Indian Students In Australia Research Articles

The Transnational Migration Strategies of Chinese and Indian Students in Australia

AbstractCountries engaged in a race for highly skilled labour are prepared to modify immigration regulations to attract those migrants; however, despite abundant research regarding the mobility of the highly skilled, the mobility of international students and their subsequent migration patterns is not well understood. Using the transnational lens, this approach elucidates the practices and connections between multiples places in international student migration. This paper uses a study of Chinese and Indian students in Australia to shed light on the intricacies of their transnational migration strategies by investigating how their interactions with Australia's skilled migration programme not only results in permanent migration outcomes but also facilitate onward migration to other destinations. The configuration of Australia, and/or Adelaide at a finer spatial level, as gateways to preferred destinations illustrates how educational choices and immigration regimes intersect and impinge on the decision‐making process of Chinese and Indian students in Australia. By doing so, it not only unpacks the ‘difference’ usually associated with international education by emphasising on the importance of attractive immigration policies but also argues for the need to consider the lifetime mobility aspirations of international students and their mobility beyond the ‘stay‐return’ framework. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Big News: The Indian Media and Student Attacks in Australia

By any measure, 2009 was a big year for news in India. And yet the safety of Indian students in Australia ranked among the major news events in India that year. The India-Australia Poll 2013 found 65 per cent of respondents believed the Indian media had accurately reported the problems faced by Indian students in Australia in 2009-10. That implies two-thirds of Indians accepted the Indian media’s mostly negative depictions of Australia. Those who believed the media reporting about Australia had been accurate were more likely to be from large cities, be tertiary educated and have relatively high-incomes. The poll found 62 per cent of respondents thought Australia was a dangerous place for Indian students and that 61 per cent believed attacks on Indian students were motivated by racism. The results suggest negative perceptions about Australia created by the media’s portrayal of the student attacks linger in the Indian community. The timing of the initial attacks, and the imagery associated with them, helped attract and sustain media attention on the issue. The diplomatic tensions created by the crisis highlighted the growing influence of the broadcast media on India’s foreign relations. But the episode also exposed a deep lack of understanding about India in Australia. Governments were slow to comprehend how much damage media coverage of student attacks could do to Australia’s reputation in India.

The Production of the Indian Student: Regimes and Imaginaries of Migration, Education, Labour, Citizenship and Class

The so-called Indian student ‘crisis’ of 2009 and 2010 is often analysed in the context of how the violence against students challenged Australian multiculturalism and revealed both underlying racism and denial of racism in Australian society (see, for example, Mason 2012, Dunn, Pelleri & Maeder-Han 2011, Singh 2011). Some analyses further interrogate the incidents in relation to Australia’s relationship to India as one of its Asia-Pacific neighbours and key trading partners (Mason 2012). Yet there was a far wider context of global transformations to regimes of immigration, education, labour and citizenship that shaped the experience of Indian students in Australia leading up to and after the ‘crisis’ itself. The local context and local responses to the crisis are analysed thoroughly in other papers of this volume. What I seek to do in this chapter is to situate the very presence (and the subsequent vulnerabilities) of Indian students in Australia within several intersecting political, economic and cultural forces operating at national, regional and global scales. The focus of this paper is thus not on the violent incidents or their immediate consequences, but rather on the specific ways that transforming immigration and citizenship regimes, global labour markets, and global imaginaries of mobility and class facilitated Indian students’ mobility into Australia and shaped elements of their lives while they were here. In particular, I focus on how national mobility regimes, influenced by global processes, crafted and re-crafted the subjectivities of Indian students as by turns desirable and problematic.

The Question of Racism: How to Understand the Violent Attacks on Indian Students in Australia?

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?

Attacks on Indian Students and the Harris Park Protests: A Consul General Looks Back

From the end of May 2009, for about a year, academics and scholars, media, educationists, parents, students, diplomats on both sides, and the governments of India and of Australia were focused on a single issue: attacks on Indian students in Australia. It is no exaggeration to say that the frequency and number of attacks and, in some cases, the uncalled-for viciousness, was disturbing, confusing and totally unanticipated. Perhaps the single biggest failure was the collective inability of all stakeholders to anticipate the problem and to act in time. The system failure ought to have been recognized well before the keg burst. Once it exploded, it overwhelmed the system like a tsunami.

