Ongoing Mobility Trajectories: Lived Experiences of Global Migration [1st ed.] 978-981-13-3163-3, 978-981-13-3164-0

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Introduction (Rosie Roberts)....Pages 3-27
Tactics and Risk Under Conditions of Multi-stage Migration to Australia (Rosie Roberts)....Pages 29-47
Onward Migration Pathways Over Time and Space (Rosie Roberts)....Pages 49-84
Front Matter ....Pages 85-85
Everyday Practices of Home-Making (Rosie Roberts)....Pages 87-109
Arrivals, Departures and Returns (Rosie Roberts)....Pages 111-137
Citizenly Identities and Translocal Belonging (Rosie Roberts)....Pages 139-168
Front Matter ....Pages 169-169
Mobility Narratives and Shifting Identities (Rosie Roberts)....Pages 171-193
Conclusion (Rosie Roberts)....Pages 195-207

Citation preview

Rosie Roberts

Ongoing Mobility Trajectories Lived Experiences of Global Migration

Ongoing Mobility Trajectories

Rosie Roberts

Ongoing Mobility Trajectories Lived Experiences of Global Migration

123

Rosie Roberts School of Creative Industries University of South Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia

ISBN 978-981-13-3163-3 ISBN 978-981-13-3164-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3164-0

(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964688 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

This book is based on people’s personal stories of migration. I am deeply grateful to each of the thirty-three people involved in this research who trusted me with their stories over the past 7 years, and I hope that I have done them justice. I would like to thank those who provided constructive and thoughtful feedback on draft chapters (Dr. Dianne Bills, Associate Professor Jodie George, Professor Carol Johnson, Professor Susan Luckman, Associate Professor Sabine Marschall, Associate Professor Angela Scarino, Dr. Jonathan Crichton, Dr. Shanthi Robertson and Dr. Kylie Jarrett) and to my doctoral supervisors, Dr. Jean Duruz and Associate Professor Peter Bishop, for their insights and conversation in the early stages of this research. I am also grateful to Springer and the editorial team for supporting this project. Most importantly, I would like to thank my family for their love and sense of humour—Rhys, Mum, Dad, Jordan, Juliet, Eloise, Sunni, Kate and Harley-the-dragon. This book was born out of my doctoral research. I am thankful for the financial support provided through an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) that enabled me to undertake this project and a Maurice de Rohan International Scholarship to undertake research interviews overseas. Parts of Chap. 4 were originally published in ‘Travelling Memories’: The Homemaking Practices of Skilled Mobile Settlers. In S. Marschall (Ed.). Memory, Migration and Travel (2018), pp. 24–44. Oxon and New York: Routledge.

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Part I

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1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Mobile Lives: The Fluidity of Australian Immigration and Emigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.1 Immigration to Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2 Emigration from Australia by Overseas and Australian Born . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Conceptualising the ‘Skilled Migrant’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 From Migration to Mobility: Longitudinal Approaches to Mobile Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 The Research Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 Structure of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Tactics and Risk Under Conditions of Multi-stage Migration to Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Education-Led Migration: The Australian Context . . . . . . . 2.3 Institutional Policy Meets Lived Practice: Enacting Agency Under Conditions of Multi-stage Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Onward Migration Pathways Over Time and Space . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Practices of Mobile (Re)settlement Over Time and Space . 3.2.1 Life Course Perspectives on the Shifting Family and Career Negotiations of Skilled Mobile Settlers

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3.2.2 Trailblazing Pathways of Skilled Migrant Women 3.2.3 Onward Migration Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part II

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Practices and Connections

4 Everyday Practices of Home-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Surrogate Landscapes, Traveling Objects and Well-Worn Pavements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Surrogate Homes: ‘I Suddenly Have a Sensation of ‘Home’...but It Doesn’t Last’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Traveling Objects: ‘I’m Bringing My Life with Me, I Even Packed My Wooden Spoons’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 Well-Worn Pavements: ‘Trying to Build a Geographic Mental Map’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Arrivals, Departures and Returns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Arrivals: ‘My Sense of Being Foreign, a Clumsy Transplant in a New Land’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Returns as Reorientations: ‘It Just Felt like an Explosion of Arrivals and Departures All at the Same Time’ . . . . . . . . 5.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Citizenly Identities and Translocal Belonging . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Conceptualising Citizenly Identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Negotiating ‘Citizenly Identities’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 National Identity and Everyday Rituals . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 Singular Loyalties and Negotiations of Guilt . . . . . 6.3.3 Translocal Connections: ‘That Misplaced Idea that You Can Only Be Loyal to One Thing at a Time’ . 6.4 Destabilising and Reinscribing Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part III

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Stories 171 171 175 178

7 Mobility Narratives and Shifting Identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Introduction: ‘Small Stories’ and ‘Preferred Selves’ . . . . . . . 7.2 The Currency of Story-Telling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Active Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.1 Emily: ‘I’m Black, Not Deaf, So You Don’t Need to Shout’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.2 Amar: ‘Somebody like Me with a Turban, with Skin Colour That’s Different... People Are Always Going to Assume Something About My Identity’ . . . . . . . . 7.3.3 Sharon: ‘I like the Flexibility that These Different Personae Offer’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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8 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Ongoing Trajectories and Temporary Migration . . . . . . . . 8.3 Multiple Home Sites, Connections and Citizenly Identities 8.4 Narrating Experiences of Mobility and Resettlement . . . . . 8.5 Reshaping Migration Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I

Trajectories

Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract The introductory chapter examines the value of viewing Australia as a single site within a range of transnational connections. Until recently, Australian migration research and policy has been concerned with what Ley and Kobayashi (2005, p. 112) describe as the traditional migration narrative of ‘departure, arrival and settlement’. Instead, this book argues for a more expansive understanding of Australia within global migration flows, which recognises the experience of contemporary migration as a complex matrix of interactions and connections over time and space, rather than linear and permanent migration. This research began as an exploration of skilled migration. However, as the research progressed and the lives of those interviewed unfolded, it became clear that being a ‘skilled migrant’ was just one categorization that they occupied over their lives and often through a series of migrations. However, with skilled migration as my starting point, I begin this chapter with an analysis of theoretical and empirical research in this field, to problematize the labour driven perspectives of this migrant classification. I argue that there is a need to separate the conceptualisation of skilled migrants as those who engage in official labour channels from people who embody the concept of skills but migrate in other ways, such as spouses and family-sponsored migrants who are not recognised in a country’s official skilled migration statistics. When differences among skilled migrants are often as great as the distinctions between skilled and unskilled, there is a need for more empirical research that recognises and investigates this diversity by attending to the everyday, affective and embodied experiences of these migrants over their lives. A longitudinal and biographical approach to the study of migration brings together spatial, temporal and relational frames, through which to understand the often messy, and evolving experiences of resettlement and belonging. Keywords Temporary migration · Skilled migration · Middling transnationalism Australia · Spatiality · Temporality

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 R. Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3164-0_1

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1.1 Introduction Drawing upon longitudinal and narrative research processes, this book examines transnational mobilities into and out of Australia through the lived experiences of migrants as they negotiate embodied, material and imaginative forms of (re)settlement, home-making and belonging. I examine the trajectories, stories and experiences of a group of migrants who were, at the time of the first research interview in 2010, tertiary educated, had professional experience in their fields, and had links to Australia (as an origin and/or destination) at some point in their lives. The aim of the research was to understand how skilled and educated migrants experienced and represented mobility over time and space, attending to their personal and local contexts and to a broad range of motivations for mobility including, but not restricted to, labour market outcomes. The research sought to understand specific forms of temporality that are ongoing and unfinished rather than more traditional linear, settler narratives. What emerged through their stories were the complex ways they made and remade homes and the tactics they used to enact agency and negotiate risk under the spatial and temporal conditions of multi-stage migration trajectories. I examine the diverse opportunities, restrictions and experiences of those formally defined as skilled migrants as well as those who identified, presently, as educated and skilled but were not initially recognised in this way by a nation’s immigration policies. Many utilised a range of visa classifications and occupied the status of temporary migrant for long periods of time, despite their growing social, cultural and economic embeddedness in destination countries. Through their narratives, which allow for a layering of time and space, Australia becomes a site of home and away, origin and destination, settlement and resettlement. Australia is viewed as a single site within a range of transnational connections, recognising contemporary mobility as a complex system of interactions rather than one-way permanent relocation. The research sought to capture the diversity of experiences amongst the expansive catchall of ‘middling transnationals’ (Conradson & Latham, 2005) and to describe the practices of people whose life histories have been punctuated by both spatial and ‘status mobility’ (Schuster, 2005) with ‘multiple moorings’ of ‘various durations’ (Cohen, Duncan, & Thulemark, 2015, p. 162). By understanding skilled migrants in broader terms, beyond inter-company transferees and the global elite, and including those who migrate through alternative routes, such as international students and as refugees, a more expansive and mobile range of relationships to space and time become evident. Two criteria guided my selection of research participants. One, already described is that Australia is a site within their migration histories. Using this perspective, I take Australia as a vantage-point from which I could speak to migrants about their multiple lines of departure and arrival and their multiple attachments and identifications, both physical and imaginative. The second criterion was tertiary education and professional experience in their fields. Each participant had already achieved at least an undergraduate degree and had worked for a minimum of three years in their chosen profession. I began interviewing in 2010 and had ongoing conversations

1.1 Introduction

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with many participants, sometimes yearly, up to the writing of this book in 2017–18. This timeframe provided rich longitudinal data on how their pathways, connections, identities and stories shifted over time and space. I also asked them to provide retrospective narratives of their migration experiences in order to capture the shifts in their migration pathways and the differing contexts of their mobility, not just during the research period but over the duration of their lives recognising that their migration narratives were already in motion before I started talking to them. Only recently has research begun to challenge fixed typologies of skilled migration to investigate the dynamism between migrant categories as people negotiate personal and professional circumstances in their decision making (Robertson, 2014; Ryan & Mulholland, 2014; Ryan, Sales, Tilki, & Siara, 2009). Research on migration and transnationalism has frequently presented a binary between temporary and permanent migration as well as an opposition between elite and lower-class labour migrants in a polarised global economy (Dustmann, 2000; Smith & Favell, 2006, p. 25). In contrast, this book challenges the commonly assumed linearity or circularity of skilled migrant trajectories, to show the diverse pathways migrants pursue as they negotiate both opportunities and restrictions over time. A spatial and temporal approach disrupts labour centred constructions of the skilled migrant. While the participants who inform this research were all tertiary educated and had worked in professional positions at some point in their lives, many began their migration journeys as international students, temporary labour migrants, through family led migration or as refugees. Additionally, while they may have migrated under a skilled migrant visa during one relocation, subsequent migrations and emigration contexts prohibited them from utilizing this classification. The body of work examining migration flows and the experiences of migrants has often focused on single sites, linear links between a singular origin and destination country, distinct groups of people, or a migrant classificatory scheme such as humanitarian migrant, low-end labour migrant or skilled migrant, rather than how these categories shift over time for an individual (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016; Conradson & Latham, 2007; Ho, 2011; Rutten & Verstappen, 2014; Ryan & Mulholland, 2014). As Pratsinakis, Hatziprokopiou, and King (2017, p. 2) have recently argued, while such categories have been useful analytical tools, they have ‘limited explanatory value when it comes to assessing different forms of mobility, particularly in the complex new global map of migrations’. I have taken a life cycle approach (Ho, 2011; Ley & Kobayashi, 2005) to researching migration, which demonstrates that while governmental categories are produced to explain and contain skilled migrants, many migrants break down these categories as they tactically (de Certeau, 1984) utilise the visa system to build up a case for long term residency and expand their options for future mobility, over the course of their lives. By removing rigid methodological boundaries, such as a singular origin or destination country (e.g. Findlay & Li, 1998; Findlay, Li, Jowett, & Skeldon, 1996), the focus shifts from migrant categories to people’s mobile pathways and practices over their lives, often

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involving multiple points of arrival and departure, connecting countries of origin, multiple destinations and future migration trajectories. Throughout the book I argue that it is more productive to focus on mobility practices and experiences than on normative, and often singular, categorisations of migrants (i.e. as skilled/unskilled, temporary/permanent). When practices rather than categories become the methodological focus, opportunities are presented for understanding the range of positions, identities and pathways that individuals inhabit over their lives. While the work of scholars from migration studies has significantly influenced my thinking and I draw heavily upon this field in my analysis, I prefer to use the terminology of ‘transnational mobility’ (Robertson, Harris, & Baldassar, 2018) and mobile settlers to capture the multiple pathways, practices and transitions of people who move within and between a range of categorisations over their lives. As this research seeks to demonstrate, short term intentions and visa restrictions often transform into longer term and ongoing mobility trajectories that encompass multiple categorisations, statuses, directions of movement, temporal frames and spaces of connection. Migration, for these mobile settlers, as I have come to describe them (see Chap. 3 for discussion), is experienced as a complex and nuanced phenomenon. It is experienced differently between individuals, from one location to the next, as well as experienced differently by the same migrant as their lives unfold and circumstances change. The broad parameters for inclusion in this research resulted in a socially, culturally and linguistically diverse group with a range of intersecting identities related to gender, ethnicity, age, nationality, religion and profession. For instance, I examine the story of a young woman named Lan, who escaped Vietnam by boat following the Vietnam War. She came to Australia as a humanitarian entrant where she completed her schooling and tertiary education. She then moved with her British husband to the US as a postdoctoral scholar, where she utilised various visa categories such as ‘spouse’ and ‘tourist’ to extend their stay, and recently moved back to Australia to train and work as a teacher. Or James, who was born in Scotland and has lived for at least five years at a time in a range of countries including Australia, China, Japan and the US, and who has recently returned to Australia to retire (his fifth relatively long-term repatriation to Australia). At first reading, it is unclear what a Vietnamese migrant living in Australia or the US and a Scottish migrant living in Japan or China have in common. Their migration trajectories, sites of connection, motivations for relocation and length of stay in destination countries, over their life course, are diverse. They migrate under different conditions and statuses as their migration pathways unfold; they sometimes move alone, sometimes with their families. What unites these diverse threads is the common experience of becoming educated and skilled over time and space and the desire to move to improve their life circumstances, leading to multiple relocations and resettlements. The narratives in this book provide a window into the intimate, personal lives of individuals’ diverse migration trajectories in an effort to reflect the complexity of contemporary migration and mobility experiences.

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1.2 Mobile Lives: The Fluidity of Australian Immigration and Emigration One central factor linking participants in this research is that Australia was, at some stage, a location in their mobility histories. I have approached this research by identifying a location where motion is evident, seeking a vantage point that catches that motion locally to show how incoming and outgoing migration to/from Australia is a fluid process often uncovering a multiplicity of transitions (in terms of space and migrant classification) (Appadurai, 2009, p. 48). Whilst this is a story about Australia, it also speaks to contemporary immigration issues and experiences globally, particularly in the West. Australia has always been a diverse country, pre-colonization there were estimated to be over 250 unique Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language groups (AIATSIS, 2017). Since colonization we have also developed an increasingly diverse nation through federal immigration policies. The 2016 Census results show that almost half of the population, which has increased by 8.8% to 24.4 million since 2011, was either born overseas or had at least one parent who was (ABS, 2016). Twenty-six per cent of Australians were not born here, which is higher than the US (14%), Canada (22%), New Zealand (23%) and the United Kingdom (13%). The Census results also show that, for the first time, Australia received more migrants from Asia than Europe, with China and India the sources of the largest proportion of new arrivals. Australia was chosen as a focal point from which to observe mobility for two reasons: first, because it is one of the largest growing economies through the intake of skilled migrants who can contribute to a knowledge-based economy1 (ABS, 2012; Banfield, no date; DIAC, 2009; Syed, 2008, p. 30); and, second, because Australia’s skilled diaspora overseas constitutes a significant portion of the nation’s outgoing migration (Hugo, 2006; Hugo, Rudd, & Harris, 2003a). Migration in Australia has historically been understood as ‘temporally linear’ (Robertson, 2014) with research and policy following the traditional migration narrative of ‘departure, arrival and settlement’ (Ley & Kobayashi, 2005, p. 112). Methodological nationalism also tends to frame migrants through a rigid ‘temporal dimension’ (Meeus, 2012, p. 1777), which separates migrants into permanent and non-permanent. In spite of theoretical shifts in migration research towards understanding the transnational flows of mobile people, it is still common for empirical research to separate permanent settlement and temporary migration as well as skilled and unskilled labour as unrelated processes. In this book, Australia is not conceptualised as simply a source/destination country. This is not a useful dichotomy because participants’ migration histories reflect a range of connections to Australia over the course of their lives. Australia may have been a country of origin, a destination for participants’ migration and/or a temporary place of settlement, sometimes repeatedly, in their ongoing migration journeys. The ‘staggered’ (Robertson, 1 Although the skilled stream does not account for those whose visa statuses do not reflect their level

of skill or education.

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2013) or multi-stage migration trajectories that are explored in Chaps. 2 and 3 work to disrupt linear temporal framings of the ways in which migration is experienced. While there are many countries of origin for participants in this research, it is beyond the scope of this book to provide a context statement for every nation attached to participants’ migration histories. However, Australia is a common linking factor between all participants as either a point of origin or a destination, and it is therefore useful to describe some of the key immigration policies since Federation that have shaped the Australian immigration and emigration context.

1.2.1 Immigration to Australia Australia’s history of colonisation has significantly shaped our contemporary national identity and our policy responses to immigration issues. Australia was founded as a British colony in 1788 with continual British intakes into the country, violently displacing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. Encouraged by a fear of losing Australia’s links with Britain, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1902 gave way to the foundational White Australian Policy (Jakubowicz, 2002, p. 107). The White Australia Policy aimed to eradicate the culture of the Indigenous peoples and assimilate them into white Australia as well as to enact a restrictive immigration regime which excluded non-whites from Australia and from Australian citizenship (Hage, 2002, p. 358; Markus, 1994, p. 110). During the 1960s it became progressively less acceptable internationally to retain the racial exclusion of the White Australia Policy (Castles, Cope, Kalantzis, & Morrissey, 1988, p. 51; Hage, 2002; Stratton, 1999). From an immigration perspective, Australia’s declining population and a labour shortage that threatened the expansion of local industries meant that the nation needed to look towards more diverse migration streams rather than relying on an intake only from Britain. Australia began accepting migrants from Northern and Eastern Europe, and later, migrants who were considered at the time to be ‘lesswhite’, from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. In the wake of this expanded immigration program, the government introduced an assimilation policy aimed at integrating new immigrants into Australia’s AngloCeltic culture. Assimilation policy—which later led to an ‘integrationist’ settlement policy acknowledging assimilation took more time than expected—foreshadowed multiculturalism in that it was the first government recognition that Australia was no longer a homogenous, white, European nation. In 1973, Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government introduced a discourse of multiculturalism into Australian society (Ang & Stratton, 1998, p. 30). In response to Australia’s increasingly diverse population, multiculturalism emerged as both a discursive construction of the nation’s identity and as a set of prescriptive government policies aimed at ‘managing’ cultural diversity (Ang & Stratton, 1998, p. 32; Pakulski, 2014). As a discourse, multiculturalism achieved two aims. First, it provided Australians with a national identity which attempted to replace the nation’s historically racist and shameful past. Second, as a symbol, multiculturalism creates the ‘public fiction’ that Australians live in an inclusive and tolerant society (Ang & Stratton, 2001, p. 98). Ang and Stratton (2001,

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p. 100) have argued that Anglo-Celtic Australians are discursively constructed as the mainstream and as outside of multicultural Australia. Multicultural Australia is then constructed as made up of non-English-speaking migrants. Aboriginal peoples are often entirely absent from the multicultural debate, in part because they are overlooked by white Australia and in part because many resist being framed as ‘another ethnic minority’ having always been multicultural (Ang & Stratton, 2001, p. 102; Dunn, 2010; Hollinsworth, 2016). During the 1980 and 1990s, ‘white paranoia’ was reignited, fuelled by the highest arrival of Asian immigrants since the Gold Rush and their increased visibility to the Western colonial gaze (Hage, 2002). This was intensified by the Labor government’s push towards an Australian Republic that would have further disengaged Australia’s ties to the British Monarchy and, finally, the granting of land rights to Indigenous people through the Mabo Judgement (Jakubowicz, 2002, p. 109). The resurfacing of ‘white paranoia’ also came with Australian historian and commentator, Geoffrey Blainey’s (1984), public opposition to multiculturalism and Asian migration and, later, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation campaign. Leader of the One Nation political party, Hanson (1996) opposed the supposed ‘special’ treatment of Aboriginal people and condemned Asian immigration as well as multicultural policy, arguing she represented the views of ‘ordinary’ white Australians (Ang & Stratton, 2001, p. 96). Similarly, Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to publicly denounce Hanson’s racist views, as well as his abolition of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and heavy restrictions on migration intakes, further dismantled the multicultural policy of the 1970 and 1980s. Nevertheless, as the recent Census results demonstrate, the diversity of Australia’s immigrant entrants is still an important national characteristic and, while somewhat contested, multiculturalism has provided the contemporary framework for national migration and settlement policy. While the huge influx of migrants into Australia in the years after the Second World War was largely through the Family Stream and the relocation of large extended family groups, it is now more common for smaller family networks or individuals to migrate. We have seen a steady decline in family migration in favour of temporary labour migration (Mares, 2018), aimed at strengthening our knowledge economy and global competitiveness. The ‘skilled’ stream of Australia’s migration programme is designed to improve the productive capacity of the economy and fill skill shortages in the labour market, including those in regional Australia. It represents the majority of places offered (128,550 places in 2017–18 or 68.9% of the migration programme). The ‘family’ stream is predominately made up of Partner visas, allowing Australians to reunite with family members overseas and represents 30.8% of the migration programme (57,400 places in 2017–18). From 1 July 2012 the Australian Government introduced changes to the skilled visa selection process with SkillSelect. SkillSelect is designed to ensure the skilled migration program is based on the economic requirements of Australia. The program allows the Australian Government to better manage who can apply for skilled migration, when they can apply and in what number—reducing the time taken to process an application. The program also helps address regional skill shortages by allowing migrants to indicate if they are willing to live and work in regional Australia.

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The program is an online service that permits skilled workers who are interested in migrating to Australia to record their details to be considered for a skilled visa through the submission of an Expression of Interest (EOI), which effectively eliminates the backlog of applications. Essentially, the previous ‘points system’ moves from an ‘auto-pass’ approach to ‘by invitation’ (hence the EOI requirement designed to erase queues). Potential migrants can be contacted and nominated for skilled visas by Australian employers or state and territory governments, or they can be invited by the Australian Government to lodge a visa application. From July 2012 all migrants who were interested in the points-based skilled migration or business investment and innovation visa program were required to submit an EOI and receive an invitation in order to lodge a visa application. An early criticism of the SkillSelect scheme was concern particular demographic groups may be favoured when employers, rather than government, select skilled workers. For example, we can see an impact of employer preference on skilledmigrant source countries, favouring those from an English-speaking background. Whereas points-based selection systems, introduced globally during the 1970s, were designed to ensure a transparent and consistent process for migrant admission, employer choices are not subject to the same level of scrutiny. In the 2010–11 period, the Government-selected top-four source countries in the skilled category were India (21%), China (18%), the UK (14%) and Malaysia (6%). The top source countries in the employer-sponsored temporary labour category were the UK (22%), India (13%), South Africa (8%) and the Philippines (7%) (DIAC, 2010). This is interesting because it shows that the positions of English-speaking countries—either British or formerly British colonies—are higher on the list when Australian employers get to choose. In 2014–15 the order has shifted to the UK, India, Philippines and Ireland, while under the government-selected points system, the UK comes in at number four and Ireland at number eleven (Home Affairs, 2014–15). There are also criticisms of the points-based system, including whether or not the government is able to accurately predict areas of skill shortages, which can lead to over- and under- employment in different areas. The points test also does not include those who migrate for different, non-job-related reasons, nor does it take into account skills like communication, resilience, the ability to learn on the job or transfer skills to a range of changing industries (Hoang, 2016). It is also biased towards younger applicants with English proficiency. For instance, the Skilled Independent Subclass 189 visa, which requires a pass score of 60 points. Hypothetically, if a person was 25 years old, had ‘superior’ English language skills and an undergraduate degree, they would be able to obtain 65 points based on these factors. However, a person aged 42, who also has ‘superior’ English and a degree, would only score 50 points. The points test is designed to attract skilled migrants in ‘high value occupations that are in medium to long-term need in Australia’ (DIBP, 2014, p. 12) and are thus weighted towards younger migrants who can work for longer. Across Australia’s broad migration programme streams (skilled, family, special eligibility and humanitarian), there are a growing number of long term yet temporary migrants living in Australia (estimates are around one million, see Mares, 2016). In 2013 there were approximately 65,000 people living in Australian on temporary

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visas who first arrived between 6 and 10 years earlier (Mares, 2016, p. 5). These temporary migrants include international students, working holiday makers, skilled workers on 457 visas, asylum seekers, refugees and New Zealanders who arrived after 2001. Some temporary migrants work for several months or a few years before returning to their country of origin or moving onto another destination, while others seek Permanent Residency (PR) status and eventually citizenship. In March 2018, the 457 temporary work visa was replaced by the Temporary Skills Shortage (TSS) subclass 482 visa with tougher language requirements and restrictions on the number of visa renewals. This new scheme is comprised of two streams: (1) a short-term stream allowing for a two year period of stay that can only be renewed once for a total stay of four years and therefore has no pathway to permanent residency; and (2) the medium-term TSS visa that is valid for up to four years and has a pathway to permanency but migrants will have to live and work in Australia for a minimum of three years before an employer can sponsor a visa holder for permanent residency (compared to the previous two year period for the 457 visa and an unlimited number of onshore renewals) (Home Affairs, 2018). The measures also included higher language requirements with migrants having to achieve a score of six compared to the previous score of five (see Mares, 2018 for detailed comparison). One of these temporary visa pathways holds the potential to become full members of Australian society whilst the other views migrants only in terms of their short-term labour contribution. Another important migration trajectory that often leads to skilled worker status is through the education-migration nexus. For example, the trajectory of an international student to permanent resident is referred to as ‘two-step’ (Hawthorne, 2010a, b) or ‘staggered’ migration (Robertson, 2013). Citing a back-log of more than 140,000 applications for skilled migration, in 2010 DIAC amended the student visa system, making it more difficult for international graduates of Australian universities to become skilled residents in Australia (Owens, 2011). Central to these amendments was raising the English-language-proficiency requirement by more than 20% from ‘competent’ to ‘very good’. However, after a 10% fall in Australia’s education export earnings in 2010–11, visa-rule reforms were changed to allow faster visa approvals for foreign students and the right to work in Australia for two years after graduation in order to prevent further losses of overseas student income (Mares, 2016). The Knight Review (2011) of the student visa program, and the government’s responses to it, have recognised the importance of international education to Australia in terms of revenue and long-term residency opportunities, through which international students might, in the future, contribute to the country’s productivity (Knight, 2011). Beyond the temporary labour migration debate there is also a larger national debate around asylum seekers. It is worth noting that public perceptions of mobile people (regardless of their formal category) are often impacted by misinformation circulating around so-called ‘illegal’ immigration. Furthermore, research has shown that the humanitarian entrants of today are often the skilled workers and entrepreneurs of tomorrow (Collins, 2017). Australia’s international advocacy for refugees has been compromised by negative political rhetoric and cultural stereotyping that frames asylum seekers arriving by boat as ‘illegals’ and ‘queue jumpers’ as well as insinuations that they may be associated with terrorism. The arrival of asylum seekers in Australia

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has been a contentious political issue since Liberal PM John Howard was in office. While asylum seekers arriving by boat represent a minute proportion (less than 3%, Phillips & Spinks, 2011) of Australia’s annual population growth, media and political discourse has fuelled the common misconception that Australia is being ‘flooded’ by illegal immigrants that might threaten ‘our way of life’ (Hanson, 1996). The asylumseeker debate is certainly powerful, with ex-PM Howard winning re-election in 2001 in large part because of a tough policy on asylum seekers arriving by boat, after he prevented the Tampa cargo ship (which rescued crew and passengers from a sinking boat) from entering Australian waters. This decision foreshadowed a new era in immigration policy, preventing asylum seekers who are attempting to reach Australia by boat, from reaching our shores. The Rudd Labor government ended the Howard government’s asylum seeker policy when they came into office in 2007. However, from 2010 to 2013 there was a steep increase in asylum seeker arrivals by boat (Phillips, 2017), and Tony Abbott and the Coalition were elected once again, partly on a platform of ‘stopping the boats’. Since then, asylum seekers have been processed in offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, living in appalling conditions (Amnesty International, 2016; Watson, 2016). The UN Human Rights Committee has harshly criticised Australia for its treatment of refugees. Arguing Australia has breached its human rights obligations, the UN Human Rights Committee has urged Australia to end offshore processing and bring asylum seekers to Australia.

1.2.2 Emigration from Australia by Overseas and Australian Born While much of the debate on migration focuses on immigrants to Australia, outgoing migration from Australia has also increased substantially since the mid-1990s (Hugo, Rudd, & Harris, 2001). The decision to leave Australia may be due to a wide range of reasons. Overseas-born emigrants might choose to return to their country of birth due to feelings of homesickness or insecurity in relation to long-term settlement options in Australia. Older migrants may leave Australia after retirement, returning to their country of origin, and younger migrants might return to their country of birth to fulfil family responsibilities. Of the 91,737 people who left Australia in 2012–2013, 52.7% were born overseas. The largest group of overseas-born emigrants were from New Zealand with UK born as the second largest emigrant groups, followed by China, Hong Kong SAR-born and the USA. Of these, most had lived in Australia for more than five years (73.1%) (Home Affairs, 2014). However, statistics on permanent departures are captured from information provided by passengers as they leave Australia and so while they provide an indication of emigration trends they cannot represent the full picture. For example, the statistics include passengers who declare an intention to depart Australia permanently and therefore don’t include people who state they are leaving temporarily but do not return or those who say they are leaving permanently but then return in the future.

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Researchers have also examined Australia’s diaspora overseas, where approximately one million Australian citizens currently live outside of their homeland on a permanent or long-term basis (ABS, 2012; Banfield, no date; Hugo, 2006). For Australian citizens, the decision to emigrate is usually based on employment reasons although some young people, born in Australia to migrant parents, may return to their parents’ country of birth with them. While NZ, the UK and the USA have traditionally been the most popular locations of residence for those leaving Australia, we are witnessing a gradual shift towards destinations in Asia with increases in emigration to Singapore, China, Japan, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates (ABS, 2012; Banfield, no date; DIAC, 2012). Previous studies (Hugo et al. 2003a, b; Fullilove, 2005) have described the Australian diaspora as young, skilled, educated and as progressively mobile, moving between Australia and a range of destination countries as strategic, serendipitous, personal and professional opportunities arise. In 2012–13, 62.9% of people departing Australia permanently (or at least this was the intention), had secured employment prior to leaving (Home Affairs, 2014). Australia has also introduced policies to try to re-engage the Australian diaspora living overseas, as evident in policy reports and senate inquiries (Fullilove, 2005; Fullilove & Flutter, 2004). Such policy discourses appeal to a relatively ‘essentialised’ notion of home and national identification in which a person’s identity is presumed to be largely associated with one country (Fahey & Kenway, 2010, p. 566; Tomlinson, 1999, p. 104). This perspective condenses ‘home’ to a singular location at a time when global increases in mobility and displacement have reconstituted people’s relations to places such as ‘home’ and ‘away’, ‘origin’ and ‘destination’. James for example, a participant who was introduced earlier in this chapter, was not born in Australia. He moved here as an eleven-year-old but identifies Australia as his strongest site of home despite living outside of Australia for most of his adult life. Should he be considered an Australian expatriate, part of the Australian diaspora, or the Scottish diaspora, or a global migrant with ties to multiple countries, people and places all over the world? Contemporary mobility practices mean the nation may not be a person’s primary source of identity and ideas of ‘home’ might be constituted by more than one centre (Fahey & Kenway, 2010, pp. 567–568). There are always going to be fluctuations in immigration policy, as demonstrated in this section. The human implications of the continually changing political territory are that people will always have to adapt and employ different tactics to navigate immigration systems. With such a diverse population moving into and out of Australia via a variety of pathways, there is a need to adapt research paradigms, including data collection, to track the complexity and shifts in migration trajectories over time and space. In the next section I problematise conceptions of who constitutes a skilled migrant in contemporary society. In particular, I highlight literature that moves the discussion towards a lifecycle approach to the lives of migrants, as well as towards a broader understanding of skilled migration as a phenomenon not just practiced by the ‘elite’ but as an increasingly common experience amongst ‘middling transnationals’ who occupy a space between high- and low-end labour sectors (Baas, 2018; Conradson & Latham, 2005).

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1.3 Conceptualising the ‘Skilled Migrant’ Over two decades ago Iredale (2001, p. 8) offered the definition that a highly skilled migrant is an individual with a university degree or extensive experience in a particular field. However, there is no straightforward way to define who is a highly skilled migrant in terms of skills, credentials, experience or length of stay. Koser and Salt’s (1997) discussion about defining a skilled migrant provides further layers, highlighting three broad perspectives on the production of this identity, which may change depending on the interplay between the migrant, the state and the employer. First, migrant centred definitions often explore issues of brain drain/gain/circulation (e.g. Bernstein & Shuval, 1995) and emphasise the agency of the individual in their choice to relocate, which may be related to much more than their level of education and expertise. Second, from the perspective of the state, a skilled migrant is someone whose expertise would benefit the country on national economic grounds. Papademetriou and Yale-Loehr (1996) refer to these migrants as ‘priority workers’, a labour centred definition focussing on the transfer of human capital. Third, employers may exercise determination in defining what is a skill in relation to their specific requirements, context and strategies. In particular, the Australian government’s SkillsSelect program gives employers more control in defining what and who counts as skilled. Kim (2010, pp. 588–599) describes ‘skills’, which were once understood as ‘complex social processes’, as becoming ‘de-contextualised and de-constructed into finite, isolable “competences” to be located as the property of the individual, who then carry them, luggage-like, from job to job and also across spatial boundaries’. Such a perspective suggests that possessing human capital allows for ‘frictionless’ global mobility, in which ‘the “human” part is measured in terms of internationally recognised qualifications and quantifiable talents’ (Favell, Feldblum, & Smith, 2007, pp. 16–17). Not surprisingly, as Favell et al. (2007, p. 17) go on to suggest, economic perspectives on the ease of skilled migration based on credentials and experience do not match empirical realities. The myth, they suggest, is the individualistic notion that the human capital of education can allow one to move freely, regardless of social structure and without local connections or embedded networks. People who are seen as rich in human capital are perceived to operate outside of society and yet simultaneously integrate into their host country whenever they choose, when the reality is, as this research explores, they also face considerable barriers to settlement and belonging. Immigration policy can benefit from a more relational approach to skilled migration that considers the complex intersections of migrants’ multiple social locations, positionalities and their shifting statuses, in addition to their identities as skilled workers (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Even though migrants may be skilled, they may not take up full-time work in the resettlement country or employment in sectors classified as highly skilled (Kofman & Raghuram, 2005). It is difficult to determine whether someone is ‘skilled’ or ‘highly skilled’ as this is largely subjective and there is much slippage between these terms within the literature (e.g. Khoo et al., 2008; Syed, 2008 refer to ‘skilled migrants’

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whereas E. Ho (2011), Koser and Salt (1997) refer to ‘highly skilled migrants’ with no criteria for this differentiation). The level of skill, as ‘skilled’ or ‘highly skilled’, may be influenced over time and in different places by the level of demand for particular expertise over a migrant’s life course. What is defined as a skill is constantly changing with the demand for particular expertise. Most governments, through their immigration programs, frequently adjust their definition of skilled migration according to the skill set that is perceived to be in demand. Consequently, the goal posts defining who is deemed a skilled migrant are continually shifting (Millar & Salt, 2008). The usefulness of the distinction between skilled and unskilled migrants has also been questioned, with some arguing that we should instead pay attention to the characteristics of individuals across and within these categories, acknowledging that people may, at different stages of their lives, belong to both (Kofman & Raghuram, 2005; Koser & Salt, 1997; Nagel, 2005; Robinson & Carey, 2000). There is a need to separate the transfer of skills through official labour channels from their embodied transfer through persons who may migrate in other ways, such as spouses and familysponsored migrants who are not recognised in a country’s official migration statistics (Kofman and Raghuram 2005; 2009). Differences among skilled migrants are likely to be as great as the distinctions between skilled and unskilled (Robinson & Carey, 2000, p. 103; Willis & Yeoh, 2002). While alternative conceptions of the ‘skilled migrant’ have included ‘skilled international migration’ (Findlay & Garrick, 1990), ‘skilled international labour circulation’ (Cormode, 1994), ‘professional transients’ (Appleyard, 1991), and the ‘migration of expertise’ (Salt & Singleton, 1995), the debates outlined in this section indicate that a single definition cannot be applied to the ‘skilled migrant’ and that within the context of changing global flows of people, such a definition would likely be unhelpful. The diversity of the social, economic, cultural and educational backgrounds and experiences of the participants involved in this research demonstrates the vast differences within the often-reductive category of skilled migration and furthermore, middling transnationalism. In this research, participants’ mobility was not just about continual movement across space but also the continual acquisition of skills and negotiation of social locations and positionality in different contexts. They did not simply cross a line from unskilled to skilled. Rather, their trajectories involve both a continual skilling as well as transitions from official governmental categories of ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’, depending on where they were living and under what family and professional conditions. Research on skilled migrants has traditionally limited analysis to the associated labour outcomes and professional contexts of their migration as well as their negotiation of immigration policy and processes. Less frequently does research consider the complex intersections of migrants’ home lives and emotional attachments in addition to their work contexts. As a consequence, skilled migrants are often positioned as disengaged and dislocated from their local surroundings. There is a need to relocate skilled migrants within place-based relations, within their individual histories and trajectores. In this research I have considered the migration experiences of participants and their positioning through their relationships to a range of narratives outside of official skilled migrant and human capital discourses. Emotional subjectivities are

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central to discussions of migration because people’s mobility in terms of whether they belong or do not belong in a new location, whether they stay temporarily or are able to become permanent residents, is affected as much by their emotional experiences as it is by the legal constraints that govern the length of their stay (Skrbis, 2008). This book develops a greater understanding of the ways migrants negotiate immigration policy in their everyday lives. Without such information it is hard to know whether, for example, lower percentages of women entering a nation as skilled migrants means that they do not possess what are deemed as necessary ‘skills’, or if they enter under spousal visas and then continue to work in skilled professions but are not officially recognised as such. Furthermore, are labour and employment outcomes key drivers in people’s migration decision-making or were other motivational factors at play? In what ways do skilled migrants describe the impact of resettlement in relation to processes of identity formation, and how might their particular social locations and narrative practices change the way they experience migration?

1.4 From Migration to Mobility: Longitudinal Approaches to Mobile Lives As has been argued so far, migration has historically been understood through specific types of movement and as undertaken by specific kinds of people, with each classification viewed as relatively discrete (e.g. Beaverstock, 2002; Hugo et al., 2003b). However more recently, at least from a theoretical perspective, migration is increasingly understood as a diverse process that links together countries of origin, destination, and future migration trajectories, through more empirical research is needed to understand the lived experiences of such processes. In response researchers have begun to suggest that a longitudinal approach to the study of migrants is required, which would take account of the continuum of migrant experiences over time and space (e.g. Ho, 2011; Ley & Kobayashi, 2005). Analytical perspectives often capture snapshots of migrant experiences and subjectivities. As E. Ho (2011, p. 118) argues, such ‘snapshots’ slice the migration experience into isolated periods of time rather than looking at migration ‘as a continuum’ that consists of ‘multiple gradually realised trajectories, embedded in both the emigration and immigration regimes’. To limit migrant research only in terms of visa or occupational categories would narrow an understanding of the changing statuses and transformation of migrant categories over time. Even when migrants return to their country of origin, this does not imply the move is final, as many migrants may continue to relocate to different destinations throughout their lives (Kobayashi & Preston, 2007; Ley & Kobayashi, 2005; Nagel, 2005; Raghuram & Kofman, 2002; Yeoh & Huang, 2000). In addition, migrants often draw upon a range of migration strategies in order to work and live in a country or countries, which sometimes contradicts their highly skilled status (Ho, 2011, p. 119). The term migration does not encapsulate all forms of human mobility, but rather, restricts and classifies movement through a political lens. By contrast, the term

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mobility conceptually shifts the focus away from linear understandings of migration and towards the complexities of movements spatially and temporally. The conceptual latitude of the term ‘mobility’ captures the variable temporalities of people’s settlements in different locations, the multi-directionality of movement and the ways mobility is lived within and outside of nation-state policies. It also allows for the examination of how the mobility of some implies the immobility of others. Migration research increasingly conceptualises mobility in fluid terms, breaking down singular categorisations such as traveller, migrant, tourist, resident and instead focusing on their intersections (Cohen et al., 2015; Hannam, 2008; Williams & Hall, 2000). Increased global mobility has occurred as a result of a range of factors including expanding technologies facilitating greater interconnectedness; mobility brought about by human conflict; an increase in the number of people undertaking tertiary qualifications within the context of the neo-liberal knowledge economy; and the perceived cultural capital inherent in migration, as a vehicle for career and lifestyle advancement (Axhausen, Urry, & Larsen, 2012; Bourdieu, 1984; Hannerz, 1996; Ryan & Mulholland, 2014; Sassen, 2001; Urry, 2007). The expanding field of mobility studies (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006, p. 1) over the past two decades has produced a range of spatial metaphors to capture the increasing global movement of people, ideas, information and capital with terms like ‘flows’ (Favell et al., 2007; Sassenm, 2001), ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) and ‘tipping points’ (Urry, 2005). The first wave of research around global mobility was largely macro in its approach, analysing global networks and flows of people and capital within global cities (e.g. in the work of Castells, 2000; Sassen, 1994, 2001; Taylor, 2004). Since then, a more agent-centred approach to global mobility has emerged from disciplines such as anthropology and cultural geography, which have moved to recognise the local experience of global processes (Castles, 2002; Gardner, 2006). Much of this research focused on the experiences of people who have been forced to migrate either for humanitarian reasons or who are low-end labour migrants (May et al., 2007; McDowell, Batnitzky, & Dyer, 2008) or it has focused on the global elite (Beaverstock, 2002; Beaverstock & Smith, 1996; Fan, 2002). Until recently there was less research that investigated the mobility practices of migrants who move within and between these categories. One notable exception that explores mobility between low-end labour and elite labour is found in the work of Conradson and Latham (2005, p. 229) who argue transnationalism is a practice of many more people than just the elite and ‘developing world’ migrants. They argue for a space in between that captures ‘middling’ forms of transnationalism. While their conceptualisation of ‘middling’ transnationals usefully deconstructs binaries between low and high end labour mobility, I extend this further to consider whether skilled migrants movements between typologies of developing world migrants, middling transnationals and elite labour sectors occurs throughout their lives. I argue that focussing on mobile practices rather than rigid categories of people provides space for talking about the range of positions, identities and pathways that people occupy and pass through over their lifetimes. The recent work of Michiel Baas (2018), examining Indian skilled migrants in Singapore, is particularly useful for further interrogating the ‘middling space between migration categories’. The middle is an expansive and complex category

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that involves multiple statuses within it and includes skilled and unskilled labour. Baas (2018, p. 47) suggests that ‘the space [middling] migrants occupy between more clearly recognizable categories is principally dynamic and fluid’ where defining skills in terms of ‘mid-level’ could mean ‘a compromise and/or an aspiration’ in different contexts. People may experience both upward and downward social mobility during different relocations and in different contexts over their life course. Depending on when you speak to the migrants in this research, they may be constructed as sojourners seeking overseas professional and travel experiences, refugees escaping conflict, or they might be deliberately or coincidentally on the path towards permanent labour migration. The spatiality and temporality associated with their experiences contests binaries between student/worker, tourist/worker, skilled/unskilled, temporary/permanent within contemporary migration policy (Roberts, 2018). By understanding the pathways of skilled migrants over their life-course, which may include alternate routes, a more expansive and mobile range of relationships to place and time than that attributed to mobile managerial elites (Beaverstock & Boardwell, 2000; Beaverstock & Smith, 1996) or lower-class labour sectors (Shelley, 2007) becomes evident. People move around the globe for variable lengths of time, often independent of their initial intentions, short term visas get extended and those who were once conceived as permanent migrants may return home to their country of origin or move to a second or third destination under different visa conditions. The next two sections frame the methodological parameters of the study and situate the research within processes of narrative inquiry, that can capture such temporal and spatial shifts.

