriety wins; the place to which he has come to be a witness this day is a court, after all, with a judge and lawyers, where questions put to witnesses must be answered. Subdued by the consciousness of this fact, the witness sits back in his chair and answers the questions, the last of them in a monotone that bespeaks resignation, if of a very temporary sort.

‘You just watched also?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the other forty or so men, they just watched?’

‘Yes …’ (1977: 11–12)

Overtly there is nothing in common between this document and the substance of my own work. But it testifies to almost every theme I wish to take up: from their different mental worlds, the different webs of meaning that hold them in place, Mr Barry and the witness seek to attach totally incongruent interpretations to the same act, or failure to act; the repressive coercion of the camp is contrasted with other situations of voluntary compliance where people ‘might choose between one form of behavior and another’, but at the same time the court and the politico-legal institutions on which it stands exert their own formidable control in determining what is relevant information, what words mean and how the participants will interact—even to the point of requiring that questions ‘must be answered’; the witness eventually gives in and in doing so confirms the attorney’s pre-eminent position—yes, the question is answerable, as the attorney insists it is; and what the witness contributes to the picture that finally emerges is not his understanding of the experience of the participants in that terrible scene but a muffled distortion, for the benefit of Mr Barry’s uncompromising view of the world.

Webs of meaning

The response that I am concerned with, when I speak of response to the presence of non-Anglo-Saxon elements in the Australian population, is the response of the aware actor. Awareness involves attaching meaning to the data of experience. That meaning-giving should be at the heart of the enquiry undertaken here follows from a concept of man, culture and sociological analysis, which are nicely conveyed by Clifford Geertz:

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (1973: 5)

The web of meaning attaches to objects (people, action, social relations, invisible structures, ideas, material phenomena and so on) in the form of values, norms, attitudes, aspirations and beliefs or knowledge. Part of this knowledge is shared group knowledge about the nature of objects. For the sake of convenience I shall call this social knowledge, as compared with private knowledge (while recognising that all knowledge is social in the sense that it exists in the form of language and accrues to the individual by virtue of his social position). A major component in the construction of knowledge is the determination of what knowledge is (a question I shall not pursue further) and what its parameters are, that is, what are the relevant, desirable or necessary objects of knowledge. In courts of law or in the determination of a committee’s brief, the business of establishing parameters may be the subject of rigorous and refined debate, but these are exceptional circumstances. For the most part, parameters are defined unobtrusively—by default, as it were—the relevant and appropriate being taken for granted, the irrelevant and inappropriate being scarcely given a nod. Weber’s account of the nature of bureaucracy is a classic statement of this process. The specific nature of bureaucracy, Weber says,

develops the more perfectly the more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Preface
• 1 Definitions
• 2 Overview
• 3 Child Migrant Education in the Fifties and Sixties
• 4 From Migrant to Multicultural Education in the Seventies
• 5 Defining Migrant Health
• 6 Health Care
• 7 Trade Unions
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index