Abstract
For the past ten years I have been involved in research on the topic of Indian student-migrants in Australia. What started in India in 2004 with the ostensibly simple questions why there was such a surge in Indian students’ enrolments in Australia, turned into a study which had the question of migration at the heart of its investigation. Realising that the majority of Indian students based their decision for Australia on the relatively easy pathway the country offered towards permanent residency my research focused on understanding how such trajectories from students to migrants took shape. However, as I argued in Imagined Mobility (Anthem Press, 2010), while the propensity to apply for PR may be high, permanently residing in Australia was often not the objective. Instead many Indian students saw a PR as facilitating the start of transnational existence. In this paper I will draw upon a vast collection of newspaper articles as well as ethnographic material collected over this period in order to produce a personalised account of how I, as an academic researcher, observed the discourse about Indian students in Australia ‘migrate’ from them being welcome international students and would-be migrants to unwelcome profiteers whose place in Australian cities was highly contested. Questions I will focus on are: how did the violent attacks and subsequent debate about their racist nature impact the lives and trajectories of Indian student-migrants as starting transnationals; how did they themselves reflect on these attacks especially in relation to them now being ‘permanent residents’; and finally, what role do ‘Indian students’ continue to play in Australia’s skilled migration debate?
Highlights
On 15 March 2013 popular news website News.com.au announced that the AustralianImmigration Department would soon be relaxing its ‘work rules’ for international students, allowing them to work in any job for up to four years after their graduation from an Australian university
The article continued by noting that in 2012 the number of former international students who were working temporarily in Australia on so-called 485 skilled graduate visas2 had increased by 74% to 38,210 (‘the same number of unemployed Australians aged 20 to 24, who were searching for their first job in January’)
While the change was intended to make Australia a more attractive destination for high quality international students, Australian unions were dissatisfied with this explanation, as they claimed that recently graduated international students would ‘snatch jobs from local graduates’
Summary
Students are ‘duped, fleeced or blatantly misled by offshore education agents who, in many ways, are the linchpin of Australia's $15 billion international education industry, the nation's third-largest export after coal and iron’ (The Age 23-05-09) It is not just ‘foreign charlatans’ who are involved in ‘this bonanza industry’, ‘[t]here are a worrying number of unscrupulous private college operators in Australia, or “crooks” as Immigration Minister Chris Evans described them this week, ready to swindle students the moment they land in the country’ (The Age 23-05-09 A delegation of the Australian police had travelled to India to discuss the attacks and, at the time, Deputy Prime Minister Gillard had made the announcement that she would scrutinise ‘rogue colleges’ (WAToday 26-05-09). Fresh attacks on students were still regularly reported on, increasingly the focus was on the closing down of colleges and, in relation to this, on international students who were unable to finish their courses; declining international student numbers because of the damaged reputation; and the bruised relationship between India and Australia
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