1.5 The Research Project I use a longitudinal and biographical approach to understanding the mutable and evolving experiences of mobility, home and belonging for the participants involved in this research. As already described, several criteria guided my selection of research participants (i.e. they were tertiary educated, had worked in their profession for a minimum of three years and had lived in Australia at some point in their lives). The parameters of this research meant that I had a diverse sample but what links participants together is their complex and ongoing mobility trajectories and the spatio-temporal dimensions of their lives. I began interviewing in 2010 and had ongoing conversations with many participants, sometimes yearly, up to 2017. I also asked them to provide retrospective narratives of their migration experiences in order to capture the shifts in their migration pathways and the differing contexts of their mobility, not just during the data collection period but over the duration of their lives. In this research, life-story methods allowed participants not only to describe events and how they experienced them but also how they made sense of them over time (Bruner, 2003; Chase, 2005; Ricoeur, 1984; Riessman, 2002, 2008).

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In the first round of in-depth narrative interviews conducted in 2010, thirty-three participants were interviewed. I then invited them to participate in additional informal conversations in 2012 (n  25) and again in 2017 (n  14).2 Five participants sought to communicate stories about their lives more frequently, corresponding with me by email on an annual basis. While twenty participants lived in Australia at the time of the first data collection (in 2010) and thirteen were living overseas, the people in each of these categories shifted between rounds of data collection. Some that were living overseas in the first round of data collection had returned to Australia or moved to another country and some of those who were living in Australia had moved overseas. As participants were not situated in one location, interviews were conducted faceto-face and via Skype as well as through ongoing written dialogue by email. Initial interviewees were invited to participate in the research by way of my own personal and professional contacts, their networks, as well as through migrant community groups in Adelaide, Australia. At the time of the first interview the participants ranged in age from late 20s to late 60s, with the majority aged between 35 and 45. Within the research group, nineteen participants were female and fourteen were male. I interviewed a broad range of married, de facto and single migrants to allow for different relocation motivations to emerge. The parameters of the research meant that participants were born in a range of countries including Australia, Canada, India, China, Venezuela, England, Scotland, Poland, Bosnia, Germany, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Finland, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Brazil. They were also trained in a diverse range of occupations (e.g. as academics, teachers, scientists, managers, social workers, engineers, chefs and nurses and in finance and logistics, communications, public policy and international development). Participants spent between three and ten years on temporary visas in a range of destination countries, as they transitioned across working holiday, student, spousal, bridging and permanent residency visas. Interviews were conducted in English, audio-recorded and they lasted between one to two hours. Interview questions revolved around participants’ motivations for migration and their migration histories over time and space, strategies for moving (visas, etc.) and future migration intentions. The interviews also sought to elicit memory narratives of participants arrivals and departures, material practices of home-making and belonging in different places, and the ways their social and cultural identities intersected with the different places in which they have lived. Pseudonyms have been used in order to maintain the anonymity of participants’. Methods of narrative inquiry were used to take account of the identity work of participants as they construct themselves within particular social, cultural, political and historical contexts. Because narratives are often used in our daily lives as a means for dealing with uncertainty, examining migrant narratives is a useful method for researchers in this field because migration is often associated with feelings of agitation, disruption and dislocation. People continually reconstruct and present ‘preferred selves’ (Riessman, 2002) in order to cope with the situations they are faced with and 2 The

third round of data collection was an addition to the original project and many participants had changed contact details between correspondence and I was unable to make contact again.

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1 Introduction

do so in constant dialogue with their memories of the past, current circumstances and aspirations for the future, and in relation to their awareness of social positioning and location (Yuval-Davis, 2011). A narrative approach (Chase, 2005; Riessman, 2008) allows for the layering of time and space and provides a more contingent view of mobility that often unfolded, through their stories, as a series of serendipitous encounters and chance events rather than pre-determined routes. The analyses of interview transcripts were approached in two ways: first, in relation to participants’ practices and experiences (i.e. movements between locations as well as their home-making practices); and second, how they used language to represent these experiences and in particular their feelings, positions and identities. Chase (2005, pp. 656–657) outlines some analytic lenses that I have found useful in interpreting participants’ narratives. First, narrative is a particular form of discourse, told retrospectively, to order and make sense of past experiences. In my analysis I paid attention to ways in which participants described not only what happened but also the effects of an event or situation on their emotions. Second, narratives are a form of verbal social action: when someone tells a narrative they are simultaneously constructing and performing the self, experience and reality. In this way, participants’ stories become a creative process of meaning-making. Third, narratives are also situated within and constructed by the social contexts in which they are created, and the audiences they address. This helped me to unpack the social, cultural, political and historical conditions references in their stories.

1.6 Structure of the Book Rather than reinforcing the binary distinctions between skilled and unskilled migrants, temporary and permanent migration, this book examines the lived and emplaced narratives of individuals across and within a range of formal immigration categorisations over their lives, to render more complex understandings. This introduction has mapped the conceptual field of migration and mobility as it relates to the Australian migration context and processes of skilled migration and has argued for a narrative approach that is attentive to space and time in order to understand participants’ shifting connections over their lives. Two central arguments have been made and will be examined throughout the book. First, that the contemporary mobilities of skilled and educated people are diverse and difficult to contain within the boundaries drawn by conventional categorisations, such as ethnic or cultural groups, visa categories, defined and/or linear pathways. Second, that the research I have conducted into this complex phenomenon is assisted by narrative driven and longitudinal methods of inquiry that help depict and represent this diversity over their lives. While it has not always been represented in this way, migration persistently evades one-dimensional and reductive theorizations. Global events and changing social and political contexts continually give rise to a multiplicity of migrant pathways that often spill over the edges of conventional migration research categorisations and policy approaches. Research focusing on retrospective narratives

1.6 Structure of the Book

21

of migration gathered from migrants at different stages of the migration and transition process provides important longitudinal perspectives on migration trajectories. The book contributes to migration research in three ways. First, it seeks to unsettle notions of who constitutes a skilled migrant in contemporary society and demonstrate the diverse mobility patterns and visa categories that reflect the continuum of migration experiences over time and space. There is a sense that one can only be a skilled migrant if one is already skilled, an economic-rationalist perspective that neglects the multiple paths that lead to one becoming skilled. Personal narratives of migration provide an opportunity to hear what new forms of belonging emerge as a result of participants’ multiple connections, and what kinds of new identities are created in the wake of these narratives. This means transcending linear understandings of the direction of movement. The pool of potential skilled migrants is much more expansive than simply those who fall under the government’s definition of ‘skilled’. Second, this research illuminates migrants’ complex negotiations of attachments to home and belonging, and their multiple and shifting intersections of social, cultural and linguistic identities. Some participants represent mobility trajectories that have been shaped through a series of chance events as they seized opportunities ‘on the wing’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. xix). Others show how mobility is rarely a seamless process but a series of dislocations, as identity politics and histories play out in their everyday interactions to limit the extent to which they can move or belong (van der Velde & van Naerssen, 2011; Yeoh & Huang, 2011). In addition to the agency of the individuals involved, this book also considers how personal, spatial and structural factors shape their mobility practices, identities and opportunities (e.g. in relation to the needs of children, availability of employment, visa restrictions and experiences of inequality in relation to gender and ethnicity). While some participants speak from a position of privilege and are unaware of the value of their passports, except in airport queues, others who began their migration journeys as international students, accompanying spouses or refugees, are very aware of the limits of their own passports. Third and finally, this book will show how participants interpret and imagine their multiple identities, belonging/s and social locations, using narrative as a performative mode of becoming. Telling stories is never merely a form of expression but a complex interaction between self/other, speakers/listeners. A dialogicality that is embedded in particular contexts and shapes what is voiced, what is heard, and the extent to which social locations and positions can be negotiated (Bakhtin, 1981; Volosinov, 1973). Migrant narratives allow for multiple possibilities in the telling and positioning of selves where their stories become mobile as they travel with the storyteller. Participants draw upon discourses from their everyday social relations as well as discourses from government, philosophy and literature, both scholarly and fictional, to theorise their own lives, social locations, identities and sites of attachment. A narrative approach permits the layering of time within participants’ accounts—time as located in the past when an experience occurred and time as relived through multiple retellings in the present (Ricoeur, 1984; Riessman, 2008), which can re-shape memory and experience. This book is comprised of six chapters that follow three conceptual threads to take account of the situated mobility experiences of a small group of educated and

22

1 Introduction

skilled people who have lived in Australia at some point in their lives (1: trajectories; 2: memory, emotion and translocal home-making; and 3: narrating migrant identities and negotiating social locations). Chapters 2 and 3 examine the physical movement of people and their diverse migration pathways (i.e. what motivated their migration, what people actually did in order to facilitate mobility and under what conditions). Chapter 2 focuses on the specific migration tactics involved in student-led mobility as people seek long term options for living overseas. Chapter 3 then examines how conceptions of home and away are problematized for migrants over time and space, as participants occupied a multitude of visa categories and migrant subjectivities over their lives. In Chaps. 4, 5 and 6 I examine the consequences of migrants’ physical mobility on their emotional and embodied attachments to places and people. I explore the materialities, memories and everyday practices associated with making and reimagining homes (Chap. 4); narrated moments of arrival and departures over the life course, both physical and symbolic (Chap. 5); and their citizenly identities, constructed through their often emotional negotiation of multiple sites of attachment at different levels (e.g. local, national, transnational and translocal) and in different registers (e.g. physical, emotional and symbolic) (Chap. 6). In Chap. 7 I explore the narrativisation of participants’ identities, social locations and self-positioning as an integral process for negotiating migrant subjectivity. The telling of one’s life, self, location and positioning becomes the ‘doing’ of identity. Taking a longitudinal lens gives scope for examining the ways these people make and re-make themselves (and are re-constructed by others) throughout their lives as migrant subjectivities shift and change through politics of identity, status, opportunity and chance. In the concluding chapter I describe how this research contributes substantively and methodologically to an understanding of the ways skilled migrants experience their mobile pathways and histories. The life course approach provides an alternative to transnational research that focuses on linear links between a singular origin and destination country, distinct groups of people, or a single migrant classificatory scheme. I show the productivity of viewing Australia as one site within a global network of relations. Thus, notions of who constitutes a skilled migrant in contemporary society are challenged, demonstrating the diversity of different mobility patterns, identities, sites of connection and visa categories that reflect the expansiveness of migration experiences over time and space.

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Chapter 2

Tactics and Risk Under Conditions of Multi-stage Migration to Australia

Abstract This chapter provides a detailed examination of the narratives of two Venezuelan migrants who engaged in multi-stage migration practices in order to seek long-term living options in Australia. I show how they deploy a range of tactics to negotiate risk and uncertainty under the spatial, temporal and institutional conditions of temporary migration by moving to regional areas, drawing on friendship networks and continuously responding to changing ‘in-demand’ skills lists and shifting migration policy. I argue that time spent on temporary visas is actively and intentionally used by migrants to create future migration possibilities and security for themselves when there is an unknowability of migration outcomes. Temporary migrants are moved through policies designed to meet the needs of global capital and skills shortages but they are also reasoning individuals who tactically pursue opportunities, put down roots and continually evaluate and readjust their plans and fall back positions, even within a relatively limited range of choices. Keywords Student-migrants · Skilled migration · Multi-stage migration · Risk Friendship · Australia

2.1 Introduction Temporary migration has been steadily increasing (DIBP, 2016a, b, c) within western industrialised nations, including those that have historically been constructed as ‘settler’ societies, such as Canada and Australia. While permanent migration has not disappeared in the Australian context, a range of policy measures have resulted in temporary migration overshadowing permanent migration. The largest temporary migrant categories include international students, working holiday makers and skilled workers and combined, have a growth rate around three times the number of permanent visas (growing from 350,000 to 80,000 in a ten-year period) (Mares, 2016, 2018). The first wave of research in this area tended to focus on the economic, political and legal consequences of temporary migration for migrants and host nations © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 R. Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3164-0_2

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(Carens, 2008; Hugo, 2006). A second wave of research is now emerging, which seeks to examine the personal, subjective and often precarious experiences of temporary migrants including but not restricted to their labour market outcomes (Baas, 2018; Fudge, 2012; Goldring & Landolt, 2011; Mares, 2016; Robertson, 2017). This chapter examines the migration stories of two people who studied in Australia for a prescribed period of time (two years) in order to gain temporary worker status, with the long-term goal of seeking permanent residency and eventually, citizenship. I examine how they use tactics and enact agency under the conditions of ‘staggered’ migration pathways (Robertson, 2013), exploring issues related to: the institutionally driven temporal conditions restricting their visas and location of work; how their formal visa status influenced their employment prospects and experiences; how they engaged with shifting government policy and changing ‘in-demand’ skills lists; and the ways they drew upon peer support networks to increase their chances of long-term migration. Through an analysis of these issues, contradictions emerge between their state-sanctioned status as liminal and temporary, and their subjective experiences of living and working in Australia. This research did not begin as an exploration of the growing field of student led or ‘two step migration’ (Hawthorne, 2014; King & Raghuram, 2013; Raghuram, 2013; Robertson, 2013; Tan & Hugo, 2017) but it did reveal the ways that participants occupied a range of visa statuses, developed multiple sites of attachment and utilised a range of migration tactics over their lives, one of which was education-led mobility. I focus on the experiences of two people who migrated to Australia as international students and are now Australian citizens (Mateo and Seb, both born in Venezuela). While they self-identified as skilled and educated (holding a minimum of a bachelor’s degree before coming to Australia) and had experience working in their professional fields in their countries of origin (minimum of three years), they chose to undertake an additional qualification in Australia as a faster route to long-term residency (rather than through a skilled migration pathway). It is also notable that for the four participants in the broader study who were Australian born (or Australian citizens since childhood), and studied overseas, their qualifications were undertaken as an addition to their undergraduate degrees completed in Australia and were not the motivation for their migration. Instead, these four had all moved to take up employment, which was secured before they left Australia. Their additional postgraduate qualifications, which they decided to do after relocating, were seen as a way of ‘strengthening their skillset’, ‘moving into another field’ (Hannah), improving future employment prospects wherever they lived in the future (James and Sam) and for pure interest and self-development (Sophie). However, for other kinds of temporary visa holders like Mateo, Seb, whose stories are described in this chapter, their temporary status as international students turned temporary graduate workers (TGW) in Australia, was often a precarious lifeline to better living conditions. While statuses such as international student and temporary graduate worker are constructed through government policy and discourse as short term, the intentions of those who occupy these visas are often tied to the desire for long-term settlement and residency rather than sojourn. They are pathways to permanency. The Knight Review, conducted in 2011, examined student visa programs in Australia,

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and argued that temporary graduate visas are designed as ‘an adjunct to study’ rather than a pathway to permanent migration. Temporary Graduate Workers (TGW) are constructed by political and policy discourse as potential short-term workers rather than potential settlers. But while political leaders, like Scott Morrison (2011), try to circumscribe temporary migration as bounded and transitory—‘that such entrants return home when their purpose and stay has been completed—whether it is for work, study or visit’—this is often not the case because people are not merely ‘economy units’ who leave when their labour is no longer required (Dauvergne & Marsden, 2011, p. 14, 2014; Mares, 2016; Robertson, 2013). Within processes of transnational mobility people are caught between complex constellations of movements and moorings (Glick-Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Sheller & Urry, 2016, p. 12) that determine how and where one moves, under what spatiotemporal conditions, and whose trajectories are able to be re-shaped and/or rerouted (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006, p. 8). Such moments of immobility, waiting (Bissell, 2007; Conlon, 2011, p. 353), anchors, and moorings (Hannam et al., 2006) have been increasingly described in theoretical ways (i.e. that we must look at immobility as much as mobility and that they are mutually constitutive processes) but have less frequently been discussed through empirical examples. Drawing on the work of de Certeau (1984) I examine how Mateo and Seb used tactics (both planned and unplanned) to navigate risk and enact agency under multi-stage migration trajectories. I also draw on ideas of mooring and waiting (Conlon, 2011; Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller, 2016) while on temporary visas, to argue that these periods are actively used by migrants to attempt to create future migration possibilities and security for themselves, when there is an unknowability of migration outcomes. I begin by outlining the policy contexts that have shaped student immigration pathways to Australia over the past few decades, before providing an in-depth analysis of the stories and experiences of two Venezuelan student-led migrants living in Australia. Achieving migration goals outside the prescribed purpose of the student visa often involves a tactical manipulation of policy conditions by migrants to extend their stay in the quest towards permanency, by working with and responding to continually shifting institutional constraints.

2.2 Education-Led Migration: The Australian Context International education has grown to be Australia’s third largest export industry worth nearly $30 million in 2016–2017. The experiences of those who pursue educationled migration, as a pathway towards long term residency, increasingly problematise the boundaries between temporary and permanent settlement as well as complicating reductive migrant subjectivities such as student, spouse, tourist, skilled and unskilled (Allon & Anderson, 2010; Mares, 2016; Robertson, 2011, 2013). International students turned temporary graduate workers are not formally defined through skilled labour migration policies, which can disguise the number of temporary workers arriving in Australia. We have access to statistics on how many people transition between

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two visa categories in a certain time period (e.g. from a Student Visa to a 457 Visa with approximately 11,000 students pursuing this pathway in 2016–2017; or a working holiday maker extending their visa for a second year by working for a minimum of 88 days in regional Australia and then transitioning to a study visa, a pathway taken by more than 10,000 WHM in 2016–2017) (DHA, 2017; Mares, 2018). However, we can only assume that a proportion of people who achieve Permanent Residency were international students at some stage in their migration trajectory, as there is no data that tracks people’s multi-stage migration pathways all the way through to permanency or departure. Australia’s international student enrolments increased substantially during the Howard political era, when a direct link was established between study and permanent residency. Having an Australian qualification gave migrants five extra points in the ‘points test’ (Koleth, 2010) and an additional ten points to those with a prior qualification deemed to be in short supply (on the Migration Occupations in Demand List, MODL). In 2001, the government also made this pathway more attractive by allowing students to apply for a permanent visa while onshore whereas previously they would have had to return to their country of origin to apply. After 2005, the government expanded the skills list to include qualifications in the vocational sector. At the time, Australia’s unemployment rate was low and the minerals boom signalled the possibility of significant skills shortages. In 2009 the Rudd government reduced the education-migration nexus by scaling back these measures with the intent to produce more jobs for Australian citizens (Evans, 2009; Koleth, 2010). However, the move was ill-timed, occurring as the Global Financial Crisis took hold and the high Australian dollar inflated the cost of studying in Australia with the numbers of student enrolments falling dramatically. The higher education and training sector reacted to the considerable drop in international students, an income source they had come to rely on, by lobbying the government for action that would continue to support the industry (Mares, 2016, 2018). The government then developed the 485 post-work study visa that made it easier for international students to remain in Australia after their study finished. Since 2013, international students in Australia who have finished the minimum requirement of a Bachelor’s degree, which includes at least two years study in Australia, are able to apply for a post-study work visa of between two and four years, depending on their level of qualification. While there is a global discourse around the need to attract skilled workers, the reality is that in most developed countries, they are recruited from migrants already residing in the host country. In Australia, almost 50% of temporary skilled workers, or those with subclass 457 visas, are granted to onshore applicants (Mares, 2016, p. 60–61; DIAC, 2013) (note that the 457 visa was abolished in March 2018 and replaced with the Temporary Skill Shortage TSS visa with tightened requirements relating to language, work experience and onshore renewal). According to the Department of Home Affairs (DHA, 2017), between 1 July and 31 December 2017, student visa applications granted increased by 7.1% (to 167, 873) when compared with the same period in the previous year with the highest increases for the nationals of China, India, Nepal and Brazil. During this period there were 383, 913 student visa holders in Australia, the highest recorded number in any year since 2014. Over one third of stu-

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dents in Australia at 31 December 2017 were from China (20.1%) or India (14.8%). In the six-month period to 31 December 2017, there were 90, 137 former student visa holders granted another substantive visa where most of the former students moved onto another student visa (37.8%), a Temporary Graduate visa (subclass 485) (21.6%) or a Visitor visa (12.3%). It is notable that staggered migration pathways often involve more risk and take longer to secure options for residency. For those who transition to permanent residency through a series of multi-stage migration processes (e.g. from working holiday maker, to student, to graduate temporary visa), this pathway to permanent migration takes on average a duration of 6.4 years, compared to the 457 visa or employee sponsorship to PR status, that takes approximately 2.7 years (Mares, 2018). In Australia, the student visa states under its eligibility criteria that you must demonstrate you are a Genuine Temporary Entrant (GTE), and not using the visa to maintain ongoing residency beyond the five years. This integrity measure is assessed relatively subjectively in relation to each individual’s circumstances, immigration history and, if under the age of 18 years, the intention of their parents or legal guardian (DIBP, 2015). Applicants must also show or declare that they have ‘genuine access to sufficient funds’ from ‘an acceptable source’ to cover their costs of living and studying in Australia for the first 1–2 years of their stay (Evans, 2009). It is stipulated this requirement is not designed to exclude students who, post-study, go on to develop the skills required by the Australian labour market and apply to become permanent residents. The rationale for having the ability to select labour migrants from the pool of international students is that these people have had time to develop language skills (if English is not their first language) and there is no uncertainty regarding their qualifications. Within such policy discourses there exists an ongoing tension between governmental aspirations to control incoming migration and at the same time, maximize enrolments for Australian educational providers. As a consequence, the need to support a critical export industry also opens the door to international study as an expanding pathway for permanent migration. The Knight Review (2011), which examined student visa programs in Australia, argues temporary graduate visas are designed as ‘an adjunct to study’ rather than a pathway to permanent migration. Temporary Graduate Workers are constructed by political and policy discourse as potential short-term workers rather than potential settlers. However, such workers have already lived in Australia for at least two years prior to obtaining a graduate visa, which strengthens the likelihood they have put down roots. As Robertson (2014, p. 1927) has argued, policies which permit studentpermanent-resident pathways, have ‘engendered a cultural space in which PR remains the ‘holy grail’ for many international students’. As will be argued through Mateo and Seb’s stories in the next section, achieving migration goals outside the prescribed purpose of the student visa often involves a tactical manipulation of policy and work conditions by migrants to extend their stay in the quest towards permanency.

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2.3 Institutional Policy Meets Lived Practice: Enacting Agency Under Conditions of Multi-stage Migration Mateo was born in Venezuela in the early 1980s. At that time, Venezuela was one of very few Latin American countries with a strong economy, amidst a region of authoritarianism and unrest. However, the nation’s repeated failures to reform the economy during the 1980 and 1990s, in addition to the collapse of the major political parties, led to a power vacuum that was replaced by anti-establishment political figure, Hugo Chavez Frias. Poverty, crime, high unemployment and a currency crisis led Mateo to pursue options for immigration. When he was in high school he told his parents that he wanted to do an exchange program to learn about another country but shortly after Chavez stopped funding such programs. He then decided that if he was going to migrate somewhere ‘[he] needed a degree’. He went to university in Venezuela to study Engineering. Half way through his degree, he said ‘the revolution and communism got worse and worse’ and fearing for their safety, his family decided to try and move to Florida. They were able to relocate to America on a Business Visa, opening a branch of their business in Miami. However, after a year of living in America, the business ran into financial trouble. At the time he could have chosen to stay in the US illegally but decided it was a migrant pathway he did not want to pursue. He said that North Miami is more ‘an extension of Latin America’ and that ‘it would have been the same as living in Venezuela’. He returned to Venezuela and finished his degree. Mateo said he had a very limited knowledge of Australia beyond ‘the Sydney Olympics and Crocodile Dundee’ but his friend Seb, who had lived in Australia as a student and who I discuss later in this chapter, suggested he consider it as a migration option. Mateo first tried to migrate to Australia as a skilled migrant, which meant he had to stay in Venezuela two to three years after the completion of his degree to gain enough professional experience to apply. This was the first instance of waiting at the hands of government policy for a result that was not guaranteed. He found a job in his profession and after three years, started the process to apply for a skilled visa to Australia to work as an engineer. He had to be assessed by Engineers Australia and submit examples of projects he had worked on. While waiting on the outcome of his application, he described how life in Venezuela had deteriorated even further. He said you would go straight from work to home because if you parked your car anywhere else ‘you would be robbed or kidnapped’. With still no outcome on his application after several years, and no idea when or if that would eventuate, Mateo, Seb and two other friends (Sofia and Dylan) decided to apply to come to Australia as international students instead of through a skilled migration pathway. He researched the skills list advertised by the Australian government to tactically choose a qualification that was in high demand in the host country. He subsequently applied for and was accepted into a Masters of Aviation Instrument Management in Melbourne. However, because the in-demand skills list produced by the government is continually changing, there was constant pressure to finish the program and get into his professional field as soon as possible.

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I think, when we came here, we knew that every six months the government announces changes in migration. When I arrived here with the student visa, in my head, I had five months or four months to do something about it, even though I had two or three years or whatever. My life was lived in lots of four months. I had to plan ahead because we’re organising ourselves to rules that are set, but that can be changed in six months. It’s always shifting. (Mateo)

The ability of the government to revise immigration policy every few months meant that even though his university program in Australia lasted two years, the conditions that provided him with the best chance of staying beyond his student visa, as a graduate temporary worker (GTW), were changing at a much faster rate. This included the level of English language proficiency required by the government as well as the Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL). The Australian Skilled Visa ANZCO Search engine notes on their website that the occupation list can change daily. This can leave people in a protracted state of limbo, with many working and studying in Australia for many years, developing an increasing sense of connection, belonging and a desire to stay, but are unable to achieve a sense of security, ‘especially if government changes the rules along the way’ (Mares, 2018). However, Mateo is also critical of friends in the same circumstances as him who did not plan for such policy changes. He mediated this constant state of uncertainty by having multiple ‘back-up plans’. I’ve met so many people that organise themselves for this certain visa and this certain score from the English language test, and they got to that point, and then the next month the government says, ‘No, sorry. It’s not 6.5, it’s 7.5’, and they’re like, ahhh! And I’m like, what are you going to do now? They just go, ‘Oh, but this and that’. I’m like, ‘No. It’s no excuse man. You knew this. You can’t just wing it, it doesn’t just happen, especially organised skilled migration. There’s a checklist, there’s rules. This is what it is. In six months, it might change’. (Mateo)

His discussion highlights how temporary migrants need to understand the system that they’re entering, have a predetermined plan but also one that is flexible enough to respond to changes in immigration policy and shift course if required, to increase chances of long term residency. While he was studying for his Masters, Mateo had two choices to extend his stay. He could apply for full permanent residency or apply for a sponsored regional visa in South Australia. For him, the first step was securing a pathway from Venezuela to Australia. Once this goal had been realized he knew that applying for permanent residency would be a three-year wait, by which time the English level and skills list may have changed. However, if he moved to Adelaide, because it is a city that is considered regional by the government, he would wait less than one year to get Permanent Residency (PR) status because the city is trying to attract skilled workers. Waiting is experienced through both spatial and temporal frames, shaping where he could live and work, for how long and under what conditions. In this instance, being moored to Adelaide was connected to regional and national geopolitics around addressing skills shortages in regional areas by encouraging the relocation of TGW in exchange for potentially shorter visa waiting periods. However, waiting was also an active process that involved reflection on the part of migrants themselves (Conlon, 2011, p. 353). Mateo had intended to use

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the state sponsored regional visa to his advantage, as a short-term tactic for long-term residency, before relocating back to Melbourne (though having met his partner in Adelaide, he is still there seven years later). He describes how migration, as a temporary migrant, does not just happen once at the initial point of relocation from one nation to another but also involves multiple internal migrations (i.e. from Melbourne to Adelaide) and from one visa status to another over time (international student to graduate temporary worker to permanent resident) as states of temporariness unfold through different spatial and temporal conditions. Mateo states: I applied for it, got the visa after nine months and came to Adelaide. It was like migration, within migration, within migration. I had to start all over again. (Mateo)

He felt that coming to Australia on a student visa, rather than taking the skilled visa pathway, increased his chances of getting permanent residency and eventually citizenship. Being a student in Australia meant that he met lecturers who could connect him with their local employment networks. He was also studying with domestic students, making friends in the community, and undertaking casual work to earn money and improve his English skills at the same time. His multi-stage approach to migration increased his chances of getting to Australia and staying long term by having the time to develop these networks, work experience and an understanding of Australian cultures. Mateo also described some of the difficulties he faced trying to find employment in Australia. When he first started looking for skilled jobs within his professional field he was putting his full Venezuelan name on his resume. After many attempts and not getting phone calls for jobs that he believed he was qualified for, a Venezuelan friend that he had met in Adelaide suggested that he ‘Australianise’ his name. Instead of using my first last name (in Venezuela you get your dad’s last name and your mother’s maiden name as a second surname), he suggested that I use my second surname and drop the last vowel so it would sound European or French, giving me a potential advantage over other ethnicities. Interestingly enough, after doing that I was getting at the very least, a phone call from job applications that I was qualified for. I asked several job recruiting experts/advisors about this practice and they all agreed that it is wrong but it is the reality. (Mateo)

The labour market experiences of those from non-English speaking backgrounds versus English-speaking backgrounds are known to be vastly different in the Australian context (Tan & Lester, 2012). There is certainly evidence in Mateo’s story and other participants’ in this research, that signals barriers to employment through ‘perceived language and cultural deficits’ (Robertson, 2014, p. 1926) and several participants talked about altering their résumés in the hope of getting an interview. For example, another participant named Izabel who migrated from Brazil to Australia suggested that rather than skills and qualifications, her eventual job success was due to ‘luck’ and ‘being in the right place at the right time’ (she met her future mining and logistics employer whilst working in a department store). She also says that securing employment commensurate to her skills and qualifications was almost impossible through official channels (e.g. recruitment companies, job advertisements and applications). Like Mateo, she believes that employers often don’t take

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migrants’ résumés seriously because ‘they’re not from Australia or their name is not in English’. She felt she was discriminated against based on her résumé. She says, ‘if you look at my résumé you see that actually it reads the same as an Australian girl with a similar qualification, it’s just that mine has some words in Portuguese.’ Mateo also reflected on the precarious experience of being a temporary migrant. He said that most employers knew what Permanent Residency status was and that it was the first thing they would ask him in an interview. So employers will go ‘oh do you have PR’ and I’ll go ‘oh no’ and they’ll so ‘Well what do you have?’ ‘Skilled visa, this and that.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘That’s a temporary residency.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Okay, so I have a residency for three years. After three years, I could extend it for two more years, and after three years and one year living in the state, in the regional area, I can apply for a permanent residency’. They just go, ‘Oh, so it’s not really a PR?’ They go like, ‘ooooh, right’. So you feel like you’re in limbo. (Mateo)

He described how he was constantly applying for jobs and talking to employers on the phone who would inevitably ask if he had PR status. When he responded ‘no’ he said, ‘you could hear it in their voice straight away that they’re not going to call me back because I’m not really a resident’. This is comparable to other studies of international students turned temporary graduate workers in Australia, whose participants also felt that their temporary visa status was an impediment to employment with employers implicitly and explicitly rejecting applicants who did not have PR status (Baas, 2011; Robertson, 2014). While temporary graduate visas present no legal barriers to labour market participation, their precarious temporal status can become an unofficial barrier to employment. The contradiction is that while temporariness is framed as desirable through state policies to attract a flexible workforce, the relative worth of this status from the perspective of employers and industry is uncertain (Robertson, 2014, p. 1924). There are gradations leading towards full citizenship from international student, to graduate temporary worker, to permanent resident and the pinnacle for many, of full citizenship (Robertson, 2014). If migrants are fortunate enough to move along this spectrum, they navigate unsettled spaces of in-betweenness over the course of this journey. They occupy a space of labour-liminality with state-based sanctions framing them as temporary, but this formal liminal status also overlays the subjective experience of being a migrant. Mateo’s feelings of not quite being a resident while also having no intention of returning to Venezuela, caused him to feel untethered to either location of home for many years. The not-quite-resident positionality of temporary migrants not only presents challenges in gaining employment and feeling welcome but can also change the way migrants relate to the host country. If temporary migrants are valued for their university fees and labour but not valued as ‘active and engaged members of society’ (Mares, 2016, p. 281), then we encourage migrants to view Australia through a similarly mechanistic lens, devoid of feeling and attachment, rather than how their evolving connections and sense of belonging shape their social and cultural contributions and obligations towards Australia as a significant site of home. As Mares (2018) recently suggested, there is a tension between the expansion of temporary migration and Australia’s long held principle of ‘citizenship-based multiculturalism’ and the rights and responsibilities that this entails.

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I now shift to the experiences of Mateo’s best friend, Seb. Seb was born in Venezuela and is one of Mateo’s closest friends. When Seb was a teenager, he recalls his dad reading the newspaper and seeing a story titled ‘Australia is Not That Far’. Previous studies on international students have examined a range of push and pull factors that lead to student mobility such as the dominant language spoken in the destination country, educational reputation of the host country, local links in the host country and the ease of obtaining a student visa, among many other factors (Hawthorne, 2014; King & Raghuram, 2013; Tan & Hugo, 2017). Yet for the most part, participants in this research attribute the selection of destination country to a succession of chance events and unexpected opportunities. It was the interplay between tactical decision-making and serendipity that eventually led to their selection of migration country and their options for long-term settlement rather than a pre-determination to migrate to a specific country. After reading the newspaper article, Seb’s father encouraged him to go to the embassy and find out more. He first came to Australia on a student visa in 1999 but was sent home in 2001. I was living in Brisbane, in Brisvegas. I went to Sydney, fell in love with this Australian girl … Let’s not talk about that (laughs). I moved to Sydney, and I lost my passport in the journey, because I was going by cars and by buses and stuff. My passport took like two or three months to get renewed. When I got the passport I went to the nearest Immigration Department office in Sydney to update my visa. But they put me in this room which was like in the movies, like a glass window that you could see inside but you couldn’t see outside. (Seb)

His visa was locked to the educational institution that he came to Australia to study at and when he moved states and universities, following his girlfriend, he didn’t update his visa and was therefore in breach of its conditions. I was scared as hell, because I didn’t know what to do. They kept me there for six hours, asking me questions. ‘Why did you lose your passport?’ Why did I lose my passport? Because I’m an idiot, that’s the only response I could actually say. They cancelled my Visa and said, ‘You’re not getting it. Your visa has been cancelled’. ‘Well, sign here’. I said, ‘Well no, I’m not going to sign anything, because if I sign anything I’m tied, so let me have a chat at least with my girlfriend outside’. ‘No you can’t talk to her. You are an illegal alien right now. You can’t go out.’ I said, ‘Okay, can I go to the toilet?’ ‘No you can’t. Pee here if you want to.’ They kept telling me to sign the form. I said, ‘I’m not going to sign anything until I’m talking to someone that represents me.’ In the end, the guy comes back and pretty much gives me a bridging Visa for two days. I had to bring like $50,000 for them to go to court or bring a one-way airline ticket that is booked for no more than a week away, back to Venezuela. They were my options. And that’s what I did, I bought a ticket, so I got kicked out of the country, left my girlfriend. I was banned from Australia for five years. (Seb)

He said that the experience taught him to value what you have and to ‘control situations’ as much as possible because it can all be taken away so quickly. When he was ‘kicked out’ of Australia he said the ‘honey moon period’ of returning home only lasted for three months. It was enough time to fully comprehend the politically and economically unstable situation he found himself in again. He decided to do anything in his capacity to return to Australia. The path back to Australia would not have been possible, he said, without the support of what he calls ‘the Team’ (Mateo,

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Seb, Sofia and Dylan), four friends who decided together to migrate to Australia. Each of them had a different role to play, based on their skill set, in trying to make their migration aspirations a reality. I don’t know if I would have done this alone. I think I was too scared to be alone. My part was the leadership, to look for the journey, the pathway. I also knew how things worked in Australia, the culture. Mateo was in charge of public relations and research, finding different study options for us. Sofia made sure we had all our paperwork together and understood all the application rules and kept us to deadlines. Sofia was structured, she was a machine for that. It was part of the strategy because there were things I was not good at that they were was amazing at. Dylan found the money, in a way. (Seb)

While there exists a growing field of research examining the student-migration nexus (Baas, 2011, 2018; Raghuram, 2013), the role of friendship networks rather than family and kinship networks has only begun to be examined in this context (e.g. see Robertson, 2018). For Seb, Mateo, Sofia and Dylan, their friendship and the networks they had between them, helped facilitate their initial pathway to Australia and also provided them with an anchor, a sense of security and familiarity, and a financial support system in Australia (i.e. they lived together in the same house to reduce rent and loaned one another money when necessary). They also provided one another with a sense of family, having migrated as young adults without their parents. Mateo described Seb as ‘my chosen brother, he’s my family here’. Equally, friendships that were important at the start of their migration journey changed over time and space as their professional paths diverged and new relationships developed (e.g. Seb and Sofia separated and the four of them lost touch, with only Seb and Mateo remaining close). Seb was anxious that if he did migrate again, as a student, he would be kicked out and so was initially against the group trying to migrate via this pathway. This was partly because of his prior experiences in Australia and partly because of the inflation rate in Venezuela. The prices were incredibly distorted as the economy has several different exchange rates, one of which is the official market rate and another, the much higher black-market rate. If he had to pay for his international degree at the black-market rate, there was no way he could have afforded to relocate. He said he would rather apply for a skilled visa in Australia from Venezuela and had already started the application process. However, by chance, Dylan’s father worked for the government and through his networks was able to help them get acceptance to apply as international students, and more importantly, gain access to currency at the official rate, making it a much more feasible migration pathway. I reduced risk where I could, I was playing it very safe. The other thing I reduced risk was, Sofia and I, we were still a couple. Applying to migrate together had a better success rate. It was double the money but it was double the points, you know? All the time within the immigration department, the list of desired degrees changes all the time, twice a year, every year. Having both of us, with two degrees, actually helped us. At the beginning my degree [Engineering] was a higher level, or more points, than Sofia’s. But at the end, when we actually applied, Sofia had more points than mine [Communications]. That’s why I ended up not in Adelaide, I ended up in Melbourne. That’s the difference between Mateo and I. We had 30 or 40 points over the minimum so didn’t have to migrate to a regional area. (Seb)

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Mateo and Seb decided to study in Melbourne because RMIT was the only university offering the Masters program face to face, rather than online. They felt they would more easily be able to develop professional networks and improve their language skills if studying fully on campus. Mateo, Seb and Sofia all came to Australia on a student visa to undertake a Masters program. Dylan came with a six-month visa to learn English because his English skills were not deemed strong enough to study an additional qualification. They planned their departure dates in a staggered way so that they could finish their English courses and study at university at the same time. Seb and Sofia had prepared all of their documentation to apply for permanent residency as soon as they arrived and a year later received PR status. He said: That’s the reason why you plan your strategy. The more your environment is hostile, the more strategies you have to plan to avoid a failure. So it depends on the environment that you’re in, you play accordingly. So, yes, [the government] might move the poles, but it’s a risk that you’re taking and that’s why you try to reduce the risk in some way. (Seb)

Another way that they reduced risk was by coming with three other people, which was much cheaper than migrating alone. The group was able to rent a two-bedroom apartment where they lived together. Taking the student pathway also meant they were able to earn more money living in Australia whilst building up their case for long term residency. Once in Australia, Seb also knew the pitfalls from his previous experiences. He described how when you come to a first world country from a third world country, ‘you get blinded by the shine of all the things that you can have’. Dylan loved Nintendos, PlayStations and things like that. In Venezuela those cost a lot of money. Here, we can buy them for nothing. In Venezuela people work because they have nothing else to do. Here people work because they know they have to. I told them, ‘Guys, we have to be careful with money, this is how it works, this is the structure’. Mateo and Dylan go out, and they had too much in front of them, they were buying guitars, and buying TVs and things. ‘Guys. Don’t get excited about the shiny shit. Be careful because you haven’t started applying for residency…Guys you gotta wake up’. Then one day Dylan’s visa was about to expire, he’d finished his English course, and he was just doing shit, any job he could find, nothing productive and I said, ‘Fuck you guys! If you guys don’t wake up, you’re gonna go back. And let me tell you something, I know what that’s like’. They would just tell me to stop stressing. (Seb)

Several weeks before Dylan’s English courses were due to finish, Seb had already started planning for when Dylan asked for his help. When Dylan did approach him for advice, Seb laid out a plan for what he should do. Okay. You’re gonna study computers. You’re gonna study this course because it’s the cheapest you can find, you’re gonna apply on this date. In two days, you’re gonna send the document back to Venezuela to apply for the dollars in Venezuela. You’re gonna tell your dad the next day that you are actually putting that application in. Then I’m gonna give you the money to pay the university. You’re gonna pay me back in three weeks, whenever the money gets sent from Venezuela. (Seb)

Seb’s capacity to manipulate the immigration system to his own ends, creating opportunities ‘on the wing’ (de Certeau, 1984) contributed to his, and his friends’, long term chances of residency. Seb also talked about numerous friends he had met

2.3 Institutional Policy Meets Lived Practice: Enacting Agency …

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in Australia who have similarly migrated from various South American countries with aspirations to become permanent residents but ‘no plan’. He sees them working long hours doing multiple jobs. Of the thirty he said he had met over the past decade, only two of them have stayed. One friend who has been in Australia for as long as Seb (eight years) is still studying and is not yet a Permanent Resident. He is still elongating; his visa is made of rubber. He arrived here and started as a bricklayer. Then he had an accident, then he did something else that didn’t have anything to do with getting permanent residency. They end up studying all these shit courses that do nothing, the courses aren’t even in the courses required to stay in Australia. But, because these courses are cheaper and because they have to go to work, to study, so they can stay more, and they can work more, working in the shittiest jobs. It’s a catch 22. These guys are becoming like the Mexicans of the US. The tuition costs are huge. It’s bananas. The government must be rubbing their hands together. But the thing is, the problem is not laziness, because let me tell you, they worked 10 times more than me. I based it, and this sounds terrible, but I base it in ignorance, I base it in a lack of knowing what to prioritize, or not understanding the system. Because they’re so scared of money, because they don’t have it and because they need the money to be able to stay. You know? It’s a rat race. So they jump on the money. (Seb)

International students may use the temporary graduate visa as a pathway towards permanent residency or to gain work experience that may be valuable to them if/when they return home. However, there are also those like Dylan or Seb’s friend described above, who needed to engage in any work they could find in order to pay off the debts accumulated from studying multiple qualifications to extend their stay, and simultaneously continually enrol in additional qualifications even though they were unlikely to lead to secure employment or long-term residency. As Seb states, these additional qualifications are rarely on the in-demand skills list but are cheaper and provide a short-term fix to ‘elongate’ their visas. However, the ‘outlay of capital’ through paying for education keeps the long-term desire for permanency alive as they attempt to stay on through multiple student visas and then temporary graduate visas (Robertson, 2014, p. 1928). Even though Seb’s friends had a relatively high level of education in their country of origin (minimum of an undergraduate degree), they were often employed in unskilled roles as a matter of immediate survival rather than the fields they were qualified for. Graduate temporary workers are able to undertake a range of jobs because unlike sponsored temporary migrants, whose visas are attached to a specific employer, they are able to be flexible, though this is inherently more risky in the long term. They are not part of official guest worker schemes and so with a ‘visa made of rubber’, seek to extend their stay through a series of ongoing temporary statuses, tied to jobs and courses that may have no long-term benefit for seeking PR status. Seb’s experiences above underscore the importance of planning for a range of scenarios in order to increase the chances of his and his friends, long term migration options. He says you need to tactically choose a qualification that is on the government skills list and at a reputable education institution. His experiences also signal the differential privileges available to international students. He had enough capital to study the degree that he wanted at the institution that he chose. He was also able

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to secure funds in Venezuela at the official market rate rather than the black-market rate, a chance prospect, through Dylan, that would be unavailable to many. He also had knowledge about how the immigration system worked and the culture of the host society as a previous international student in his early twenties. In addition, he had enough money to prioritize his study rather than working multiple jobs and post-graduation, was financially able to support himself whilst trying to secure a job in his field (a task which took over a year), instead of continuing to take low paid hospitality roles as a means of survival. Attempts to move along the continuum of temporariness towards permanence hinge upon many factors including their access to financial resources and social networks/relationships as well as their ability to use their current skills/knowledge/education to conform to state sanctioned criteria of migrant desirability in Australia. However, it is not just the conditions of the receiving country that are important, it is also about where migrants come from. My data shows the importance of the sending country (i.e. in terms of the conditions of Venezuela that changed so rapidly it was not tenable to stay there due to crime, black market rates and high inflation) as well as the financial resources and social/support networks leveraged in Venezuela to open up the potential of coming to Australia in the first place (through Dylan’s father). Though we know a lot more about temporary migration in Australia over the past few years through the work of scholars such as Mares (2016) and Robertson (2017), Seb also provides a particularly unusual case as someone who came to Australia, was then forced to return to Venezuela but was able to find a pathway of return for a second time, all under the conditions of student migration. He also shows that no one is immune from deportation, despite their investments in Australian society (socially and economically). Deportation becomes yet another potential facet of the temporal experience of migration that produces interruptions in mobility trajectories and plans. While Seb and Mateo both show how they are agentic in using temporary state-imposed moorings in Australia to increase their chances for long term living options, it is still difficult to entirely subvert the disciplined spaces and sovereign control of government migration regimes and their corresponding regulations.

