Abstract
Australia’s pro-immigration policies have played a vital role in national population growth, serving to address what would otherwise be chronic labour shortages and population ageing. While migrants to Australian have shown a clear preference for cities and tend to locate with co-ethnics, variations by visa class—employment, family reunification, and asylum—have yet to be fully explored. This paper aims to identify variations in settlement patterns of immigrants in Australia by visa types and the factors underpinning these choices, paying particular attention to ethnic networks and employment opportunities. We apply a series of negative binomial regressions to aggregate census data linked to visa status. At the suburb level, our results show the importance of the presence of compatriots in shaping the location choices of family migrants, with the exception of skilled and humanitarian immigrants from China, Malaysia and Thailand. At the regional level, skilled migrants, including skilled regional migrants, respond to employment opportunities to a greater extent than family and humanitarian migrants.
Highlights
With almost a third of its population born overseas (ABS, 2017), Australia is a high immigration country by global standards
A growing body of work focussing on the settlement patterns of the overseas-born has demonstrated a strong preference toward major cities—particular in Sydney and Melbourne—and a preference for residential clustering with members of the same migrant group at a neighbourhood scale
The recent release of ACMID, which links visa class with census data, provides a unique opportunity to address this gap for permanent migrants
Summary
With almost a third of its population born overseas (ABS, 2017), Australia is a high immigration country by global standards. Access to ethnic networks is likely to play a greater role in the settlement decisions of humanitarian migrants who have less access to material resources upon arrival and may be more reliant on assistance of various kinds by those speaking the same language, among other common attributes Understanding such settlement patterns is complicated by the fact that some visas such as those from the skilled regional migration scheme require the recipients to reside in a particular regional area for a minimum of two years. The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen a substantial growth in the level of net overseas migration to Australia (ABS, 2019a, b), and an increase in the share of skilled migrants from 32% in 1997 to more than 60% in 2018 These changes have occurred in a context of diversification of origin countries in favour of Asia (Jupp, 2001; Raymer et al, 2018, 2020; Wilson & Raymer, 2017). In Australia, migrants’ marked preference for residing in large metropolitan areas, Sydney and Melbourne, has been explained by the educational and economic opportunities that cities offer (Hugo, 2008a) combined with access
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