'Life in one colour'

In April 2010, an Indian university student was robbed while leaving the campus of his university in regional Queensland. Soon afterwards, the local newspaper described how a ‘gunman’ had accosted the student and ‘forced [him] to lay [sic] face-down on the ground’. The event was not isolated in the national context; there had been a sharp rise in media reports of violence against Indian students in Australia during the preceding six months. The attack in the regional city of Toowoomba appeared to echo these other incidents, given that the victim was an Indian student and the alleged perpetrators were young white Australian males. The case called our attention to how reports of violent racism in metropolitan centres might affect perceptions of social inclusion in regional communities.

Writing Ideas: Eventing versus Venting

A commonly stated desire of the contemporary novelist is to avoid preaching, or sounding didactic. There could even be a tendency to steer away from tackling the big issues of our times, perhaps for fear of sounding heavy handed, or alienating readers. The focus of this paper is on creative engagement with the sociopolitical milieu in which we find ourselves. This is the project of the novel I am in the process of writing as the creative component of practice-led research. The fiction emerged following the violent attacks on Indian students in Australia 2009, and the ensuing media attention in both India and Australia. Specifically, this paper examines the writing of a novel raising the tough questions accompanying multiculturalism and race relations in the contemporary urban setting of Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on Deleuze' notion of the Event, I will consider how that notion sits with the writing of a novel with an agenda.

Queer Asian mobility and homonational modernity: Marriage equality, Indian students in Australia and Malaysian transgender refugees in the media

In recent years, the regulation of mobility has seen marriage equality emerge as a homonational discourse of progressive gay and lesbian politics championed on the erasure of homophobia to end systemic discrimination. While homonational modernity promotes the superiority of a nation through sexual openness, it also mobilizes the fear of homophobia to marginalize racialized and sexualized minorities through sexual quarantine. Using media case studies on Indian student migrants and Malaysian transgender refugees from the Asian Australian diaspora, this article examines how homonational modernity regulates the queer mobility of diasporic Asian subjects. The article uses these case studies to interrogate homonational modernity and, in doing so, hopes to create a critical platform for a politics of queer Asian mobility. Critically illustrating how ‘Asia’ (e.g. Malaysia and India) and the Asian diaspora (e.g. Asian refugees and queer migrants in Australia) have been made present in Australian’s homonational modern imagination as sites of inclusion and exclusion, this article provides a critical approach to the regulation of mobility that allows for the intervention of and accounting for the uneven distribution of race, sex and gender that conditions personal mobility, revealing the institutional constraints and privileges that shape queer liberalism and homonormativity.

‘I am tomorrow’: Violence against Indian students in Australia and political denial

India has experienced significant economic growth since the 1990s. Young middle-class Indian nationals have embraced international tertiary and vocational education as a part of this trend. Many of these students have come to Australia to study. In 2009, claims that Indian students in Australia were being targeted for racial violence received worldwide media attention. This article presents the results of a qualitative study of public documents surrounding the ‘violence against Indian students’ issue over a 12-month period. It contends that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that some of the victimisation had a racial or anti-Indian element to it. Drawing upon literature on racism, it reveals a discourse of denial that runs through the responses of Australia’s political leaders to this claim. In the current global environment, however, exposure of Australia’s denial by the Indian media may operate as a form of counter-discourse from an emerging superpower whose citizens refuse to tolerate the failure of western nations to take responsibility for the injustice of racial violence.

Naming the ‘R’ word in racial victimization: Violence against Indian students in Australia

In 2009, thousands of international students, led by the Federation of Indian Students in Australia, staged a public protest in the central business district of Melbourne in Australia. One focus of the demonstration was the claim that Indian students living in Australia were being deliberately targeted for racist violence and crime. In the months following the demonstrations, many deep-seated problems in the international education industry were revealed, generating multiple and ongoing reviews of the education, migration, housing, transport and criminal justice sectors. This article focuses on the ways in which police services and political leaders have responded to the claim that racism is behind the victimization of Indian students studying and living in Australia. It will argue that, with one or two exceptions, both have responded with a range of discursive strategies that, ultimately, amount to a form of denial. Significantly, this is not a denial of the problem of violence itself but, rather, a denial of the racial character of that violence. Such denial raises the question: can racist victimization, or any form of hate crime, truly be acknowledged if the prejudiced or biased nature of that victimization is not accorded public recognition and condemnation?