2.4 Conclusion Seb and Mateo are examples of middling migrants who do have a greater degree of choice relative to other mobile categories (such as unskilled temporary labour or refugees). Both are highly educated, skilled and are now Australian citizens. Yet detailed analysis of their narratives, as middling transnationals, also reveals how their mobility was not always straightforward and involved moments of risk (social, financial and psychological), uncertainty and even deportation, along the way. They were trying to gain local qualifications, demonstrate their skills, knowledge and performance in the local employment market, for a profession that is deemed valuable by the immigration department at that moment in time. This is risky because as Mateo states, the social value of particular qualifications ‘shifts over time’, you can’t just

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‘wing it’ but have to take the ‘rules’ and the ‘checklist’ seriously and be able to respond to changes quickly. It’s also a financial risk, outlaying significant funds to undertake study as international students with the long-term desire of becoming permanent residents that has no guarantee of eventuating. Mezzadra and Neilson (2012, p. 195) have described this education-migration nexus as an ‘intricate obstacle race’ in which temporary migrants must ‘perform appropriately’ in order to open up the possibility of extending their stay. Yet both Mateo and Seb understand such precarity through the lens of opportunity; they feel that despite challenges, if they are ‘clever and savvy’, they will ultimately reach their migration goal. Bissell (2007, p. 277) describes ‘waiting through spaces of mobility’ as ‘an often inevitable and frequent experience woven through the fabric of the mobile everyday’. Periods of ‘waiting’ can be actively incorporated into migrants’ everyday lives as periods of opportunity as well as containment. Waiting is a distinctive dimension of stasis for migrants, which operates as both a ‘dynamic effect of international geopolitics’ as well as an actively embodied component of migrant’s daily lives (Conlon, 2011, p. 355). Periods of waiting and anchorage can provide a rich conceptual lens for understanding how migrants negotiate spatio-temporal intervals in active and intentional ways. Temporary migrants are moved through policies designed to meet the needs of global capital and skills shortages but they are also reasoning individuals who tactically pursue opportunities, put down roots and continually evaluate and readjust their plans and fall back positions, even within a relatively limited range of choices. Mateo and Seb were waiting to gain options for long-term residency but they were not waiting in a passive sense. The uncertainty associated with their mobility meant that they tried to mitigate risk by tactically selecting courses that aligned with government priority areas, moved to locations that had reduced waiting times (e.g. regional areas), sought local connections and engaged in work across skilled and unskilled areas to make use of waiting times and improve their language skills. Rather than waiting in their respective countries of origin for a skilled migrant visa (which was often their first strategy but took too long), they decided to take a multistage migration approach, apply for a student visa and wait in Australia, where they would at the same time be putting down roots in the country and building up a stronger case for long term residency. The tactics they used while actively waiting, are not always conscious manipulations of a system, they’re not necessarily plotted out but instinctive reactions to the situations they find themselves in. Intellectually, emotionally and bodily, they’re putting things in motion they hope will give them some options in the future. Migrants who are part of the ‘mobile middle’ as Baas (2011, 2018) describes, may be in a precarious position in terms of being in a liminal zone of temporariness but they are also in a position to tactically work with policy to try and secure favourable outcomes for themselves. The ‘mobile middle’ not only describes their assumed level of education/skills in between low and highly skilled professionals but it also points to the ways they are a highly mobile group ‘that actively engages with the constraints and opportunities inherent to their position’ and in doing so they also ‘cautiously but determinedly test the limits and flexibilities of the migration programme of which

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they are essentially a part’ (Baas, 2018, p. 50). While Mateo and Seb might both be described as mid-level skilled workers, their stories demonstrate how both have tried to be upwardly mobile by upgrading their skills and education and studying degrees on the government prescribed in demand skills list in ultimately striving to achieve permanent residency and eventually citizenship in Australia. They are not low skilled workers but nor are they necessarily high skilled yet (at their point of arrival in Australia), staying with other migrants to reduce the cost of living in a small two-bedroom apartment in Melbourne and working in construction and low-paid hospitality jobs. As part of the ‘mobile middle’ Mateo and Seb display agency in actively negotiating the constraints of the migration system in order to study, work and potentially secure long-term living options in Australia where their particular visa (student, graduate temporary worker) is a product of governmental as much as their own negotiation and tactical manoeuvring. The in-between, liminal space of temporary migration is used to their advantage, reframing uncertainty as an opportunity to increase their chances of staying long term. Mateo and Seb use tactics so that while they may be ‘caught in the nets of discipline’ as de Certeau describes (1984, pp. xiv–xv), they also utilise the visa system to extend their stay in various countries by taking out successive temporary visas while they build up a case for long term residency. They, in a sense, make do by manoeuvring within the structures that govern whether they can stay, how long and under what conditions. While the strategy of government migration departments is to administer closure and control, temporary migrants are sometimes able to disrupt and subvert these disciplined spaces to their own ends. These tactics are both active and reactionary processes that expose the limits and constraints of structures of institutional control and show the interactions between shifting government policy and lived everyday experiences, as migrants negotiate these policies in their own lives and re-calibrate and reroute their plans where possible. For example, I described how Seb had to unexpectedly return to Venezuela when he breached the conditions of his visa and Mateo talked about having to continually start again, when he arrived in Australia and also when he moved to a regional area to improve his chances of gaining residency. These kinds of interruptions in their migration plans (Robertson, 2017) meant they had to repeatedly reimagine their aspirations and tactics for longterm settlement options (i.e. undertaking study for a particular migration outcome when they were already highly educated and skilled; or living for required of periods of time in a regional area). While I have described people who have used education as a gateway to long term residency in Australia, this does not preclude their future mobility. Taking a longitudinal approach to migrant lives reveals the complex pathways and migrant subjectivities that often emerge over time and through space. Drawing upon participant’s retrospective stories, the next chapter maps the relocation pathways of participants for whom Australia was one point of settlement in a life of unfolding relocations. International student status was just one subjectivity amongst many that they may have occupied over their lives. For example, Mateo talks about his desire to move back to Venezuela to support his friends and family, heavily involved in political protests. I began this article drawing on Hannam et al.’s (2006, p. 6) use of the term

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‘mooring’ as a metaphor to explore the interdependencies between mobility and stasis arguing that ‘mobility cannot be described without attention to the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities’. The maritime symbol of a mooring is particularly relevant to the experiences of international students turned skilled migrants. The immigration system regulates their movements, mooring them to a country and region under certain conditions. But while they are anchored or secured, at least temporarily, moorings are also flexible. They give boats a degree of latitude to shift and change direction in the water. While participants are tethered to student and graduate visas, which dictate how long they can stay and where, how many hours they can work and the selection of the most productive workers (in terms of skill and age), people also exploit such moorings by seeking qualifications, networks, regional locations that might extend their stay or be one citizenship among many, that they collect over their life time. So while moorings provide the possibility of stasis, they also, always, imply the possibility of relaunch (Germann Molz & Gibson, 2016, p. 15). The next chapter captures some of these moments of stasis and onward mobility by examining participants’ experiences over time and through space.

References Allon, F., & Anderson, K. (2010). Intimate encounters: The embodied transnationalism of backpackers and independent travellers. Population, Space and Place, 16(1), 11–22. Baas, M. (2011). Imagined mobility: Migration and transnationalism among Indian students in Australia. London: Anthem Press. Baas, M. (2018). The mobile middle: Indian skilled migrants in Singapore and the ‘middling’ space between migration categories. Transitions: Journal of Transient. Migration, 1(1), 47. Bissell, D. (2007). Animated suspension: Waiting for mobilities. Mobilities, 2(2), 277–298. Carens, J. (2008), Live-in domestics, seasonal workers, and others hard to locate on the map of democracy. Journal of Political Philosophy, 16. Conlon, D. (2011). Waiting: Feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility. Gender, Place and Culture, 18(3), 353–360. Dauvergne, C., & Marsden, S. (2011). The ideology of temporary labour migration in the post-global era. In A. Shachar & G. Brahm (Eds.), Citizenship in a globalised world: Perspectives from the immigrant democracies (pp. 1–30). Retrieved from SSRN https://ssrn.com/abstract=1768342 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1768342. Dauvergne, C., & Marsden, S. (2014). The ideology of temporary labour migration in the post-global era. Citizenship Studies, 18(2), 224–242. DIAC, Department of Immigration and Citizenship. (2013). DIAC subclass 457 State/Territory summary report 2012-13. Retrieved December 17, 2018 from http://www.457assistance.com/ article/diac-subclass-457-stateterritory-summary-report-2012-13-to-30-november-2012. DHA, Department of Home Affairs. (2017). Student visa and temporary graduate visa program bi-annual report. Retrieved March 23, 2018 from https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/ ReportsandPublications/Documents/statistics/student-temp-grad-program-report-dec-2018.pdf. DIBP, Department of Immigration and Border Protection. (2016a). Migration programme statistics 2015–2016. Retrieved November 19, 2017 from https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/ ReportsandPublications/Documents/statistics/2015-16-migration-programme-report.pdf.

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DIBP, Department of Immigration and Border Protection. (2016b). Student visa and temporary graduate visa programme trends, 2009–10 to 2015–2016. Retrieved June 3, 2017 from https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/ReportsandPublications/Documents/statistics/ student-visa-trends-2015-16.pdf. DIBP, Department of Immigration and Border Protection. (2016c). Temporary entrants and New Zealand citizens in Australia as at September 2017. Retrieved June 3, 2017 from http://www. border.gov.au/ReportsandPublications/Documents/statistics/br0169-30-sept-2016.pdf. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Evans, C. (2009). New visa measures to assist international students, media release, Canberra. Retrieved December 20, 2017 from http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display. w3p;query=Id%3A%22media%2Fpressrel%2FRBPV6%22. Fudge, J. (2012). Precarious migrant status and precarious employment: The paradox of international rights for migrant workers. Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 34(1), 95–131. Germann Molz, J., & Gibson, S. (Eds.). (2016). Mobilizing hospitality: The ethics of social relations in a mobile world, Abingdon. Oxon & New York: Routledge. Glick-Schiller, N., & Salazar, N. (2013). Regimes of mobility across the globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(2), 183–200. Goldring, L., & Landolt, P. (2011). Caught in the work-citizenship matrix: The lasting effects of precarious legal status on work for Toronto immigrants. Globalizations, 8, 325–341. Hannam, K., Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). Editorial: Mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities, 1(1), 1–22. Hawthorne, L. (2014). Indian students and the evolution of the study-migration pathway in Australia. International Migration, 52(2), 3–19. Hugo, G. (2006). Temporary migration and the labour market in Australia. Australian Geographer, 37, 211–231. King, R., & Raghuram, P. (2013). International student migration: Mapping the field and new research agendas. Population, Space and Place, 19(2), 127–137. Knight, M. (2011). Strategic review of the student visa program 2011 report, Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Retrieved May 10, 2012 from http://www.immi.gov.au/students/ knight/_pdf/rec-list.pdf. Koleth, E. (2010). Overseas students: Immigration policy changes 1997–May 2010. Parliament of Australia. Retrieved December 20, 2017 from https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/ Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/0910/OverseasStudents#_ftn45. Mares, P. (2016). Not quite Australian: How temporary migration is Changing a Nation. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Mares, P. (2018). All work, no stay? Is the ideal of Australia as a nation of permanent settlement giving way to a new reality of Australia as a guest-worker society? Retrieved August 18, 2018 from https://www.sbs.com.au/allworknostay/. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2012). Between inclusion and exclusion: On the topology of global space and borders. Theory, Culture & Society, 29(4–5), 58–75. Morrison, S. (2011). Scott Morrison promises to protect the “Borders of Our Values”. Retrieved September 26, 2017 from http://australianpolitics.com/2011/11/18/morrison-promises-toprotect-the-borders-of-our-values.html. Raghuram, P. (2013). Theorising the spaces of student migration. Population, Space and Place, 19(2), 138–154. Robertson, S. (2011). Student switchers and the regulation of residency: The interface of the individual and Australia’s immigration regime. Population, Space and Place, 17(1), 103–115. Robertson, S. (2013). Transnational student-migrants and the state: The education-migration nexus. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Robertson, S. (2014). Time and temporary migration: The case of temporary graduate workers and working holiday makers in Australia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(12), 1915–1933.

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Robertson, S. (2017). Migrant, interrupted: The temporalities of ‘staggered’ migration from Asia to Australia. Current Sociology. In Press. Robertson, S. (2018). Friendship networks and encounters in student-migrants’ negotiations of translocal subjectivity. Urban Studies, 55(3), 538–553. Sheller, M. (2016). Uneven mobility futures: A Foucauldian approach. Mobilities, 11(1), 15–31. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2016). Mobilizing the new mobilities paradigm. Applied Mobilities, 1(1), 10–25. Tan, G., & Hugo, G. (2017). The transnational migration strategies of Chinese and Indian students in Australia. Population, Space and Place, 23(6), e2038. Tan, Y., & Lester, L. (2012). Labour market and economic impacts of international working holiday temporary migrants to Australia. Population, Space and Place, 18(3), 359–383.

Chapter 3

Onward Migration Pathways Over Time and Space

Abstract By defining skilled migrants as only those who migrate through skilled visa pathways, we cannot recognise the range of people who may in fact be skilled or highly educated but utilise different categories to facilitate their mobility. Narrow conceptualisations of skilled migration also discount those who are likely to be considered ‘skilled’ in the near future. Drawing upon empirical data, this chapter problematizes who is considered a skilled migrant in contemporary society by demonstrating the diverse mobility patterns and visa categories that reflect the continuum of migration experiences over time and through space. By reconceptualising skilled migration as a biographical and temporal project, involving diverse pathways towards becoming skilled, bureaucratic and static conceptualisations of this classification can be expanded and re-contextualised. I introduce the phrase educated and skilled ‘mobile settlers’, as an alternate framing to skilled migrants, to capture the diversity amongst migrants and the dynamism of their pathways. Using this framing, I describe the practices of people whose life histories have been punctuated by relatively frequent relocations, either repeatedly going away and coming back or moving incrementally from one location to another. This chapter will show how being a skilled migrant involves a complex negotiation of immigration/emigration contexts, qualifications and skills, personal ties and social locations, particularly along gender lines. Migrant relocation pathways are shown to be underpinned by serendipitous events and emotional attachments as much as by pre-determined and strategically motivated intentions. Keywords Skilled migration · Middling-migrants · Multi-stage migration Temporality · Spatiality · Biography

3.1 Introduction Academics and government institutions tend to position skilled migrants as the global elite and this is not necessarily an accurate description. By lumping all mobile citizens into such a homogenous group [it] actually works to disguise the voices that these people have. (Kate, Australian Immigration Department employee) © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 R. Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3164-0_3

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By examining the mobility of people over time and in broad terms, intersections between identities such as tourist, traveller, worker, resident, refugee, working holiday maker and student become visible. In addition, while people may personally identify with a migrant identity, it may not be recognised by the legal system. For instance, an individual might see themselves as a skilled migrant even if they relocated under a spousal, student or tourist visa, tactically subverting the immigration system to initiate relocation and extend their stay. A life-cycle approach to the study of migration takes into account the diversity of types of mobility (travel, leisure, migration, escape etc.) and migrants’ private and public identities and sites of attachment over time. This approach also acknowledges that those who engage in ‘lifestyle mobility’ (Thulemark, Duncan, & Cohen, 2013), ‘middling transnationalism’ (Conradson & Latham, 2005) and other forms of skilled labour migration (Beaverstock, 2012; Findlay, 2002; Khoo, Hugo, & McDonald, 2008), may not have always been so privileged. People who are currently included within such classifications may have been excluded from these types of migration opportunities at other times in their lives. It is not uncommon for people to negotiate a range of shifting socio-cultural, political, economic and personal conditions that constrain and enable mobility over their lives. Conceptual labels like ‘skilled migrant’, ‘middling transnational’ and ‘lifestyle migrant’ can often obscure the contradictory experiences and diverse experiences that exist within these categories as well as between them. As Baas (2018) recently argued, the ‘mobile middle’ involves both experiences of upward and downward social mobility. Research that explores different pathways towards skilled migration is relatively new (e.g. Ho, 2006, 2011; Robertson, 2014; Ryan & Mulholland, 2014; Ryan, Sales, Tilki, & Siara, 2008). In particular, Ryan and Mulholland’s (2014, p. 598) study of French highly skilled migrants in London characterizes the ‘dynamism of migratory trajectories’ by including a range of migrant categories that unsettle binaries between temporary/permanent, elite/and everyone else. This body of work offers important longitudinal perspectives on migrant lives but tends to focus on discrete national and/or ethnic categories of people and destination countries. Removing research boundaries such as a singular origin or destination country, shifts the focus from migrant categories to people’s mobile pathways and practices over their life course. Biographical narratives, which are attentive to place and time, can capture multiple migrations across and within national borders as well as imaginative forms of arrival and departure, as people’s affective and embodied connections and sites of belonging shift over time and place. The term ‘skilled migrant’ does not adequately capture the way many tertiary educated and skilled people negotiate middling transnational pathways involving mixed moments of upward and downward social mobility, temporariness and fixity. For that reason, I describe participants as skilled middling (Baas, 2018; Conradson & Latham, 2005; Robertson, 2018) ‘mobile settlers’ who engage in practices of mobile settlement. The aim of this conceptualisation is to capture the practices of people whose life histories have been punctuated by incremental relocations and shifting migrant statuses and subjectivities. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s (2002, p. 1)

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work, I suggest that while it is ‘far simpler to think about the concept of A or B, or of B as non-A, rather than the process of what goes on in between A and B’, it is necessary to engage with ‘flows’ and ‘interconnections’ if we are to understand the spatial and temporal trajectories of mobile lives. The term mobile settlers avoids traditional categories of immigration that are too static to represent the way in which many migrants become movers (Recchi, 2006). The term settler is used to ground participants’ mobility because even though their lives often involved frequent relocations, they also developed strong localised connections to places and people, even if those connections changed and dispersed. Relationships between movement and fixity, within the mobilities paradigm, provide a more flexible lens for understanding human mobility in terms of people’s scattered, yet simultaneously situated and emplaced connections. In a globalised world migration is often understood by policy makers in economic terms (Dauvergne & Marsden, 2014; Migration Council Australia, 2015–16). This is particularly relevant to discussions of temporary labour migration because the precariousness of these migrants’ status renders them as ‘economy units’ who, in theory, are required to leave when their labour is no longer needed (Dauvergne & Marsden, 2011, p. 14, 2014). Objectives of temporary labour migration programs, driven by employer demand and mediated through state policies, rely on several principles that are difficult to achieve: (1) that countries have accurate knowledge of the labour shortages that exist; (2) that qualifications are internationally transferable; and (3) that migration policies can provide workers on a ‘just-in-time’ basis (Dauvergne & Marsden, 2011, p. 14). However, scholarship has established that once temporary migrant workers arrive, it is difficult to guarantee their departure (Mares, 2016; Robertson, 2013). Furthermore, it may not be as workers that people initially arrive—they may be humanitarian entrants who seek to have previous skills recognised in a new country; spouses accompanying a lead migrant on a skilled visa even though they are skilled themselves; or as the previous chapter showed, an international student who is seeking education as a pathway to permanent residency. The longer a person remains in a country, the deeper their social, political and economic attachments become—although, as this chapter will argue, onward migration can never be ruled out. Life-course research on skilled migration can also develop knowledge of migrant decision making within family and relationship contexts. Bailey and Mulder (2017, p. 2691) have recently pointed out that being a skilled migrant is not a singular identity but one of many, intersecting with certain privileges on the one hand and discrimination on the other, particularly related to gender. Ramos and Martín-Palomino’s (2015) research, for instance, has shown how life-course decisions of skilled women migrants (related to education, employment, marriage, children, child-care) are closely linked to the agency they possess and the circumstances they find themselves in. Within literature on family migration, the concepts of ‘tied movers’ and ‘tied stayers’ has been developed (Cooke, 2008). Women often face additional challenges entering the labour market in destination countries as they negotiate professional and family life (Lee Cooke, 2007; Liversage, 2009; Purkayastha, 2005). It has been

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argued that it is predominantly the partner with the most human capital, or the male partner irrespective of human capital, who has the most influence over the decision to migrate (Gilmartin & Migge, 2016; Smits, Mulder, & Hooimeijer, 2003). This research focuses on the longitudinal experiences and retrospective narratives of migrants to capture shifts in their trajectories and attachments that occur spatially, temporally and relationally (i.e. in terms of kinship and family ties). Rather than a linear or pre-determined process designed to meet skill shortages as defined by policy makers, participants experienced a multiplicity of transitions involving career disruptions, varied visa statuses, chance opportunities, shifting personal ties and obligations, re-imagined futures, settlements and re-settlements. The emphasis in this chapter is on participants’ motivations to move in the first instance, why many continued moving over the course of their lives, what factors influenced their decisionmaking, where have they lived and under what conditions? Nine stories of mobile re-settlements are used to illustrate the complex pathways and identities of skilled mobile settlers and the ways in which both time and space are integral in their unfolding biographies. These narratives highlight some of the experiences and differential tactics used by skilled mobile settlers to negotiate their personal and professional lives and mobility pathways. Departing from the previous chapter, the tactics and trajectories participants described are not limited to education-led migration or a single destination country. While their experiences are unique and tied to their particular social locations and circumstances, these narratives are also indicative of broad patterns of experience across the thirty-three participants involved in this research.

3.2 Practices of Mobile (Re)settlement Over Time and Space The stories to follow explore three experiences of mobile (re)settlement. Through the lens of gender, Sects. 3.2.1 and 3.2.2 take a life course perspective in order to show the shifting family and career negotiations that take place between migrant couples. Decisions about where to live, when to stay and what roles each individual will undertake, shift over time. In Sect. 3.2.2, I examine the stories of two skilled women who are active agents in their mobility journeys. Their predetermined professional goals motivated them to seek linguistic, cultural, educational and professional opportunities, and capital, overseas as they progressed through a series of relocations. Finally, Sect. 3.2.3 reveals how the experience of mobile re-settlement and onward migration unsettles conceptions of home and away, foreign and familiar, sojourn and settlement, as well as the relationship between ‘escape’ and labour migration, for both solo movers and within family contexts. At different moments in their lives, participants’ individual agency interacted with structural constraints to produce shifting migration itineraries and objectives.

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3.2.1 Life Course Perspectives on the Shifting Family and Career Negotiations of Skilled Mobile Settlers 3.2.1.1

Nahid

Skilled migration research tends to focus on the lead or principal migrant and his or her work contexts. Such ‘methodological individualism’ (Kofman, 2000, p. 50) constructs the migrant as a single person, usually assumed to be male, and as disconnected from their wider social and familial contexts. While the number of women who are primary visa holders under skilled migrant categories is expanding, the majority of skilled women enter Australia as secondary applicants, though many are skilled and highly educated themselves (Hawthorne, 2011). Nahid’s experiences both reinforce and problematize the label of the ‘trailing spouse’. Nahid’s ethnic background is Bengali. She was born and raised in a Muslim family in Bangladesh and attended English-speaking schools and colleges run by Christian–American missionaries, in Dhaka in East Pakistan (which later became Bangladesh in 1971) and Karachi, in West Pakistan (now Pakistan). Nahid married in 1981 while she was studying a Masters of Arts in World History at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. After her marriage, she relocated to the United States on a spousal student (F-1) visa, to join her husband who was pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Texas. She lived with her husband in the US from 1981 to 1982, and then after her husband’s completion of a PhD in Petroleum Engineering, they moved to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia from 1982–1987. They travelled with their Bangladeshi passports, accompanied by a work visa. Nahid expressed how happy she was to be ‘living in the Muslim world again’, and that her stay in Saudi Arabia also gave her the opportunity to perform the Umrah (a pilgrimage to mecca undertaken outside the prescribed Hajj period). For Nahid and her husband, the motivation to relocate to Saudi Arabia was based on cultural and religious factors as well as economic opportunities. After five years, Nahid’s husband decided there was not enough employment security to stay in Saudi Arabia and they might have to leave if his contract expired. While Nahid was reluctant to migrate away from a Muslim country, in 1987 they decided to apply to migrate to Australia on a skilled migrant visa to try and secure a stronger economic future for their family. Nahid’s husband won a position working in the oil and gas industry and after three years living in Brisbane and Adelaide, they gained Australian citizenship. In 1990, Nahid and her husband and children moved again, this time to Muscat in Oman (carrying their Australian passports and a work visa for Oman). Their children were born in three different countries (Bangladesh, Australia and Oman) and all have Australian citizenship. For Nahid, the move to Oman was a spiritual move back to a Muslim country, allowing her to expose her children to their Islamic culture once again. For her husband, it was a financial move prompted by an attractive job offer. However, there was similar long-term job insecurity in Muscat to that in Dhahran and after five years they returned to Brisbane, Australia, where Nahid pursued her Masters and PhD degrees.

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In 2004, Nahid and her family moved to Perth. Their mobility was again necessitated by her husband’s new job. In 2005, her husband moved to the UK for employment, but this time Nahid did not relocate as she had developed strong connections to her home in Perth, both personally and professionally and did not want to uproot again (Kabir, 2007). She secured a research position at a University in Perth (2005–2009) and her husband returned after one year in the UK. While based in Perth, Nahid won a visiting fellowship at Harvard University, USA (Aug 2009–July 2011). Later, in 2011, she moved to a University in Adelaide to work as a senior research fellow (2011–2015). Nahid speaks Bengali (her mother tongue), Urdu (from Pakistan), some Arabic (learned in Saudi Arabia), and English, which has always been her medium of instruction. To say she has migrated to Australia from Bangladesh is an oversimplification, which would acknowledge only her origins and final destination, denying the multiple pathways, visa categories and migrant subjectivities she occupied, as well as the translocal connections she developed. What constitutes her sense of belonging or home is a complex question and when interviewed in 2010, she said she was unsure whether it was ‘the Muslim umma’ or her ‘land of settlement’ (Kabir, 2007). The question she raises in relation to these multiple identities not only problematises her sense of belonging in terms of national identification to either her homeland or one of her many ‘lands of settlement’, but also acknowledges her identification with the Muslim umma—a transnational community that is not confined to any particular nation. When I spoke with Nahid again in 2017, she said she felt very connected to Australia, not because she held an Australian passport but because her length of stay in Australia, her research field work interviewing young Australian Muslims and her ‘dialogue with mainstream Australians’ at conferences as well as through media outlets, has made her consider Australia, home. Nahid takes pride in her multiple identities, Bangladeshi (her heritage), Muslim (her religion/Muslim umma) and Australian (her nationality) and believes her transnational mobility has ‘added to [her] self-esteem and feelings of stability’, rather than dislocation, wherever she may live.

3.2.1.2

Emily

Emily moved to Australia from Zimbabwe with her now ex-husband. They both migrated as international students through an international exchange program. Initially, they were on a four-year student visa and the plan was to come to Australia, both complete their PhDs and go back to Zimbabwe within four years. Shortly after arriving, Emily and her husband decided that it would be too much for them both to undertake doctoral research at the same time, so Emily deferred, taking a year to ‘settle in’ while her husband began his study. While Emily had educational aspirations in Australia, her career was temporarily put on hold in order to support her husband. During the second year of their stay in Australia, Emily gave birth to their first child and she felt it was then too difficult to return to study and take care of their daughter at the same time.

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I was really struggling with working because I had to look for a part-time job, which was outside of my field, and he was studying, and we were raising a daughter and that’s when I had all this work life things just coming out of my ears. (Emily)

C. Ho’s (2006) research challenged the ‘success story’ narrative of skilled migrants entering Australia to suggest that this kind of government rhetoric disguises a more complex reality. She suggests that the difficulties women, in particular, face when settling into a new country often leads to a ‘re-feminization of women’s roles’. Women are forced to take up more traditional gendered roles as wives and mothers to support their partners (who more often than not arrive as the ‘lead’ migrant), precluding women from working (or studying). In some instances, this is due to visa restrictions associated with migrating as a spouse, because they take on the majority of childcare, or simply because they are unable to find work commensurate with their skills and experience (see Iredale, 2001; Man, 2004 for similar discussion). Similarly to Mateo and Seb described in the previous chapter, Emily also reflected on the emotional cost of being defined as a temporary migrant for nearly a decade. In 2011 I spoke to her about the process of applying for permanent resident status in Australia. She talked about how she didn’t feel like she fit into any of the prescribed categories on visa and immigration forms. Completing forms for her Australian visa, she was asked questions such as ‘what is your country of usual residence?’ Emily ‘usually’ resided in Australia, having lived there for ten years at the time of our first interview, but had to state ‘Zimbabwe’ because she was applying to be a permanent resident of Australia. She felt that questions on visa forms were ‘not applicable’ to her lived experience because she had developed strong, embedded connections to her life in Australia, ‘it was home’, but her official visa category still constructed her as ‘in a sort of limbo zone’. There are powerful emotional consequences of social discourse and governmental policy that categorise people in ways that do not always correspond to their own experiences, sense of belonging and identification. While often represented as distinct, temporary migration and permanent settlement are not isolated processes. Emily’s initial temporary status, as a temporary migrant (through work and study), cannot be separated from questions of settlement, embeddedness, increasing connection and citizenship, the longer she stayed and contributed socially, culturally and economically to Australian society. Being defined as ‘temporary’ or ‘permanent’ is experienced both subjectively and as a mechanistic/legal classification. While Emily was legally a non-citizen for nearly a decade, subjectively and emotionally, Australia felt like home for most of this period. Emily has since separated from her husband and went back to university to complete her PhD. After completing her doctoral degree she and her daughter moved to Sydney where she now works as a university lecturer and has Australian citizenship. The unfolding story of Emily’s resettlement in Australia was a series of unplanned events, negotiations and sacrifices. She left Zimbabwe with the intention of returning after their student visas expired, but fourteen years later Emily and her daughter remain in Australia and see it, at this moment, as a permanent resettlement (though future resettlement has not been ruled out). Emily’s experience also highlights the gender inequalities often inherent in academic and educational

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mobility, which intersect in complex ways with parenting and partnering. While they arrived as a dual-career and student partnership, her professional and educational aspirations were delayed in order to support her husband and undertake the majority of childcare. While she could have deployed similar tactics to Mateo and Seb much earlier in her migration to Australia in order to increase her chances of residency, the side-lining of her professional and educational aspirations because of gender politics (to support her husband and care for their child), limited the tactics available to her until much later in her resettlement. Her story highlights the importance of viewing migration within social and familial contexts rather than constructing the migrant as an isolated individual. In this way, tactics are shown to be both active (as in Mateo and Seb’s stories) as well as reactive, responding to the everyday contexts, obligations, constraints and opportunities that arise (i.e. Emily shifted from a student visa to a spousal visa, then to a temporary labour visa, in order to extend her stay, before more recently becoming a Permanent Resident and Australian Citizen).

3.2.1.3

Sharon

Sharon was born in the UK and relocated to Australia with her husband and young son in 1999. She described the decision to move to Australia as ‘accidental’. She was working as a BBC journalist in the UK at the time of the move and her husband was a scientist approaching the end of his PhD. They suspected England might not provide the financial security they desired, so they made the decision to go overseas for a few years and return when they were older, having gained international experience, which would hopefully be attractive to future employers in the UK. Having now lived in Australia for over a decade, the decision to relocate back to the UK is becoming less attractive as they continually develop new personal and professional ties in Australia. Two years before their move to Australia, they had decided to settle in Zimbabwe because of its colonial connections with the UK and ‘the idea of low cost, hired help was very appealing’ to Sharon as a working mother. She said, ‘I knew I’d want to keep my career going’ despite their relocation. This statement acknowledges her understanding of the damaging consequences migration can have on women’s careers. In contrast, it was a given that her husband would maintain his career, despite their relocation. They spent eighteen months planning the move to Harare where her husband had work waiting for him as a university lecturer and Sharon had negotiated with the BBC to become a freelance correspondent. Her husband had taken a trip to Harare to finalise his employment arrangements but following this, the university ceased contact and they had difficulty getting paperwork processed. After five months of waiting, he saw an advertisement for an academic job at a university in Melbourne and applied, ‘thinking that nothing would come of it’. In March of the following year, Sharon arrived at work one morning and went through her daily routine of checking the wires for the news program for which she worked. Reuter and Associated Press were running stories about a riot at the university in Harare. Half of the university had burned down and Robert Mugabe’s forces had arrested and tortured two journalists for reporting an uprising against the

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government. It was the beginning of civil unrest that continues over a decade later. Within an hour of Sharon arriving at work, she also received a message from her husband that the university in Melbourne had emailed him overnight and wanted to interview him for the job he had applied for, which he subsequently won. Sharon said she spent most of the day talking to colleagues at the BBC and asking, ‘where’s Melbourne?’, ‘Is it any good?’ Reflecting upon Sharon’s experiences in terms of where she is currently located, the transition to Australia appears uncomplicated and deliberate, but her story highlights how chance and serendipity played a large part in their migration to Australia. Chance is not regulated by causality and determinations but unfolds with its own rhythm. Chance, as Grosz (1999, p. 6) describes, is ‘that which signals the openness of the future, its relative connection to but also its relative freedom from the past, the possibilities of paths of development, temporal trajectories uncontained by the present’. As Sharon’s story, and many others in this research show, time unfolding through the life-course opens up the possibility for continual change in trajectories where nothing can ever be wholly determined and even the most concrete of plans is subject to the unpredictability of chance encounters and diversions. For instance, my dad, who migrated to Australia from the US to work as a teacher during the 1970s, commented that ‘the long-term pathways of our lives seemingly hinge on chance, serendipitous happenings’. What were the chances, he said, of sitting in class in Oregon State University next to an Australian whose friend was on campus the next day hiring teachers to go to Australia? What were the chances that after a year in Australia and moving back to the US (following an ex-girlfriend home) he was down to his last dollar when he received a $2000 insurance cheque in the mail, for injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident in Australia? Without that cheque he wouldn’t have bought a one-way ticket back to Australia where he still lives some forty years later. What were the chances of my dad, a Jewish man from the Bronx, meeting and falling in love with a rural Australian woman with a horse farm (my mum) and never returning to the US for more than a year at a time? Or another participant named Rita, who was born in India and after working in Dubai in hospitality, managed to get a position working in a resort in central Australia. She couldn’t remember applying for the role and was just about to return to India from Dubai after quitting her job when she received the phone call from an Australian recruitment agency. She said her migration to Australia was not ‘predetermined’ but ‘out of the blue’. When she moved to Australia she had ‘no intention of taking out permanent residency’ or of gaining Australian citizenship, both of which she now has. She said moving to Australia was ‘like a traveller’s desire. And then [she] slowly started falling in love.’ She is now the part owner of a successful Indian restaurant in regional Australia. Like Rita, my dad, and many others in this research, Sharon similarly reflects on the role of chance in shaping life trajectories over time and space. We came partly due to economics. We also came in search of the fabled better life. But to be honest, we came for the same reason that most things happen in life, serendipity met a determination to do something more with our lives. (Sharon)

Reflecting on the development of a sense of belonging in Australia, Sharon acknowledged that the decision to ‘embrace Australian culture and lifestyle grew

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organically’ and was ‘an inevitable consequence of [their] decision to live [in Australia] and make a go of [their] lives’. The term ‘inevitable’ suggests that the process of settling into a new country was not something that would ever be prohibited or unavailable to Sharon and her family—just that it might take time. By contrast, other participants, for example Emily and Amar (Chap. 7) do not frame their experiences of settlement and developing feelings of belonging as an ‘inevitable’ process. This is not an option open to everyone and Sharon reflects upon this when, as part of her broadcasting job, she describes her interviews with a group of Chinese women living in Australia on temporary visas that were designed to fill shortages in low skilled labour sectors. She asks why it is that she was given full working rights in Australia—as her husband’s spouse—and was allowed to bring their son, while Chinese women she interviewed who were employed in regional South Australia on temporary visas, had to leave their husbands and children at home. To see those women weep at the memory of the families they have left behind and hear them hope that Australia might allow them to stay and bring their families over has made me feel ashamed that I and my family have had it so easy. (Sharon)

Similarly, Jen, who moved from Canada to Australia, described how she paid less for her visa application than those who did not speak English—a particularly overt form of stratification, through the immigration selection process, which skews migrants along racial and national lines. As Jen said, ‘the whiteness of my skin was the primary reason, by far, that I was given certain privilege within the application process’. As Elliott and Urry (2010, p. 11) describe it, in a mobile world some people have more ‘network capital’ than others. ‘Network capital’ refers to the possession of ‘appropriate documents’, such as visas, money and qualifications, that allow ease of movement as well as greater access to international networks, transportation and information technologies. Such network capital is filtered through social categories such as level of education, nationality, language, gender, age and economic status. Both Jen and Sharon are reflexive about their relatively privileged status and the mobility allowances this affords. For both couples described so far (Nahid, Sharon and their respective spouses), the decision to migrate was made as two sets of relatively empowered people who were able to seek and actualise better lifestyle conditions in another country. The different subjectivities associated with temporary migrant categories (e.g. low skilled labour versus skilled migrants) authorise some people’s right to travel freely with their families and be welcome, while simultaneously delegitimizing other people’s claims to mobility, accompaniment and belonging (Germann Molz & Gibson, 2016, p. 8). Not everyone is able to feel at home within the nation and national discourses frame the nation-state as a home that is open to particular foreigners but simultaneously protects our borders against other foreigners. In 2017 I interviewed Sharon again and she described how her life had changed over the past six years. While she could have continued to work remotely as a freelance correspondent for the BBC, she decided to undertake a PhD in Journalism. In 2013, after finishing her research, she made the decision to join the Australian Defence Force because it was difficult, at the time, to obtain secure employment as an

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academic and because her son had been in the Australian Air Force Cadets and often talked about how it made him feel ‘part of something… giving him a community and a sense of place’. At that point in her life, Sharon said she ‘really needed to feel part of something’ and the Defence Force presented this opportunity. At first she joined the Army Reserves part time so she could maintain flexibility and not have to uproot her family. She was appointed as a public affairs officer in early 2013 and in 2015 was asked whether she would consider being deployed to the Middle East in a public affairs role. After discussing it with her family, she was deployed for six months towards the end of 2016. Sharon reflected upon the impact migration had on her professional life. She moved to Australia at the age of 29 after establishing herself as a respected journalist in the UK and felt she had ‘effectively lost ten years of career development’ when she moved. Had I stayed in the UK and just done the classic, climb the greasy pole at the BBC, I think by the time I’d got to my mid 30s, I probably would have held a position of responsibility. Whereas here, partly to some extent starting out again in a new country, but also because I chose to work part time and I wanted to be a freelancer because I wanted to spend loads of time with my kids and be a hands-on mum, that meant that I didn’t open myself up to the career opportunities that I could have had. That all had a knock-on effect. That fact I chose to do a PhD later in life and then you’re effectively knocked back to being a student again. Then joining the Army at the age of 42, then you’re being knocked back again… They appointed me a captain when I got in… Most captains are around 30. They’re not 42… The choices that I’ve made they are partly connected to the migrant experience, but also connected to the fact that I wanted to be a mum and not be too obsessed with work and actually have time for my family. They have had an impact on my career progression, there’s no question about that. (Sharon)

While Sharon acknowledges that she may have held a senior position in her organization in the UK had she stayed, migration is not the only reason for disrupted or re-imagined career trajectories. Migration certainly was the catalyst for pursuing different opportunities (PhD, freelance work, joining the Defence Force) but in many ways this also opened up more expansive and creative avenues for the application of her journalistic skills (i.e. in research, volunteer and public affairs contexts). Sharon also identified it was extremely important she have time with her children. This would likely have had an impact on her career progression regardless of whether she migrated or remained living in the UK. The ideal skilled migrant worker is usually constructed through national policy and ‘points systems’ (e.g. in Australia, Canada and New Zealand) as young and with no dependents (Tani, 2017). This capitalizes on migrants’ economic capacity as they are seen as being able to work for longer and as less likely to need welfare assistance in the short term. However, this also means people are migrating at an age when significant life course transitions are more likely to occur (meeting partners, marriage, having children). Following migration, her prioritisation of family was similar to another participant’s experience in Switzerland. Angela relocated with her husband Dave and their young daughter to Switzerland when Dave was offered a work transfer. Angela stopped paid work while living in Switzerland to care for their children. She had worked as a psychologist before moving to Switzerland, and described herself as being very career-minded.

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She had worked in several states in Australia and spent time working in New York, Canada and the UK in her profession. While in Switzerland, Angela gave birth to their second child and described feeling ‘relieved’ to be able to use migration ‘as an excuse’ to focus on more domestic duties. While she would have experienced language difficulties if she had entered the workforce in Switzerland, she described her decision not to work as deliberate and not because she did not have the opportunity. In Angela’s case, migration was employed as a way to engage in more domestic duties without, as she says, ‘looking like this was a personal choice’. Perhaps reconciling the loss of her professional identity was easier to process if others saw her gravitation towards a more domestic lifestyle as something that was out of her control. This re-orientation of women away from paid work and towards the domestic sphere is one of the outcomes that may arise, at least temporarily, for skilled female migrants who relocate with their partners. While this was the case for several women interviewed for this research (Emily, Nilaya), Sharon, Nahid and Angela’s examples show that not all female migrants necessarily view the ‘re-feminisation’ of gender roles as a negative or forced outcome of their migration. While several female participants gravitated, for a period of time, towards the domestic sphere post-migration, this kind of discourse assumes that women view the domestic and homely space as an undesirable option. The issue is not whether women do or do not gravitate towards the domestic sphere post-migration but whether this is a choice or a requirement. For Nahid, Sharon and Angela this was a choice whereas for Nilaya (described below) and Emily, their partners’ employment and educational aspirations as the lead migrant, meant their own careers were devalued. It is these kinds of complications which emerge from life-course, narrative based research inquiry.

