Transnational Student-Migrants and the State

The Education-Migration Nexus

Shanthi Robertson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137267078
• eBook ISBN: 9781137267085
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

International students are often engaged not just in education, but in high stakes towards gaining permanent migration status. This book unpacks the consequences of this education-migration nexus, analyzing migration policies and providing a vivid picture of student-migrants' lived experiences.

1

Introduction

From 2003 to 2005 I was working in Melbourne, Australia, teaching academic English and university preparation courses to international students at various private and university-based English-language centres. My job and my students’ presence in Australia were part of a national boom in education as an export commodity that saw over 4 million international students educated in Australia between 1997 and 2009 (Australian Education International (AEI), 2010a). My students were all working on their English skills to gain entrance to Australian university or vocational education and training (VET) courses. In classroom role-plays and in conversations in the corridor I often asked students about their study pathways and career aspirations. The most common reply when I asked them why they had chosen to study accounting, for example, was ‘for PR’. The goal of Australian permanent residency (PR) was, for a large number of these students, the central desired outcome of their international education experience. For many, this would be a long and costly journey, involving up to two years of full-time language classes, a three- to four-year degree and possibly also postgraduate study.

I began to realize that my classes consisted not just of transient students who would sojourn in Australia for a few years and return home but of potential migrants who were in the early stages of a complex and relatively new type of migration pathway. I saw glimpses of the challenges that they faced in living far away from family and friends. I heard how their long-term plans often encompassed a sense of back-and-forth mobility between Australia and their countries of origin as well as the possibility of further moves to the global cities of Europe and North America. They seemed to represent a new wave of migration that was radically different to the trend of permanent settler migration that has historically dominated countries like Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. These models of settler migration encompassed the type of migration experienced by previous generations in my own family, when one’s status as a permanent settler was fixed upon entry into the nation-state, and, although connections remained with one’s ‘roots’, an old home was by and large replaced with a new one.

The ‘student-migrants’ I encountered instead experienced a staggered process of entry into Australia. Arriving first on student visas, and often remaining on temporary work visas for varying periods after graduation, they had to fulfil a number of criteria to be successful in their ultimate applications for permanent residency. This extended migration journey was often fraught with specific challenges and obstacles, as government criteria for immigration could change during the course of their study. It involved balancing ongoing transnational connections and obligations to friends and family in their home countries with fulfilling their intertwined education, work and migration goals in Australia. One of my most promising students in an Advanced English class was a young Chinese woman who wanted to do a Masters of Accounting. She consistently excelled in her grammar and writing assignments and her spoken English was fluent, but she still spoke with a strong Chinese accent that native Australian speakers often struggled to understand. She cried desperately one day in the corner of the classroom after receiving the results from her third attempt at the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam. She had again failed to get a high enough score in the speaking component to qualify her for her university course. Without the IELTS score she wouldn’t be able to finish her course and get PR, and have her husband and son join her in Australia. Every failed test meant more months, or even years, away from her family. The following year, an Indian student from my English for Academic Purposes class came to me for advice, with a print out of the Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL) from the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA)¹ website. He had studied engineering in India but was considering studying for a vocational qualification in community welfare in Australia, as community welfare workers were at the time listed on the MODL. His immigration agent in India had told him that in Australia community welfare workers earn more than doctors and that the job carries high levels of social prestige. He was starting to sense, after a year in Australia, that this was not true.

Students like these were on a specific kind of long-term migration trajectory and embedded in a complex web of regulatory systems that simultaneously enabled and constrained their ability to enter the state temporarily as students and then to accumulate the capital required to become skilled migrants. Testing systems, course requirements and constantly shifting migration policies were central to their negotiation of their study, careers, goals and desires. The connection of the experience of overseas study with longer term migration, a connection that creates the phenomenon of the ‘student-migrant’, was the direct result of an uneasy intersection that had developed between international education and skilled migration policies in Australia and many other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations from the end of the 1990s onwards: the education–migration nexus. Nexus policies varied across national contexts as well as in specific countries over time, and will be discussed in some detail in the following two chapters. In general, however, nexus policies tend to involve systems of immigration control that favour international graduates of local educational institutions as skilled migration applicants. In countries that use points-based systems to assess migrants, this has usually involved extra points being granted for local qualifications, particularly in fields of national labour shortage, and in many countries it has also involved ‘visa pathways’ through which individuals could transition, across various steps, from temporary student visas to work or residency visas, all while remaining onshore. The education–migration nexus also involves policies that allow those on student visas greater participation in the local labour market while studying. This means that rather than applying for and being processed as migrants prior to their entry to the nation-state, potential migrants have instead been residents, working and studying in the host country, for a number of years before status as a permanent migrant is granted.