Indian student concerns about violence: exploring student perceptions

While considerable attention has been given to the spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia in 2009 and 2010, less attention has been paid to how the students who were at the centre of the furore perceived the violence. In this paper we explore the perceptions of Indian postgraduate and undergraduate male students studying in Melbourne, Australia, based on data gathered in focus groups. Analysis revealed four broad themes in students' explanations for the attacks: race hate versus opportunism, intercultural issues, systemic ineffectiveness, and media reporting. Students' perceptions of the reasons for the attacks were divided in some areas and aligned in others. There was divergence among students about whether the attacks were race hate crime or opportunistic, and about intercultural issues. Students' perceptions were aligned on issues of systemic ineffectiveness and media reporting. In the current context of decreased international enrolments from Indian students, in which we seek to better understand them, the findings provide implications for international student policy and planning priorities.

Violence against Indian Students in Australia: A Question of Dignity

The recent incidents of violence reported against Indians students in Australia raises questions about the root cause of such attacks and consequent policy responses. Should the authorities deal with the problem as one of illegal possession of weapons or as a racial attack arising out of racial and ethnic differences. While statements from Australian police have tended to play down the racial element, Indian media and human rights activists have tended to emphasise the role of race and racism may play in these incidents.

“Indian Ocean News”: Indian Challenges To Australian Racialised Media

Two events involving Indians in Australia have grabbed news headlines at different times. One was the 1945 campaign supporting Indonesian Independence in which Indian seamen – known then in Australia as “lascars” – played a high profile role for which they have seldom been acknowledged. The more recent has been the 2009 series of violent attacks on Indian students in Australia, which have aroused major news coverage and public debate in Australia and India. How might “news” media reflect better the potential of both these stories to tell transnational “Indian Ocean news” in which more than one narrative is heard? How, in fact, might they reflect the qualities of the Indian Ocean itself in fostering circulation and dialogue? To contribute to this wider question, this article explores two issues. Firstly, do cultural stereotypes persist over time and, if so, is it because news media re-create and re-circulate them in changing circumstances? Secondly, how does “access” to “making news” come about: whose voices are heard and how are “news” stories identified and told? In the light of what appears to be the simple perpetuation of old stereotypes into the 2009 stories, this paper examines both newspaper and documentary filmic representations of the 1945 campaign. It argues that the outcomes in each case involved selective, rather than wholesale, use of stereotypes. Moreover, each was the result of interaction and often contestation between the participants and the recorders of news – the “sources” and the “producers” – rather than complete dominance by Australian reporters or Western filmmakers over how the stories were told. The paper identifies the more effective of the 1945 strategies used by Indian actors and points to the ways such stories might be read as “Indian Ocean news” which makes visible not only each side of the story but the interactions themselves. This is no longer just a possible future scenario – digital media and internet communication mean that today’s stories are being read and watched almost simultaneously around the world by very different audiences. So working out what “Indian Ocean news” might be is now a matter of urgency.

The Penal Politics of Hatred

Gail Mason, Director, Sydney Institute of Criminology Faculty of Law, University of Sydney, Australia delivered the 2009 J.V. Barry Memorial Lecture on the penal politics of hatred. On the 31 May this year, between 2000 and 5000 students, led by the Federation of Indian Students in Australia, rallied in the CBD in Melbourne.The anger of these international students has been sparked by concerns that they are being specifically targeted for robberies, assaults and other forms of attack. The perception has been that these incidents are not random and cannot be attributed to the kind of bad luck that comes with living in a modern metropolis. Rather, the ire of these international students has been raised by the belief that there is something more insidious behind the violence experienced by members of their community. The claim that comes across loudly and clearly from these rallies is that it is prejudice and racism that lie behind the attacks or, even more specifically, some kind of anti-Indian sentiment. These protests have also managed to convey the message that many international students, not just from India, are deeply dissatisfied with the conditions under which they study, work and live while in Australia. The extent to which these claims are an accurate representation of the problem is not a question I address in this lecture. Instead, I am interested in the kinds of responses that these claims have generated. The issues themselves have attracted extensive media attention both in Australia and India and, in terms of the latter, this coverage has been fiercely critical of the problem of racism in Australia. This, in turn, has led to comment and action at the highest level of government. Julia Gillard and John Brumby are just two Federal and State politicians who have already visited India in an attempt to reduce the fallout to Australia's international education industry. We have also seen a concerted and targeted policing response, the establishment of a hot-line for victims, a Senate inquiry into the welfare of international students and a number of other governmental initiatives in the migration, education and employment sectors.