3.2.1.4

Nilaya

Nilaya and her family were born in Bangalore, India. She refers to 1991 as being ‘the first chance to get out of Bangalore’. She had their first child and a successful career, when ‘out of the blue’ an offer came for her husband, who worked in finance, to relocate to Geneva, Switzerland. Nilaya’s family moved there for two years. They returned at the end of the two years to India, where they built a family home and had their second child. Soon after, Nilaya’s husband was offered an opportunity to work in Chicago for a year. They moved to Chicago and stayed for two years. They didn’t enjoy the quality of life there and didn’t want to continue to raise their children in the US, so they decided to relocate back to Bangalore, which Nilaya says was ‘still home’. They settled again in India for five years. As their two children were growing up, Nilaya was unhappy about the social conditions in Bangalore, particularly as she knew another lifestyle from her time in Europe and the US. She and her husband began to wonder whether Bangalore was the right place to raise their family and at that point her husband was offered another work opportunity in Adelaide, Australia. Nilaya said they then had to make the difficult decision to settle somewhere permanently, as their children were getting older and they did not want to continue to move them backwards and forwards between countries and schools.

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Nilaya relocated to Australia from India with her husband and two children on a family-dependent visa in 2001 and has lived there ever since. Her husband relocated under a skilled visa, and his employer then sponsored the whole family. Nilaya is now an Australian citizen and was unable to retain her Indian citizenship, which had both practical and emotional implications (explored in Chap. 6). While she describes how they were looking for a location for long-term settlement, she says that future migration, even now has not been excluded as an option. Their transnational pathways and connections often produced ongoing rather than fixed travel plans. I’m very scared to say no, we’ll never move again… I was a one-town girl, one city girl. All of a sudden the first plane I get is going to Geneva, I come back to India and I said ‘That’s it, I’m not moving anywhere’. Then we go to the US and we said ‘It’s a promise, it’s the last time’, and then we come back from Chicago and say ‘Now we can’t go anywhere, we are very settled, the kids are at this age’. Then we moved to Adelaide. So I’ve learnt not to say, ‘No, never’. (Nilaya)

As Ley and Kobayashi (2005, p. 113) have suggested, the idea of home becomes problematized because transnationalism ‘invokes a travel plan that is continuous not finite’, where migrants ‘never quite arrive at their destination because they never quite leave home’. Nilaya’s migration story also highlights how decisions around migration are linked to life-course transitions, such as having children and deciding where to raise them so they are not continually moved around. While the discourses around skilled migration are often individualistic, suggesting migrants design their own biographies and trajectories, in reality these decisions are often made in family contexts and in response to what countries offer in terms of visa and lifestyle conditions. Analysis of migration pathways needs to take into consideration the range of visa statuses occupied by migrants throughout their lives but it should also be acknowledged that these visa statuses may not reflect what a migrant actually does in a country. It is hard to know if migrants who enter a country through family-related and non labour-related admission categories do not possess the skills to contribute to a country’s skilled labour market (Kofman & Raghuram, 2009). While Nilaya is now an Australian citizen and has full working rights in Australia, she did not work in Geneva or Chicago as she migrated on a spousal visa with limited work rights, despite her high level of education and professional experience (Masters in Business). The level of skill a person possesses and the admission category by which they enter a country are not necessarily equivalent to one another. Literature on skilled migration has predominantly been a story of male migration, with women occupying the status of the accompanying migrant (Kofman & Raghuram, 2005, p. 149). There is much less attention paid to the experiences of migrant women, particularly those who relocate under family or spousal visas but who are, themselves, highly skilled (Donato, Gabaccia, Holdaway, Manalansan, & Pessar, 2006; Meares, 2010; Webb, 2015). Many women experience migrations of ‘risk’ as they negotiate significant career disruption and often, increases in domestic responsibilities (Ho, 2006; Meares, 2010; Suto, 2009). Yeoh and Willis (2005) suggest that these women are not so much ‘deskilled’ as ‘re-domesticated’. This re-orientation of women away from paid work and towards the domestic sphere is one of the outcomes that may arise, at least temporarily, for skilled female

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migrants who relocate with their partners. Nilaya’s experience in the US and Switzerland conforms to this perspective as she migrated on a spousal visa to accompany her husband, limiting her work rights, and consequently stayed home to care for their children. Nilaya described how time away from work to care for their children and the successive migrations to Chicago, Geneva and Adelaide had serious implications for her career. She said she was either unable to work due to child care responsibilities or visa conditions, which meant that when they eventually moved to Australia, and her children were in school, she felt like she was ‘starting her career again’. Women may seek to combine work, career, marriage and family but these multiple rationalities are difficult to grasp using a classification of migratory moves based on a single reason, such as labour, family or asylum. Immigration rules force the migrant into a category, as for example, the female migrant who enters through a family-related route and becomes the dependant of a male labour migration (Hyndman, 1999; Kofman, 1999). While international mobility capital (e.g. international qualifications, networks and professional experience) is seen as a desirable attribute it can also be highly gendered, reproducing the dichotomy of public masculinity (Nilaya, Emily, Sharon and Nahid’s spouses relocated for work or study) and private femininity (Nilaya, Emily, Sharon and Nahid followed and undertook the majority of childcare), even when they were initially all dual career households, each partner having a high level of education and professional experience. Male careers are often strengthened through mobility whereas female careers are often diminished or experience significant delays. Migration research has traditionally focussed on heterogeneous couples and the dominant role of men, as the lead migrant, in migration decision making (Iredale, 1999; Koser & Salt, 1997). Women are constructed as ‘trailing’ spouses, wives and mothers who experience deskilling and gravitation towards more domestic obligations such as childcare, post-migration (Bruegal, 1996; Cooke, 2008; Man, 2004; Ong, 1999; Yeoh & Willis, 2005). In the examples provided in this section, Nahid, Nilaya and Sharon have experienced a degree of career decline at significant life course moments, such as having and raising children, which has resulted in gender differentiated career progression (similar finding found in a study by Ackers (2005), which examined the experiences of female academic scientists). While these women experience structural and familial constraints in realising their professional aspirations through migration, they also have agency as highly skilled women and negotiate these tensions related to their professional and family lives, over time and in different places. In addition to male-led spatial mobility, participants also exercised extra mobility tactics within their family contexts. If we were to take a snapshot approach to Nahid’s life, she may be constructed as a ‘trailing spouse’, particularly in her early migrations. As time passed, she gained educational capital and developed stronger professional and personal ties to her home in Australia, and she also made decisions not to move when her husband did. Recently, their relocation to the US was instigated by Nahid so she could take up a research position. Shinozaki (2014) has described this as ‘pendulum mobility’ and ‘taking career turns’. Nilaya also renegotiates tensions around where to live and work over time. Australia was chosen because Nilaya wanted a place to settle in the long term. Her children were in school and she wanted to be able to embed herself for an extended period of time

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in her professional field. Though her background was in Business/Commerce she ended up retraining as a student learning advisor. Sharon undertook freelance work for the BBC while she was in Australia, balancing work and family commitments. However, she also used time off with her children to undertake further education and reorient herself towards an academic career. In contrast to multiple studies of de-skilling amongst female skilled migrants (Ho, 2006; Meares, 2010; Yeoh & Willis, 2005), less research considers how decision making, and the balance of power, shifts between partners over time and through successive migrations. Shinozaki’s (2014) research provides an important example of ways transnational career strategies involve a ‘fine balancing act’ within shifting intra-family gender relations. Migrants use tactics to develop their careers in relation to factors such as access to childcare, life-stage, and the role of dual-career policies in destination countries that would allow full spousal employment. While gendered stereotypes were present within the four families described in this section in ways that could be understood to disadvantage skilled women, such circumstances can be contested rather than static, where decisions about where to move, when to stay, and who is the lead migrant, shift over time and in different contexts. Over their lives, participant career and family strategies continue to change and evolve. Interestingly, when I first interviewed Sharon in 2007 she said they initially wanted to move to Zimbabwe because childcare was affordable and she ‘knew [she] wanted to keep her career going’. When her husband’s employment offer fell through they had to revise their plans and he ended up getting a job in Melbourne, Australia. When I spoke to Sharon in 2017, she talked about the move to Australia as representing an opportunity to take a step back from work, continue study and most importantly, ‘be a hands-on mum’. Her narrative around keeping her career going despite mobility has shifted over time, presenting alternate ‘preferred selves’ (Riessman, 2002) that reflect and attempt to make sense of the shifting circumstances she was in over time (2010 and 2017). Section 3.2.1 has examined migrants’ shifting career and personal negotiations that occur within family contexts over the life course. Two key points are made. First, women may migrate through family migration streams, which overshadow their skills and potential. This is particularly the case for women who enter the country as an accompanying spouse and often intersects with caring responsibilities, as women gravitate away from the work force post migration to care for children. For some, this was a choice, for others it was not. For Nahid, Nilaya and Sharon, focusing on childcare responsibilities post-migration, even if determined by work limitations associated with spousal visas, was still a responsibility they actively claimed for themselves, even when it had an impact upon their careers. Second, while childcare responsibilities may result in the re-domestication of women away from paid work, such tensions can also be re-negotiated over time and space. The stories in this section have shown how these women enacted a degree of agency in migration decision making at different periods in their lives. All of these examples highlight how the expectations of both partners are negotiated over time and place. Taking a longitudinal approach to understanding skilled migration practices amongst couples allows for a deeper understanding of how people try to balance career strategies and

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family lives spatially and temporally. In contrast, the next section explores female participants who were the principal decision makers, driving their migration journeys from the outset. Their professional goals motivated them to acquire additional skills and knowledge (personal, cultural, professional, linguistic) as they tactically progressed through a series of relocations.

3.2.2 Trailblazing Pathways of Skilled Migrant Women 3.2.2.1

Chloe

In the past, migration research addressing gender relations focused predominantly on unskilled female migration (e.g. Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Momsen, 1999; Pedraza, 1991; Phizaklea, 1998; Ukwatta, 2010). Feminist accounts of migration have critiqued literature that fails to acknowledge the role of gender in skilled labour mobility (Kofman, 2000; Nagel, 2005, p. 199). Rarely do stories of skilled women feature within the dominant narratives of skilled migration and as active agents of migration (Riano, 2003, p. 314, 2016). Kofman (2014) and Raghuram (2008) argue that we must pay attention to skilled women, as movers in their own right, rather than merely co-movers. Traditionally, it has been women who followed their migrating husbands, though research has begun to emerge that focus on instances where men are the followers (Gallo, 2006; Shaw & Charsley, 2006). The previous section focused on family contexts where migrant decision making often oscillated between partners. This section focuses on the stories of two women who, even after meeting partners, largely drove their migration futures. Chloe’s relocation story is more complicated than simply relocating on a skilled visa. She had long term international career goals that required incremental steps. In her mid-20s, Chloe moved from Adelaide to Paris because she wanted to learn to speak French fluently to give her the best chance of working for the United Nations (UN) or another non-government organisation (NGO)—a dream she had since she was a young woman. At this point she might have fallen under E. Ho’s (2011) definition of the ‘self-initiated global careerist’. Surprisingly, Chloe is one of only a few in this research whose major initial motivation for relocation was to advance her career rather than improve her lifestyle, gain self-knowledge, experience other cultures, or escape conflict. Instead of an inter-company transferee or employersponsored migrant from the outset, Chloe made a personal and independent decision to migrate to Paris to learn French, seeking suitable work post-migration and carefully negotiating visa regulations to extend her stay. She began her migration experiences on a Working Holiday Visa. While learning French in order to work for the UN was the end goal, she was willing to start with any job, in order to secure a better job once her language skills improved, and eventually get the ‘dream job’ (Parutis, 2014), although what constituted her dream job shifted over time. Chloe lived in Paris from 2005 to 2015 and had previously lived in Japan as a university exchange student. She had hoped her spatial strategy of international

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education experiences in Japan and international work exposure in France would lead to ongoing and moveable career possibilities in the future. While her initial goal was to speak French well in order to work for the UN, she says other reasons for staying were added the longer she lived there. For example, when I interviewed her in 2011, she said she was ‘doing well in [her] job’ and she had a boyfriend at the time who was Scottish and who wanted to stay in Paris. The initial labour outcomes of her mobility have given way to other motivations for staying: ‘My original plan of one year, to develop my French, has now extended to…. I don’t know….! I love living here and so does my boyfriend, for so many reasons other than work’ (Chloe). As described, Chloe initially moved to France on a one-year working-holiday visa, which must be applied for before the age of thirty. However, unlike many WHMs, she had no intention of returning after one year. She was there for professional reasons and her working-holiday visa status did not match her professional intentions. Like those described in Chap. 2, it was a tactical decision to get herself into the country. As her working-holiday visa approached its expiration date, Chloe asked her employer to sponsor her. She said this was a long process because she had to be in a job for a minimum of six months within the period stated in her visa before a workplace would potentially agree to sponsor her. The sponsorship process took three months to complete, and every year she had a review where the government decided whether to let her stay. While Chloe’s long term future in France was always tenuous, it was not experienced in the same way as the constant prospect of being sent home that participants’ like Mateo and Seb experienced (Chap. 2). For them, migration to Australia was their best chance of a better life, whereas for Chloe, if long term residency in France did not eventuate, she felt confident that she could gain entry to another country on a working visa. After six years in France, Chloe was eligible to apply for citizenship on the grounds of having a specialised skill set that was deemed valuable to the country. In 2012 she became a dual citizen with Australian and French citizenship. In her first week living in Paris, Chloe found the job she remained in until she left in 2015. The role developed with her understanding of the company and her French language skills. The company provided English lessons by telephone and internet to people all over the world, and her role involved frequent international travel to the US and Malaysia. She worked her way up to a senior managerial role within the company. While there has been a tendency to dichotomise permanent settlement and temporary migration, they are actually interrelated processes (Khoo et al., 2008; Robertson, 2013). For Chloe, temporary migration was the first step to acquiring permanent resident status and to eventually becoming a French citizen. Temporary migration also gave her the opportunity to learn about a destination before making plans to pursue permanent migration. While she did not know if she would stay in France forever, when the opportunity for permanent residency and then citizenship became available, she took it, giving her more residential and employment options even if she chose not to settle there permanently. When I spoke to her in 2011 she said she did not envisage moving back to Australia for a long time. If she did, it would be because she feels it is a good place to raise kids if she decided she wanted them, but if she chose not to have children it is because there is ‘too much of the

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world [she] hasn’t seen yet’. In 2017 I interviewed Chloe again. On a previous return trip to Australia to visit family (2014) she met her now husband Ezra (Australian born but had lived in London for three years) on a flight back to Australia. They commuted between London and Paris for two years. In 2015, Chloe’s father passed away unexpectedly. They moved back to Australia for six months to sell his house and take care of his financial affairs, before both moving to London in 2016 where Chloe now works in project management and has recently given birth to their first child. While they don’t intend to live there forever, they are hoping to expand their options for living abroad by gaining residency and citizenship to the UK within the next few years, in order to accumulate a range of possibilities for onward migration.

3.2.2.2

Sophie

Sophie was born in Adelaide, Australia. When she was 21, she travelled to Tanzania to work as a teacher for a year. She was motivated to go by a prior experience visiting Africa (Zimbabwe and Zambia) as an eighteen-year-old, during her first year of university, while undertaking a Bachelor of Creative Arts. She loved the experience and knew she wanted to return for a longer period of time once she completed her degree in Australia. She enjoyed her time teaching in Tanzania so much that when she returned to Australia and finished her undergraduate program, she enrolled in a Graduate Diploma in teaching so she could return to Africa as a qualified teacher. Once she finished her Diploma in Education she was advised by friends and mentors to get experience as a teacher in Australia first. While she took their advice and spent several years working in Australia, she didn’t enjoy it and so used her profession as a teacher to fund her way through a Masters in International Development. She said she wanted to ‘understand the historical roots of poverty in Africa and understand what changes need to take place to improve the life outcomes of many Africans.’ When Sophie finished her MA, she found it difficult to find work in Africa and her Masters supervisor encouraged her to apply for a PhD instead, where she focused her research on Ghana. During her candidature she said she ‘got bored, like a lot of PhD students’ and decided to relocate to London for a few years and take a break from study. In London, she started working as an academic support officer in citizenship and human rights at a university. Whilst there, her manager encouraged her to pick up her PhD again. However, visa complications changed her plans. Sophie (like Chloe) was a tertiary educated and skilled woman who travelled to the UK on a Working Holiday Visa rather than through a skilled visa category. The week she was due to apply for a skilled migrant visa, the UK announced changes to the ‘points-based system’, which subsequently ‘created a backlog of six months for visa processing’. Sophie had run out of work rights on her WHV and could not stay in the UK any longer. She did not want to return to Australia either, saying ‘I didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore’. So instead she decided to travel to Ghana to undertake her doctoral research. While there, Sophie met and fell in love with her now husband, Daniel. They decided to both move back to Australia because obtaining visas for the UK was seen as too

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difficult for both of them—although getting a visa to Australia for her then fiancé, proved just as difficult. They ended up living in Kenya for eight months waiting for visas to clear. While Sophie loved living in Nairobi, Daniel didn’t. I realise now that my experience was different to his as I was always afforded a certain privilege as a white person in Africa. As a West African, he was more often discriminated against or insulted for not speaking the local language. So expectations on him were different to the expectations on me. But he did do six months of university there through an offshore Australian university – which helped him reduce his study time when we got back to Australia. (Sophie)

While living in Kenya, Sophie was also pregnant with their first child, which was the impetus to move back to Australia as the medical appointments were too expensive and Daniel’s visa had finally been approved. After a few years in Australia, Sophie was offered an international development role in Oxford and Daniel agreed it was a good move. They both migrated to the UK on a Tier Two Skilled Migrant Visa. She described how they both prefer Europe to Australia as it is more ‘plugged into global thinking and is a little more progressive’. In addition, my Ghanaian husband had some difficult encounters with racism in Australia – both outright and everyday racism – which was starting to wear thin. I also didn’t like my mixed-race daughter always being the only brown person in the room (which was probably mainly due to the work and social circles we seemed to fall into, as there are clearly a lot of brown people in Australia). (Sophie)

Like most in this research, Sophie describes motivations for relocation that, while including work opportunities, were ultimately based on personal and familial factors. For her husband and her children, Sophie wanted to live in a place where she felt cultural and linguistic diversity was a more accepted and normalized experience. She felt the UK presented this opportunity although she also acknowledges the recent return to particular forms of nationalist rhetoric, in a post-Brexit England, aimed at tightening borders and restricting immigration. Sophie’s experiences also show how ‘making homes’ is different at different life stages. When she was living overseas as a single person, much of her sense of belonging was connected to the social group around her and having similarly minded people to ‘have fun and experience that life with’. Now, as a mother and wife, she feels it is her ‘little family’ that ‘makes a home together’ wherever they might be living. She develops a sense of belonging by making sure the location she lives is ‘open and accepting’ of her children. I am a white Australian, with mixed race children. I believe the fact that my children are mixed race is important to my migration decisions so although it is their ethnic identity – it is also part of my decision making around new homes and locations. (Sophie)

Sophie and Daniel have now been living in the UK for four years. Her work (improving educational outcomes for people in Africa) requires her to travel to either Africa or the US, on a monthly basis. Her mobility and her work has always been intertwined. She says she ‘has to move to access better work opportunities but also work opportunities have enabled [her mobility]’. Because of the frequency of Sophie’s work-related travel, her husband has been the primary carer for both of their children, for the majority of their early years.

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3 Onward Migration Pathways Over Time and Space We’ve taken turns but he’s been the biggest contributor re months on the (parenting) job. We’ve both suffered for this in our careers. I’ve been penalised by an assumption of what I can do as a working mum and he’s been penalised for being out of the workforce for a period (penalised more than women tend to be in my opinion). The issues around the gender pay gap can’t be resolved outside of the domestic labour issue. Men need to receive the same rights as women to parent their children. Women need to receive the same rights as men to pursue their careers. I think this intersects with gender more than migration. But there is some overlap. For example, because I was the skilled migrant (sponsored by my employer) Daniel had to move with no job and look after Lanie when we first moved to Oxford. At his first job interview they asked him thousands of questions about how he felt taking a long break for caring responsibilities and they seemed to focus on it more than his actual skills and work experience. It was like they’d never met a man who has had caring responsibilities before. (Sophie)

Sophie and Daniel’s experience provides an interesting counterpoint to the stories of other male-led migration trajectories described in this chapter. Similarly, Daniel has been ‘penalized’ in terms of the jobs he can pursue because, like Nahid, Nilaya and Sharon, he has been out of the workforce undertaking the majority of childcare. But unlike Nahid’s, Nilaya’s and Sharon’s male spouses, Sophie has also suffered professionally because she is a mother. Her employer has questioned her ability to undertake significant overseas travel, making a judgement that she should be at home with her children more. There is little research that explores the migration experiences of transnational couples with children, in which childcare is undertaken by the male partner. It is worth exploring how childcare responsibilities are negotiated within dual career migrant households in ways that unsettle the traditional public masculinity, private femininity binary. Finally, like most in this research, serendipitous events dramatically altered Sophie and Daniel’s mobility trajectories. I asked whether there was anything related to her migration experiences that Sophie wished she had done differently and her response highlights again, the importance of chance and unexpected events in shaping migrant trajectories. I almost [responded] that I wish I applied for my highly skilled migrant visa before the UK rolled out the points-based system – but if I had done that I would never have met my husband and had my beautiful girls. (Sophie)

This section has examined the stories of two skilled women who actively shaped their professional lives through the accumulation of international professional capital. They had pre-determined professional goals and used overseas work experience to incrementally realise their aspirations and produce long term living options (through residency and citizenship) in different locations—even though they may not decide to settle in these locations long term. These two women were also unique as their main initial motivation to relocate was to gain experience in their fields that they couldn’t get at home, whereas most of the other participants negotiated a range of factors outside of employment (chance events, lifestyle factors, poor living conditions in country of origin) that first motivated their migration. The final section examines the experiences of four participants whose frequent mobile re-settlements over space and time, unsettle conceptions of home and away, foreign and familiar, sojourn and settlement, as well as the relationship between ‘escape’ and labour migration.

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3.2.3 Onward Migration Patterns In migration research, single-origin-single-destination models for thinking about movement have become increasingly problematized. Thus far, the experiences of migrants in this chapter have shown that many move again to a second, third, fourth or fifth country. People adopt onwards international migration tactics, leveraging the social, cultural, economic and networked capital they have accrued in successive destination countries to advance their prospects of moving to the next location (see Paul 2017 for detailed discussion of ‘stepwise’ migration; special issue of Population, Space and Place 2011 on ‘the temporal, social, spatial, and legal dimensions of return and onward migration’). Sometimes this was a conscious and deliberate strategy and at other times it is the result of circumstances, chance events and opportunities, often negotiated within family decision making contexts. All of the migrant stories in this chapter highlight participants’ mobile trajectories, which unsettle ideas of home and away, temporariness and permanence to show how they are interdependent rather than distinct processes. While the previous two sections examined how decision making around migration itineraries was negotiated, over time and space, through differing relations of gender within family contexts, the next section focuses on the factors that lead to the emergence of such onward migration patterns. Over the life course, these patterns often span a range of migration categories (humanitarian, middling, elite) as well as multiple destination countries and regions. I use three examples to examine how individual agency intersects with immigration structures (i.e. temporary status versus opportunities for long-term settlement), which in turn frame migrants’ itineraries and aspirations. For James, Lan and transnational couple, Hannah and Pete, Australia has been returned to, as the site of home, on more than two occasions, without excluding migration to new destinations.

3.2.3.1

James

As already suggested, participants often described how their migration pathways were mediated by a succession of unplanned or accidental events. James, who was born in Scotland, came to Australia with his family because his brother suffered from a rare lung disease, which gave him very little chance of living. His parents looked for a better climate, which led them to Australia in 1965 when James was 11. After high school James worked in Australia for three years before receiving a scholarship to study in the US, where he completed his bachelor’s and postgraduate degrees. He then moved back to Adelaide, teaching for ten years in a high-school before moving to Canberra to work in a university for nine years. He then moved to Nagoya, Japan, on an academic exchange to work in a university, a move he described as ‘an accident’. He escorted the president of a Japanese university around a newly-built international residential college, which was part of his institution in Canberra. After showing the president around the facility, the Japanese university offered James an exchange. He initially took leave of absence from his work but after three years living in Japan and

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continually extending his stay, his workplace in Canberra told him to either return to Australia or resign. While initially he thought he would stay one year as a temporary sojourner, he ended up staying in Japan for thirteen years, longer than he has ever lived in one country. James could be described as an ‘accidental navigator’ whose unfolding migration trajectories are extended incrementally through ‘chance strategies’ (Ho, 2011, p. 124). He insinuated himself into localities and experiences by seizing opportunities ‘on the wing’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. xix), which were propelled by serendipitous events. He returned to Australia approximately twice a year but he said the location of home ‘lost its clear boundaries’. More often than not, he now occupies the positioning of a guest or visitor when he returns to Australia to visit friends and family. When I interviewed James in 2010, he had just decided to move back to Australia, as he felt that he needed ‘to put down roots’ in his chosen country and be closer to his family as he approached retirement. With a sense of irony, after one year of retirement in Canberra, Australia, James said he became restless and took up a job offer in Macau. His experiences show the importance of taking a biographical and longitudinal approach towards migration research to capture people’s shifting subjectivities and experiences. I spoke to James again in 2017. His twelve-month post in Macau had turned into seven years and he had just returned to Adelaide for his second attempt at retirement in Australia, having not lived in that city since 1988. While James has been formally characterized as a temporary migrant throughout all of his migrations (with the exception of Australia, where he became a citizen), unlike Mateo and Seb in the previous chapter, he experienced ‘temporariness’ from a relatively privileged standpoint. He is also self-reflexive about this, describing how ‘whether he could move’ was never a question. The processing of temporary work visas, in various countries, was experienced as a straight forward bureaucratic process without any concern his employers would fail to sponsor his residency for as long as he wanted to stay. However, the subjective experience of frequent moving (to be explored in later chapters) was more problematic. The more sites of home James accumulated, the more the idea of home became fragmented and increasingly difficult to locate anywhere, in its fullest and original sense.

3.2.3.2

Lan

Lan was born in what she refers to as Saigon, what we now know as Ho Chi Minh City, during the Vietnam War. She came to Australia with her father as a refugee in 1980. Lan’s father was imprisoned for three years following the Vietnam War, and she says that while in prison, he learned those on the ‘losing side’ would be oppressed for three generations, meaning his children and grandchildren would be ‘unable to reach their full potential’ (Lan). As a tertiary educated woman with significant professional experience. Lan talks about the outcomes of migration on her career but she also narrates personal and emotional memories such as the leaking boat on which she and her father escaped Vietnam. After being rescued by people on a passing yacht, she recalled how she felt watching the escape vessel disappear towards the horizon.

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My sister turned one year old, we celebrated the lunar new year of 1980 and then my dad and I escaped Vietnam. We did not have enough gold for the whole family to escape together… There were two Buddhist monks on board the boat that we left Vietnam in. The larger monk often gave me his rice to eat. We traveled on the boat for a few days then it started to leak, the water was bailed out with cans… My dad could not sleep since he got wet when he lay down. I slept by laying on him. One afternoon a large yacht went by, children were held up to show we were not pirates… There was the white male captain, two ladies (one white and one of African descent) and a boy. A rope ladder was thrown down for us to climb up. The lady of African descent held me and carried me up the ladder; she had a razor blade in her necklace, which I thought was very unusual. That night our boat drifted away in the ocean, it was like a paper boat that I would make at home in Vietnam when it rained a lot and the water rose up to my little knees. (Lan)

In Lan’s representation of the event, her emotions seem absent from her description. Her memories focus on visual details such as the monk who gave her rice, a ladder made of rope, an African lady with a razor blade at her neck and the vision of their escape vessel drifting ‘like a paper boat’. Narrating this story as an adult, Lan’s experience is perhaps represented through a child’s eyes and in the process she distances herself from expressions of fear, apprehension and the unknown. Paradoxically, the lack of emotive language makes this narrative all the more powerful. Lan’s family’s experiences during the Vietnam War led them to place greater emphasis on educational and professional success in order for their children to ‘reach their potential’ (Lan). Rather than being ‘two faces’ of migration, skilled and unskilled, as Castles (1998) has described, there often exists a transformation of these categories over space and time. Refugees, for instance, are often depicted as a cost to a nation economically (at least in the short term) but they can make economically and culturally significant contributions in the longer term, with adequate support. A report prepared by the Refugee Council of Australia for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship outlines some of the economic, civic and social contributions of refugees and humanitarian entrants. There has also been research on the career and educational attainment achieved by the children of first-generation migrants. A 2009 study by the Australian Medical Council noted the children of Vietnamese refugees have five times the typical representation in Australia’s elite medical schools, even though their parents had low education levels (see also Reitz, Zhang, & Hawkins, 2011). Research has also shown that young people who migrate as refugees, while facing a range of complex social and structural challenges, often maintain determination and optimism for overcoming obstacles and improving their lives (McMichael, Nunn, Gifford, & Correa-Velez, 2014). Once in Australia, Lan went on to complete her schooling, undergraduate and doctoral degree in Adelaide (in Maths, Chemistry and Computer Science). After completing her PhD, Lan and her British-born, Australian-raised husband, Scott, moved to Seattle where she has since completed a postdoctoral research position. Lan originally thought they would stay in the US for three years, but when I interviewed them in 2010, they had been there for five years with no intention of returning to Australia in the near future. When Lan first relocated to the US, she went on an exchange-scholar visa and her partner accompanied her on a spousal visa. When her postdoctoral employment came to an end, her husband’s employer sponsored him to have temporary-employment

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status. Lan spent some time on a tourist visa before gaining a dependent visa for a short-term appointment in Canada. Her authorization to work, when we spoke in 2010, was dependent on her husband’s continued employment in the US, but she hoped that her new position would result in work sponsorship so that she did not have to rely on his employment status. Although on different scales of necessity, a sense of uncertainty in relation to Lan’s mobility has been a persistent theme, from her escape from Vietnam to her skilled migration experiences in the US. Living and working as a skilled migrant has necessitated continual changes in visa categories, often requiring tactical manoeuvring within visa regulations in order for them to remain in the US. Similarly to the education led migration pathways explored in the previous chapter, Lan and Scott do exercise a degree of agency amidst this uncertainty, tactically subverting structures of power—as de Certeau (1984, p. 9) would claim—that manage migrant flows, using different categories of short term visa (tourist visa, spousal visa) to incrementally extend their overseas stay. The tactics they use also show that while there are intersections between travel, tourism and migration in the literal sense (e.g. migrants travel to previous homes and visit potential new homes as tourists), people also inhabit official/governmental categories of ‘tourist’ that do not necessarily match up with what they are actually doing in a place or how they perceive themselves (as seeking longer-term settlement, work options and residency). De Certeau writes that tactics are akin to ‘the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order… that it in fact gradually erodes and displaces’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 34). They are disrupting the intention of immigration policy by subverting it from within the territory of the powerful. Gradations of temporary visa statuses are used for long-term ends, although permanence is not always achieved. In 2017, after multiple short term visas over an eight year period with no guarantee of permanency, Lan and Scott decided to move back to Australia, where she is now training to be a high school teacher. They wanted to be closer to family and friends and also to find more secure employment and settlement options. Lan’s experiences, similar to James’, indicate that the accumulation of multiple migrations over their lives increasingly problematize conceptions of home and away. While they may be conceptualized as ‘middling transnationals’, using Conradson and Latham’s terminology (2005), as neither disadvantaged nor wealthy elites, there is much more movement and diversity within this categorization. Lan began her mobility as a refugee and would not have been considered ‘middling’ until her late 20s, when she relocated to the US as a highly educated woman. In addition to people moving into and out of classifications like ‘middling’ over their life course, there is also likely to be significant diversity within this category, which requires further investigation. While James does not consider himself a ‘global elite’, his mobility is experienced from a relatively privileged position. He has easily gained entry into multiple countries, by invitation from employers in the host country, and taking out successive visas was never problematic. By contrast, while Lan relocated to the US as a highly educated woman with professional experience in her field, her long-term prospects of being able to stay, were precarious. She had to take out successive visas that often belied her skilled status, in order to extend her stay, never knowing when this would not be possible, forcing her time there to come to an end. While

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these are only two stories, James and Lan’s experiences underscore the necessity to think through stasis and mobility and changing migrant subjectivities over time, rather than taking a snapshot approach. Their stories also problematize the somewhat vague ‘catch all’ of ‘middling’ that contains a diversity of experiences and situated specificities (Ryan, Von Koppenfels, & Mulholland, 2015, p. 199).

3.2.3.3

Hannah and Pete

While there is a large body of literature that focuses on the experiences of transnational families, and particularly migrant women, who are part of low skilled labour flows (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997; Lutz, 2011; Parreñas, 2001, 2005), there is little research that explores the decision-making process of middling transnationals within family contexts. In particular, the negotiations experienced by transnational couples from different countries of origin are unexplored in the research. Hannah and Pete are two research participants who provide a final example of the ways people can move through a whole series of migrant categories over their life course. Hannah grew up in South Australia. Her mother was from New Zealand, and her dad was born in England. After Hannah finished high school, she spent time in South America on a gap year before undertaking a university degree in Adelaide. After her last university exam she went to London where she lived for six years (her father was born in the UK and therefore Hannah held a British passport). In 2006 she spent several months travelling through Europe on her way back to Australia, where she had planned to settle permanently. During this travel she met her future husband, Pete, and says that meeting him ‘killed the plan’ of a smooth resettlement in Australia. Hannah has qualifications in social planning, project management (both from Australia) and crime prevention and community safety (completed in the UK). Her professional roles in Australia have predominantly been in the area of social planning and policy in the public sector but overseas she was forced to translate her skills into diverse contexts to find work (including policy, marketing, human resources and research). Pete was born and raised in Heidelberg, Germany. He completed a Master’s Degree in Economics in Heidelberg and worked at an insurance company in Frankfurt for three years, before resigning to travel around the Middle East. He was 28 at the time and told me travel was something he needed to do before ‘settling down’, a sentiment echoed by many participants. While participants often assumed such travel and short-term work in another country would precede their final settlement back in their country of origin, instead it often led to a life lived in overseas locations. Pete met Hannah while he was riding his motorbike from Germany to Israel. A chance meeting unsettled his notion of returning permanently to Heidelberg, a location where his family had lived within a 20 km radius of the city for generations. After Pete and Hannah met, they travelled together for a few months before Hannah returned to Germany with Pete, staying for three months while he organised his visa for Australia and sold all of his belongings. They decided to return to Australia together because Pete thought the country had a favourable immigration reputation and his work experience and credentials would allow him to easily find employment in his field. This

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assumption was based on government immigration publicity-material about working in Australia. Despite his high level of qualifications, professional experience and English-language proficiency, he was unable to acquire work in his field or work commensurate with his skills, qualifications and previous employment. Pete describes his experience of migration to Australia as ‘extremely negative’. His description of his experiences in Australia suggest there is a discursive mismatch between his expectations of what Australia would be like and how it is experienced when migrants arrive and begin looking for work. Like Mateo and Izabel’s experience described in Chap. 2, he struggled to find work and felt that employers and recruitment companies automatically overlooked his credentials when they saw he was born overseas English is not his first language (despite his fluency). Previous research on skilled migrants in Australia has shown professionals from a non-English-speaking background (NESB) consistently experience poor labour-market outcomes (Hawthorne, 2010). Many studies have indicated that migrants who change their names or only use an initial on their CV, in order to sound ‘local’ and receive more positive responses from employers (Colic-Peisker & Tilbury, 2007; Pinkerton, 2013). Hannah and Pete described their frustration with finding suitable employment for Pete in Australia. His résumé was all over the city, but they just look at it and they see that you’re not from Australia and just throw it straight in the bin. A friend of mine had worked at a recruitment agency and we’d said to her “Can you just get them to look at Pete’s CV, and if there’s something wrong with it, if it doesn’t represent him well or whatever, can you just tell us?” Because people kept saying “yeah, it’s great, fine, we’ll register you”, and then they never ring back. So it was because of her that someone actually looked at his CV. I think even when they put you forward for the job, the recruitment agent was doubtful that you would succeed, like she did it as a favour I think really, to go “Alright, I’ll give you a try but you might not have a good chance”. (Hannah) This recruiter, she said to me, “I don’t think you’re good enough for that job” and the job, it was just a bit of data entry, nothing too crazy but she says, “I’m not sure if I can put you forward”. (Pete) The recruitment agent, her prejudice was that “English is his second language and he doesn’t have much Australian work experience, so they’re probably not going to want him”. So I think sometimes you’ve got a barrier, sometimes the recruitment agents probably have companies saying “We don’t want any migrants”. And that’s probably true, but I think also then they have this perception that everyone thinks “Don’t want any migrants”, so sometimes recruitment companies might actually be a bit of a gatekeeper to it, before you can even get to an interview. (Hannah)

Pete entered Australia the first time on a working-holiday visa and then moved to a skilled-independent-regional visa. The couple lived in Adelaide, a metropolitan city that is considered by the Australian Government as a regional location for migration purposes, and therefore required fewer ‘points’ to apply for a temporary visa. With this visa, Pete had full working rights but was still a temporary resident for three years. If he lived in Australia and worked for these three years, he would have been granted his permanent visa. For most of his first stay in Australia he held short-term contracts working in call-centres. The Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia (LSIA, 2005) suggests at least 40% of professionals are unable to find work in their field

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within the first six months, post-migration. The Continuous Survey of Australian Migrants, states that 22% of skilled migrants are unemployed or under-employed after the first six months (CSAM, 2009–2011). While figures vary by source, they do complicate the assumption that increasing skilled-migration flows will reduce skills shortages. There are serious social consequences for migrants who are unable to find work in their field. Pete described feeling disillusioned, experiencing selfdoubt and skill wastage. Even when he did find work, it was not in his field of expertise. Research has shown that when employers favour local experience, forcing skilled migrants to take employment outside their field of expertise, the relevance of their prior skills and experience are further diminished (Goldsmith & Lynne, 2011). This may add weight to the education-led migration pathways pursued by those in the previous chapter, which provide them with local qualifications, time to develop networks while studying and to improve language skills if required. While state policies in Australia, in most circumstances, recognise overseas credentials and experience, Australian employers are often less willing to hire overseas staff. Reacting against the ‘success narrative’ of migrants perpetuated by Australian governments and academic researchers (e.g. see Cobb-Clark, 2000, 2001; Cobb-Clark & Chapman, 1999; Ho, 2006) argues that migrants may also experience many negative effects of migration, particularly with respect to gaining employment in their field, and adjusting to differences socially, culturally and politically. Reinforcing this point, Kate, the government immigration department participant referred to earlier, describes how the ‘success narrative’ myth creates unrealistic expectations for incoming skilled migrants: This is hard for me to say because we’re in the business of marketing the state, bringing in skilled migrants, but I do think that there are myths out there about Australia being the land of opportunity. It is, but the reality is that probably a skilled migrant who has been at some sort of level in their own country, or their country of origin, is probably not going to come to this country and step into that level. (Kate, Australian Immigration Department employee)

Human capital perspectives, which dominate the field of skilled migration (Checchi, de Simone, & Faini, 2007; Khadria, 2001; Mahroum, 2000; Stark & Wang, 2002; Williams, Balaz, & Wallace, 2004) mask other factors which impact upon migrant employment experiences, such as gender and the birthplace of new arrivals. C. Ho’s (2004, p. ii) research on the experiences of Chinese women living in Australia shows how male and female migrants, and migrants from English versus non-English speaking backgrounds, experience re-settlement in very different ways, regardless of their skill or educational level. This suggests the cultural specificity of human capital (Ho, 2004, p. iii). After several years living in Australia, Pete and Hannah decided to return to Germany. While Pete found it hard to find work in Australia, Hannah explains that this was only part of their decision to return to Germany. She says that since the time they met, they had planned to live in both countries before making a decision about ‘where to settle down’ (Hannah). Initially, they had planned to spend five years in each country but Hannah laughs as she says they soon realised ‘we were too old to take that long to decide’:

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3 Onward Migration Pathways Over Time and Space The plan to move back to Germany was always on the cards, we figured it was fair if both countries got a turn, it also gave us both the chance to form good relationships with each other’s families and understand more about the countries, cultures and way of life. (Hannah)

Their experience in Germany was positive. Pete found work within his industry, working in a bank. Hannah ‘tried to re-invent’ herself in terms of an English-speaking worker, as initially her ability to speak German ‘was non-existent’. She worked as an HR consultant, IT business-process consultant, conference organiser and researcher, among other roles, and ended up winning a position as the Marketing Manager for a university that sought to attract international students and taught all of its programs in English. She then worked as an Academic Quality Manager in a Business School that was accredited through the Open University in the UK, and needed someone who could speak German with colleagues and students, but who could write policies, procedures and quality documentation in English. Hannah’s experiences working overseas have forced her to be flexible and inventive in relation to her skills and field of work, learning to adapt to fit a myriad of roles that she would not have pursued had she remained in Australia. While Hannah’s skillset expanded as a result of her migration, she suggests that a negative consequence of the ability to translate her skills into multiple contexts is a CV that that lacked a coherent narrative. My past experience was useful – but I changed track to meet the market there. Having said that, between all of my moving, there is now not such a consistent theme through my CV. (Hannah)

Hannah and Pete lived in Germany for two years and then spent six months travelling by motorbike through Africa before once again returning to Australia. With a sense of irony, and similarly to James’s experience, Hannah recently recalled that ‘even after a six-month trip by motorbike through Africa to Cape Town, the most challenging part of the whole experience over the past year has still been resettlement in Australia’. Notions of ‘home’ and ‘away’, ‘short term’ versus ‘permanent’ settlement have been a site of ongoing negotiation throughout their relationship. Riano’s (2003) research on skilled Latin American women in Switzerland is one of the few studies that investigates the bi-national marriages of skilled heterosexual couples. Literature has tended to focus on bi-national marriages as ‘reflecting the escape of unskilled women from poverty’ where bi-national marriage functions as a means for poor women to migrate to a wealthy country and obtain legal status (Riano, 2003, pp. 313–314). By contrast, Riano (2003, p. 313) argues many female migrants are ‘highly’ skilled and their bi-national marriages are not motivated by economics but by ‘reasons of love’. After Hannah fell in love with a foreigner, new plans had to be made: We have always been in search of the place to settle and have been trying to make this decision since we met. Although we really enjoyed our time in Germany, the pace is faster; our ability to get ahead harder and thus the quality of life is incredibly different to Australia. The focus in Germany is really on working, whilst here in Australia work life balance leans towards free time – we felt that this suited us and a future family better. Once we decided that we wanted to settle in Australia, it seemed silly to stay in Germany a lot longer. We saved like crazy as our plan was to travel home to Australia through Africa and thus in the end, came back earlier than we had initially planned. Part of that was Pete not really enjoying his work in Germany, but also being aware that if we wanted to start a family the years were ticking by! Since

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arriving here [Australia] – Pete has decided for a complete career change and has, just this week, won a position as an apprentice motorcycle mechanic. We do see this as a permanent settlement, as much as anyone can. We hope that the future still includes lots of travel and we plan to return to Germany as regularly as possible to maintain ties there. (Hannah)

Recent communication with this couple (in 2017) has shown that while they are currently living in Australia, a return to Germany has not been ruled out. Pete began an apprenticeship as a motorcycle mechanic before re-training again as a nurse, a field he has now worked in for two years. Hannah returned to university to undertake a Masters in International Studies, while also working in senior public policy roles within the State Government. Their migration experiences not only catalysed continued skilling in their fields but have also caused them to re-evaluate their professional aspirations and take new career directions. They also now have a three-year-old son and are currently deciding whether or not to move back to Germany so that their son can experience another culture and language and to be closer to Pete’s family. As love migrants, their relationship has required a continual negotiation of the location of home as well as the type of professions they work in. Hannah originally went to the UK as a young, educated woman seeking a relatively short term overseas experience. But a chance meeting with Pete, traveling back home, produced a life of ongoing mobility. The presupposition that working holiday makers and other short term workers return home after a prescribed period becomes complicated by the ‘personal emotional intimate attachments’ that many are forced to make after developing relationships with people from different countries (McLeod & Burrows, 2012, p. 369). Decisions about where to locate ‘home’ as a transnational couple are not made within the framework of the relationship alone, but negotiate many other factors and people outside of the relationship. They negotiated challenges around where they could each find the most suitable employment, lifestyle factors in terms of where to raise children, and emotional ties around wanting to be close to family, nieces and nephews as they grew up. Like Ryan and Mulholland (2014, p. 598) point out, in their study of French skilled migrants in London, migration should not be represented as a binary of mobility versus settlement. Instead, they acknowledge the ‘continuum of emplacement’ that people engage with over their lives, involving short term, temporary and long-term plans as well as the interplay of a range of professional, personal and familial factors. There is an added complexity in living between homes for this transnational couple because they each experience in-betweenness on an ongoing basis. When Hannah is at home in Australia, Pete is not, and when Pete is at home in Germany, Hannah is not. Equally, when Pete is returning to his country of origin, Hannah is migrating, and vice versa. They have spent considerable amounts of time ‘trying to fit into both contexts’ (Hannah) as citizens of each nation and they feel they are now somewhere in the middle—no longer at home in their country of origin or their partner’s. This section has examined some of the ways that a series of migrations over time and space has blurred the boundaries between conceptions of home and away, foreign and familiar, skilled and unskilled for both solo movers and within family contexts. While some participants support Ryan and Mulholland’s (2014) findings that skilled migrants move less as they age, becoming increasingly aware of the costs of onward

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migration (e.g. Nilaya and Angela), this was not the case for every participant. While there was often a desire to find somewhere to settle permanently and ‘once and for all’ (James), onward migration is never ruled out as new personal, familial and professional opportunities and obligations arise. Multiple migrations early in their lives often set the scene for a life of frequent relocations, continually searching for a final resting place that rarely eventuated. Yet each location was not thought of as transient or short term. Participants stayed in each location for a minimum of three to five years, and consciously developed deep connections to these locations and the lives they built there.