In 2003, few Australians were really aware of the existence of the nexus. One of my fellow English teachers was puzzled about the constant talk of ‘PR’ among the English-language students, thinking they were referring to ‘public relations’ rather than ‘permanent residency’. But over the next seven years, the education–migration nexus was to take centre stage in national policy debate in Australia, as well as develop into a global trend, as countries like New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom began to craft and refine their own versions of nexus policies.

This book is an attempt to understand the education–migration nexus as both a political and a social process, emblematic of the emerging acknowledgement that the internationalization of education is deeply implicated in broader social transformations taking place across national, transnational and global scales (Stromquist and Monkman, 2000; Mok, 2003; Collins, 2004, 2010; Huang and Yeoh, 2005; Lewis, 2005; Waters, 2005). It is the result of several years of qualitative fieldwork on student-migrants in Melbourne, Australia. It foregrounds Australia as a local case study of these global processes because Australia has led the world in both the internationalization of education and in its implementation of policies that link this internationalization explicitly to the governance of skilled migration. This book unpacks the social and political implications of these processes and how, specifically, the social is embedded within the political. It does so by examining the shifting relationship between student-migrants and the state through a detailed picture of the lives, decisions and practices of individuals engaged with the migration pathways created by the education–migration nexus. It provides a detailed overview of policy development in concert with this analysis of lived experience, in order to paint a picture of how the macro-politics of state policy intersect with the micro-politics of migrants’ transnational social practices. I have taken this approach in the belief that ‘distinctions between micro and macro, or personal and political, can be made only for analytical purposes; in the lives of real people, these realms intersect and interact constantly’ (George and Ramkissoon, 1998, p. 107). This approach sheds light on the intersection of neoliberal immigration policies developed by Western countries in the ‘global race for skills’ and the strategies and desires of transnational migrants and their families. It draws on Ong’s observation that attention to culture and everyday practice ‘can illuminate how the operations of globalization are translated into cultural logics that inform behaviours, identities and relationships’ (Ong, 1999, p. 22). In doing so, the book reveals how student-migrants negotiate their relationships to multiple states, how they adapt to the tenuousness of a migration journey that blurs the boundaries around temporariness and permanence, and how they maintain transnational social networks and transnational imaginaries throughout the different stages of this journey. It is particularly concerned with how potential migrants actually interact with the immigration regime of the host country and how the negotiation of these bureaucratic hurdles to belonging impacts on the migrant experience.

I seek to add a new thread to existing research on transnationalism by providing empirical insights into the student-migrant experience as a form of what Yeoh et al. (2003) have referred to as ‘middling transnationalism’. Student-migrants simultaneously display characteristics of highly skilled and highly mobile ‘flexible citizens’ (Ong, 1999) and of vulnerable and exploitable labour migrants. Student-migrants are thus framed as an exemplary illustration of the need for migration theory to adapt to a blurring of boundaries around different categories of migrants (Castles, 2002). I attempt here to adopt and develop theoretical framings which help to analyse the complex interplays of strategizing, obligation, desire and uncertainty that shape such experiences of middling transnationalism. I reveal how migrant subjects are shaped by the power relations that constitute migration as an increasingly intensified site of governmental activity and, in turn, how migrants respond to this often precarious and instrumentalized positioning (Ong, 1999). More broadly, the book demonstrates how the internationalization of education is implicated in social processes occurring globally. It positions the student-migrant experience within changes to immigration policies and patterns at the global level and speculates on the long-term impact of other similarly fragmented migration pathways. It argues that these pathways destabilize the ‘settler migration’ paradigm still prevalent in traditional Western migrant-receiving nations.

