Martina Boese

This book examines how migration and migrant work are governed, lived and understood beyond major cities. Using Australia as a settler-colonial immigration country with extensive regional migration policies, the book offers a critical migration sociology of regional migration as both a policy project and a social space. It approaches regional migration at three levels: as everyday practice shaped by migrants, refugees, employers, service providers and long-term residents; as a governance arena structured by differentiated visa regimes, rights and responsibilities; and as an object of knowledge produced across disciplines and institutions. Across eight chapters, the book maps key policy settings shaping regional migration and migrant work, reviews social-scientific research on regional migration, refugee settlement and precarious labour, and traces critiques of economistic rationales in migration governance. Drawing on qualitative research conducted between 2010 and 2023 in regional Victorian towns, it analyses how stakeholders narrate the “value” of migrants, how attraction and retention are framed, and how onward mobility—often labelled “secondary migration”—is negotiated across life course, gender, racialisation and place-based opportunity structures. The book also examines how multiculturalism is debated and practised in regional communities, including the strategic mobilisation of economic arguments “from below”. By placing migrant work, belonging, rural and regional change, and the governance of mobility in dialogue, this book is designed for scholars and students in migration studies, sociology, labour studies, human geography, refugee studies, rural studies and public policy, as well as practitioners concerned with regional settlement and workforce regulation.

The year 2013 is the 40th anniversary of the end of the 'White Australia policy'. In these four decades Australia's immigration policy has shifted from a primary concern with cultural homogeneity or Britishness to a focus on demand-based skills through an increasingly fine-tuned system of points tests, occupation lists and employer-sponsored visas. Despite disproportionate politicisation of asylum seekers in recent public discourse, the intake of refugees and humanitarian entrants has remained relatively small. While Australia's contemporary migrant and refugee intake is truly multicultural, and governments continue to adhere to an official multicultural policy, integration into the Australian community and culture has been the dominant process, especially for second and third generation Australians. Australian identity and citizenship have changed in the last forty years, making Australia and its people more pluralistic and richly diverse. Becoming Australian focuses on the ways in which migrants and refugees meet the challenges of 'becoming Australian' and the transformative process for Australia and its people as they incorporate the continuing influx of multicultural peoples.

The year 2013 is the 40th anniversary of the end of the 'White Australia policy'. In these four decades Australia's immigration policy has shifted from a primary concern with cultural homogeneity or Britishness to a focus on demand-based skills through an increasingly fine-tuned system of points tests, occupation lists and employer-sponsored visas. Despite disproportionate politicisation of asylum seekers in recent public discourse, the intake of refugees and humanitarian entrants has remained relatively small. While Australia's contemporary migrant and refugee intake is truly multicultural, and governments continue to adhere to an official multicultural policy, integration into the Australian community and culture has been the dominant process, especially for second and third generation Australians. Australian identity and citizenship have changed in the last forty years, making Australia and its people more pluralistic and richly diverse. Becoming Australian focuses on the ways in which migrants and refugees meet the challenges of 'becoming Australian' and the transformative process for Australia and its people as they incorporate the continuing influx of multicultural peoples.