3.3 Conclusion Methodologically, migration research needs to be an ongoing project that is processual in nature, attentive to the past, the present and the future and leaves space for contingency; unexpected and divergent pathways and events that sometimes require migrants to shift course and change plans (that is, if they had a plan to begin with). This chapter has argued for the importance of examining participants’ experiences over time to take account of migrants’ shifting intentions and statuses as well as looking at migration decision making processes within social and familial contexts, rather than as isolated individuals. Different mobility categories, such as international student, tourist, working holiday maker, accompanying spouse, refugee, temporary graduate worker and skilled migrant, are formally constructed by institutions and governments in ways that make assumptions about the different forms of mobility practiced by those who occupy such categories. These kinds of subject positions are also ‘inhabited, resisted and manipulated’ through the practices of individuals (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011, p. 9). This chapter has described some of the ways participants negotiate mobility across national borders, and within family contexts, which has produced a range of official categorisations to describe them as well as shifting personal identifications including refugee, tourist, temporary migrant, resident, traveller, visitor, observer, guest and citizen. Thus, migrant categories tend to be too limiting to understand the complexities of migrant journeys, their multiple identities and dispersed connections, over the life course. The traditional paradigm of linear migration patterns leading to settlement, integration and permanency is increasingly contested and instead recognised as temporary and involving multidirectional migration trajectories (Castles, 2002; Robertson, 2014). While government immigration policies structure the macro context in which skilled migrants’ make their migration decisions (in terms of what visas are available and their conditions), this chapter has shown how the life course choices and migration trajectories of mobile settlers are also connected to everyday decision-making processes that are intimately bound up with the lives of family members. Even when life course approaches show how migration journeys begin as individual pursuits (Chloe and Hannah), over time these often transform into migration decisions made within family contexts. Participants’ life-courses cannot

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be fully understood as individual trajectories but as relational mobility projects that involve people in complex relations with family, friends, professional identities, government policy, their own social locations and embedded geographies of home and attachment. Participants’ mobile resettlements fostered multiple transnational connections, serendipitous happenings, opportunistic tactics, reimagined careers and reoriented responsibilities within the domestic sphere. Their trajectories constitute ‘unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. xviii). However, reading participants’ stories in retrospect can help to bring these paths into view. The label ‘skilled migrant’ resonates with discourses on human capital and knowledge economies. There is a sense that one can only be a skilled migrant if one is already skilled, an economic-rationalist perspective that neglects the multiple paths that lead to one becoming skilled, as well as excluding those who are skilled and educated but migrate under a non-skilled visa. Skilled migration is experienced by the migrants captured in this chapter, not as a linear or pre-determined process to fulfil skill shortages defined by policy makers, but as a complex negotiation of diverse immigration contexts often involving career disruptions, varied visa statuses, re-imagined futures, settlements and re-settlements. The transnational connections within migrants’ lives and the spatial and temporal shifts experienced by different kinds of migrants, as they negotiate the changing immigration policies of states, produces new forms of migrant agency and subjectivity (Goldring & Landolt, 2011; Ong, 2006). Lan’s experiences, for example, show that migrants are not wholly subject to the constraints of various migration policies, but also enact a range of tactics of resistance to the limitations imposed on them as temporary migrants (Bailey, Wright, Mountz, & Miyares, 2002; Robertson, 2014, p. 1929). Ideas of temporariness as distinct from permanence are contested because people often transition to and from a range of temporary visa categories in their quest towards permanence (obtaining PR or citizenship) over time and space. For all the participants in this research, they had already reached a migrant destination country. Relatively speaking, participants in this research are the lucky ones. Yet, within this diverse group there are still variable capacities for agency and opportunities for mobility. The needs of children and partners, the availability of jobs, chance encounters, visa restrictions, national systems of governance, and emotional ties all play their part in decision making processes and the range of choices that are afforded to individuals. While some participants represented their eventual permanent residency status or citizenship as an ‘inevitability’, dependent only on time (e.g. Sharon), others in this research felt their temporary status was a precarious state that may never be overcome (Lan, Emily, Seb, Mateo). They felt constantly vulnerable to being sent home if they didn’t ‘tick the right boxes’ (Emily). Depending on when you speak to the migrants in this research, they may be constructed as sojourners seeking overseas professional and travel experiences, refugees escaping conflict, or they might be deliberately or coincidentally on the path to permanent labour migration. By understanding the pathways of skilled migrants over their life-course, which may include alternate routes, a more expansive and mobile range of relationships to place and time than that attributed to mobile elites becomes evident. People move for different periods of time, may transition between a series

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of visas and those who were initially framed as permanent migrants might return home to their country of origin, or move to another destination under different visa conditions. In mobile and situated lives, we should always leave space for the unexpected. As Hannah, who has migrated five times, states ‘we do see this as a permanent settlement, as much as anyone can’. (Hannah) The previous two chapters have explored some of the motivations, decision making processes and pathways that skilled migrants take around the globe over their lives. The focus has been on how and why they moved. They traveled across national borders to flee persecution, to find temporary and longer-term work, to seek new experiences and lifestyles, to engage in tourism and recreation, and to visit friends and family. I now turn my attention to how they represented their re-settlements through narrative, transforming a range of identities and connections to people and places by inhabiting their homes, streets and communities through their everyday home-making practices. While these people were physically mobile, through multiple relocations, they were also imaginatively mobile as threads of memory at multiple scales (local, national, transnational) are woven into their lives in new contexts (Erll, 2011; Kennedy & Nugent, 2016). In the remaining chapters I examine I focus on home and belonging examining: how resettlement is manifested in locally specific ways through participants’ everyday home-making and mnemonic practices (Chap. 4); physical and symbolic departures, arrivals and returns problematizing home and away (Chap. 5); and the implications of mobility for how participants develop ‘citizenly identities’ and sustain multi-stranded and emplaced translocal connections (Chap. 6). Finally, I explore how they use story to articulate their belonging and their identities across multiple sites and as a form of resistance towards the ascriptions of others (Chap. 7).

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Part II

Practices and Connections

Chapter 4

Everyday Practices of Home-Making

Abstract This chapter examines how participants’ inhabit homes and communities near and far through their embodied, material, imaginative and narrativised home-making practices where home is both an imagined space of belonging and a lived space. Remembering becomes an active process and constitutes a motion of attachment that journeys back and forth between homes and involves an ongoing articulation of what home is and was (Fortier, 2003; Blunt & Varley, 2004; Blunt & Dowling, 2006). The chapter will highlight the productivity of viewing Australia as one site within a range of transnational connections where every migrant relocation carries with it traces of previous local, national and transnational memories that overlap and ‘take root’ in new contexts (Kennedy & Radstone, 2013, p. 242). I show how the sensory experiences of migrants are often the site of uneasy tensions between surrender and resistance, between ‘fitting in’ by ‘borrowing’ the practices of another and actively ‘re-interpreting’ local habits with personal inflections. In particular, everyday practices such as socialising, walking, gardening and cooking are used by participants to ‘carve out life chances’ from spaces that at first appeared too foreign (Deleuze, 1997, p. 3). Keywords Migration · Memory · Home-making · Belonging

4.1 Introduction Home is just this bucket for…I don’t know that there’s another word that has so many conflicting meanings. It’s a weighty word… Home is your story, because it’s your memories. It’s wrapped up in everything you understand about who you are. (Jen)

An emotionally inflected and embodied analysis of mobility and resettlement informs the everyday, lived experience of formalised immigration strategies and broader policy debates. Like Jen suggests above, home is a ‘weighty word’, carrying emotional and often contradictory layers/meanings where home/s, both real and imagined, cannot be separated from narratives of self.

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Boccagni (2017, p. 26) has recently re-invoked the term ‘homing’ to investigate the temporal and spatial practices through which migrants attempt to ‘reproduce, reconstruct and possibly rebuild meaningful home-like settings, feelings and relationships’. Through such practices, the past, present and future become intertwined as people relate memories from past homes and re-invoke such memories in their current practices and aspirations for their futures. There is a growing body of theoretical and empirical literature on embodiment and the senses within migration studies and geography (Chau, 2008; Classen, 1997; Conradson & Latham, 2007; Howes, 2006; Hsu 2008; Low, 2012; Tolia-Kelly, 2006, 2007). Dunn (2010, p. 7) has argued that if the scale of analysis for researching migrants is at the level of bodies, it keeps studies from moving too far away from ‘place’ and too far towards mobility. While participants’ mobility has opened up new possibilities for attachment and new positions within social networks across space (Beck, 2008; Bauman, 1992; Giddens, 1991), this chapter focuses on how belonging is embedded in place—recognising that localised spaces also involve mobilities that are fundamental to the constitution of place. Home is understood as a multidimensional concept that involves places, spaces, emotions, activities, and a state of mind or being. It may be a site of desire, intimacy, longing, comfort, familiarity and hope as well as a site of alienation and fear (Blunt & Varley, 2004, p. 3; Brah, 1996). It is important to note that idealistic views of home have been widely criticized to show how homes are often the site of oppression, particularly for women (Brickell, 2012; Rose, 1993; Sibley, 1995; Wardhaugh, 1999). There are examples in this research where home, for several participants, was not associated with positive and nostalgic memories. For instance, Emir, who left Bosnia for Australia on a humanitarian visa, describes home as a much more complicated desire. He says home is ‘when you have friends, when you feel good, and where you can sleep peacefully’, and since he had to leave Bosnia because of the war, ‘[he] lost this feeling of home’. Since leaving Bosnia, Emir has created what he describes as ‘temporary homes’ in Sarajevo, Sydney and Adelaide. Here safety and security are not associated with home but are found beyond it in multiple locations—some that involved feelings of estrangement and alienation and some that involved a sense of temporariness. Through contemporary migration practices, home is rarely a space of belonging with static and impermeable boundaries and is often characterised as fluid, mobile and as wished-for places. Over a decade ago, Blunt and Dowling (2006) responded to the growth of analyses of home by suggesting a new sphere of research termed ‘critical geographies of home’. They elaborate upon three components necessary for a critical geography of home including: ‘home as simultaneously material and imaginative; the nexus between home, power and identity; and home as multi-scalar’ (Blunt & Dowling, 2006, p. 226). In the first perspective—the material and imaginative—home is viewed not only as a physical space in which people live their daily lives but also an imaginative and metaphorical space of emotion and belonging (Al-Ali & Koser, 2002;

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Bachelard, 1969; Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Dowling & Mee, 2007). The second perspective—home, power and identity—relates to the home as a space of belonging and meaning in which people are positioned differently with respect to their different social locations (e.g. gender, age, ethnicity and class—see Chaps. 3 and 6) (Blunt, 2007). In the final perspective—the multi-scalar—home is viewed as being crosscut by multiple relations to personal, private, public and political worlds. In this sense, homes are constructed through movement and dialogue. Massey (1992, p. 14) suggests that ‘a large component of the identity of that place called home derived precisely from the fact that it had always in one way or another been open; constructed out of movement, communication, social relations [and memories] which always stretched beyond it’. Homes are never cut off from the exterior worlds that surround and circulate through such spaces. Rather than bounded zones of activity, our homes are produced through movements within and beyond them, and can thus be conceptualised as ‘mobile geographies of dwelling’ (Blunt & Varley, 2004, p. 3). People’s memory narratives provide insights into how memories of the past enter our everyday lives in the present, shaping the ways we live now and in the future. Even if only for a brief moment, ‘the past is experienced as present, as if it were an intimate part of the here and now’ (Lems, 2016, p. 130) as people engage in ‘(mind-)walking’ (ibid, 2016, p. 130) through their ‘memory place[s]’ (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 41). By examining participants’ everyday, affective and embodied homemaking practices, this chapter reveals some of the ways people develop sites of belonging through performative and multisensory ways of connecting and remembering. Through repetitive visits to ‘surrogate’ (Leite, 2005, p. 283; Marschall, 2017a, b) landscapes that remind them of home, and through their relations to transplanted mnemonic objects and practices, participants’ negotiate the dislocations associated with resettlement as they attempt to recreate home/s in new locations. Their narratives show how every relocation carries with it traces of previous local, national and transnational memories that embed themselves in new contexts (Kennedy & Nugent, 2016; Kennedy & Radstone, 2013, p. 242). The conceptual lens of mobile resettlement running through this book allows memory work to be investigated through different forms of mobility over time and space, as refugees, labour migrants, tourists, spouses and international students negotiate multiple relocations, subjectivities and visa categories over their life course. Migration and mobility, whether forced, voluntary or a combination of the two, is a fundamental way in which individual and collective memories become mobilized and crystalised. As people and their imaginations travel across the globe, their memories are transformed through local contexts, dwellings and interactions. In particular, I draw upon the perspectives of Erll (2011, p. 5) who, within the field of Memory Studies, contends that we need to understand the differing ways people ‘handle time’ by ‘working through the past’, the present and ‘visions for the future’ (Erll, 2011). Erll (2011, p. 11) describes this understanding of memory as ‘travelling memory’, which sustains itself in and through movement and changing ‘social, temporal and local contexts’. Such travelling memories are invoked through storytelling and narrative discourse as skilled mobile settlers recall, rehearse and reshape their memories to make practical sense of their actions and of time (Ricoeur, 1984).

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Mnemonic processes—whether through the stories they tell, the objects they bring, the homes they create ‘with their hands’ or the surrogate landscapes they visit—unfold ‘across and beyond’ the multiple cultures of home and abroad (Erll, 2011, p. 9). Memories are ‘not bound to the frame of a place, a region, a social group, a religious community, or a nation, but truly transcultural, continually moving across and beyond such territorial and social borders’ (Erll, 2011, p. 10). We each have different memberships, experiences and identities that are unique to us and we invoke them at different times in different ways, producing both big and small memory narratives. In the field of narrative inquiry, Georgakopoulou (2006) makes the distinction between ‘big’ and ‘small stories’. Big stories are those that describe ‘life determining (or threatening) episodes’ where speakers are asked to bring these episodes together into a life story. By contrast, small stories are usually short, as the name suggests, and constructed through interaction. They do not represent a whole life but are the kinds of stories we tell in everyday settings as much as in research interviews. They are stories that reflect on mundane, everyday experiences, ‘that seem to pop up, not necessarily even recognized as stories, and quickly forgotten’ (Bamberg, 2006, p. 63). Participants’ memory-narratives functioned in the same way. Sometimes, they told ‘big stories’ about turning points in their lives or traumatic experiences (e.g. Lan’s escape from Vietnam following the war, as explored in Chap. 3, or the significant moment of participants’ arrivals in destination countries, as explored in Chap. 5). However, they also told more everyday ‘small’ memorynarratives, particularly as we spoke more frequently over time. While Chaps. 4 and 5 examine ideas of home and belonging there is an important distinction separating the two. This chapter focuses on dwelling and everyday practices of living in new homes. Chapter 5 reflects further on ideas of home and belonging but through the lens of movement (arrivals, departures and returns) rather than stasis. This chapter foregrounds moorings whereas Chap. 5 emphasises mobility—acknowledging that they are mutually constitutive processes.

4.2 Surrogate Landscapes, Traveling Objects and Well-Worn Pavements Drawing upon participants’ memory-narratives and representations of home-making, the next three sections examine their everyday routines and practices, as well as the transplanting of mnemonic objects that allowed them to partially domesticate the foreign, by reaching back to familiar pasts. Through such home-making practices participants enacted a degree of agency by creatively reinterpreting the foreign through personal and translocal memory-practices.

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4.2.1 Surrogate Homes: ‘I Suddenly Have a Sensation of ‘Home’…but It Doesn’t Last’ Participants everyday experiences in new migrant homes elicited emotional responses and reflective insights into points of connection, similarity and difference (Rishbeth & Powell, 2013, p. 174). Eva was born in Poland and migrated to Australia with her mother as a young child. They traveled on a family visa to join Eva’s aunt. Eva completed all of her education in Australia (up to PhD level) and now travels overseas frequently as part of her academic job. Eva described how she ‘re-identified and re-articulated’ her previous Polish home ‘back into a new landscape’, expressing a particularly creative way of negotiating foreign surroundings. She finds familiar aspects of the European scenery she remembers from her childhood and either recreates them in her garden at home, or searches for them in public spaces. Eva also discussed the labour she has put into creating a space of belonging in her garden. By actively working the earth, she feels as though she is creating a connection and attachment to that place through the reactivation of memories in new homes. Many scholars have explored the ways dwellings are transformed into homes in the context of everyday and habitual activities (e.g. Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Pink, 2004, 2012). This might include cyclical events, such as birthdays and religious gatherings, as well as routine activities. We embed our ‘selves’ in places through routine activities such as walking, or in this case, gardening, creating spaces for the enunciation and expression of a self in space: You often associate home with a building, a street, so that’s one layer. Then another layer, at home with my chickens in my garden, where I can smell familiar smells, my cooking smells, I’m walking around and I know this is my space and my place… I was walking home from a bus recently and I saw my house in the distance, and I went ‘This is my home’, and I thought ‘Oh, why did I think that?’ and it’s because it’s as a result of the labour of my hands, because I garden in it, I’ve made it look the way it looks, it’s that claiming, that sense of having a home because I have worked on the land. (Eva)

Eva attempts to re-enact a sense of home over time and ‘against the spatial and temporal separation’ from what used to be her home (Boccagni, 2017, p. 74). Through such ‘homing’ (Boccagni, 2017, p. 74) practices, ‘the sensoriality and materiality of home is retained, reproduced, or negotiated anew’. Eva’s activities in her garden and the meanings she invests in them are intertwined processes. In her garden, she plants vegetables from her childhood in Poland and uses these to make dishes that her mother used to cook for her. ‘Habit memories’ from her childhood are ‘accumulated in the body’ and re-enacted in the present through repetitive activities (Whitehead, 2009, p. 133). Eva’s narrative highlights the sensory geographies of home through smell, sight and repetitive activity within a space—a ‘domestic entanglement of nature and culture’ (Blunt, 2005, p. 512). She talks about her ‘intimate relationship’ with the soil, a garden she has created, and how she ‘feeds, nurtures and works’ with it. She is able to develop a sense of knowing about her place through her gardening experiences, which perform an embodied claiming of space as a form of belonging (Tilley, 2006; Wise & Chapman, 2005). It is about the day to day interactions and

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routines of domestic life, ‘the temporalization of everyday practices such as tidying up, sleeping, cooking, or eating, within a given place, contributes to make it familiar, secure and controllable’ (Boccagni, 2017, p. 69). Repeated physical routines, or ‘fields of care’, within a house, may over time create a sense of home… [t]he home thus becomes a source of identity and status, and allows for a sense of connection to both people and places, to the past and to the future. (Wardhaugh, 1999, p. 96)

In a similar way to Eva, recreating familiar landscapes in her garden in Australia, Sharon narrated how she deliberately visited places in her migration country that reminded her of her previous home in the UK: The landscape, where we live [in Australia], looks very similar to the rolling green hills where I grew up in the UK. Sometimes when I drive up Shepherd’s Hill Road there’s a connection that’s made in my brain, and I suddenly have a sensation of ‘home’—the kind of feeling I had as a child when I’d been at school all day and then I would head home. But it doesn’t last. My brain fights with itself and reminds me that this isn’t my home and that I’ve only been here five years. It’s like a switch goes on and then it’s cut off. I find that hard. I so desperately want to feel at home here or somewhere. When I go back to the UK now, I don’t feel at home there either. (Sharon)

The sensory experience of driving up this road connects Sharon to a previous home through a complex intertwining of emotion, meaning and memory. It is both a physical and embodied journey as well as a symbolic and imaginative one. As she says, driving up this road she is momentarily transplanted to another time and place, ‘though it never lasts’. Low and Kalekin-Fishman’s (2010, p. 198) concept of ‘sensorial transnationalism’ is relevant to Sharon’s experience. While she is visually sensing a localised space in Blackwood, Australia, she consumes it through her memory of transnational sense-scapes and homes. How she responds to the sensory pull of previous homes in different cultural contexts may change depending on how long she lives in Australia. She tries to reconcile a sensory interface between the familiar landscapes of her homeland and her new ‘surrogate’ (Leite, 2005, p. 283) surroundings in Australia. Staeheli and Nagel (2006, p. 1599) suggest that ‘in leaving home, immigrants must make a new home, and they must negotiate the contradictions of both homes, even as they may feel they belong to neither’. Expressed in a slightly different way, Ahmed (1999, pp. 330–331) suggests that ‘home becomes the impossibility and necessity of the subject’s future (one never gets there, but is always getting there), rather than the past which binds the self to a given place’. Sharon visually consumes landscapes in Australia that remind her of home in Britain. But recognition of this British countryside aesthetic is fleeting and often leaves her emotionally bereft of a home in either place. Neither place, here nor there, fulfil the expectation of a home in its fullest sense—reflected in her statement ‘I so desperately want to feel at home here or somewhere. When I go back to the UK now, I don’t feel at home there either’. Migration involves not only a spatial dislocation, but also a temporal dislocation: the “past” becomes associated with a home that it is impossible to inhabit, and be inhabited by, in the present. The question then of being at home or leaving home is always a question of memory, of the discontinuity between past and present. (Ahmed, 1999, p. 343)

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The passing of time is also reflected in personal experiences of place: a growing familiarity with surroundings, the development of friendships, the accumulation of memories connected to a specific location. When I interviewed Sharon in 2017 (our fifth conversation), seven years after our first interview, she reflected on the shifts in the location of home that had taken place during that period. While she often made comparisons between the UK and Australia when she first arrived, these comparisons had become less and less over time. Two years ago, Sharon and her husband made a conscious decision that every Friday night they would go to their local pub and get to know the community. They also developed a routine where every Saturday they’d visit a local deli, get to know the owner and buy produce to cook a meal using locally grown ingredients. What we do is we go to the deli in Blackwood to get our olives and have a chat with Jason. Then we go to the Belair Bottle Shop and then we’ll have a little tasting and have a chat. Then we’ll come home and then we’ll cook a nice meal based on some stuff that we might have bought from the local supermarket. Just those little things have made an enormous difference in helping us to feel part of the community where we actually live. (Sharon)

These seemingly mundane, everyday routines allow them to ‘connect to where [they] actually live and the people around [them]’, which has made a difference in developing a sense of home in Australia. Participants also talked about the imaginative location of home, shifting profoundly through experiences of loss over the life course. Seb, who born in Venezuela and originally migrated to Australia on an international student visa, had just gained Australian citizenship when his Aunty phoned to tell him that his dad was extremely sick. He flew home immediately, but his father passed away before Seb’s arrival. When he returned to Australia, unemployed and with barely any money left, he described how he felt extremely disoriented and had ‘lost track’ of where he was going. I love to know where I’m going. I was … imagine a plane that lost a wing and is going down like this [hand gestures]. That’s how I felt I was in that particular period. Because my only goal in life was to make my dad proud. And when he wasn’t there, my goal in life got buried with him. So then I had to really scour what was the goal that I was looking for. Because I didn’t have the goal anymore. I had to restart and reset myself. (Seb)

After his father died, Seb’s friends kept telling him ‘You have to go forward. You have to go forward. Do new things, move, go. Join clubs!’ While he took their advice and joined some sporting clubs in Australia to make friends and remain social, it did not immediately help. He felt the pressure to move forward with his life, in order to move on from the grief of his father’s death, was not working. So instead he decided to do the opposite. What would happen, he asked, ‘if instead of going forward, I go backwards?’ He used his memories from his past to reconnect with a narrative of self that was familiar and comforting to him as well as to reconnect with memories of his family when they were all together. He started engaging in activities he remembered from when he was a child, which was a time that he felt most happy. So I had a car that was broken, and I used to repair cars with my brother, so I started to do that again. That was, by the way, my best psychologist. Going backwards was good. I bought Lego, which I used to buy when I was a kid. It was excellent, it made me remember what it

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4 Everyday Practices of Home-Making was like when I was young. You get involved in all this new shit that you get into. New food, new, new, new, new, new. But you forgot what you like, what you know, what you used to like that you left behind. When you’re young, everything that happens to you seems natural, it’s not pushed by society, it’s all the human side of you absorbing what is around, you are not pushed by fears, you’re not pushed by judgement… You know? But when you’re 30, you have crossed all these lines already… suffering for x or y… So I said, let’s go back and find out what it feels like. What I used to like. And that’s doing stupid things, like eating stuff that I used to like, that I used to eat. Reading books that I’ve already read. When I was a kid, when I was a young adult, when I was an adult, like before where I was. And that’s what got me out of it. It was like a reset. (Seb)

While mobility routes and itineraries are future oriented in terms of where to resettle and how to make migration plans a reality, creating a space of belonging in the present is often developed through memory-practices that journey back to the past. Migration is always an adaptive experience in that the migrant changes in order to fit in, yet they also bring parts of themselves with them and these parts are sometimes emphasized more than if they had stayed at home. Seb narrates how he reconnected with a specific time and place, to a sense of self and to relationships with others that were important to him. He re-established these connections in the present by fixing cars to remind him of his brother, undertaking hobbies like Lego, reading books and eating foods that connected him with his childhood. While he makes reference to these as ‘stupid things’, indicating the superficiality of these activities, he also attributes value to them as means of reconnecting him to a sense of self that was lost after his father died. When his father, the strongest anchor in his life, was no longer there, he needed to develop a narrative of self in Australia that embedded his family history from Venezuela and his childhood and adolescent stories in a new context rather than erasing them. Life in a new country can never be a new/fresh start because we cannot help but bring traces of our transcultural and translocal lives with us. Nilaya’s experience provides a final example of the ways mobile settlers seek to creatively bring together the past and the present. Nilaya, who was born in India, has lived in the US, Switzerland and Australia with her husband and two children. Though she is highly skilled and educated herself, she relocated to all of these locations on a spousal visa, taking on the majority of childcare responsibilities (see further discussion in Chap. 3). She describes how she reconciles her traditional Indian culture with an Australian sense of identity in a form of creative ‘reappropriation’ (Nilaya). For the past ten years Nilaya’s family have spent ANZAC Day (a national day of remembrance to commemorate Australians and New Zealanders who served in war) with a group of their Australian friends, and she always brings Indian food to share with them on this occasion. Aussie lamb is creatively altered using Indian spices: As for ANZAC day – we do go for the march to see ‘our Uncle Bob’ march and then gather at our friends. I do Aussie lamb with Indian spices and our friends (local extended family) cook it in the Weber with coals and wood chips!! Potatoes too I do with Indian spices – they do not last very long. Through all this process, the smells, sounds (grinding, pounding etc.) do bring back childhood memories – interestingly my girls find this noise in the ‘early morning’ too disturbing! They also say, I do agree on this one, the house ‘stinks’ of Indian spices – I am trying to find a way to overcome this. (Nilaya)

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De Certeau (1984, p. xvii) would liken Nilaya’s appropriation to ‘poach[ing]’ a particular understanding of the ANZAC celebration. Nilaya states that it is about creating ‘familial’ ties and ‘doing things together’. She also remarks how ‘you don’t see the resemblance at first’ but then local and national understandings of belonging can be taken and inflected with their own personal meanings and interpretation. The ritual of ANZAC Day becomes an opportunity for performing solidarity amongst diversity. It is a particular occasion for coming together and solidifying or renewing national identity—even when inflected with cross-cultural mnemonic ‘spices’. Nilaya’s participation includes their own heritage in this national occasion while also connecting them to a (white settler) narrative of Australia and part of its relatively recent history. Tastes of her past are inserted into English-Australian dishes through making, sharing and eating together (Demossier, 2000; Duruz, 2011; Karaosmanoglu, 2009; Sutton, 2010). De Certeau (1985, p. 158) has said that we cannot ‘reduce to assimilation the adaptability of a foreign body to the host country’ but rather this adaptability involves ‘a whole panoply of tactics to reuse parts of the culture for one’s own purposes’. In this example, Nilaya and her family creatively inhabit different cultural configurations as acts of both assimilation and re-appropriation. Insinuating themselves into the place of another by dwelling, cooking and re-appropriating (de Certeau, 1984, p. 117) becomes a form of creative bricolage linking old homes to new ones. This section has examined how these mobile settlers use memories of past home to develop connections to new homes. They describe their emotional responses and reflections on the similarities and differences between sites of belonging and represent their changing orientations to home over time. They also describe how they actively sought to remember and redefine the location of home through a range of practices: visits to familiar looking ‘surrogate’ landscapes in new migration countries; the creation of home-spaces that through their daily practices of cooking, gardening, childhood games and fixing cars, reminded them of pre-migratory lives; and through the creative re-appropriation of unfamiliar national cultures and practices. While such practices did not produce home/s in the present that were free from ambiguity, contestation and longing, they did assist them to move forward with their lives in new ways by using their pasts as a resource.

4.2.2 Traveling Objects: ‘I’m Bringing My Life with Me, I Even Packed My Wooden Spoons’ All forms of mobility are connected to the movement of things and to materiality as people embed themselves in local contexts as well as carry, send and receive things over time and space. Our everyday engagements with material cultures have become an important site of exploration, assisting scholars to understand how identity and belonging is continually produced and negotiated through our daily habits and routines. In this growing field of research (Burrell, 2008; Horst, 2011; Miller, 2008; Parrott 2012; Rosales, 2010; Svasek 2012) scholars are providing insights into mobile

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lives through the lens of objects and materiality. The use of ‘things’ in new contexts can materialise relationships with people’s pasts through recognition/appreciation of the material realm as well as coming to terms with the abandonment of objects and practices left behind in previous homes. The impact of migration on identity has been the site of significant social analysis, as configurations of self are re-shaped in different contexts. Dealing with material worlds in new homes forces migrants to continually examine their environments in comparison with their practices from former cultural contexts. These reflexive processes ‘result in highly creative material environments… in which past and present come together to form new, even if sometimes instable, contexts of identity production and display’ (Rosales, 2017, p. 288). While material culture is often used to assist migrants in realising their aspirations of ‘fitting in’ and building new sites of belonging and identification, it is also a useful conceptual lens for exploring the more dislocating experiences resulting from mobility, displacement and loss (ibid, 2017, p. 289). As research has found (Ahmed, 1999; Blunt & Dowling, 2006), migrants are often caught ‘betwixt and between’, never quite leaving the original site of home and never quite arriving at the new one. In this research, it is evident that what people bring with them in terms of mnemonic objects and what they leave behind, carries significant meaning in relation to their identities. Some participants left home with nothing but a ‘pink pop-up umbrella’ (Lan escaping by boat from Vietnam) or a ‘14 kg backpack’ (Chloe moving to Paris as a working holiday maker), while other participants left home with ‘everything’ from their previous house ‘down to [their] wooden spoons’ (Amanda moving to Ireland from Australia on a skilled labour visa). What they carry with them is understandably connected to the form of mobility being undertaken at that moment in their life course. Lan, for example, could not carry much with her when she and her father escaped Vietnam. However, in her later migration to the US, as a post-doctoral researcher, she brought more items to remind her of her life in Australia. Chloe and Hannah originally moved to Europe as working holiday makers with intentions to return to Australia after several years. For practical reasons, luggage restrictions and their assumption they would return home in the not-too-distant future (though this was not the case), they packed only the essentials they could fit into their backpacks. Several participants also described how they did not only take items with them to remind them of their first home when they moved overseas but instead collected items from the multiple locations they had moved as migrants, to represent their translocational identities. These items (rugs, ornaments, furniture, photographs, artwork, cook books etc.) were important markers of their mobile and transnational lives, telling a story about their multiple connections. When I asked James (who has lived in Scotland, Australia, the US, Japan and Macau) whether he took any particular material items with him to remind him of home when he moved to Japan, he responded: ‘Strangely enough I did not. I say strangely enough because when I returned to Australia I brought lots of things home to remind me of there.’ In addition, Sharon remarked that she did not bring many objects or furnishings with her when she moved from the UK to Australia and the items she did bring ‘were personal, to connect me to myself, but not to remind me of home. I came here for a new and different life’.

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While she did not bring objects or furnishings that connected her to the physical space of previous homes, she did treasure personal items that assisted her to develop, as much as possible, an uninterrupted narrative of self from one location to another. Amanda moved from Australia to Ireland in her early thirties, on a skilled visa. She had lived there for two years when I interviewed her in 2010. When I interviewed her again in 2017 she was currently going through the process to apply for Irish citizenship. In 2010, she described to me how she had spent considerable time ‘crafting’ her own space and the ‘aesthetics of that space’. She makes a distinction between people who migrate with just a suitcase, and her own compulsion to bring all of her belongings in order to create a ‘homely’ and ‘comfortable space’ in a foreign location. She said, laughing, ‘the people who bring only a suitcase—it makes me uncomfortable just thinking about it’. What did I bring to remind me of home? All of it (laughs). Everything I brought with me. I spent a lot of time crafting my own space and my aesthetic into my space back home, partly because I lived in the same house for ten years in Adelaide, and so my stuff, my objects were really important to me, and the comfort they brought me. I brought quite a lot of things to Dublin. I had quite a few paintings from friends who make art. They were important to get into my space. I collect 50s/60s memorabilia. I had lots of lamps which I needed, my kitchen items, glass bowls and ceramic bowls all over the place. I think that was also part of the whole leaving forever thing, so I’m bringing my life with me. I even packed up wooden spoons! I’ve got a lot of stuff I’m sentimentally attached to, particularly since mum died and dad sold the family home. There was a kind of extra influx of stuff and a lot of my kitchen is inherited from her. So that stuff, that was a connection I clung to. (Amanda)

Amanda’s geography of home in Ireland extends beyond her household, projecting routes and connections between the past and present and across space—embodied memories of her pre-migratory life (Tolia-Kelly, 2004, pp. 508–509). She brought ‘all of her life with her’, which included connections to her mum, her childhood home and the home she lived in as an adult in Adelaide. These domestic objects signify the multiplicity of geographical scales involved in identification (Walsh, 2006, p. 139). They are connections she ‘clings to’ through the accumulation of objects imbued with histories of use and meaning. Crafting these spaces constitutes a memorialisation of her home in Australia and the ‘enactment of a cultural self’ when the objects are displayed or consumed with others (King & Christou, 2010, p. 111). De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol (1998, p. 145) has discussed how a place, inhabited by someone for a period of time, ‘draws a portrait that resembles this person based on objects (present or absent) and the habits that they imply’. I imagine that entering Amanda’s house and seeing all of her belongings would compose a narrative about her life before she has said ‘the slightest word’ (de Certeau et al., 1998). Emily similarly talked about the objects she took with her from Zimbabwe to Australia, to remind her of home: Little ornaments that I had, just to remind us of home. I’ve got like heaps and heaps of Zimbabwean music. We’ve got food. When we came over we had like, because our staple food, a flour, kind of like polenta but it’s white, so we brought that over. I brought quilt covers from home, all that stuff that you see over there like the pillow cases and stuff [points to the couch I’m sitting on], that’s all from home, towels even, because like the Zimbabwean, like

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4 Everyday Practices of Home-Making we use like 100% cotton with the towels, and they just have a different feel to the Australian towels. I have lots of things, hair products, I have a lot of things that just remind me, and you just feel like you still have that connection with Zimbabwe, it’s still there. (Emily)

When Amanda left her home in Australia and Emily left Zimbabwe, both thought they would be away for a minimum of four years, and so they brought a lot of items from previous homes with which to furnish their new homes. Some participants left with much shorter plans to stay overseas, even though they may eventually have been extended their stay substantially or indefinitely. For them, not bringing items with them provided a sense of comfort in knowing, or at least thinking, they would return home in the near future. In this way, leaving home seemed less final and instead became a gradual realisation over time. Jen originally ‘visited’ Australia as a nineteen-year-old, on a three month tourist visa. She came to visit a friend who she developed a relationship with online. Six weeks after her arrival they married, for love and for legal reasons, so she could remain living in Australia for the foreseeable future and was able to take out a working visa, before eventually becoming a Permanent Resident and citizen (she has now lived here for twenty years). Jen originally came on a tourist visa, which had restrictions on the time she could stay in Australia as well as the amount of luggage she could bring with her. While her long-term personal intentions did not match her ‘official’ migrant category, she only brought small items with her because she did not know how long she would stay and also because she did not want to alert immigration to the possibility that she intended to stay much longer: I didn’t know if I’d stay, I didn’t know what would happen, so I decided that I would just, kind of take what I needed but what do you need when you might be leaving your life? I always had like a memory box thing, so I took kind of the most important stuff out of that, I took photos, I took some of my favourite books, clothes, jewellery, that kind of thing, all that kind of personal, personal stuff. (Jen)

The extent and type of objects carried also depended on what stage in the lifecycle the move occured, if a person had already set up a home or is relatively young when moving overseas. Jen has not shipped any other possessions over since she left Canada nearly twenty years ago because as she said, ‘I didn’t have like this grownup life then….it was all self-contained in a bedroom’. But she still yearns for her childhood belongings: When my mum was out here [visiting from Canada] I actually wanted her to bring that stuff, I really want that stuff still, and part of me feels like once it’s here maybe my whole life will be here…because this is my childhood. It’s in a completely different place and there’s no childhood ties to here, so I’d love to have my stuff from my childhood so it felt like, complete here. (Jen)

Jen’s narrative draws attention to the importance of objects in defining a sense of home. It is a way of re-attaching what has become a broken history. She feels that if she could move all of her childhood possessions to Australia, it would provide a sense of continuity and access to a childhood history that is currently unavailable to her. Unlike Amanda who left Australia as a thirty-year-old and had time to move out of her family home and invest in the more public spaces of her own home, premigration, Jen left Canada as a nineteen-year-old and so her belonging had been

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contained, up to that point, in her childhood bedroom. When I interviewed Jen again in 2017, she no longer desired her childhood belongings in Australia, in order to reconstruct or transplant a narrative of self from her previous home to her current home. In this way, her home experience in Australia is dependent upon time because the longer she stays abroad, the greater the likelihood of achieving intergenerational roots in her destination country (Boccagni, 2017, p. 68). She is now engaged with a child on the way and feels that the location of home ‘will shift profoundly’ because, more and more, her family is located in her current home, not just her previous one. In this sense ‘homing’ is then associated with life course transitions as much as chronological time (Boccagni, 2017, p. 68). Nilaya, who was born in India and has since lived with her husband and two children in the US, Switzerland and Australia also discussed the material items she brought with her to remind her of home. However, she stressed that because she has moved multiple times, she has learnt ‘not to be cluttered’ and ‘not to cling onto stuff’: I brought photographs and a few books. But that’s another hard thing to deal with because you sort of set up home, and then you have to let go. But I’ve learned because I think in the last fifteen years we’ve moved four countries, and about eleven homes. But I try not to call any of them temporary accommodation. You sort of get used to it and learn not to be cluttered, not to cling onto stuff so much. And my husband is very philosophical in that sense. He says, “It’s what you make of it”. I would love to bring my crystal, but if it has a crack in it, my heart breaks, so then you think “What’s the point in bringing all that stuff”, then you have to be practical because of all the weight restrictions and quarantine restrictions. So I brought a few things that were important, like our photographs and books. The kids picked a few little things from home, their books and some of their soft toys. Some of the Indian art and little things that we’ve got, more sentimental value like, for our wedding and my parents gave me something, things like that. What else? To be practical we brought a few things to start up the house with, which people really appreciate and you think you take it for granted, like the Indian embroidered blankets and throws, or the cushions. Cooking, we are big on food and kitchen and eating and sharing company, and there were some things which were important, and things which are very Indian, and I wasn’t sure you would get them here, so I brought some of those dishes, and cooking things like my pressure cooker and little things like that. Clothes, we brought all our Indian clothes. Even for men, my husband’s a bit shy in the beginning. He said “No, I’m not going to wear it”, and then I forced him to for a couple of occasions, like our friend’s wedding, Greek, an Australian wedding, and they loved it. (Nilaya)

Here we can see how home is described as a material realm as well as an emotional and imaginative space. Nilaya’s home is a repository for material objects that intersect with personal, social and cultural meanings. Nilaya, her husband and children brought items that had mainly ‘sentimental’ value, using these objects to connect them to their house in India, to a sense of self (such as Nilaya’s photographs of her marriage in India), and to the broader Indian culture (through particular cooking utensils and ingredients, as well as Indian clothing). There is a contradiction in her narrative as she simultaneously denies the importance of possessions in creating a sense of belonging, demonstrated in phrases such as ‘have to let go’, ‘learn not to be too cluttered’, ‘learn not to cling’, ‘it’s what you make of it’ and ‘have to be practical’, while also reinscribing the important emotional connection she has to particular objects that have ‘sentimental value’ as well as ‘practical value’ and remind her of her home in India.

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As she states, if her China ‘cracked’, so too would her ‘heart’. Her narrative also points to the negotiations that occur between family members as Nilaya and her husband work through what is valued and what is not, during experiences of migration. As Miller (1998, p. 6) suggests, objects can be used to create the ‘fabric’ of our social and cultural worlds. Everyday practices of home-making and materiality transform spaces and give houses identities as homes. People invest themselves in their home spaces, creating familiar surroundings through material possessions which connect them to past homes and selves, as well as representing their global itineraries. As the examples in this section have demonstrated, ‘letting go’ of previous homes is a fraught process. Some participants learned to ‘be practical’, negotiating what they could ‘cling to’ and what can fall away, and some resisted letting go and maintained strong connections to previous homes by ‘bringing their lives with them’ in the form of material possessions. Others brought items to connect them to many homes, building a material narrative of their translocational identities, memories and experiences.