Bringing a sociological lens to the student-migrant experience

In the course of the research for this book I spoke, formally and informally, to student-migrants of different ethnicities, genders, ages and sexualities in Melbourne, Australia. We spoke in pubs and coffee shops, in offices, in classrooms, on campuses, on trains and trams. I used traditional ethnographic methods of in-depth, semi-structured interviews and participant observation as well as ‘cultural probe’ packages of mixed media materials that allowed student-migrants to record and reflect on their migration journeys using journals, cameras and postcards. I also attended and observed several immigration and education fairs, student-migrant protests, and student and ethnic community events. I met with migration agents, education agents and student services officers working at the coalface of the education–migration nexus.

Over the course of this research, multi-layered and intimate pictures of student-migrants’ lives emerged. Each student-migrant had their own story, and no story was the same. Some had lived, travelled and studied around the world before coming to Australia. One Chinese-Malaysian woman described herself as a ‘serial international student’ having completed her undergraduate degree in Canada, her master’s degree in the United Kingdom and then coming to Australia for her PhD. For others, coming to Australia was their first overseas experience and often their first time living outside the family home and outside of their hometown. Young men from India and Pakistan described how the hardest thing about being in Australia was learning how to shop for food and cook. Living with their families they had never had to put on a stove or go into a supermarket. Some student-migrants had always seen studying in Australia as an opportunity to migrate, meeting with agents in Jakarta or Beijing or Caracas before their departure and calculating with efficiency the cheapest courses that could provide the right amount of migration points. Others had arrived intending to return home after graduation but finding themselves wanting to stay. Some saw the value of gaining foreign work experience. Some fell in love, with the culture and lifestyle of the country or with an Australian partner. Some didn’t even want to stay, particularly, but became caught up in the cultural pressures of gaining PR – every other international student in their university class was applying for PR, so they felt they should too. Many young, single student-migrants wanted to stay in Australia to free themselves of kinship obligations at home. After a taste of independence as students they didn’t want to return to living with parents, to working in the family business, to arranged marriages or pressures to marry and have children. One young Malaysian woman who had been in Australia for six years as a student said, ‘I’ve got too many tattoos now and too much Aussie in my accent to go back now.’ Some had an economic imperative to stay – they needed to earn money to pay back some of the debt they and their families had accumulated in financing their education. Others had high-paying jobs waiting for them at home but were not quite ready to leave their adopted home.

Applying a qualitative and sociological lens to the diversity of student-migrant experience is important to this book. It’s particularly important because the media and the public imagination, and to a certain extent the academic discourse, have tended to homogenize and polarize student-migrants into two opposing and highly limited stereotypes. Student-migrants have been imagined, on the one hand, as savvy, professional and elite ‘designer migrants’ who warrant neither normatively orientated analytic attention nor settlement support. On the other hand, they are cast as suspect and exploited ‘back-door migrants’ who either exploit their education for disingenuous purposes or become victims of an unscrupulous industry that rob them of their education nest eggs. In reality, most student-migrants’ experiences fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Student-migrants have also largely been framed, in Australia and elsewhere, by the two most statistically prominent nationalities: Chinese and Indian. This book is an attempt to break down some of these limited framings and reveal the vast range of experiences and narratives of people encountering the student-migrant journey. I spoke to Chinese mothers who had been saying goodnight to their young children on Skype for over three years; young Scandinavian men with advanced degrees and perfect English who could not find work on their bridging visas and so volunteered for invasive, but well-paid, clinical trials at Melbourne hospitals to keep them afloat until their residency was approved; a Japanese musician who struggled through a hairdressing qualification so he could stay in Australia and keep gigging with his band. I also spoke with a dynamic professional couple, with one partner who had already gained PR. They had folders on their kitchen table piled high with paperwork: photos, emails, statutory declarations, every birthday card they had ever sent each other. These were to document their relationship, so that they could obtain a partner visa. There were people working illegally in restaurants and factories and people working in high positions in some of Melbourne’s most prestigious companies. A qualitative approach has, I hope, allowed some of this diversity of experience to become apparent in my discussions of student-migrants as transnational subjects and of their relationship to the state.