4.2.3 Well-Worn Pavements: ‘Trying to Build a Geographic Mental Map’ The intertwining of memory and embodied, everyday practices like walking, was another way in which participants negotiated the physical and symbolic location/s of home. The metaphor of ‘taking a trip/stroll/walk down memory lane’ is often used to describe the ‘mind-walking’ (Lems, 2016, p. 130) that takes place when people describe a set of recollections accompanied by feelings of nostalgia and longing. ‘Memory lane’ is a topographic visual metaphor for strolls through the imagination. But the mind is not separate from the body. Accompanying their detours into memories of home and sites of belonging, is the actual physical experience of walking around familiar (and sometimes foreign) streets and neighbourhoods. Reflecting on the meanings of home and the entwining of memory and embodied practices, Jen who relocated from Canada to Australia, remarked: It resonates with you. You feel like everything’s kind of right in a way, because that’s your place, you’re comfortable. And so it becomes home because you walk down a street [in Nova Scotia, Canada] that I remember falling on when I was a kid and skinning my knee; or it’s home because I meet up with a friend and I remember twenty years ago we walked down the same road; or I drive past my high school and I remember every day going in there. (Jen)

Her home in Halifax, Nova Scotia resonates with her via her imagination because the place is imbued with memories of familiar and well-worn pavements on which particular events, like falling and skinning her knee, occurred. The ‘long poem of walking’ those spaces builds up a narrative of someone’s life and inserts its countless references and orientations into them, such as ‘social models, cultural mores, [and] personal factors’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 101). The roads Jen describes are not just physical markers of the home and community in which she once lived, but sensory

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markers that hold memories and reconnect her to that location (Rishbeth & Powell, 2013, p. 162). For Jen, her present home in Australia never quite feels like the home of her childhood, yet the home, place and relationships of her childhood no longer exist outside of her imagination. Home is not just the physical structure or geographical location of Adelaide or Halifax but also an emotional and imagined/remembered space. The word ‘resonate’ gives voice, within the limits of language, to the embodied character of these concepts, where repeated practices in a location build up over time to produce a sense of belonging and home. The places in which we live (physically and imaginatively) continue to ring out or echo with signs of ourselves, our practices in space, and our relations to other people. Amanda also used the word resonance to describe how an understanding of a place is felt through the body as much as in the mind (Braidotti, 2002, p. 5). Home is a feeling I think of comfort and, and comfortableness as well. I guess it’s about the depth of the resonance… it’s an inner knowing, of people and place. I still don’t feel I have that with Dublin. I don’t know the town, I still have to consult my map to figure out where I’m going, so I can usually find my way there … I don’t kind of have that … I mean in the same ways I didn’t know street names in Adelaide, but I knew how to get there. I’ve started to build bits of that socially, trying to build a geographic mental map. (Amanda)

De Certeau (1984, p. 1147) views ‘place’ as what is considered proper or preestablished. Space, however, is comprised of ‘the intersection of mobile elements’ and are ‘practiced place[s]’. For de Certeau, places are blank canvasses over which practice takes place, while space is what is produced through practice. De Certeau’s distinction between space and place can be compared to the distinction between a map and an itinerary. The map signifies the collective and ordered representation of a place and the itinerary represents the action and practices by which this place is produced and transformed into space. In the excerpt above, Amanda gives the example of walking the streets in Adelaide (her first home). Her ‘knowing’ of this space occurs through movement and ongoing practices in this location where space and knowing are inseparable. Even though she did not know all the street names in her home city, she had a ‘geographic mental map’ (Amanda) of that space because she had physically walked its streets, created shortcuts and alternate paths, for many years. Her use of the term ‘map’ conforms more to de Certeau’s understanding of an itinerary because she is implicated in the production of the space she walks through her everyday practices. Knowing a place habitually and intimately is like having a living map tattooed on a body, which Amanda is yet to achieve in Dublin. When I spoke to Amanda in 2017, she also described how the location of home had shifted once she bought at house in Ireland. She is also currently going the process of applying for Irish citizenship and said the main impetus for applying now was to be able to vote in an upcoming referendum regarding reproductive and abortion rights for women. Home, here, is comprised of many layers. It is the streets and surrounding suburbs that she walks and begins to know, intimately, over time. It is the bricks and mortar house that she has turned into a home through her collection of 1950 and ’60s memorabilia. It is also the claiming of a physical site through home ownership. Lastly, it is civic participation, becoming a citizen in order to have her voice counted in relation to issues she feels passionate about. All of these layers

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of home combine to strengthen ‘home’ as located in the present. At the same time, Amanda said she increasingly finds return trips to Australia exhausting. She returns approximately once a year, each trip is short and crammed with seeing friends and family. She also feels as though she is ‘repeating the same stories’. Australian culture that was once so familiar to her, also now feels loud and sometimes overconfident. Attentiveness to the temporal meanings associated with home-making shows the importance of migrants’ past homes in shaping current homes (both materially and imaginatively) and future orientations (Boccagni, 2017, p. 67). Each home place (both in Dublin and Adelaide) is influenced by the passing of time. As she begins to spend less time visiting Australia, changing her relationships to that place, she is simultaneously deepening connections through the ‘micro-texture of everyday life’ (Boccagni, 2017, p. 68) lived in Dublin, anchoring her more and more to her life lived there. Eva, who was born in Poland and migrated to Australia with her mother as a child, describes how she did not feel as though Australia was her home for about fifteen years. She stated she did not feel she had been ‘part of the landscape’ long enough, and that this can only be attained ‘through the passing of time’ and the creation of ‘new memories’ in Australia. In the following excerpt, Eva talks about how she came to ‘re-articulate’ her new surroundings in Adelaide as ‘home’: I started walking some of the familiar streets as an adult rather than a child, and having that sense of history. “Once upon a time I was here as a child and I am here as an adult”. I remember walking outside and I thought “I could really stay here for the next twenty years and not move anywhere”, and I found that striking because we moved thirteen times in the first two years in Australia, so not to be on the move, not to be living in boxes, I had this realisation, “I could stay here” and I thought “Why? Is it because it’s my home?” And part of it was because something familiar from Poland happened to me on Hunter Rd [in Adelaide], the trees, the leafage. And so I think I re-identified it and re-articulated it back into a new landscape. (Eva)

Several ideas thread through this passage. First, the act of walking itself can be a practice that intensifies a person’s relationship between self and landscape (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011, p. 6; Lorimer, 2011, p. 24). In the line ‘once upon a time I was here as a child and I am here as an adult’, Eva invokes the genre of the archetypal fairy-tale, which accomplishes a sense of inevitability that this is how life should be, and until she had lived these experiences in Australia, she could not identify with the normalcy of this narrative. She was outside of that archetypal linear narrative until she realised the sense of history here that had not previously been available to her. She narrates her experience of being two people in this place, of having a history she can draw on and of being here long enough to feel part of the landscape and not ‘out of place’. Every new home requires time to be reconstructed as a ‘living, participating and richly experienced home place’ (Saile, 1985, p. 87). Second, she is remembering a time before this, when she did not feel strongly connected to Australia as her home. Eva also describes how she ‘re-identified and re-articulated’ her previous Polish home ‘back into a new landscape’, expressing a particularly creative way of negotiating foreign surroundings. Like Sharon, she also finds familiar aspects of the European scenery she remembers as a child and then either recreates them in her garden at

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home, or searches for them in public spaces in order to insert former connections and identities into new homes. Also, I think I was surrounded by Greeks, Italians, people that did not speak English. I was surrounded by people who were different from me, different ethnicities, you know, the Italian man riding a bike selling his onions and tomatoes type of thing. And that kind of made me feel like home by being surrounded by others who were migrants like me but very different from me. Which is why I can’t live up…I couldn’t…I think of pretty, lovely areas but I couldn’t live in them, I call it Lego Land. For me, it’s just really white, and I’m white. But there’s this kind of normative sense about it and it’s about belonging, sure they’re nice places, looks nice, nice, but it’s not me, it’s not, it could never be home. (Eva)

In this excerpt, Eva discusses her refusal to identify with white, middle-class people and neighbourhoods, even though she would be perceived as ‘white’, and considering her education and employment, she is middle-class. Eva refuses to identify with a white space, although it should be acknowledged this is a choice available to her only because she is white. In this sense, Eva’s demarcation and rejection of a white neighbourhood positions ‘white’ Anglo-Celtic locals as native-born in contrast to Indigenous communities and to more recent migrant groups. She takes comfort in being surrounded by migrants who are different to one another and to her. She simultaneously (and perhaps unconsciously) locates neighbourhoods that are ‘too white’ as the ‘true locals’, who are positioned as outside a narrative of migration and diversity. In Eva’s construction of Greek and Italian neighbourhoods as not ‘white’, she demonstrates the socially constructed nature of whiteness, where some are seen as whiter than others at different points in history (Nayak, 2007; Steyn, 2001; Stratton, 1999). ‘Whiteness’ encompasses a range of positions and racialisations even though it is often constructed as monolithic and as a reified entity against everything else. All representations of landscapes are contested and even in Eva’s description, the neighbourhoods that are seen as ‘too white’ and too monocultural are positioned as the ‘true locals’ when they are, of course, relatively recent migrants themselves compared to the First Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who are silenced in this version of history. There is no connection to the Indigenous Australians but instead, a binary developed between ‘white’ Australia (as having a longer historical connection to the continent) and more recent migrant groups (such as Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese and Chinese). For Eva, the ‘normative’ Australian urban landscape is ethnically ‘white’ and visually ordered and neat and is a landscape in which she feels she does not belong. All places encompass multiple histories and affective experiences. Eva embraces the diversity of her local neighbourhood, suggesting that while they are all strangers to one another, they share the common experience of being relatively ‘recent’ migrants, people whom at one time or another felt ‘out of place’ (Eva). In a sense, Eva feels more at home living in neighbourhoods in flux. Eva proposes that her community, in the most local terrain of the neighbourhood, is created through the shared experience of ‘not belonging’. This is a similar point to that made by James (described in Chap. 5), who found a sense of belonging through membership to a larger group (all migrants to Australia) who, to some extent, will always be outsiders

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in the Australian landscape. Eva suggests living with difference on a daily basis creates more habitable and familiar spaces. Home cannot be ‘neat’ or ‘nice’ because in her philosophical and imaginative thinking and through her experiences, the idealisation of home has been disrupted by her migration; it has become messy. And while this messiness has been difficult to negotiate, it has simultaneously shaped her understanding and maintenance of home spaces. Massey (2005) talks about places as put together from a diverse range of elements and social relations as moments of ‘throwntogetherness’. It is in this space of ‘throwntogetherness’ that Eva finds her home. Part of migration is arriving and recreating yourself in new contexts. This recreation relies on a relationship that is developed with infrastructure, bricks and mortar. The previous two sections described how people transplanted objects and practices into new homes from their pre-migratory lives as a way of finding the familiar amongst the strange and as a way of maintaining a connection with their histories. This appears to be an early tactic in migration experiences. In contrast, in this section Eva, Jen, Amanda and Sharon also talk about the creation of new histories in migration countries as time unfolds and they accumulate experiences—‘having that sense of history’ (Eva) or ‘inner knowing’ (Amanda) that only comes with time and repetition. In this sense, new practices and memories meld with, rather than replace, old ones. And while this history of habitation is unfolding and growing in new homes, the history of inhabiting old homes begins to fray and unravel. As Jen suggests, the familiar streets of her childhood ‘don’t belong to her anymore’ even though they feel like they should. In this section, a sense of home, identity and belonging is enacted through the physical and imaginative re-encounter of sites of stimuli (gardening, cooking, walking familiar streets). Rather than movements and knowledge being separate processes, the movement of walking is itself a way of knowing (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, p. 5).

4.3 Conclusion Our successive living spaces never disappear completely; we leave them without leaving them because they live in turn, invisible, and present, in our memories and in our dreams. They journey with us. (de Certeau et al., 1998, p. 148) …at any given moment of the life course, home as sense and cognition is attached (or not) to the present circumstances and dwellings; assumed to revisit the past, or some fragments of it, against the material background of the dwellings in which it took place; re-directed towards the future, in terms of aspirations to feel at home in one or more place, and of the relational, emotional and material underpinnings of such aspirations. (Boccagni, 2017, p. 70)

It is not surprising that memories of past lives and homes are given heightened currency through experiences of mobility and resettlement, as the ‘supposed unity of self, place and time’ becomes unsettled (Lems, 2016, p. 136). This chapter has shown how participants were often caught between multiple homes. They continued to make and re-make home, despite feelings of ‘in-betweenness’, through their homemaking practices and their re-articulation of sensory geographies in new contexts.

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Remembering becomes an active process and constitutes a motion of attachment that journeys back and forth between homes and involves a ‘continual reprocessing of what home is/was/might have been’ (Fortier, 2003, p. 131). In this way, their everyday worlds are not bounded zones of activity but are produced through movements and entanglements within and beyond them. Returning to Erll’s (2011, p. 11) notion of ‘travelling memory’ she states that ‘memories do not hold still’ but are ‘constituted first of all through movement’ so that rather than ‘sites’ of memory we should be attentive to ‘travels’ of memory. In this chapter, I have shown how memories are often unexpectedly recalled when bodily movements, mobility patterns and memories are re-enacted and reactivated through the ‘physical re-encounter of sites of stimuli’ (Marschall, 2017a, b). Such moments are not always associated with memories of significant events but are constituted through their everyday interactions and embodied memories of often unexpected ‘vivid recollection[s] of long-forgotten mundane, trivial details of quotidian life back then, at home’ (Marschall, 2017a, b). For example, Eva’s interactions with her Italian neighbors or her gardening practices in Australia that re-connect her with home in Poland, or Amanda’s furnishing of her new home in Dublin with her 1950s memorabilia from Australia. These are small stories (Bamberg, 2006), of everyday emplaced practices, that connect them to small-yet-powerful memories from previous lives. And it is through these kinds of small stories that we see how people enact, distance themselves from and embrace, a range of identities and positions that are often contradictory and reveal the ways they are working through home-making processes and their sense of self, in new contexts. Memory was used by participants to try and develop a sense of continuity between old homes and new homes but equally, memories also engendered experiences of dislocation within local places that never quite fulfilled the expectation of home. Performing familiar activities and reflecting on how they connected them to other homes and people was important in developing a sense of belonging. While the mobility of participants meant home had become multi-sited, these participants still desired strong, embedded connections. Their memories travelled along with these mobile settlers and were practiced, rehearsed and invoked in local contexts. For example, participants’ sense of belonging was developed through multiple grounded practices such as gardening and Eva’s tactile interaction with the soil; visual practices such as Sharon’s search for familiar landscapes in Australia; and the sharing of different tastes when Nilaya cooked ‘Aussie lamb’ in ‘Indian spices’. Importantly, participants’ home making practices highlight that working with everyday home spaces involves making connections between past, present and future homes. The multiple sites of home are experienced as ‘material and immaterial, lived and imagined, localized and (trans)national space[s]’ of belonging (Walsh, 2006, p. 123). As this chapter has shown, sensory experiences are often the site of uneasy tensions between ‘fitting in’ by ‘borrowing’ the practices of another person or place and actively ‘re-interpreting’ local habits with personal inflections. Making new homes involves developing a sense of self and a personal space that is sometimes consistent with, and sometimes deliberately apart from, previous lives and selves.

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Memory was more than a reminiscence, it was actively used to creatively and imaginatively re-negotiate connections to a range of translocal sites and identities. As well as a resource to support continuity of self, and normalcy amongst the strange, memories were also used in processes of adaptation that gave people resources for maintaining their sense of self whilst also conforming to local habits. Nilaya’s cooking, for example, overlays her Indian national culture onto an Australian and New Zealand commemorative event. She is a ‘carrier’ (Erll, 2011) of her own cultural memories across space, while also absorbing the nationalist cultural memories of her new home in Australia. Participants’ experiences also highlight the importance of the passing of time as gradations of re-settlement occur: after nearly eighteen years in Australia, Jen is no longer ‘holding her breath’; after ten years in Dublin, Amanda has developed an ‘inner knowing’ of her local neighbourhood through repetitive walking; and Sharon has let go of some desire for her original, remembered home in England, instead consciously trying to ‘make connections’ to where she ‘actually lives’. Life in a foreign country is lived in tension between surrender and resistance, where participants continually negotiate what they can do without and, equally, what they can cling to.

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Chapter 5

Arrivals, Departures and Returns

Abstract Through the lens of memory, embodiment and materiality the previous chapter examined the everyday routines and practices that participants engaged in, to produce new homes. Analysis focused on the more local scale of home-making in gardens, houses and neighbourhoods, though their practices always involved traces of translocational memories transplanted into new spaces. In this chapter I extend this analysis of home-making by focussing on the ways that participants’ homesites are enacted, negotiated and revised over time and space, reframing ‘home’ as a series of dynamic locations, which are influenced by their experiences of ‘return’ as well as significant life events such as marriage, divorce, the birth of children and the death of loved ones. Through participants’ memory narratives, home is shown to be continually negotiated from different subject positions over their life course as they engage with sites of significance in different ways; as residents, guests, citizens, outsiders, tourists, visitors and migrants. Home-making is represented as an enduring and unaccomplished experience imbued with multiple arrivals, departures and homecomings, both imaginative and material, over the life course. Keywords Migration · Homecoming · Belonging · Time · Space · Biography

5.1 Introduction I returned home about two times a year, but gradually over the years nomination of “home” lost its clear boundaries…I started looking at Australia through new eyes, perhaps those of a visitor. (James) Home is some place that feels comfortable for the long term; someplace that you know (or think) you can always go back to. Maybe it has some familiar friendly faces around who make you feel welcome, maybe it’s just someplace that has your life’s collection of stuff. I’d really like to tow it to where my friends are but they are scattered to the ends of the earth like me so it would need to be pretty mobile. (Andy)

James describes the blurring of ‘home’ and ‘away’ through successive return journeys and the development of multiple sites of attachment over his life course. Andy’s expression of home highlights some of its multiple dimensions: a tangible © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 R. Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3164-0_5

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place filled with material possessions; an imagining or idea of a place that you think ‘you can always go back to’; a site for social relations; and a space that has become unsettled through the maintenance of multiple translocal connections. Home and belonging are complicated ideas that are subject to influences of time, space and identity shifts as the meanings and functions of home change over the life course. The circumstances under which people leave their home/s, their experiences after leaving, and their destinations all impact on their understandings of home and belonging. As Chaps. 2 and 3 argued, participants’ resettlement journeys rarely had a definite startor end-point and consequently, there were often too many homes to allow securing the ‘roots and routes of one’s destination’ (Ahmed, 1999, p. 330). Through participants’ reflections on home and belonging, this chapter explores ideas of arrival, departure, foreign and familiar, homecoming and homelessness to show how home is negotiated as both a physical and imaginative space and through shifting subject positions over time and space (e.g. as residents, guests, outsiders, tourists, visitors and migrants). Stories of arrival and departure provide a useful lens for examining the interactions between the imagination and lived experience because of the role that expectations and aspirations play in motivating and mediating migration experiences. The meanings associated with ‘home’ have become an important site of theoretical and empirical research, producing a large body of literature across a range of disciplines (e.g. Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Blunt & Varley, 2004; Duyvendak, 2011). Traditional conceptions of home have been unsettled through dramatic increases in global mobility. For migrants, home is both ‘here and there or neither here nor there’, as they negotiate affective connections to places, people and diverse spaces of belonging (Marschall, 2017). Home operates at a range of levels: it is a material and symbolic space involving physical sites, daily practices, social relations, emotional geographies and feelings of belonging; it involves relations of power, identity and social location; and it operates at a range of scales (crosscut by personal, public, political, local, national, transnational and translocal connections) (Ali-Ali & Koser, 2002; Bachelard, 1969; Blunt, 2007; Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Dowling & Mee, 2007). Homes are constructed in and through movement and dialogue and encompass strong social and emotional attachments that are developed through social relations that stretch beyond their walls. Relations to home are also profoundly connected to memory. As shown in Chap. 4, home is an important site of autobiographical memories; a place of remembered material objects, landscapes, social relations and sensory experiences. Whether someone has migrated voluntarily or by force, the longing to return to previous homes, permanently or temporarily, is contingent upon the ways in which home, and its loss, are remembered (Stock, 2010, p. 24). As Marschall (2017) suggests, going home might be the catalyst to relive or pursue memories, to extend the process of remembering itself or an occasion to reconstruct one’s past and reshape identity in the present. Recently, Boccagni (2017, p. 66) has argued that whether we conceive of home as a location or locations, as a set of grounded relationships or emotional experiences, ‘the meanings and functions of home vary along the life course of those who construct and inhabit it’. Investigations of home

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and process of home-making for migrants should therefore be attentive to shifts over the life course (from youth to adulthood) and as mobility trajectories change. As this book has argued so far, there is often a disjuncture between official terminology (i.e. that determines the legal status, social positioning, length of stay and capacity for mobility of a person) and the subjective experiences and feelings of migrants themselves (Roberts, 2018). Participants’ narratives show a fluidity between traditional demarcations of travel and migration, skilled and unskilled, home and away, foreign and familiar where temporary mobility often turns into longer term migration and produces multiple spaces of home and belonging, both lived and imagined. Official distinctions between skilled migrants, international students, working holiday makers, refugees, lifestyle migrants, sojourners, just to name a few, become further complicated by the subjective meanings attached to such terms from migrants’ themselves, in addition to how dominant societal discourses frame such categories. While all of those who participated in this research were currently skilled, educated and relatively mobile, migrating voluntarily in search of employment, better economic conditions and personal opportunities, they often had experienced prior relocations as refugees, international students, working holiday makers or accompanying spouses, which enabled and constrained their mobility in various ways. This chapter argues that leaving, arriving and returning is experienced differently not just between migrants who participate in different kinds of mobility (e.g. humanitarian, skilled, family) but also different forms of ‘arrival’ and ‘return’ are experienced by the same migrant over the life course as their mobility pathways, identities, obligations, desires and social contexts shift. As Nikos Papastergiadis has described (2010, p. 247), complex patterns of contemporary migration mean that there is not a singular homecoming, but a multiplicity of returns over the course of one’s life. The homecoming itself is also problematic. Rather than a straight forward return to one’s origins, homecoming can involve dislocation and displacement and often renders the homecomer a ‘stranger’, outsider, or guest rather than a local (Bielsa, Casellas, & Verger, 2014, p. 63). In addition, homecoming may not always be a return to one’s origins or first home, but a location of significance that may have been one site of home among many resettlements over one’s life course. In this chapter I show how the journey home is an important catalyst for self-reflection and reimagining of one’s relationships with home, in all its locations, as both a remembered and material space. Trips home force the homecomer to confront and revise old memories, embodied memories are relived and forgotten memories rise to the surface, often with highly emotional consequences. This chapter is separated into two parts. Through participants’ narratives, I begin by examining their memories of arrival in destination countries, where their expectations and imaginings of place are first met with reality/lived experience. As one participant reflects, ‘the imagination can be misleading’ (James) where the intended destination cannot be known until it is experienced. Prior to a migrant’s relocation, the new host country is a wholly imagined construct. Yet much is invested in that imaginary world, which can be a powerful catalyst for migration. Second,

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I examine the multiple experiences of both physical and imaginative ‘returns’ that occur over a migrant’s life, their shifting attachments to home, their motivations for return, and the feelings associated with often being outside of the cultures that were once the most familiar to them. Paradoxically, homecoming was often more disorienting/dislocating than departure or arrival in new homes.

5.2 Arrivals: ‘My Sense of Being Foreign, a Clumsy Transplant in a New Land’ Conceptualisations of ‘home and away’ as well as ‘foreign and familiar’ are complicated through processes of mobility and dwelling. Sometimes previous homes are re-visited through relatively short ‘provisional returns’ to see family and friends (Long & Oxfeld, 2004), sometimes returning home becomes a relatively long-term destination through repatriation, and at other times the location of home continuously shifts between multiple old and new homes as life events unfold (e.g. birth of children, death of loved ones, loss of employment, relationships with foreigners and retirement). The biographical, life-story, approach to this research as well as the long-term qualitative methodology employed (i.e. speaking to migrants 2–3 times over a sevenyear period), has allowed for insights into their lives before and following a range of relocations. This has provided an opportunity to understand the extent to which their expectations of migration destinations departed from or confirmed the realities they experienced in these places. Prior and often idealised conceptions of destination countries were confronted by the everyday and embodied knowledge that comes with living in a place. They experienced new locations, not just as being caught between two or more cultures but also as being suspended between reality and the imagination. This section focuses on participants’ representations of their ‘arrivals’ into new places and the ‘surprises in sensation’ that this involves (Ahmed, 1999, pp. 341–342). The experience of ‘arrival’ is a time when people are most acutely aware of the sensory differences between where they have come from and where they have come to. It is also a space where preconceptions and cultural imaginings of destinations were first challenged because participants had all anticipated the foreign locations they were entering. It was evident that when participants began discussing their migration pathways, the moment of arrival was etched in their reflections as an experience of heightened sensory awareness. For example, Nick, who migrated from Adelaide to New York, describes the affective differences between the two. Adelaide, Australia, was viewed as ‘sleepy, quiet and slow paced’ compared to the ‘bustling commuter trains in NY’, the pace of life, long working hours, and the intensity of New York as a city ‘that never sleeps’. This section deliberately includes extended stories from participants to convey the expressiveness and emotionality intrinsic to their memories of arrival in order to show how places are understood through emotion and the senses. In the following narrative, Eva (from Poland) describes arriving in Australia with her mother during the 1980s:

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We landed in Sydney. It was stormy and very tropical and rainy, and the reason why I’m smiling about this was because before we left for Australia, I guess one of the urban myths was that it doesn’t rain in Australia, it’s never cold. You don’t need umbrellas. My mum’s friends were saying “You won’t need to take umbrellas”, “Won’t need to take coats”. I mean aside from the fact that it’s a land of milk and honey, the weather is perfect and, you know, kangaroos are jumping in the streets (laughs). I mean they seriously were a part of the cultural imagination of people living in Poland, so you have that, the imagination versus the reality. We land in Australia and it’s raining. I remember this, it was raining, it was grey, and it was warm. I remember really clearly stepping out into the airport, and being confronted, having this feeling of being confronted by the strangeness of the airport, the big space, everything’s really new, objects literally, that are familiar to you, like they just don’t look like they usually look, like they just look more polished, more sophisticated, more colourful. It was strange, it just looked so alien. And here I am standing with my mum in the terminal, and my mum’s looking out for my auntie who she hasn’t seen, in person, for probably at least 15 years, so I remember feelings of real strangeness, of being confronted by the open space, the colours, but also, the anticipation of feeling my mother’s anticipation and her nervousness, also anticipating meeting them myself… And I have this particular memory of travelling in the car from the airport and remembering the palm trees and the gum trees, and how everything wasn’t as green, that lushes, thick, dense green foliage that you’re used to seeing in Europe. It wasn’t, and to me that meant that it wasn’t green, literally, even though, you know, I learnt to discover the different greens that exist. The other thing too was it was just so huge, big roads, and freestanding houses, weatherboard houses too, because this was in Sydney, these big highways and just this massive world, you know, coming from a densely populated little country like Poland, which you probably could fit into the state of Victoria if you squeezed hard enough. (Eva)

This narrative shows the significance of sensory experiences in a new place and how new landscapes are rendered ‘knowable’ through our senses. Hayden (1995, p. 18) writes: ‘…it is place’s very same assault on all ways of knowing (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) that makes it powerful as a source of memory, as a weave where one strand ties in another’. The expectations or ‘cultural imaginings’ Eva had formed about Australia were challenged upon her arrival. She thought the sun was always shining and there would be kangaroos jumping in the streets. Places, whether homes, towns, cities or nations, come to hold particular affective-emotional connotations. For example, Paris is viewed as the city of romance, New York as a ‘fast-paced city that never sleeps’ (Nick) and, for Eva, Australia was perceived as ‘a land of milk and honey’. Such representations are unavoidably incomplete, situated and mythical. Eva was ‘confronted by the strangeness’ of familiar objects in this new landscape. The colours of the landscape were very different, ‘a new kind of green’. She felt she had arrived in a ‘massive world’. This ‘massive world’ could be interpreted in this way because of the differences in how space is used and configured in different societies. Eva recalled the densely populated cities and towns in Poland, where the houses were all ‘crammed in on top of one another’ compared to the space afforded to individual home-owners in Australia and the sprawling geographies of its cities and suburbs. The moment of arrival can often become a significant aspect of changing subjectivities shaping the ways people view the places where they are living and how they engage with those places. In Eva’s memory of arrival, Australia’s affective possibilities as a place ‘of milk and honey’, ‘where the sun was always shining’,

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were confronted by a different experience of place. She felt overwhelmed by the vast sense of space, by the unfamiliarity, by the rain and by the different colours. Encounters between bodies and places often cause involuntary emotions registered through the body, such as surprise, fear or apprehension (e.g. Eva felt her mother’s ‘anticipation’). Conradson and Latham (2007, p. 232) suggest ‘affect’ is produced, through engagement and interaction, as an ‘emplaced encounter’. It has taken Eva twenty years of ‘emplaced encounters’ in Adelaide to feel a sense of belonging there (see discussion in Chap. 4). Even though Adelaide is now her primary site of home (both physically and emotionally), she still returns to Poland every few years and describes it as an enduring site of connection that will always remain. While orientations towards previous homes may strengthen or weaken over the life course, they are never erased or replaced completely. Their traces continue to journey with migrants, reshaping how they understand the present, through their experiences of the past. Sharon, who relocated from the UK to Australia with her husband and young son, recalled the first time she stepped out from Melbourne Airport. Like Eva, she said she had expected sun and ‘some kind of carnival atmosphere’ like she had seen on the popular Australian television soap opera, Neighbours. Now that she is in Australia, she knows that this expectation was ‘absurd’, but she states that she was ‘brought up on’ Neighbours in the UK. She remembers when she was at Oxford University, completing her first degree: All the undergraduate students would pile into the Junior Common Room at 1:30pm every lunch-time to watch it before they went back to class. We believed in those endless beaches, the happy neighbourly banter and the sunny, Australian accents. I confess that I called my son Bradley because I’d always been struck by the Brad character in Neighbours with the tousled blond hair. Very fanciable. And he surfed! I know it sounds shallow. But sadly, it’s true. So when Paul and I walked outside the airport building and smelled the misty, early morning air of Melbourne for the first time I had to persuade myself to be positive. It’s early morning, I thought, of course it’s going to be grey. It’ll brighten up later. I was to find out, of course, that Melbourne is neither grey nor cheery. Like most places – it’s both. I was struck by the concrete. As we left Melbourne Airport and drove out to the city’s eastern suburbs there was concrete everywhere. Lining the roads, forming the bulk of buildings. Again, I tried to persuade myself that we were just seeing the concrete-y parts and that we’d be seeing lush green forests and red desert soon. I made it my business to get out of the city and into the Outback as soon as I could to experience what I perceived to be “real Australia”. I’d read about it in an explorer’s book I had as a child. Cattle stations the size of Wales and the endless desert that stretches for the thousands of miles. We arrived in Melbourne on May 3, 1999. In August that year I scored a BBC job to go to William Creek and film with some anti-nuclear waste dump protesters who were riding camels through the desert – they’d called themselves Humps not Dumps. When I drove north out of Port Augusta with my cameraman and saw the desert for the first time I felt like my chest was exploding with the mind-blowing beauty of what I was seeing. I loved it and still do. I make sure I go Woop Woop (as I call it) at least once or twice every year. (Sharon)

In these two excerpts, Sharon narrates the contrast between her expectations of what Australia would be like and the reality upon her arrival. Visions of ‘endless beaches’ and ‘sunny, Australian accents’ were met with the cold and dreary morning air of Melbourne. To longer-term ‘locals’, Melbourne is known as the city where it’s always grey. Sharon concedes that Melbourne, like most places, is neither wholly the

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place of her imagination nor the reality of her early experiences but a combination of both. Representations of the Australian interior—‘lush green forest and red desert’—were also part of her expectations rather than the concrete that typifies most cities. She acknowledges the ‘fancifulness’ of her anticipations and that these imaginings of the ‘real Australia’ were, of course, stereotypical constructions of a white settler Australia. It is these stereotypes that powerfully influence the narratives she had constructed in her mind about the Australian lifestyle awaiting her family at the end of the tarmac. Most Australians never experience the desert but Sharon did eventually get her taste of her version of ‘authentic’ Australia, working on a news story in northern South Australia, her ‘chest exploding with the mind-blowing beauty’ of what she saw. Moving to Australia provided Sharon and her family with new experiences and affective possibilities. For Sharon and Eva, their move to Australia and to the specific places where they would live (Melbourne and Adelaide) offered new ways of feeling and being. Paradoxically, Sharon feels most at home in a landscape that feels most alien to her (the desert) and that reinforces her original perceptions of what ‘real’ Australia should look like. The narrative she builds about her expectations of Australia has been nourished by other narratives, such as those in television shows (e.g. Neighbours) and literature (e.g. childhood explorer books). She has generated meanings about new places through the lens of her past and particular childhood memories, which have the capacity to transform her relationship to Australia. Although she acknowledges these as stereotypes and recognises the plurality of place, she nevertheless still goes searching for the ‘real’ Australia to repair a broken narrative of place. This is profoundly connected to her own identity as a migrant in search of belonging. Each moment of arrival becomes a point of rupture, punctuation, in a migrant’s life—between the known and unknown, between the imagination and reality. Each arrival announces the beginning of a new journey or passage, yet it does not become intelligible until it is told in retrospect. In 2017 I interviewed Sharon again. She talked about how in the past, the anticipation and imagination of what an arrival would be like, significantly shaped her experience of it. However, because of her frequent experiences of mobility over her life (for work, as a tourist and to visit family), more recently she has let go of trying to anticipate what was coming and accept that reality rarely equals one’s expectations. I remember that I would think about [arriving in a place] a lot in advance and get excited about it and imagine in great detail, almost rehearse, almost write the play in my mind of … Say I was returning to the man who’s now my husband, who was then my boyfriend. I remember, for example, when we both met at university and I went off on a trip once to Asia, which for me at that time was a really big deal. It was the furthest away I’d ever travelled. I went with a friend. We went around China and Hong Kong before the handover and Thailand. We were gone for about five weeks. I remember just the anticipation of coming home and seeing my boyfriend again at the airport and just thinking that the minute I clapped eyes on him that there was going to be this thunderbolt moment. Our eyes would lock as I came through the sliding doors at Heathrow Airport. Then I would walk over and then he would pick me up in his arms and it would be like something out of a pop video. What’s really interesting is I’ve noticed that now at the ripe old grumpy age of 46 that I feel very differently about all that stuff now in that I’ve learned over the years that the anticipation

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and the reality never match up. Sometimes the reality in many ways is better. Sometimes it’s a bit of a disappointment, but it’s never what you think. Actually by trying to rehearse it and run it through your mind, that actually isn’t going to change the outcome. That’s not going to control anything and make it any better. Actually you’re better off just rolling with it. (Sharon)

Similarly, to Sharon, James also described ‘a feeling of being let down’ when your experience turns out to be ‘very different from your expectations… all that psychic energy has been wasted’ (James). Appadurai (1999, p. 6) argues that the imagination ‘is the wellspring of increased rates of migration’. Envisioning better or different lives for ourselves opens up trajectories for new imagined worlds and possibilities (Vigh, 2009, p. 105). Stories of arrival provide a useful lens for examining the relationships between the imagination and lived experience because of the role that expectations and aspirations play in motivating and mediating migration experiences. When Sharon first arrived in Australia and when she recounted her return home to England, after a trip to Asia (where she was greeted by her husband at the airport), her individual experience of arrival and return was filtered through particular culturally-specific imaginings. She appropriates a collective colonial imagining of what Australia would be like, and a western archetypal narrative of embracing loved ones at Heathrow airport (as utilised in many films and TV shows). But she is also self-reflexive about reality and expectation. With life experience, she no longer fixates on what it will be like, knowing you can never truly control or understand the reality of something until you are there. While the imagination might be the catalyst for her migration to Australia, structural conditions also play their part. As discussed in Chap. 3, Sharon and her family were originally supposed to migrate to Zimbabwe but political unrest meant that her husband’s employment did not eventuate. Her arrival in Australia is also experienced as a relatively privileged, educated woman. She is not escaping a homeland and seeking refuge in another but actively seeking relocation as one of potentially many available options. In this way, the extent to which she is able to imagine and actualize a new lifestyle for herself and her family is bound up in their social location and socio-economic status (Benson, 2012). They had access to the economic resources, cultural knowledge as members of the Commonwealth, skills and qualifications to realise their aspirations and imaginings of a life in a new country. As Smith (2006, p. 54) argues, ‘certain individuals are much better placed to be successful ‘authors’ of their own lives than others’. Indeed, while Chapters Two and Three highlighted the often serendipitous, chance events or turning-point moments in their lives that led to their migration, this merely explains the timing of events but is not necessarily the primary reason for why they migrated. If we dig deeper we can see that their particular social locations, access to networks, educational and professional capital, contexts in origin and destination countries, all had a cumulative effect on realising or constraining their migration. People’s imaginations and practices continually interact with the broader structural processes and contexts around them. The feelings towards arrival and departure also change over the life course. Sometimes earlier migrations, if they migrated as children, were driven by family members and outside of their control, whilst later migrations were engaged with by choice.

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The next narrative of arrival is told by James, who has lived in Scotland, England, Australia, the US, China, Japan and Macau. I draw on several narratives collected over a six year period as well as his reflections on childhood arrivals, some fifty years earlier. His first narrative describes a sense of feeling alienated by the Australian landscape soon after he moved from Scotland to Australia as an eleven year old. This is in contrast to Sharon’s experience of outback Australia: I was a newly arrived migrant in Australia and went with a group of Aussies to camp in the Flinders Ranges. They were all arguing about who would be the unlucky one to sleep by the broken tent flap. It was 40 degrees in the shade. I thought they should be arguing about who was going to sleep in what I thought was the best position, so I volunteered, not knowing the nights were extremely cold. Having to cope with a cold wind blowing in gritty dust (not to mention the constant noise of the broken tent-flap), I had a terrible night of sleeplessness on my blow-up mattress and thought I could never have a worse night – that is until I punctured the mattress and had to sleep the second night on the hard ground. I thought then I would never be at home in this harsh, difficult landscape. Of course, I share with all non-Aboriginal people the sense of being an outsider in this harsh and dangerous landscape. In Australia, you don’t look at scenery in the same way you look at it in England. There, scenery is pretty: here it is absolute OTHER. In a sense all non-Aboriginals are foreign to it, and that is one thing which brings all new Australians together, whether from the First Fleet or straight off the latest flight. In a way, we are all outsiders. (James)

This narrative highlights the importance of cultural knowledge in understanding places. James thought that the group was arguing about who would sleep in the best position, as he did not have local knowledge about the vast differences between dayand night-time temperatures in the Australian bush. He also discusses the alienating effect of landscapes. For him, the space was ‘harsh’ and ‘difficult’, and rendered him an ‘outsider’ and an ‘other’. He suggests that the othering function of this landscape is something that unites all new Australians, from colonial settlers to more recent migrants. His narrative also highlights the multiple meanings and interpretations of the same place by different people. He finds a way of belonging by putting himself in the category of all non-Indigenous Australians who may not feel that they belong. By making all of that group outsiders, he effectively makes himself an insider and one who belongs. With this narrative, it is also interesting that it is not social relations that ‘other’ him and ‘exclude’ a sense of belonging but the emotional sensory experience of a geographical location that constructs him as an outsider. Here, belonging is not just about social relations in space between groups of people but also between people and the landscape. In his discussion of being a ‘local’ in an Australian town, Garbutt (2011, pp. 56–57) suggests that someone can be ‘physically inside place but experientially outside it’. James had no prior experience of the Australian Outback, and so experienced it as an outsider. He has experienced many more arrivals and relocations since then, but he represents these positively, and any ‘jarring’ upon his arrival in a new location often brings what he describes as ‘a welcomed dose’ of cultural perspective. He relates another of his arrivals into Nagoya, Japan, where he worked for thirteen years: I expected the urban landscape of Nagoya, or any Japanese city, to be somewhat unattractive. It was a rainy late afternoon. The driver was not allowed to spend the money on going on the toll freeway so drove through endless dull streets heavily clogged by traffic. The colour

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in everything seemed washed out, rendering the whole passing scene a uniform grey. It was exactly what I expected. I remember vividly. The otherness of an Asian destination was a marked difference from arriving in a new city in the US or even a former British Asian colony where, no matter how tropical or exotic, there are familiar institutions. (James)

In contrast to Eva, James felt that his cultural imagining of this city matched his expectations. While Eva talked about the strangeness of familiar objects where they did not quite look the way she was used to, James discussed the lack of ‘familiar institutions’ because he had come from a country colonised by the British to a completely different cultural space. The following provides a final example of the affective experience of the moment of arrival in a new home. Jen moved to Australia when she was 19 to meet a friend (for the first time in person) who she had met on an internet chat site and later married. The following is Jen’s description of her first arrival in Adelaide in 2010: I landed early in the morning and John, that’s my husband, had an exam that day, and we didn’t realise when I bought the ticket that he would be writing an exam that day. So I flew in and he couldn’t come for three hours, so I just sat at the airport, after 48 hours of travelling to get there. I was freaking out, realising the kind of magnitude of what I’d done. As soon as it rolled around to I think like 12.30, people started coming in the airport entrance, I’m looking to see if it’s him. So I’m looking at all these men going “Is that you?” because I’d seen photos but I didn’t really know, I’m sitting there watching the door and whatever, and then he came in and walked up to me and, and we did the whole ‘hi’, and that was very bizarre, and his accent was really full-on to me. And I noticed I couldn’t listen to just one conversation, because all the accents in the airport were so strong to me that I heard everybody’s conversations rather than just the one I was having. So he arrived and we said hi. I remember noticing his hands and just being acutely aware of details. We leave the airport to go to his car and the airport doors open. It was minus 10 degree Celcius in Canada when I left, the doors open in Adelaide, and that day it was 42 degrees. The heat came rushing in and I literally stood there and went “I don’t think I can do this (laughs) I can’t do this, it’s too hot”. We got into the car and I’m thinking I need to go back to Canada, this is crazy, and we’re driving home and John had an old car and he was changing gears, and as he was going around the corner, the gear stick came out in his hand and I just went “I have to go home, this is all crazy”. But I stayed, we’re married now and I’ve lived here for thirteen years. I was 19 when I arrived. I think now I’d be so scared to do what I did but then, you’re young, you have your whole life in front of you, you kind of go “Well if this doesn’t work I’ll just do something else”. (Jen)

Jen’s narrative illuminates the impact of our sensory experiences in creating our first impressions of places and our feelings of belonging towards them. In particular, she narrates the auditory differences—‘his accent was really full-on to me’, the temperature differences and physical sensation, ‘the heat came rushing in’, and the visual differences where she was ‘acutely aware of the details’. Sensory categories such as sight, sound, touch, smell and taste cannot be separated from each other in the process of sensory experience (Howes, 2006, pp. 381–382). In the above narrative, Jen is bombarded by sensory perceptions. One sense is not experienced in preference to another but they all combine to give her an overall feeling of being overwhelmed by the country she has arrived in. The narratives that were the most descriptive, reflective and emotionally driven were often those that recalled moments of difference, otherness and of not belonging.

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This section has shown the powerful ways that moments of arrival in a new country are deeply embedded in participants’ sensory and embodied memories of places—shaping past, current and future relations in these locations. The moment of arrival is when imagined places were met with the lived experience and cultural stereotypes were both challenged and reinforced. Participants’ investments in the imaginary worlds of destination countries, pre-arrival, shaped their desires and motivations to migrate as well as their expectations of what would be waiting for them. While the migration decision making process involves multiple factors (e.g. employment options, ease of entry, visa conditions, family/personal responsibilities), the imagination is also a powerful resource for enabling relocation to a specific country and city. People are shaped through their arrivals and at the same time, their arrivals are overlayed with having had different encounters along the way, which influence and reconfigure the self and therefore what is arrived at.

5.3 Returns as Reorientations: ‘It Just Felt like an Explosion of Arrivals and Departures All at the Same Time’ Return, does not simply mean, ‘going home’. In a mobile world, the locations of home and belonging are becoming more complex and multi-sited. Over time, the participants’ in this research experienced a series of arrivals, departures and returns. For many, their lives in a new country were always lived in relation to the question of return, whether a realistic option or an imaginative desire. This research argues for a longitudinal approach to the study of migration, which takes account of the continuum of migrant experiences over time and space. Rather than ‘snapshots’ that slice the migration experience into isolated periods of time, migration is examined ‘as a continuum’ that consists of ‘multiple gradually realised trajectories, embedded in both the emigration and immigration regimes’ (Ho, 2011, p. 118). Even when migrants return to their country of origin, this does not imply that the move is final, as many migrants may continue to relocate to different destinations throughout their lives (Kobayashi & Preston, 2007; Ley & Kobayashi, 2005; Nagel, 2005; Raghuram & Kofman, 2002; Yeoh & Huang, 2000). Migration has come to be understood as a dynamic process that links together countries of origin, destination, and future migration trajectories. The common-sense understanding of ‘return migration’ refers to those who move overseas and eventually return to their country of origin. However, this conceptualisation has increasingly been problematised. For example, King and Christou’s (2010, p. 458) research on counter-diasporas and reverse transnationalism outline a typology of returns, especially as they relate to second and subsequent generations of migrants. They discuss short-term return visits that range from a couple of days to two or three months (e.g. for holidays, funerals, weddings etc.). They also highlight the important link between return visits and longer-term relocation where the return

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visit may reaffirm social ties or where a person might investigate career, investment or retirement opportunities (Baldassar, 2001, p. 363). There are also specific return mobilities for children who might be viewed as ‘trailing travellers’, when they have minimal input into travel decisions made by parents to visit a former home. Finally, returning may be an ancestral return, where a migrant returns to the country of their ancestors although they may not have been born in that country. Thus, while the conventional framing of ‘return migration’ conveys the closure of the migration narrative, it may be more appropriate to conceive of participants’ returns as never entirely completed: …return has an air of finality, of completing the circle of ocean crossings. But for some migrants return migration is less a final adjustment than another stage in a continuing itinerary with further movements ahead, whether unexpected or…eagerly awaited. (Ley & Kobayashi, 2005, p. 113)

Return migration does not adequately describe the ‘hyper-mobility of transnational citizens’, particularly where people hold strong connections to more than one location (Ley & Kobayashi, 2005, p. 123). The ongoing itinerary over time and place, experienced by participants in this research, challenges traditional representations of return migration as an uncomplicated transition from arrival to resettlement to closure. Instead, there is always a persistent openness to the possibility of future mobility, as shown by Nilaya’s comment in Chapter Three where she describes the series of returns and onward mobility they have experienced over their lives. She says, ‘I’m very scared to say, no, we’ll never move again… I’ve learnt not to say, ‘No, never’. Or Hannah who said ‘we do see this as permanent settlement, as much as anyone can’, indicating that no move is ever final. Participants’ sense of belonging in new homes was highly situated and intensified or weakened daily, depending on their contexts (e.g. home, work, community), as well as in relation to events in local and distant places (e.g. death of family members, birth of children ‘back home’, marriage to a foreigner). Their rhizomatic connections to disparate places and people meant that there were often no fixed points of origin or destination but instead, multiple lines of arrival and departure as migration journeys unfold over the life course (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In their descriptions, home was often the place where they were not rather than where they were. For example, Lan talked about the shifting location of home over time and space and through differing migrant subjectivities. Lan escaped Vietnam as a refugee and spent her adolescent years in Adelaide, Australia before relocating to the US to work as a scientist. She experiences ‘return’ in both a physical and imagined sense with the location of the return occupying multiple sites. Since living in the US, she has returned to one of her former homes (Adelaide, Australia) to visit friends and family. Lan, during these short-term visits, could be seen as a skilled migrant returning home or a tourist visiting a previous home. She has also contemplated a return to Vietnam, the original home from which she and her father escaped as political refugees. When I asked Lan if they had ever returned to her place of birth in Vietnam she replied, ‘Neither of us has returned to Vietnam. My heart wants to visit though I am still wondering if it will be safe to do so since we escaped from the

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country’. Lan refers to a fear, whether real or imagined, that state policies in Vietnam would preclude her from returning to her original homeland. Even though this is extremely unlikely, the fear associated with her escape from Vietnam overlays the possibility of a return in the present. In this example, the idea of return is experienced through multiple identities and differing emotions depending on the location of home. Returning to Australia is experienced as a migrant professional and imagining a return to Vietnam is experienced through the lens of being forcibly displaced as a refugee. A return to Vietnam could also be seen as a diasporic journey home, whereas her return to Australia would not. Recently, she has moved back to Adelaide, with permanent intentions, as an expatriate returning home, even though it is not her place of origin it is a prevailing site of home. The next example further unsettles the simplistic understanding of what it means to return home. This is a story about an Australian-born woman (Hannah) and her German-born husband (Pete), who were introduced in Chapter Three. When they return to Australia, as they have done multiple times, it is Hannah who is returning home, and when they return to Germany, as they have done multiple times, it is Pete who is returning home. As time passes and as they build a life together, the lines begin to blur for both around whose ‘home’ it is to which they are returning. This is an important point because it highlights the fact that couples should not be treated simply as a single unit. Instead, we should look at the interplay of motivations and positions that exists between them and the spatio-temporal dynamics of migration decisionmaking. There is an added complexity in living between homes for transnational couples. Hannah was born in Australia, has lived in the UK and Germany, and travelled extensively through the Middle East and Africa. Her German-born husband, Pete, now lives in Australia with Hannah. They are participants who have negotiated this in-betweenness on an ongoing basis. As described in Chap. 3, when Hannah is at home in Australia, Pete is not, and when Pete is at home in Germany, Hannah is not. Equally, when Pete is returning to his country of origin, Hannah is migrating, and vice versa. They have spent considerable amounts of time ‘trying to fit into both contexts’ (Hannah) as citizens of each nation, they feel they are both now somewhere in the middle—no longer at home in their country of origin or their partner’s. Home becomes a site of continual negotiation. Hannah states: I think because I left Adelaide when I was 22 and then spent six years in London, so I think I did the sort of first growing up to adult bit in London, like had my first flat by myself and like had a serious job and all that sort of thing. So I sort of grew up a lot there, and then when I came back to Australia, I guess there was a disconnect between that life I’d had in London and then here [Australia], and the last life I’d had, because I was really just a bit of a grown-up teenager, out drinking with your friends, and I’d never worked here. When I came back to Australia, friends had either gone or were having kids and were married. So there was really, it was really hard to find space, to make this feel like home, so other than having family here, it really didn’t feel that much like home. (Hannah)

Returning home to Australia, Hannah did not have access to a past adult life there, as she had left as a young adult to work in London. It was in London that she did most of her ‘growing up’. While she was away, her friends in Australia had gone through

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significant stages in their life-cycle, getting married and having children. Hannah and Pete go on to discuss the difficulties associated with finding a homely space: If you had asked me that half year ago, where home was, I would say it’s Germany, but I’m getting used to Australia now and it grows into you, you know. So you’re starting to, going into the middle and saying “Oh no, now I’m sitting in between”, you know, somehow that makes it even harder somehow to say, but on the other side you can, the positive thing would be you have two homes in some way. (Pete)

Global increases in bi-national and cross-cultural marriage produce multiple and conflicting location/s of home, belonging and citizenship between couples. Shortly after this interview (in 2010), Hannah and Pete decided that Adelaide was not necessarily the place they wanted to settle, and so they moved back to Germany to determine whether they would prefer to live there. Having spent two years in Germany, they decided, after a six month motorcycle trip through Africa, to return once more to Adelaide and try to settle permanently (2012). Five years later (2017), they are still here but have not ruled out future relocations so that their young son can connect with his European heritage. Interactions between autobiographical memories, connections with friends and family, and comparisons to new/current homes, engender people to reflect upon their lives, sense of self and how they might have changed over time and space. Consequently, for many homecomers, home is experienced as both familiar and unfamiliar when reality departs from memories of a place. Nilaya, who was born in India and had lived and worked in Europe, the US and now resides in Australia, commented on the way perspectives on home can change over time. Nilaya describes how her whole family has now become accustomed to a different way of life and India no longer feels like the primary location of home. While the country may have changed since they lived there, they have also changed. Paradoxically, each visit home brings them closer to a home in Australia, and this was a common experience for many participants. The visit home might instead be read as a way of moving forward in their foreign lives rather than of homecoming (Baldassar, 2001). Nilaya states: The first time we went back to India it was fantastic and that was still home. The second time we started feeling a bit like Australia is home, and we went in December this year and the first thing, within the first day when we went there it was OK. By night both my kids were in tears and said ‘We miss Australia, we want to go back home’. And slowly I think we’ve all realised this is home now, the bond, and it’s a bit sad as well because the only thing that pulls me back there is my mum and my sisters and brothers, my immediate family, for both of us, but other than that, no.

It is the space from which Nilaya and her children originated—in a sense, the ‘real’ home—which is now the most unfamiliar to them. It is the place to which they return every few years to visit family members, but they are now returning as guests rather than residents (Ahmed, 1999, p. 330). Nilaya’s relationship to home has been altered through her mobility. When migrants visit previous homes they are forced to renegotiate their relationship with these home spaces through practices and perceptions acquired in their current home. Moments of return are read as central

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to self-transformations generated by geographic mobility (Robertson, 2016), which often reorient their relations to sites of home and away, foreign and familiar. On return visits, Nilaya and her family’s transnational lives lived in the US, Switzerland and Australia, also travel back with them and were often experienced as in tension with the way of life that awaited them in their original home and the immobility of friends and family whose experiences were limited to Bangalore. Nilaya’s relationship to home has been altered through her mobility. She has multiple sites of home, although some provide a more powerful sense of belonging than others, and she experiences these homes from shifting subject positions (e.g. as resident, guest, traveller, visitor, migrant). Sam was born in Australia and has lived in the UK and worked in many other countries as part of his NGO role. He described the irony that even though living overseas is about ‘challenging yourself’ and ‘learning to adapt’, the frustrating thing was that he could spend ‘the next 50 years in the middle of the Congo forest’ but he would ‘still always be defined as the Aussie’. He stated, ‘you can’t escape them, you can’t run from your roots and your origins, where you come from’. He recently returned to Australia to visit his family and said that the return visit gave him perspective on the country he called ‘home’. It made him appreciate what he had there, his friends and family, and the culture and lifestyle. It is not a place where he wants to live currently, but he can see the attraction much more strongly now that he can compare it to other places. Living in multiple locations undeniably changes perspectives on home and away, self and other. He also talks about home as continuing to be Adelaide, but that he ‘feels uncomfortable saying that’ because he is ‘just here visiting’: Even being at my parent’s house I don’t really feel like it’s my house so much. You know things have changed, I’ve moved on, it’s very much my parents’ house now. I think my mentality has changed a bit and I’m not treating it like home. I mean I’ve only got one bag and I’m staying in a guest room so the psychology of staying there doesn’t suggest that it’s ‘my’ place’. (Sam)

Thus Sam is caught in a double bind of being inescapably defined as ‘Aussie’ by those he interacts with overseas but equally no longer feels like an Australian in his original home. Similarly, Emily, who now lives in Australia, also talked about experiencing reverse culture shock when she returns to Zimbabwe to visit family. In her memory, her country of origin had been frozen in time, but the return visit reminded her that not only had past homes and the people who inhabited them changed, but so had she. I don’t know if I really call Australia home. I know I’m here, like on a practical level. I’ve been here for a long time, but part of me still tells me, the home that I associate Zimbabwe with, is kind of a fantasy now really because the Zimbabwe that I knew when I’ve gone back to visit is five or ten years older than when I left. So my idea of home, it’s like a myth, because it really doesn’t exist in that state anymore because it is changing while I’m not there. (Emily)

Similarly to Emily, Jen talked about how returning to Canada, from Australia, to visit friends and family, reoriented her more towards a home in Australia.

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All of my points of reference are no one else’s points of reference when I go home. It feels like they have continued their life there, which of course they should, and when I go back, the life that I want to continue leading isn’t available to me anymore. It’s like it’s not really my place anymore, it’s theirs, but if that’s not my place and this isn’t my place, where is my place? (Jen)

Marschall’s (2017) research on the temporary home visits of African transnational migrants living in South Africa similarly found that the return journey, and the memories and narratives this evokes, fosters a sense of self-reflection that can profoundly shift a person’s identities and attachments. While Emily and Jen still feel like outsiders living in Australia, they also now feel that they no longer belong in their country of birth, a sentiment expressed by many participants, and echoed in numerous other studies that examine how migrants often crystallise a sense of place after their departure (e.g. Ali-Ali & Koser, 2002; Madison, 2009). Emily reflected on a recent visit that ‘things had gone bad, people’s attitudes were different, the language had changed’. Her relationship with Zimbabwe fluctuates and is described as being inversely proportional to her feelings towards her Australian identity. She was frustrated that as a consequence of trying to fit into Australian society, she did not realise ‘how much further away from your own culture you’re getting as well’ (Emily). Sharon, a British participant who moved to Australia, also described how when she was in Australia (as the foreign place) she felt and claimed belonging to the UK, but in the context of return visits to the UK, she felt much less identification with this previous homeland and felt consequently ‘less British’. While participants’ subjectivities changed over time as a result of their experiences in new locations, their previous homes did not remain ‘still’ either. Sharon also reflected on return journeys to the UK. But what happens when the physical places, the homes inhabited, the streets walked, which furnished migrant memories for so long, are no longer there in a material sense? Sharon had lived in several European countries as a journalist before moving from the UK to Australia over ten years ago. Like Jen, she feels like she belongs in Australia but it does not feel like home because her history in Australia is relatively short. Belonging and home are different to me. I feel I now belong here, in Adelaide – particularly at the swimming pool, at my surf club and with my Pommy friends. Home is something else. It’s a feeling of relief, safety, refuge and feeling totally at one with your surroundings and their history. I used to feel that in one room at my parents’ house in the UK. I have never felt it since. Sadly, my parents sold that house to their local airport (Stansted) last year. I’ve just found out that plans for the airport’s expansion – hotly debated since I was 7 years old – have now been approved. My room, my refuge, is about to be bulldozed and buried under a runway. (Sharon)

While the act of migration forces people to learn how to adapt in a new environment, it also forces them to question and reflect upon where they have come from. Even though people may develop multiple sites of belonging throughout their lives, these sites may never replace their homes of childhood, the separation from which caused them to reflect upon and search for a renewed sense of belonging. In Probyn’s (1996) words, home is a ‘suspended beginning’. For Sharon, home can no longer be physically returned to and her reflections and memories of past homes reinstate and revise her memories of home in the present. Fortier (2001) describes how homes can

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be a destination and an origin, in that the homes we move towards always relate to those left behind. Movement towards some homes requires the imaginative ‘fixing’ of others. The physical journey back is always an emotional and imaginative journey through memory to the way homes used to be at a moment in time. Throughout our lives, the homes in which we were born and grow up remain ‘physically inscribed in us’ (Bachelard, 1969). Sharon’s statement that home is ‘feeling totally at one with your surroundings’ underscores the impossibility of returning to a place once conceived of as home, precisely because home ‘is not exterior to a self, but implicated in it’ (Ahmed, 1999, p. 343). The emotional connotations projected onto her previous home, through the repetitive home-making practices of her childhood, are problematised in a metaphorical and physical sense through the destruction caused by the bulldozer. Until now, Sharon was able to return to this space in her memory, particularly because it still existed as a physical site, which provided a sense of home at a distance and which she could always visit if she desired. While it was unlikely that she would ever return there permanently, there was a sense of comfort in knowing it was there. What she longed for is a spatial and geographical location that has been destroyed in a physical sense, which in turn has interrupted her imaginative nostalgia for this temporal childhood location. As Massey (2003, p. 230) states, ‘Journeys “home” are, in the imagination, often travels in time as well as space – journeys to the past. But places go on without you.’ Returning to past homes is not about returning to a fixed location (if a place can ever be ‘fixed’) but returning to an in-between place—between proximity and distance, self and other. The destruction of the site of such longing disrupts and transforms her narrative of home. Ultimately, both Jen and Sharon’s stories of returning to past homes demonstrate how their mobility has produced, by a sort of reversal, an exploration of the abandoned places of their memory. In our most recent interview in 2017, Sharon discussed a return trip to England to visit her parents. She said she acknowledges that every visit is ‘based on memories and constructed ideals’ that she has in her mind about what England is like, which she says, is not always the reality. One aspect that does remain is when she drives around the fields and winding roads near the Suffolk-Essex border. The roads round there are tiny. They’ve all got overgrown verges. It’s classic picture postcard England countryside… When I drive around there, it could be now or it could be 30 years ago. Nothing’s changed… It feels exactly the same. There’s a sense of timelessness and connection that transcends everything that’s gone between. I wholly feel part of it. When I think about driving around those fields, I get quite emotional, because when I remember it from Australia, sometimes I really long to be there.

Running alongside this feeling of home, however, is another feeling of ‘utter dislocation’, particularly when she talks to friends and family from the UK about ‘what England stands for’ and how England is perceived globally in the relationship between England and Europe. Many scholars have examined how returning to previous homes is often problematic. Migrants build up life experiences in other places, during which time the original location of home has changed, both in reality and in the migrants’ imagination (Christou, 2006; Harper, 2005; Hatfield, 2010). On her recent trip back to the UK to visit her parents Sharon recalls having an argument with

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her father when he picked her up from the airport. On the drive home, she asked her dad, ‘What is going on with the government of this country at the moment? Theresa May, just her conduct during the Grenfell Fire fallout, the fact that she couldn’t even face people, the fact she was a coward and the fact that those people…. It’s unspeakable and unthinkable what they went through. The fact that Britain’s putting two fingers up to the rest of Europe and just behaving like a petulant child, Dad, what is going on?’ Her dad became frustrated and said, ‘Sharon, I’m very patriotic, and I love my country. I don’t like you talking this way. I don’t like you coming home and telling me that England’s lost the plot. You just don’t understand. You just don’t get it.’ There is a part of Sharon that still longs for a deep connection with Britain, the British countryside and what she remembers as Britishness. Ambiguities emerge, which underscore the multi-layered and conflicting meanings that are often associated with home. Earlier in the interview she described how driving the roads on the Sussex-Essex border she has a ‘sense of home’ that she ‘does not get anywhere else’. Yet she also feels, after the conversation with her dad about British politics, that home is no longer in the UK: I know it’s no longer there. It went many years ago. I feel sad about that. It’s like I’m talking about a bloody love affair, isn’t it? (laughs) When I go home, I look for something, but I don’t find it. (Sharon)

There are contradictory tensions flowing through all of Sharon’s reflections on the multiple locations of home that never live up to her expectations. Home is a house that no longer exists outside her imagination (‘buried under a runway’). Home also exists in a broader regional sense, memories of ‘picture postcard’ settings of ‘rolling green hills’ that transcend time and don’t seem to have changed while she has been away. The location of home is also unsettled nationally through political values that contrast with her own. The Britain she remembers and the values it stood for (at least as she perceived), as open and inclusive, have changed while she has been in Australia. Her comment about her reflections sounding like she is recounting ‘a love affair’ also point to the emotionality of places. The feelings usually associated with experiences of intimacy between people are overlaid onto her relationship with her home-place as being like a ‘love affair’. The pull associated with living a long way from family and friends, often accompanied by a sense of guilt, presented an ongoing internal conflict for many participants. Australia’s substantial geographic distance from immigrant sourceand destination-countries (depending on the participant’s trajectory) meant that they often needed to sustain transnational and long-distance relationships with family and friends around the world. The return visit was a key part of maintaining these relationships but was often an experience fraught with tension. In O’Connor’s study of Irish immigrants living in Australia (2010, p. 79), he suggests that the most significant cause of homesickness was physical absence during important family events (e.g. weddings, birth of children, birthdays, illness and death). Heiki, who migrated to Australia from Finland, commented on the reverse culture shock when returning to Finland to visit friends and family. He describes how he has missed five years of life in Finland and all of the events and shared experiences in

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his family’s lives, and that those in Finland have similarly missed those aspects of Heikki and his wife Katri’s, lives in Australia. He feels sad that they are slowly losing common topics they can discuss because his family ‘cannot relate to those places, people or names’ in his stories about Australia. Returning home often accentuates the consequences of being excluded from all the ‘intervening living’ that can never be recovered (Madison, 2009, p. 174). Upon return visits, the place that was remembered as the most potent site of ‘being at home’ did not provide the homecoming they had anticipated. Similarly Kristian, who moved from Finland to Australia, also talks about the difficulty of ‘missing out’ on important family occasions and the feelings of guilt and obligation that are tied to them: With work you have a reason to go to work and that’s where you belong to that society. But at home it’s difficult because all the time you are thinking, like your parents are there and my brother has got small children so I’m often thinking about how they are growing up fast and how it would be nice if they were closer. I belong to that, to the family there but I just feel like an outsider in a way because we never meet, we never see each other, and we just sort of forget about one another. Of course emails and all these things, but it’s just not the same. (Kristian)

For Kristian, personal and professional opportunities abroad conflicted with maintaining familial intimacy with people from his previous home. Skrbis (2008, p. 238) discusses the ways being a transnational migrant involves ‘a reconfiguration… of existing relationships with family and friends.’ While technology provides an important means of maintaining connections, both Kristian and Heiki felt it does not replace physical co-presence. During participants’ time living in foreign locations, many went through significant life-cycle stages, including meeting partners, buying homes, having children and attaining occupational mobility. All of these life-stages strengthened connections to participants’ current locations. Jen, (who moved from Canada to Australia) suggests that ‘instinctively’ home is Canada, but when she is in Canada she will refer to home as Australia. Jen sees Canada as her ‘primary home’ because it is the site of her childhood. However, if she were to have children in Australia, she wonders whether that might be ‘another facet’ contributing to a ‘feeling of home in Australia’: …because then maybe this would feel like home, because I guess you kind of shift your attention from your own childhood to their childhood. (Jen, interviewed in 2010)

When I interviewed Jen again in 2017, she had just found out that she was pregnant with her first child. She described how having a family in Australia has shifted the location of home even more. She also talked about the imaginative location of home shifting through experiences of loss over the life course. When parents passed away, this often changed the dynamics of the location of home. Jen narrates two powerful arrivals and departures that she has experienced as a migrant, both physically and symbolically, both of which are around the death of her father. She describes her arrival back in Canada when she found out her dad was sick and arriving by his bedside to see him being ‘kept alive by machines’ as a ‘very instrumental arrival’. This return trip was not about going home for a holiday, for leisure, or for joy but instead she arrived at the ‘awful realisation of how far [she] was from home and how finite everything is’.

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Many different departures happened in that time. My dad left this earth. I, in some ways, left my marriage. While I was married for five more years after that, my partner didn’t come with me and my dad was dying, and we knew that. Something in me left our marriage because I couldn’t be that alone. And then I guess arriving in Canada and kind of being there for a particular purpose and it’s so complicated because, I was planning to go home anyway to visit my family for a holiday, this had all happened when I spoke to you in 2007. But in retrospect it has taken on a lot more meaning because I miss dad so much now, because I can reflect on all of that in a way that was too sore to touch in my memory at that time, when we spoke. So I mean, departing here to go home to something that I knew would be awful and hard and doing it by myself and the knowing that I had to come back here and then leave mum alone in Canada. It just felt like an explosion of arrivals and departures all at the same time. Most of the time I can handle that I made this different life, I couldn’t handle it in that moment. I couldn’t handle that I wasn’t there the last time that I spoke to him… the last time that I spoke to him I was in Hobart, listening to a song called She’s Called Nova Scotia. I was in Hobart and Hobart looks like home with the waterfront and everything. So I was listening to a song called ‘She’s called Nova Scotia’ and I was thinking about the fact that I was going to fly home to see my parents and I was literally going to show up on their door step and surprise them. And I mean that turned out to be a blessing because I had the flight already but it also, of course, was torture because I was supposed to surprise them and instead I had to go home to see my dad die. Prior to that, arrivals and departures had always been hard but not forever and that was for forever. And I’ve had a couple more forever’s since then where it has been that, I have had to say goodbye forever, in various ways, even to my marriage. And I guess as always happens, as you get older, you collect more memories and some of those are happy and wonderful and some of them are sad and terrible and some of them are both… arrivals and departures for me, I think, used to be probably all about the excitement of arrival and the sadness of departure and I don’t think it’s that clear anymore. I don’t think I’m necessarily always happy with arrivals because I know, I know what it means to leave all of the things I leave, all the time… both places are more home than they’ve ever been so I kind of feel like I’m glad to get home, whatever that means. But they’re just more complicated because there’s more at stake, because forever isn’t forever anymore. And that’s hard. (Jen)

In this narrative, Jen powerfully articulates how a series of arrivals and departures have occurred over her life, which are physical, symbolic and highly emotional. Through her migration, and the development of multiple sites of home, arrivals and departures begin to complicate one another. Up to the point of her return trip home to visit her dad before his death, arrivals had always been associated with joy (because Jen was going back to the strongest site of ‘home’, which was still Canada and more specifically, Halifax, Nova Scotia). The return visit was undertaken as a holiday to see family and friends, to travel and to introduce her new partner or friends to her family. By contrast departures from Canada were usually associated with sadness (i.e. having to say goodbye to family members temporarily). However, as life experiences accumulated and time unfolded, arrivals became harder too, because she always knew there would be an inevitable goodbye/farewell. Having lived a life in Australia over the past twenty years (married, divorced, engaged to a new partner and due to have their first child in 2018), Australia is also now a strong site of home so that in departing Canada, while involving some sadness, she is also now going home. The deeply embedded meanings associated with her first home become fractured as she has accumulated additional home spaces. Paradoxically, she feels that the more you have of ‘home’, the more you feel you are ‘homeless’.

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Finally, I describe the experiences of a participant who has made many home spaces over his life course that complicate the idea of ‘return’. Ossman’s (2007) work has highlighted how moving to a third country or ‘third space’ can often provide a means of moving beyond such binary constructs and comparisons as home and away. In particular, such transcendence can be seen in James’ experiences. Having lived in multiple countries he is one participant, in particular, who developed a more cosmopolitan and flexible understanding of home and belonging as opposed to the feelings of being ‘caught in-between’ two main sites of home. Although his experience is still fraught with ambiguity as claiming a ‘world identity’, as he does, has not replaced feelings of alienation when returning to prior homes that were once familiar. As the opening quote to this chapter suggested, James returned home to Australia several times a year but over time, the designation of home ‘lost its clear boundaries’ and he began to look at Australia through the eyes ‘of a visitor’ rather than a resident. Occupying a ‘third space’, James also described a sense of being between homes after living for five years or more in six different countries over his life. He feels much less connected to a nation than to particular people and groups of friends in disparate locations around the world. Approaching 60 years of age (2010) James decided to return to Australia to ‘put down roots’ (James) and retire. He felt that ‘the longer [he] left it, the harder it would be to resettle’. Most of his family were also living in Australia and he wanted to be ‘a regular part of that’. I think you can have multiple homes but there will always be one place that is more comfortable above all others. (James)

However, as James’s experience shows, the contradictions and ambivalences of migration continue as migrants’ lives unfold. While James moved back to Australia in 2010 with the intention that this move would be permanent, he moved again in 2011, to Macau. This was supposed to be for a one-year posting but was extended for seven years. In 2017, he returned to Australia again for his second attempt at retirement. This example reinforces the need to take a life course approach to the study of migrant lives in order to understand the complex mobility pathways, practices and circumstances that people engage with over time and space. During our most recent conversation (2018), he is considering moving overseas again. Interestingly, regardless of his highly mobile life and connections, he still seeks one place, above all others, to return to. Thus while James constructs himself as de-nationalised, he simultaneously and contradictorily finds home in its strongest sense, in Australia. James’ ongoing quest for ‘a better life’ explains the ambivalence that many of the migrants feel about the location of home and also explains why the initial destination is rarely the final destination. He keeps his options open. In Benson and O’Reilly’s (2016, p. 11) research on ‘lifestyle migration’, this ‘can mirror the tourist’s search for the authentic, which, in the process, destroys the authenticity it seeks’. As a kind of geographical ‘Peter Pan’ syndrome, James never quite reaches home but is always in the process of getting there. James views his continual compulsion to find ‘the perfect place’ to settle as both a personal failing as well as a productive force. Because he never quite gets there, is never quite satisfied or at home, he is propelled forwards towards new experiences

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and connections with unfamiliar people, cultures and places. Migration represents both escape and promise. I’m prone to dreams about a more perfect location for me, so I never really feel like settling down anywhere. There is always another border gate between the reality of the present and the imaginary world of the new destination. (James)

For James, migration ‘is always an adaptive experience’. He felt he could never be the same person in two (or more) different locations. His cumulative experiences change him as well as the locations he has lived in over time and space. Spending years at a time in Japan, China, the US, Scotland and Australia has meant he has developed ‘roots’ and ‘wings’ simultaneously (Beck, 2000). Yet despite his frequent mobility he continues to search for a place to settle ‘once and for all’, one place that would provide an uninterrupted sense of home and belonging. Hence, his multiple returning settlements in Australia over his life. However, this desire for fixity, for embeddedness in an original site of home, never lives up to his expectations. The lengthy periods of time he has spent establishing new homes in a range of overseas locations has rendered him an ‘observer’ within Australia, the strongest site of ‘home’, rather than ‘a participant’. In many ways, his desire to be mobile and to ‘gain somewhere and something and someone else’ produce ongoing unsettledness in either state—stasis or mobility—home or away. I have moved so much in my life that the idea of being in the same place for the rest of my life is singular and certainly not unalloyed with positives and negatives. As in all migrant experience (and I think of myself as migrating again) you give up a lot in the process in the hope to gain somewhere and something and someone else. There is always a tension, in me at least, between the fixed and the need to wander. It is interesting that both depend on the other, for they make no sense without their opposite. (James)

Increasingly it is recognised that the fluidity of mobility as well as the experiences of fixity or stasis are ‘relationally interdependent’ (Jensen, 2009, p. 146) rather than contradictory, with places providing momentary ‘spatial mooring[s]’ (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011) to develop sites of belonging and home. As such, James has developed multiple international routes as well as localised roots but each complicates the other. When he is in a relatively familiar location, he gets restless and feels the need to explore somewhere else. When he is ‘somewhere else’ he longs for home—a location that with every move, is increasingly hard to find. The more I have moved around the less I feel I actually belong anywhere. I have lived longer in Japan than in the country of my birth, Scotland, or the country of part of my educations, USA where I spend six years, and the country of my chosen citizenship, Australia. I have just “retired” to Australia where I partially feel a stranger. Most of my friends when I lived here many years ago have either moved away for professional reasons to other countries and cities, or have passed away. So I have returned to a new place, however much Adelaide looks the same except for a few more restaurants in Rundle Street east, or the new oval eating up the parklands, it feels different than when I lived here before. In fact in many ways it feels as foreign as the foreign locations I have inhabited. Now I am faced with working out how to belong to a new place, despite its being my place of residence. So asking the question where do I belong, I come up with other questions, not answers. Now in retrospect the answer is beyond me. When in another culture—Japan, USA, China—I feel being on the margins liberating, whereas at home, where one theoretically shouldn’t be in the margins, it is more challenging. (James)

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Homecomers frequently experience themselves as ‘involuntary marginal’ in the local contexts that used to be ‘home’ because they have missed all of the interstitial living that occurred while they were away (Bielsa et al., 2014, p. 75; Dürrschmidt, 2016, p. 495). While a stranger imagines that they will encounter the unfamiliar, the ‘homecomer’ (Schütz, 1971) must negotiate the realisation they will ‘never again be fully part of the unquestioned familiarity that make the quality of what used to be [their] social milieu’ (Dürrschmidt, 2016, p. 496). Homecomers face challenges and ‘ruptures’ for a range of reasons. They need to re-adapt to a place that has transformed as much as they have changed themselves, to a place that is both familiar and strange (Bielsa et al., 2014, p. 66). Returning to James’s roots is problematic because the ‘roots have been separated from the plant’ (James), rendering reconnection all but impossible. In order to find some sense of belonging or home in his once familiar home-town, requires him to make a new life and put down new roots. However, this is not a straightforward process. The process of returning to a home is related to the inability to fully inhabit spaces that were once familiar. Madison (2009, p. 105) has argued: ‘there seems to be a desire for the home country to remain frozen in time and unchanging, unavoidable change means that home also becomes a foreign country, while simultaneously deeply familiar…’ Over time, people and their homelands continue to change and move further apart. Bielsa et al. (2014) have described homecoming, not as a return to one’s origins, but as a movement that involves dislocation and displacement and positions the homecomer, in many ways, as a stranger. They argue that homecoming does not fit neatly into the predominant focus of migration research on the linearity of migration and a presumed increasing integration into the host society, nor does it feature in current approaches that focus on transnationalism and the circularity of movement. Homecoming, as an archetypal frame in literature, presumes the closing of a circle and the reestablishment of order. Instead, Bielsa et al. (2014, p. 66) invoke the concept of displacement and dislocation to underscore ‘the impossibility of return as the closing of a circle’. While displacement has usually been associated with the foreigner’s identity, the relationship between displacement and the homecomer has had less attention. Rather than the circularity or closure of return, or the completion of a journey, the return becomes another mooring in participants unfolding migration pathways.

5.4 Conclusion Appadurai (1995) has argued that place as a material geographic location has less significance in people’s lives than place as a cultural construction, which is produced through social relations and in people’s imaginations. Landscapes hold immense social, cultural and emotional value in people’s sense of belonging, producing identifications with particular places, local and national cultures. Jen, for example, explained how going home (from Australia to her childhood house, her home-town of Halifax in her nation of Canada) ‘is like letting out a breath she didn’t know that she was holding’. She does tell me, six years after our first interview, that she can

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‘now breathe in Australia’, indicating the importance of temporality in making and inhabiting new homes. The emotional experience of arriving home is described as an exhalation of breath. It is only when she returns to Canada, from her second home in Australia, that she realises she has been carrying around a persistent tension that dissipates upon her to return to her original home. For many participants, experiences of migration engendered comparative reflections, like Jen’s, between new and old homes, in order to make sense of dislocating experiences as well as the desire to find some sense of the familiar amongst the foreign. Home and belonging are complicated ideas that are subject to influences of time, space and identity shifts. Thus, linear settler narratives and singular migrant categories tend to be too limiting to understand the complexities of migrant journeys, their experiences and dispersed connections. This chapter has argued that leaving, arriving and returning is experienced differently not just between migrants who participate in different kinds of mobility (e.g. humanitarian, skilled, family) but also different forms of ‘arrival’ and ‘return’ are experienced by the same migrant over the life course as their mobility pathways, identities, obligations, desires and social contexts shift. At different times, in different places and under different conditions, they occupy a range of official categorisations as well as shifting personal identifications including refugee, tourist, temporary migrant, resident, traveller, visitor, guest, returnee and outsider. Homecoming involves different motivations and complexities. Some returned home with permanent intentions because of family obligations (Heiki and Katri), some returned on short visits to see family or because a loved one passed away (Jen, Lan, Emily). Through a series of migrations, others returned to ‘homes’ that were the most significant affective sites of home but were not their country of origin (Lan and James) and for bi-national couples, going home for one partner was going away for another (Hannah and Pete). The physical journey to both destination countries (point of arrival) and previous homes (point of return) also involves an accompanying ‘inward journey’ and ‘cognitive homecoming’ (Basu, 2005, p. 38). Homecoming, rather than reinforcing the original site of home, was often met with ambivalence, contradictory feelings and simultaneously reinforced a sense of belonging to the host country and further separation/rupture from their roots. As Sharon and Emily’s experiences have shown, life in their old country had changed as much as they had, during the interim period. These examples have shown how the act of migration can reconfigure relationships between home and away, depending on different spatial contexts, significant life events, experiences of loss and gain. In all of these excerpts the location of home is lived as an enduring tension. Ilcan (2002, p. 2) writes: ‘settlement is a practice without firm boundaries. Its enclosure is never complete or finalizable, as its boundaries are shot through with an enduring and unsettling tension. This tension is between being, and being otherwise’. For most participants, their lives in a new country were always lived in relation to the promise of arrival and the question of return, whether a realistic option or an imaginative desire. Their feelings about returning home for a visit or returning permanently also fluctuated over time, depending on circumstances in the country of origin or in their current home.

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Sometimes these feelings were heightened with age, as with James who was perhaps the most mobile of all participants and who discussed having a ‘world identity’, yet still decided to return home to Australia to retire closer to family. In the narratives included in this chapter there is a kind of melancholic recognition in participants’ reflections where they suggest that they will always occupy an in-between state, and may never find a place above all others that feels like home, and when they talk of multiple homes, there is often a vague and ambiguous sense of attachment. The experience of leaving home/s is always related to the inability of our memory to fully understand the new places one comes to occupy (Ahmed, 1999, p. 343). This failure is felt through the ‘discomfort of inhabiting a migrant body, a body which feels out of place’. Furthermore, the process of returning to a home is similarly related to the inability to fully inhabit spaces that were once familiar. Thus, arrivals at new homes and returning to old ones can both strengthen and disrupt the migrants’ sense of self. Many participants in this chapter also talked about the mismatch between both the imagined and lived arrival and the imagined and lived homecoming. As we can see in James’ experience, returning home to Australia to retire was the catalyst for another relocation and experience of uprooting and regrounding, rather than a final resting place. In this way, return is shown to be an ongoing part of the mobility experiences of participants in this research, rather than a concluding movement in space. Mobility and embeddeness, ‘uprootings’ and ‘regroundings’ (Ahmed, Castada, Fortier, & Sheller, 2003, p. 2) are mutually constitutive processes. Everyday lives lived in new locations as well returns to supposedly familiar prior homes, produce shifting configurations and locations of home that wax and wane over their lives. Home-making is a practice that requires ongoing negotiation.

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Benson, M. (2012). How culturally significant imaginings are translated into lifestyle migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(10), 1681–1696. Benson, M., & O’Reilly, K. (2016). Lifestyle migration—Expectations, aspirations and experiences. Farnham: Ashgate. Bielsa, E., Casellas, A., & Verger, A. (2014). Homecoming as displacement: An analysis from the perspective of returning social scientists. Current Sociology, 62(1), 63–80. Blunt, A. (2007). Cultural geographies of migration: Mobility, transnationality and diaspora. Progress in Human Geography, 31(5), 684–694. Blunt, A., & Dowling, R. (2006). Home. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Blunt, A., & Varley, A. (2004). Introduction: Geographies of home. Cultural Geographies, 11, 3–6. Boccagni, P. (2017). Migration and the search for home: Mapping domestic space in migrants’ everyday lives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Christou, A. (2006). American dreams and European nightmares: Experiences and polemics of second-generation Greek-American returning migrants. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(5), 831–845. Conradson, D., & Latham, A. (2007). The affective possibilities of London: Antipodean transnationals and the overseas experience. Mobilities, 2(2), 231–254. Cresswell, T., & Merriman, P. (2011). Introduction. In T. Cresswell & P. Merriman (Eds.), Geographies and mobilities: Practices, space, subjects (pp. 1–15). Farnham: Ashgate. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dowling, R., & Mee, K. (2007). Editorial: Home and homemaking in contemporary Australia. Housing, Theory and Society, 24(3), 161–165. Dürrschmidt, J. (2016). The irresolvable unease about belonging: Exploring globalized dynamics of homecoming. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(5), 495–510. Duyvendak, J. (2011). The politics of home: Belonging and nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Fortier, A. (2001). ‘Coming home’: Queer migrations and multiple evocations of home. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(4), 405–424. Garbutt, R. (2011). The locals: Identity, place and belonging in Australia and beyond. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang. Harper, M. (2005). Emigrant homecomings: The return movements of emigrants, 1600–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hatfield, M. (2010). Children moving ‘home’? Everyday experiences of return migration in highly skilled households. Childhood, 17(2), 243–257. Hayden, D. (1995). The power of place. Cambridge and Massachusetts: MIT Press. Ho, E. (2011). Migration trajectories of ‘highly skilled’ middling transnationals: Singaporean transmigrants in London. Population, Space and Place, 17(1), 116–129. Howes, D. (2006). Cross-talk between the senses. Senses and Society, 1(3), 381–390. Ilcan, S. (2002). Longing in belonging: The cultural politics of settlement. London: Praeger Westport. Jensen, O. (2009). Flows of meaning, cultures of movements—Urban mobility as meaningful everyday life practice. Mobilities, 4(1), 139–158. King, R., & Christou, A. (2010). Cultural geographies of counter-diasporic migration: Perspectives from the study of second-generation ‘returnees’ to Greece. Population, Space and Place, 16, 103–119. Kobayashi, A., & Preston, V. (2007). Transnationalism through the life course: Hong Kong immigrants in Canada. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 48(2), 151–167. Ley, D., & Kobayashi, A. (2005). Back to Hong Kong: Return migration or transnational sojourn? Global Networks, 5, 111–127. Long, L., & Oxfeld, E. (Eds.). (2004). Coming home? Refugees, migrants, and those who stayed behind. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Chapter 6

Citizenly Identities and Translocal Belonging

Abstract Under conditions of globalization, citizenship has become an increasingly contested concept, which has expanded beyond a rights based approach to include an affective dimension (Lister, 2003; Ho, 2009; Werbner & Yuval-Davis, 1999; Kymlicka, 1995). This chapter will analyse how participants negotiated multiple and often competing identities in relation to previous and current homes and nations. These negotiations are influenced by participants’ social locations (gender, ethnicity, age) and migration experiences, which lead them to hold different dispositions towards the attainment or renouncement of ‘citizenship’ and national belonging in both a formal and emotional sense. The grammatical nominalisation that results in the term ‘citizenship’ works to distance and abstract us from what it is to be ‘citizenly’. I use the phrase ‘citizenly identities’ to acknowledge the agency of people in shaping their translocal and transantional memberships and identifications and to argue that citizenship represents a process of becoming where official designations do not always align with subjective affiliations. Focusing on people’s emotionally oriented citizenly identities embraces the way being a citizen is also a personal and emotional process. Though they may be officially constructed as outsiders to a nation, they are often experientially and affectively, insiders, continually strengthening their connections to place through their everyday practices and social relations. Keywords Citizenship · Citizenly identities · Belonging · Transnational migration

6.1 Introduction From national and transnational belonging to the most local and intimate spheres of our daily lives, there has been an increasing focus on people’s attachments to diverse sites and the ways such attachments, and people’s social locations, intersect with notions of identity. This chapter explores how participants represent, inhabit and reshape their personal and legal sites of citizenship and belonging over time and space. Citizenship, as a specific site of belonging, is understood by research participants as a pragmatic, national policy and an emotional, intimate and translocal © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 R. Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3164-0_6

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process. Examining people’s translocal attachments and citizenly identities in a situated way brings to the fore the emotional representations and experiences through which people make meaning in their everyday worlds—an intimate scale of identification that often tells a very different story to the one inscribed in passports. I use the conceptual lens of ‘translocal subjectivities’ (Conradson & McKay, 2007, p. 168) to examine how participants describe their attachments and identities as multiply located through processes of transnational mobility, over the life course. Conradson and McKay (2007, p. 168) describe translocal subjectivities as ‘emerging through both geographical mobility and multiple forms of ongoing emplacement’. The use of translocal subjectivities also recognises that migrant identities are often more closely aligned with specific localities within the nation rather than the nationstate itself (Conradson & McKay, 2007, p. 168). Participants’ sense of belonging/not belonging was often expressed in relation to local spaces such as their home/s, the homes of friends, work places, sites of leisure and religious organisations. I argue that understanding the meanings people attach to ideas of belonging, home and citizenship is a mobile project because people’s connections and perceptions change over time and in different contexts. Their translocal subjectivity was not something that was simply attained through mobility but involved continual negotiations within different spaces and at different times during their unfolding migration experiences. Scholars have argued that processes of globalisation and increasing transnational mobility have redefined the concept of citizenship in relation to ideas of home, belonging, community identity, and legal rights and obligations (Joppke, 1999, 2007; Painter & Philo, 1995; Soysal, 1994; Yuval-Davis, 2006). People’s transnational mobility in terms of whether they feel as though they belong or don’t belong in a new location, whether they stay temporarily or are able to become permanent residents, is affected as much by their emotional experiences as it is by the legal constraints which govern the length of their stay (Skrbis, 2008; Svasek, 2010). As Boccagni and Baldassar (2015, p. 74) suggest, when people move away or between homes, their emotions are also ‘on the move’. Emotions such as fear, hope, nostalgia, guilt and desire are an integral part of the life experiences of migrants. Indeed, a key theme explored in the book so far is the emotional foundations of migrants’ translocal ties, obligations, practices and decision making processes. Examining the emotionality of migration experiences allows for researchers to understand the connections between the individual and the social (Zembylas, 2012, p. 167), ‘bodies and places’ (Davidson, Bondi, & Smith, 2007) and ‘micro and macro levels of social reality’ (Turner & Stets, 2005, p. 1). Attention to issues of citizenship and belonging, through the lens of emotion, also disrupts the ‘straight-line’ thinking often associated with integration and settlement (i.e. diminishing identification with homeland and increasing attachment to host country) (Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015, pp. 75–76). Research has begun to show the ways in which citizenship is a social process, negotiated and experienced in emotional ways by individuals within their everyday lives (Ho, 2009; Leitner & Ehrkamp, 2006; Marston & Mitchell, 2004; Nyers, 2007; Phalet & Swyngedouw, 2002). Ho (2009) developed the concept of ‘emotional citizenship’ as a tool of analysis to explore the emotional subjectivities of migrants and how their representations of belonging influence notions of political citizenship.