Student-migrant transnationality, the immigration regime and assemblages of power

The heterogeneous narratives of the student-migrants I met did, however, have key common threads. The first thing they had in common was pragmatic: they all arrived in Australia on student visas and wanted to or had already managed to stay on after graduation as migrants. The other commonalities were more complex. For example, their transnationality – the ways in which their everyday lives were embedded within a constant sense of back and forth between their two homes: the bleating of their mobile phones at two o’clock in the morning as text messages from loved ones in different time zones came through; the switching rapidly from their mother tongues to English as they conversed with their housemates in Melbourne and then with their parents on Skype. There were constant and sometimes competing pulls of desires, plans and obligations that stretched their lives, past, present and future, across more than one place. The other most prominent commonality was their relationship to the assemblages of power, across, above and within the state, that enabled and constrained their choices. Embedded in a staggered and often tenuous pathway to migration, student-migrants spoke in a language infused with the neoliberal and biopolitical logics that they encountered in their dealings with administrative agencies. They spoke about the Department of Immigration, about their migration agents and lawyers, about the shifting of national priority occupations lists, about how many points they needed for a successful PR application and what they had to do to obtain these points. They talked about health checks, English-language tests, skills assessments, evidence of funds, police clearances: their bodies, capabilities, relationships and bank accounts laid bare to the scrutiny of the immigration regime. They spoke about waiting, about uncertainty, about strategizing their lives and choices and re-strategizing as the immigration regime constantly changed around them.

I therefore position this book as sitting, theoretically, at the intersection between the self, the state and various other assemblages of power that enable and constrain migrants’ life trajectories. By ‘assemblages of power’, I mean in fact multiple and interconnected sets of forces. This includes the regulatory authorities of the state, such as the institutions and actors involved in the governance of immigration at the national level (the immigration regime), but also institutions and structures of power that operate both within and beyond the national level, such as the global media, the transnational education and migration industries, and the transnational family.

The education–migration nexus has been described as an exercise in ‘policy experimentation’ (Hawthorne, 2010). This book speaks to the lives and choices caught up in this experiment. The student-migrant experience is not homogenous but all student-migrants in some ways follow the same trajectory, if they are successful, from transient to permanent belonging. They are also, I argue, migrants whose lives are subject to a particular ‘moment’ in the trajectory of global capital, in which both labour and education have been simultaneously and rapidly globalized and marketized. They are subject to particular kinds of relationships to the state and to the intricate and intertwined power assemblages brought about by the globalization of education and labour, and by the nationally specific policy frameworks of the education–migration nexus.

In the next chapter, I outline the gradual development of the connection between international education and skilled migration policy in a global context. This recognizes the global processes that have given rise to the student-migrant phenomenon, such as the global knowledge economy, the commodification and internationalization of education, the linking of education and immigration in the cultural practices of transnational families, and the global race for skills among Western nations. The chapter charts significant policy developments and reveals the numbers of migrants who have come through these pathways in core receiving countries since the end of the 1990s. The third chapter turns to an analysis of Australia as a case study of the nexus par excellence, as not only the first country to develop policies that provided direct pathways for international students to become skilled migrants but also the country that has taken in by far the highest proportion of student-migrants in the past 15 years. It shows how an acute skills shortage and an increasing reliance on private funding in the tertiary education sector led to Australia’s construction of the education–migration nexus. These two areas of governance became inexorably intertwined as Australia sought new pathways to obtain ‘designer migrants’ who were locally trained, English speaking and socially acculturated. It also shows how a number of highly publicized controversies around the education–migration nexus led to an eventual tightening of opportunities for students to transition to migration, including claims of poor-quality colleges that were little more than ‘immigration factories’; the exploitation of student-migrants by education providers, landlords and employers; and racialized attacks of street violence against Indian students and migrants in Australian cities. The chapter charts how these issues influenced policy development and examines some of the many critiques of the education–migration nexus that have emerged in both academic and political debate.

I then deal generally with questions around the conceptualisation of the student-migrant experience. What is the migration process that student-migrants undergo? How can their entrance to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Education–Migration Nexus: Global Flows
• 3 The Nexus and Its Discontents: An Australian Perspective
• 4 Shaping the Student-Migrant Experience
• 5 Encountering the Residency Regime
• 6 Acquiring and Practising Citizenship
• 7 Negotiating Border-Crossing Lives
• 8 Conclusion: Precarious Transnationals and the Settler Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index