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She advocates for an analysis of the ‘emotional logics of citizenship’ (2009, p. 3) at the level of individual experience in order to understand how this can then be linked to broader social processes. More recently Fortier (2016, p. 1040) introduced the term ‘affective citizenship’ to further destabilise citizenship ‘as a strictly legal, institutional product of state authority and rationality’ and broaden our understanding of how it involves ‘emotions, feelings, bodies’. Attention to affect also gives consideration to how the feelings attached to citizenship are ‘unevenly distributed across gendered, racialized, sexualised, classed bodies—some citizens feel safer than others; some citizens are deemed safer than others—and in turn, how subjects’ feelings about citizenship are not all equally valued’ (Fortier, 2016, pp. 1040–1041). As Chap. 2 argued, in relation to student turned temporary graduate workers, immigrants recognise the differential capacities they have to achieve Permanent Residency and citizenship status. While concepts of affective citizenship (Fortier, 2016), intimate citizenship (Plummer, 2003), emotional citizenship (Ho, 2009; Marston & Mitchell, 2004) and emotional geographies (Ahmed, 2004a, b; Davidson & Milligan, 2004; Good, 2004) have developed over the past decade, these theoretical observations need to be further operationalised through empirical research in order to better understand their situated applications as conceptual tools. Belonging has a number of dimensions and can be conceptualised in both a formal and informal sense (i.e. legal membership versus social spaces constructed through identification and participation), and involves the sharing of values, networks and practices. Informed by the work of Yuval-Davis, Kannabiran, and Vieten (2006) and Yuval-Davis (2006, 2011), I approach belonging as a broader concept than citizenship and home. While I explicitly discuss participants’ representations of their citizenly identities in this chapter, the notion of citizenship is approached as a mode of belonging rather than as a separate concept. Belonging includes an emotional dimension that cannot be adequately encapsulated by the term ‘citizenship’ alone, which relies upon formalised societal constructions of insiders and outsiders. For Yuval-Davis et al. (2006, p. 190), belonging is a site where ‘the sociology of emotions interfaces with the sociology of power’ (see also Parreñas, 2005) work on care networks and emotional labour). Vieten (2006, p. 267) suggests that while ‘relatively fixed, legally or territorially shaped factors determine whether one is an immigrant or an exile, the transformations of national attachment and belonging involved in dynamic processes of migration are not covered by this binary arrangement.’ To demonstrate this point, one participant in my research relocated from the US to Australia in the 1970s and, while he did not take up Australian citizenship until more recently (2003), he describes his symbolic attachment to Australia as being, for many years, much stronger than his connection to the US. Here his national identification with Australia preceded his formal and legal attachment to the nation. When viewed as a mode of belonging, citizenship incorporates a sense of civic participation and performative engagement structured by their rights and obligations to multiple communities—local, ethnic, religious, national, regional and transnational—as well as intersected by a range of social locations, such as gender, ethnicity, and occupational and educational level (Yuval Davis, 2006, p. 563).

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The concept of citizenship is used in this research to investigate how individual participants describe and give meaning to their citizenly identities. The grammatical nominalisation that results in the term ‘citizenship’ works to distance and abstract us from what it is to be ‘citizenly’. By contrast, focusing on people’s emotionally oriented citizenly identities embraces the way being a citizen is also a personal and emotional process. One cannot examine ‘citizenly’ without inserting the person back into the analysis. Participants’ reflections show how their citizenship is not only a legally-defined status but also inextricably bound up in their ongoing emotional practices of identity-making, ‘fitting in’ and belonging over time and space. There are four parts to this chapter. First, I analyse how participants conceptualise and theorise the meaning of citizenship as their migration pathways unfold. I then examine how participants’ make practical and emotional decisions about citizenship in their everyday lives, through three lenses: first, in relation to the discursive slippages between citizenship and national identity (Sect. 6.3.1); second, in terms of the desire, for some, to have singular loyalties and their negotiations of guilt in relation to the gaining and relinquishing of attachments over their lives (Sect. 6.3.2); and third, by exploring the experiences of those who have multiple translocal attachments, and argue that ‘the idea that you can only be loyal to one thing at a time’ is ‘misplaced’ and outdated (Sect. 6.3.3). Before concluding the chapter, I briefly contextualize the empirical data that has been presented, by considering the growing tension in contemporary society between the destabilisation of citizenship through processes of globalisation, neo-liberalism and privatisation and the simultaneous reinvigoration of the concept of citizenship and strengthening of nationalist rhetoric, closure and securitisation.

6.2 Conceptualising Citizenly Identities Socially to me, being a citizen means being actively engaged in contributing to the functioning, sustainability and improvement of the countries that you live in/have lived in. Politically to me it means actively contributing to the political debate in the country where you live/have lived. I am very happy that in Australia the right to vote is not limited to “citizens”1 and that people not born in Australia may become Prime Minister. In an emotional sense citizenship is the place/s where you feel an attachment to the ongoing wellbeing of that country. For me this is reflected in the way that I read Australian and British newspapers that many residents in the US would not be concerned with. (Scott)

Citizenship is felt and represented by those involved in this research in a multitude of ways—as Scott articulates, it is a social, political and emotional construct. Joppke (2007, p. 38) identified three dimensions of citizenship ‘citizenship as status, which denotes formal state membership and the rules of access to it; citizenship as rights, which is about the formal capacities and immunities connected with such status; 1 Scott,

as a British citizen but Australian resident, has the right to vote in Australian elections but for all other nationalities one must be an Australian citizen to vote.

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and, in addition, citizenship as identity, which refers to the behavioral aspects of individuals acting and conceiving of themselves as members of a collectivity.’ Over the past two decades the term ‘transnationalism’ has been increasingly used to examine the ways that migrants develop and sustain familial, economic, cultural and political ties and identifications across national borders. Transnational migrants remain connected to origin and destination countries rather than cutting ties, developing multiple allegiances over time and through space (Ehrkamp, 2005; Glick Schiller, Basch, & Szanton Blanc, 1995; Leitner & Ehrkamp, 2006; Nagel & Staeheli, 2004). A number of terms have been used to describe the transformation of citizenship processes through processes of globalisation, including postnational citizenship (Soysal, 1994; Tambini, 2001), transnational citizenship (Baubock, 1994) and multicultural citizenship (Kymlicka, 1995). Much of the earlier scholarship on citizenship (e.g. in the work of Baubock, 1994; Soysal, 1994) took a largely institutional approach and provided macro-level analyses, focussing on the terms of admission to a particular nation and its requirements for legal status. As Ho (2009, p. 790) argues, while this work is integral to understanding the ways we think about citizenship in a transnational world, it also positions citizenship as a disembodied and mechanistic process. For example, Joppke (1999, p. 629) described citizenship ‘as a mechanism of closure [and] a filing mechanism, distributing people to just one of the world’s many states.’ However, because these analyses are relatively macro-scale approaches, which engage citizenship mainly as a mechanism of state power, they tend to overlook how individuals experience and represent citizenship and their strategies for reconfiguring traditional citizenship boundaries. Two key conceptualisations of citizenship are represented by the mobile settlers in this research. These two inter-related conceptualisations are: (i) citizenship as a formal and mechanistic process; and (ii) citizenship as a social, subjective and emotional identity and practice. For some participants, ‘citizenship’ was described as simply a legal process to which they attributed no emotional attachment. Sharon, for example, describes citizenship as a ‘non-word’ and as a concept she ‘associated with legal documents’. The only time she feels like an Australian citizen is when she has to vote in an election or when she ‘browses the pages of [her] passport in airport queues’. Words like identity, belonging and connection have more meaning to me and are more integral to the migrant experience. Connection to a country lies in culture (encompassing lifestyle, values, language, traditions and rituals) I believe, not citizenship. (Sharon)

Sharon then describes how she took up Australian citizenship ‘primarily for pragmatic reasons’ so that her family could all travel easily between Australia and the UK without visa restrictions. These pragmatics reasons stand in contrast to Mateo, Seb and Emily discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3, for whom Permanent Residency and citizenship status was the ‘holy grail’ of migration outcomes (Robertson, 2014) connected to achieving long term security in Australia. However, Sharon said she wanted to address the fact that her daughter was an Australian citizen (she was born in Melbourne after Sharon migrated) but the rest of her family (Sharon, her husband and son) were not:

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I did not want my daughter to feel different from us since she had a different label – ‘Australian’ – attached to her and we did not. The decision to embrace Australian culture and lifestyle was something that happened separately and grew organically. It was not something we decided to do. It was an inevitable consequence of our decision to live here and make a go of our new lives. (Sharon)

In the above passages, Sharon narrates two conflicting conceptions of citizenship. Citizenship is a legal process that she says does not contain an emotional dimension—‘it is the kind of word I associate with legal documents’. Yet she ensured that her family became Australian citizens when her daughter was born because she did not want her daughter ‘to feel different’ from them. There is an interesting tension and ambivalence within Sharon’s descriptions of citizenship. If citizenship was devoid of emotion and simply a legal document, as she asserts, then it would not matter what label was attached to her citizenship compared to her daughter’s. She denies the significance of citizenship, arguing that it is an intangible document, a ‘non-word’, yet simultaneously acknowledges the power of the passport and citizenship document in relation to identity and emotional subjectivity. Citizenship is a social process experienced emotionally by Sharon and her family. She is ambivalent about citizenship in that she both acknowledges and resists its influence but is also immensely strategic about its practical use. Her reflections show how the meaning of citizenship is elastic, depending on different situations. I interviewed Sharon again in 2017, six years after our first interview. This provided an opportunity to examine how her translocal subjectivity may have shifted over time. She reflected that if I had asked her about her perceptions of citizenship prior to the Brexit vote, she would have said ‘I’m proudly Australian, but also proudly British and European’ and that she feels ‘proud of that positioning of Britain within the European Union, that there is that bond, that relationship.’ After the Brexit vote Sharon and her husband felt differently about their British citizenship. She had recently returned from a trip to the UK to visit her family and reflected on the social and political discussions occurring in the media at the time as well as discussions she has had with her family about the departure of Britain from the European Union. I am thoroughly disappointed with Britain for putting itself into what I see as such a precarious position with consequences that are not only political, but in my opinion are clearly economic, social, cultural, psychological. I just think it’s extremely precarious territory that Britain now finds itself in. Interestingly, having spoken to a number of people back there, very few people agree with me. My entire family thinks it’s wonderful that Brexit’s happening. (Sharon)

Sharon and her husband are ‘watching’ what’s happening in the UK with close interest. They follow the political climate in the UK, from a distance, regularly connecting with friends in the UK as well as listening to and reading online commentary on the issue. She said that if Britain decides to ‘send itself down the sewer, we’re not going with it’. Here citizenship is much more than a legal document or political identification, it represents an affiliation with the cultural values of a nation. She does not want to be a part of a culture that, in her view, subscribes to ‘racism, inequality and injustice’. She feels so much emotion about this issue that she is considering revoking her British citizenship depending on the outcomes of Brexit. Sharon’s citizenly identities are not only multiply located (UK, Europe, Australia) but the strength

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of these connections shifts over time and space and involve constant re-negotiation as cultural and political circumstances in origin and destinations countries change. Nilaya, who was born in India and has since lived with her husband and two children in the US, Switzerland and Australia, had to relinquish her Indian citizenship in order to become an Australian citizen (they relocated to Australia in 2004 before Australia had a dual-nationality arrangement with India). We have Australian citizenship. And that wasn’t as difficult or … a lot of people say it’s emotional. Though at one point I thought, “Oh, it’s a bit hard” and then my husband, he’s very practical, he looked at me and said “Honey, you can stay Indian, we are going to convert. Just remember whenever we travel, you’re the one that’s going to stand in another queue and we’ll be in one queue” (Laughter). “Alright, I’m coming!” Just it was a split second to think, but it wasn’t huge or emotional, and I am so glad we did it because it makes life a lot easier for all of us to travel. (Nilaya)

This example is interesting in terms of the different emotions that circulate within the household. In other discussions, Nilaya wanted to retain her Indian citizenship because she says it’s ‘about being open’ to the possibility of return. She also describes the range of geographic scales at which she feels a citizen—‘Global citizen is what we call ourselves but we are also Australian citizens, and I also belong to the state of South Australia, and my local community’. By invoking the discourse of being a ‘global citizen’, Nilaya resists regulations that stipulate that she can only be a citizen of one country, describing her family as ‘global citizens’, yet in the next sentence she also acknowledges that officially they are ‘Australian citizens’. Nilaya also suggests that she was emotional about the decision to relinquish her Indian citizenship and resisted this at first. In contrast, her husband was quite pragmatic about the decision—‘remember whenever we travel, you’re the one that’s going to stand in another queue’. Similarly to Sharon (when interviewed six years ago), relinquishing citizenship was reduced to being merely a practical decision; it means shorter queues at the airport and easier travel. Nilaya’s husband says that by keeping her Indian citizenship, she ‘can stay Indian’, as if her ethnic, cultural and national identity could be automatically erased by revoking formal citizenship. Nilaya’s example demonstrates that even though she has lived in many countries, state policies construct her globally-claimed identity in much more contained and singular terms. Formally, she is a citizen of one country (Australia) while emotionally, her connections spread across the globe. Chloe relocated from Australia to France on a working-holiday visa eleven years ago (2006). When we discussed citizenship, she described the regulations in France for becoming a citizen, and outlined a series of dot points about how one might pursue this. For example, she says ‘in order to apply you have to have $3000 AUD, pay an application cost and complete a police check’. She said she has an annual review undertaken by the French government to assess whether she can stay, and has to show ‘tax, pay slips, rental agreements, electricity bills, all sorts of things to show [she is] providing for [herself] and doing all the right things in their country’. Citizenship for Chloe is represented as a series of pragmatic steps taken to demonstrate that she can be an ‘ideal’ citizen. After six years in Paris, Chloe became a French citizen. Her representations of citizenship correspond with the role of the state in enforcing a structure

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of normative preconditions about individuals and their relation to culture and nationality (Favell, 1998, p. 80). National feelings of self-protection translate into policies ensuring those who become citizens of France adhere to normative constructions of who constitutes a French citizen. In ideologies of the ‘good citizen’, it becomes almost impossible to separate the affective from the bureaucratic (Gordon & Meunier, 2001, p. 24). However, Chloe did not seek French citizenship because she knew she wanted to stay in France indefinitely but because it gave her more global options for living overseas, accumulating transnational choices for security/residency as her migration trajectories unfolded. In 2011, Chloe met her Australian husband on a return flight from Paris to Adelaide, to visit family. He was living in London at the time. They commuted between London and Paris for several years before moving back to Australia for six months, following the death of Chloe’s father, and both recently moved to London. They are hoping that in several years they’ll be able to apply for British citizenship though they don’t necessarily have long term plans to stay in the UK. Sophie describes a similar attitude to Chloe in relation to the desire to accumulate citizenships. She was born in Australia and met her Ghanaian husband while undertaking doctoral research in Africa. She currently only holds Australian citizenship though she has spent time living and working in the UK (on two separate occasions), Tanzania, Ghana and Kenya. Her husband is a Ghanaian/Australia dual citizen. In 2014, Sophie and her husband and two children moved to Oxford in the UK so that Sophie could take up a position working for an international development organisation. In 2019 she will be a permanent resident in the UK with the long term goal of gaining citizenship for herself and her family—although she feels the potential for citizenship is less tangible after Brexit. Like Chloe, who wanted to accumulate as many citizenships as possible to facilitate transnational practices and options, Sophie also suggested that: The return to nationalism in many countries around the world is one of the reasons I am keen to collect a few passports as you never know what restrictions will apply in the future. (Sophie)

While both Chloe and Sophie sought multiple citizenships in order to increase the transnational living and professional options available to them—an a-la-carte set of choices—for others, dual citizenship had much more serious motivations. Mateo, who was born in Venezuela and came to Australia through a student-led-migration pathway in order to escape political unrest in his country, said that you should never renounce citizenship of a country because you don’t know how your feelings towards a country will change over time, you should seek as many options for permanent settlement as you can. So many people in Venezuela, because Venezuela, back in fifties and sixties and whatnot, there was a lot of migrants from Europe because of the war. It has a massive Italian and Portuguese community. One of my cousins, his great grandad, well when he arrived from Italy to Venezuela, he grabbed his passport and burned it. Now they can’t claim the Italian citizenship because the great grandad went, “Hold on. Venezuela’s fantastic, it’s the best country in the world”. But times change, you never know what will happen to a country. Venezuela is now not a safe place to live but they have no options for leaving. (Mateo)

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Drawing on participants’ representations of citizenship, this section has shown some of the often conflictual and ambivalent meanings attached to citizenship, which often change for an individual over the course of their lives. Citizenship is represented as a social, political and emotional construct. On the one hand, it is devoid of emotion, a document or passport that allows for easier, faster, more practical travel. On the other hand, it has powerful emotional consequences, particularly if the values of a nation no longer correspond with their own. Citizenship was also shown to be a form of capital as participants sought multiple citizenships to increase their transnational living options. Sometimes this was motivated by the relatively privileged desire to work/live in a range of places (e.g. Chloe and Sophie) while for others, it provided options for more secure livelihoods if/when a country was no longer safe to live (Mateo).

6.3 Negotiating ‘Citizenly Identities’ The next section explores how participants, as highly mobile people with multiple attachments across time, borders and at different geographic scales, make decisions about citizenship and its inherent tensions, and how they conceptualise citizenship as a result of these choices. For analytic purposes, I group participants under three themes. First, I look at participants’ practices that show how feelings of citizenship and national belonging are co-produced where citizenship is a significant influence on national identity and vice versa. Second, a distinction is made between those who represent citizenship as an overriding loyalty to a single nation, and those who more easily reconciled having dual-citizenship status. Here, the different pragmatic and emotional considerations of developing attachments to more than one country are explored. Finally, I examine responses from a participant who describes having multiple, mobile and trans(local) attachments that were not always encapsulated in national terms.

6.3.1 National Identity and Everyday Rituals Sharon described the activities she engages in as an active attempt to ‘fit in’ to Australian culture. These practices are based upon a particular mythologised understanding of a white-settler Australian identity. In a sense, she seems to be searching for an authentic Australian identity in activities that most Australian-born citizens have probably never engaged in themselves. She says: I have gone out of my way to make the most of being Australian. In order to feel part of the community, both my husband and I have become volunteers: my husband is a senior fire fighter with the [Country Fire Service (CFS)] and I’m a qualified Surf Life Saver. We also love heading out into the desert and reliving the lives and times of Australia’s Outback pioneers (who, like us, were usually British). (Sharon)

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In Sharon’s performance of a particular understanding of what it means to be Australian, she engages in social activities to reinforce this identity (i.e. CFS volunteer and becoming a surf life-saver) that she feels will connect her to an Australian culture and identity. However, this is not a straightforward process, because even these practices have not ensured an uninterrupted sense of belonging for her in Australia. She repeatedly performs these particular identities, hoping they will eventually be experienced as second-nature and internalised as a lived subjectivity. Viewed in this way, belonging is not simply membership but a connection to others that is always in the process of being actively achieved (Garbutt, 2009; Probyn, 1996). Sharon appears to equate ‘being Australian’ with a white-colonial narrative. This is not only signalled by her involvement with the CFS and surf life-saving (practices typically associated with Anglo-Australian men), but also where she says she enjoys ‘heading out into the desert and reliving the lives and times of Australia’s Outback pioneers’. She talks about practices within her local community, but these practices are also connected to a broader national imaginary about what it means (a particular version at least) to be Australian (that does not include Aboriginal sovereignty). Hall (1996, p. 603) states that national cultures ‘construct identities by producing meanings about “the nation” with which we can identify’. Some people are able to identify with national discourses more easily than others. While national cultures are constructed around ideas of allegiance and symbolic identification, they are also ‘a structure of power’ (Hall, 1996, p. 605) which seeks to suppress cultural difference but are, in reality, ‘cross-cut by deep internal divisions’. Even though Sharon expresses difficulty in ascribing to this national identity, it is at least an identity that is open to her. There is a commonly held perception that Australia is built upon largely British cultural values and institutions, which has led to the expectation that British migrants will ‘fit easily’ and ‘almost naturally’ into the Australian nation (Schech & Haggis, 2004, p. 176). Schech and Haggis (2004, p. 176) argue that this conception of migration to Australia as an inevitable process of ‘fitting in’ relates to a perpetuation of an ‘imperial imaginary’ informing British migrancy. This imagining frames British Australians as less able to perceive themselves as foreign whereas other migrants are ‘condemned’ to this position and are constructed as ‘perpetual foreigners’. Sharon moved from the UK to Australia and therefore from one English-speaking country to another. She expected that the transition would be relatively easy, considering that she spoke the same language and because Australia has strong ties to the UK as a Commonwealth country. While she understood all of the words as a linguistic system, it was the history of usage of those words and phrases, that came with spending enough time in a location, which she felt distanced her from feeling within the national culture . Sharon discusses how she feels uncomfortable

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using local colloquial language and is not sure this will ever change. While she has physically built a life and community in Adelaide, made it her base and adopted a set of Australian practices, she continues to feel like an ‘impostor’, a ‘fraud’, and that she is merely ‘playing at being Australian’ (Sharon). She even acknowledges that she engages in all the ‘clichéd’ activities associated with being Australian but ‘without having a historical or ancestral connection to these things.’ She feels a sense of ambivalence towards claiming these activities as her own and that she has ‘appropriated’ or ‘plagiarised’ them. She remarks: I feel that I don’t have a right to adopt such marks of Australianness. I’d feel like a fraud, for example, if I said G’Day. I know I’d sound like an impostor because it is not part of my natural vocabulary and it sound silly with my British accent. I said it once, in Melbourne and felt – to resort to British slang – ‘a total tit’. I’ve never said it again, even though I’ve now been here ten years. Also, although I have encountered acceptance at my surf and swimming clubs, I sometimes feel that I am a Pom ‘playing’ at being Australian. I am doing all the clichéd things (swimming, surf life saving, barbequing) without have an historical or ancestral connection to those things. Although those things are now part of who I am, and I am lost without them. I still feel uncomfortable about laying any kind of claim to them. If feel I have appropriated them or plagiarised them. I feel like they are not really mine, although they are now so much part of my life and identity. (Sharon)

Sharon also discussed the importance of finding familiar connections in unfamiliar places. She stated that she has ‘had difficulty over the past ten years, with finding ways to belong’. She ‘want[s] desperately, sometimes, to feel at home.’ When they first came to Australia, Sharon and her family were living in Melbourne, but after several years decided to move to Adelaide. She remarked that they decided to move to Adelaide partly ‘because it felt more homely’: There are lots of English people here [Adelaide] or people with “Pommy” ancestry… We have surrounded ourselves with Pommy friends. We’ve all been through the same experiences and we talk about strange English things. My English friend says sometimes she just wants to talk to someone who knows what Tesco vouchers are – so she rings me. (Sharon)

Paradoxically, it is by connecting with the culture of another national identity that she seeks a sense of belonging within the Australian nation. This was not uncommon in participants’ responses. Lan (born in Vietnam, relocated to Australian as a refugee and then the US as a skilled migrant) talked about regularly attending a Vietnamese Tibetan Buddhism Centre in Seattle as a way of connecting with her cultural and religious identity, developed in both Vietnam and Australia, which eventually gave way to a sense of belonging in America. While Sharon and Lan sought to re-connect themselves with prior national and religious identities by surrounding themselves with people who practiced the same religion or who were also British nationals, some participants also deliberately sought to distance themselves from their previous national culture post-migration. Nilaya described the expectations of others in her local Indian community in Adelaide, that her family would automatically seek social connections with people from the same country of origin. However, this was something she resisted. When they moved to Australia, they decided they did not want to have ‘too many Indian friends’. When they first arrived, she remarked that the local Indian community

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invited them to Indian functions all the time. While they appreciated the hospitality, they found little commonality: Most of the people we had met, we had nothing in common. It’s very hard for us to actually relate to them, and everything was so different, and some of the things I really got annoyed at because they kept talking about our culture and we are so superior. I didn’t like that bit and even my kids started saying “Oh, we have nothing in common with them”, and some of these people that I met, what they tend to do is they’re frozen in time. They leave the country and come, and some of them have been here 30 years. Their grandparents have moved on, even in India, but they are frozen in time, and they’re imposing their values on their kids, and then they’re very judgemental, and there’s one thing we said. “If you are so judgemental or you’re so, you think this is such a bad place, why are you here? Why don’t you go back?”…My husband made a point and he said “Look Nilaya, if you were in India, we would have nothing to do with somebody, this family, not because we are being snobbish or anything, but we don’t have any commonality, OK, so why do you want to force yourself to do that here?” (Nilaya)

Migration provides opportunities for people to sometimes strengthen and sometimes distance themselves from previous ties, social, national and cultural categorisations. Later in the interview, Nilaya describes how she relates better to families that she may have nothing in common with (e.g. in terms of cultural background) but once they ‘get to know each other’ they find many similarities and shared interests. For Nilaya, belonging with people is based upon values and orientations to the world rather than cultural sameness. In the above narrative, she draws attention to the ways diasporic communities can try to maintain their national identity in foreign contexts, and sometimes exaggerate their traditional cultural identity as a way of maintaining connection and fostering a renewed sense of belonging. Some participants therefore may decide to keep their distance from people from their country of origin, and search for new communities without connections to the place they came from. Nilaya also describes how she feels a sense of belonging in Adelaide, particularly when she contributes to her local community through volunteer work, fundraising and cooking. She says she does not have much to do with the local Indian diasporic community, commenting that members of this community have questioned why she has donated locally to the Bushfire Appeal instead of donating back to India. For Nilaya, contributing to causes in her local community strengthens her sense of belonging and affiliation with an Australian national identity. Sharon, Nilaya and Lan’s embodied relationship to their new homes are never complete but constitute an ongoing and reiterative process of connecting to national identities through localised practices that draw upon their translocal subjectivities and multi-stranded connections across space and time. This performative function of belonging, through everyday practices, is central to the ‘construction and reproduction of identity narratives and constructions of attachment’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 203). While their daily practices may become more habitual and familiar over time, they also require constant effort. In a sense, migrants only become ‘locals’ when the local becomes invisible to them.

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6.3.2 Singular Loyalties and Negotiations of Guilt For one group of participants in this research there was a strong sense of loyalty to one nation above all others, and the process of taking up citizenship of a second nation was associated with feelings of guilt and perceived by them as a denial of their heritage. Andy, who was born in NY and migrated to Australia during the 1970s to work as a teacher, describes his strong attachment to his identity as an American citizen. Despite numerous overseas trips and returning to the US with his wife and children on several occasions for up to a year at a time, he has lived predominantly in Australia for the past forty years. He describes how he could not bring himself to become an Australian citizen because he might risk losing his citizenship status in his ‘home country’. For thirty years, Andy identified as American even though he resided in Australia. He admits that he ‘used excuses’ to delay the decision to become an Australian citizen in a formal sense. These excuses included the possibility of wanting to return to the US to work, or that his children, who were born in Australia, might be at risk of losing their dual citizenship. ‘In [his] mind’, he said, he might be ‘cutting off’ his chances of ever going home, even though Australia was an attractive location to call his second home. When Australia and the US eventually created dual-citizenship arrangements, Andy still believed the US retained the right to cancel citizenship if he took out allegiance to another nation (his reading of the US dual-citizenship policy information). For me, just the thought of not being American anymore was enough to make me delay for so long. It was only when I was so entrenched in Australia, and America began to seem so much less attractive (as it did with each successive visit) and they elected George [Bush] – that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. (Andy)

With the more recent election of Donald Trump, Andy said in our 2017 interview that this only reaffirmed that his decision to become an Australian citizen was the right choice. He admits that he knew for a long time that losing dual citizenship was unlikely, but it provided an ‘official’ reason for his emotional reluctance to become an Australian citizen. While being American is part of his identity, signing loyalty to Australia (even though by that time he had lived more years in Australia than in the US) did not sit comfortably with him. Like Sharon’s feelings about Brexit, it was eventually Andy’s disappointment at the political situation in the US (election of George Bush for another term in office), as well as his entrenchment in Australian culture socially and politically over a thirty year period, that resulted in his decision to become an Australian citizen. His resistance to taking up Australian citizenship for so long was also replaced by another form of resistance (i.e. wanting to differentiate himself from mainstream Bush supporters). What is interesting in Andy’s account is the ambivalence he shows in terms of his conflicting loyalties and his emotional ties versus the realities of daily life. It was important for Andy to keep his US citizenship as a status, but he felt his emotional connection to Australia and the citizenship that followed in his country of residence, surpassed the importance of his citizenship to his country of birth. Again, emotional and legal citizenship cannot be represented as separate entities but one bleeds into the other. Kastoryano (2002, p. 158) suggests

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that dual citizenship refers to one’s political status and rights whereas dual nationality is related to socio-cultural belonging and identity. Similarly, Mateo (born in Venezuela and now living in Australia) said that when he became an Australian citizen and was standing at the citizenship ceremony he felt like he was ‘cheating [his] country’ by pledging his allegiance to another. He left Venezuela because his country was in crisis and he feared for his safety. At the time of migrating, he felt that there were two clear choices. He could stay and fight to improve his country or he could migrate and raise a family somewhere safer. He said that when he first moved to Australia, he ‘didn’t care about Venezuela’, he just wanted to be safe and to have opportunities for a better future. However, as time has passed in Australia, he has found himself becoming more patriotic towards Venezuela. A close friend of his is fighting on the streets as part of the resistance movement and he is now considering flying to Venezuela to help his friend. Both Andy and Mateo also talked about the location of home becoming further problematized through significant life events, like the birth of children. Both have had children in Australia which simultaneously strengthened their connection to Australia whilst also causing them to desire reconnection with their countries of origin so that their children can understand and appreciate their cultural heritage. Lan and her father sought political refugee status when they escaped Vietnam after the war. They were relocated first to Singapore and then to Australia. Neither Lan nor her father has returned to Vietnam since. She still holds a strong emotional connection to Vietnam, and expresses that it is via her ‘heart’ and through her emotions that she responds to the possibility of return. While she wants to return, she is also fearful of whether it would be safe to do so. Talking further about citizenship, Lan stated that she went through a period a year after they moved to Seattle from Australia where, like Andy and Mateo, she questioned her loyalty to the idea of a nation or a single country because she had moved several times: I started to question my loyalty. I was born in Vietnam, grew up in Australia and now liking the feel of another country. That bothered me. I met a Chinese man who came to the US to do his PhD and stayed ever since and mentioned this discomfort I was feeling. He said that I was a world citizen and that put me at ease again. At this stage citizenship to me means that by being willing to contribute to a country in some way one is given the rights to receive the opportunities that citizens of that country are entitled to. Socially and emotionally I am most familiar and feel a connection to the Australian and Vietnamese culture. (Lan)

Lan acknowledges a sense of guilt associated with developing ties to different countries as a result of her migration experiences instead of possessing an overriding loyalty to one homeland above all others. However, like Nilaya, the notion of ‘world citizenship’, eases the discomfort of choosing loyalties and provides an alternative narrative to respond to the uneasiness of mobilities that produce too many attachments. Ironically, in a legal sense (when interviewed in 2010 and 2012), Lan felt more of a US citizen because she contributes to the economy as a resident (even though she is not a formal citizen), but feels less of a legal citizen of Australia (where she is formally recognised as such). For Lan, citizenship at the level of regulations and status is felt most strongly to the US where she was living for seven years. Not

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only does citizenship operate here on a number of registers (politically, socially, and emotionally), but these are invoked differently by different countries and at different times during the life-cycle. Her daily practices as an immigrant (not yet citizen) in the US in relation to work and her embeddedness in her local community mean that she is participating in civic activities. However, having only lived there for a short period compared to her time in Vietnam and growing up in Australia, at a social and emotional register she feels most connected to Australian and Vietnamese culture. The different inflections of the term ‘citizen’ means a person’s connections to different countries can include both official and unofficial understandings of the term as a social, cultural, emotional and political idea. Again, this emphasises the complexities of the ‘citizenship’ concept and the diverse ways its meanings are put to use as a status, identity and practice (Ho, 2009). While, for many, the emotion attached to being a citizen conjured pride, belonging and positive feelings towards a homeland, for other participants citizenship was something to be resisted and often evoked feelings of betrayal. Andy, Mateo and Lan felt like they were betraying their nation by becoming dual citizens and pledging allegiance to a second country. However, Emir felt that the nation itself was betraying him. Emir left Bosnia on a humanitarian visa after the war. He was relocated to Australia where he is now an Australian citizen. Emir did not want to maintain citizenship to his country of origin because he held dark memories of his homeland as a consequence of the war. He harboured contradictory feelings in relation to being a citizen of any country. He says that a nation can be equally a site of protection and a site of betrayal and fear. His experience underlines the complexity of citizenly identities, as they carry a great deal of baggage, emotional and otherwise. Rubenstein (2001, p. 5) uses the phrase ‘cultural mourning’ to refer to a person’s response to the loss of something with collective or communal associations, ‘a way of life, a cultural homeland, a place or geographical location with significance for a larger cultural group, or the related history of an entire ethnic or cultural group from which she or he feels severed or exiled, whether voluntary or involuntary’. Emir mourns the loss of his homeland ‘that once was’ and narrates the double edge of citizenship—that ‘it can make your life easier’ and equally ‘be very brutal’ (Emir). While Emir says that he is ‘dreaming of when we will all be citizens of the world’, his laughter and framing of the statement as a ‘dream’ signifies a kind of cynicism. Much of the traditional writing on cosmopolitanism emphasises this world-view rather than allegiances to nation-states with their competing interests (Delanty, 2000; Falk, 1994; Linklater, 1998). Yet how can someone be a citizen of the world when one can no longer be a citizen of their own nation? In Reflections on Exile, Said (2000, 173) states that exile is ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’. Emir remarks: I didn’t have any signifiers to remind me of a nation. I was quite sick of the nation. I’m dreaming of when we will all be citizens of the world. Because nations can protect you, can make your life easier, can take care of your education or healthcare system but also the nation can be very brutal and all for the sake of expanding territories or nations or the leaders that represent nations… they destroy other human beings for the sake of their nation or somebody inside that they found, that we are not patriotic enough. (Emir)

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Emir’s experience underscores the important emotional aspects of migrant experiences in shaping relations to home and citizenly identities. His experiences of war influence his identification with his country of origin and his disposition towards citizenship in his current country. While Emir’s experiences of war have influenced his relation to his former nation and notions of citizenship, it has not eroded his identification with people and places within his former nation. For example, he often spends time with friends from his home town, who now live in Australia. They enjoy re-telling stories about people they both knew and places they spent time, to reconnect them to their pasts and feelings of localised belonging. The nation, as a site of home, is both a space of belonging and alienation. This section has described the emotional aspects of gaining and relinquishing citizenships. While citizenship does constitute a formal acknowledgment of identification with a particular nation, participants’ decisions about citizenship have been shown to be far more subjective and complex for them as individuals, bringing a range of emotions to the fore that shift over time and place. Participants’ represented in this section (Mateo, Andy, Lan) also show how feelings towards origin and destination countries wax and wane over the life course and cannot be represented as a linear process (decreasing attachment to home country, increasing attachment to host country) but instead, oscillates like a pendulum. Social and political changes in each context as well personal changes experienced by individuals (such as the birth of children, death of loved ones) continually reorient the location of home both within nations, at the level of the nation and beyond the nation (e.g. in the case of Emir and James).

6.3.3 Translocal Connections: ‘That Misplaced Idea that You Can Only Be Loyal to One Thing at a Time’ There are often discursive slippages between being a citizen, citizenship and having a national identity (Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 81). Conceptualising citizenship in terms of people’s ‘citizenly identities’ is a more flexible way of understanding the concept because it allows for the plurality of attachments in people’s lives. It moves away from a purely bureaucratic and institutional conceptualisation of the term to an understanding of citizenship as an identity and practice that is fluid and rhizomatic and produces different relations between people and places at a range of scales. Belonging as a process of becoming is an ongoing daily project of developing practices that form connections between previous homes and new spaces of inhabitance. Beck (2000, p. 168) has discussed the global age as one where our lives are no longer sedentary or tied to particular places; he writes: ‘it is a travelling life, both literally and metaphorically, a nomadic life, a life spent in cars, airplanes and trains, on the telephone or the Internet, supported by the mass media, a transnational life stretching across frontiers’. As Beck explains, this life leads to what he calls ‘place polygamy’ where people can now live in and hold attachments to multiple locations at once. Similarly, Yuval-Davis (2011, p. 69) suggests when we talk about citizenship, we

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now acknowledge the existence of multi-layered citizenships that are not only connected to the state but include social and political memberships that are composed of ‘local, regional, national, cross and supranational… communities, as well as often more than one national community’. This chapter thus far has shown that even for participants who have the economic capacity to be mobile, living between citizenly identities and locations is a complex process. Largely, participants analysed so far have constructed themselves as having loyalty to a single nation, to two nations via dual citizenship, or being caught between two national identities and homes. While Beck’s view of the world suggests a somewhat idealistic view of the mobile global age, this section presents a few examples from participants that do reflect more multiple and mobile attachments. This section also examines citizenship, as an identity and practice, that is not only related to discrete nations but also to identifications with people and local sites within various countries. Many described sustaining ongoing emotional connections to the multiple places they have lived regardless of what formal citizenships they may hold. James has lived in many countries (e.g. Scotland, Australia, the US, China, Japan and Macau) and does not describe a strong connection to any nation. He is much more connected to particular people and groups of friends in disparate locations around the world: The essence of belonging to me is close to the notion of inclusion. The hierarchy of belonging is in proportion to the level of inclusion one feels in a particular group or process. I can’t be sure but I think it was E. M. Forster who said if he had to choose between betraying a friend and betraying the nation, he would always choose to betray the latter. He is really alluding to the hierarchy of belonging since the immediate support group is more powerful than that of the larger. In my experience because I have small support groups in several countries, they are always more important in my thinking and feeling than larger national identities. (James)

In James’s hierarchy of belonging, connections to small groups of friends located in multiple countries are more important indicators of belonging than connections to a nation. What he suggests is that belonging travels with the person who travels. Privileging identification with other nationals is problematic because it assumes that ‘the people with whom we happen to share formal nation-state membership and territory should be the objects of our identification and solidarity more than others with whom we are joined through other affiliative ties’ (Bosniak, 2001, p. 248). Maintaining multiple identities and attachments to different communities (social, cultural and political) across time and space and at different levels (local, national, transnational) is a common feature of migrants’ lives. James refuses to belong to a singular place, but his attachments to smaller support groups in multiple countries allow for a global disposition and identity. People participate in networks and structures with varying degrees of hierarchy (e.g. families, local communities, nations), which are all important sites of identity construction. Formally, James is an Australian and British citizen, yet his national affiliations extend well beyond these two locations to encompass Scotland (where he was born), Australia (where he grew up and now lives), the US (where he worked and studied for several years on two occasions), Japan (where he lived for 13 years)

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and most recently Macau (where he lived for 7 years). There is a coexistence of the multiple registers of being at home and at different points in his life the distinction between ‘home’ and ‘away’ has become blurred. As discussed in Chap. 4, during the time he lived and worked in Japan, Japan became a prominent site of ‘home’ and Australia became ‘away’. When he would visit Australia, he would sometimes refer to it as home, but once in Australia would refer to Japan as home. Equally, when he was a child and moved to Australia, Scotland was still home for many years, although now Scotland does not figure prominently as a site of home or citizenship but rather a place of beginning. Australia is now home, having recently returned from Macau to ‘put down roots’ (James) and retire. Regardless of his highly mobile life and connections, he still seeks one place, above all others, to return to. Thus while James constructs himself as de-nationalised, he simultaneously and contradictorily finds home in its strongest sense, in Australia. When asked ‘Where is home?’, James responded: That is a very difficult question to answer. There are times when Australia feels like home, but there are others when it doesn’t. In balance I am more at home in Australia than anywhere else, though to a certain extent I am more an observer here than a participant. This is something to do with living in several other countries – I have been denationalized. This is not anything approaching alienation or angst, merely a broader base of identity. (James)

However, the contradictions and ambivalences of migration continue as migrants’ lives unfold. When I first interviewed James in 2010 he had just returned from Japan where he had lived for over a decade, with the intention to retire in Australia. One year after our first interview he had decided to move to Macau for a twelvemonth employment contract, which was then extended for seven years. When I interviewed him again in 2017, he had just returned to Australia for his second attempt at retirement. During this interview he described how the more he has moved, the less he feels a sense of belonging anywhere. Australia, his location of ‘chosen citizenship’ feels as ‘foreign as the foreign locations’ he has lived over the course of his life. For James, repatriation has caused a greater degree of culture shock and difficulty adjusting than his experiences in Japan, the US or Macau. He feels like he is on the edges of the society in which he now lives in Adelaide, Australia even though it was where he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescent years. Paradoxically, he said that when he moved to Japan, the USA and China, he found being on the margins, as an outsider, to be a liberating experience. However, at home in Australia, where he theoretically shouldn’t be on the margins, he also feels an outsider but this is experienced as alienating rather than liberating. His identities both displace and reinstate national boundaries, forming multistranded social relations linking together a myriad of local and national sites of identification and creating new forms of belonging (Dwyer, 2000, p. 475). Beyond his formal citizenship (Australian and British) he has constructed a ‘broader base of identity’ (James) that engages ‘multiple public spheres across national borders’ (Ehrkamp, 2005, p. 347). Migrants become multiply located with attachments to family and friends in disparate locations. James continues to maintain mobile personal sensitivities and relationships with friends in distant places:

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Yes I belong to Australia, but I belong more to six people I regularly had dinner with in Japan. My belonging becomes cross-national in a sense, and my related sense of identity. Ultimately I probably belong to people rather than to places. (James)

Sassen (2002, p. 286) described post-national citizenship as ‘located partly outside the confines of the national’. For James, the national is no longer a container for thinking about citizenship, and he has instead developed translocal practices of belonging to people and places. Belonging is emotionally secured in social units other than the nation-state, through networks of friends and family living in multiple countries. Not only does James allude to the different registers of identification (local, national, transnational) but also to the spectrum of importance afforded to these. Connections to ‘small support groups in several countries’ are given more significance compared with national identities. His loyalties span countries and are not bounded by constructed borders. Conradson and McKay (2007, p. 169) discuss a similar idea in relation to translocal subjectivity. They suggest that the construction of migrant selfhood is often more closely aligned with localities within nations rather than to nation-states. National citizenship is typically a ‘second-order framing of identity’ that is foregrounded when dealing with immigration officials, employers and relative strangers in international settings. For example, in narratives from participants in this research, being asked questions of identity by immigration officials invokes particular constructions of self as opposed to being asked the same questions by friends. Earlier, Sharon described how citizenship was sometimes only something she thought about while flipping through the pages of her passport in airport queues. Furthermore, Sharon and Nilaya, for instance, are now officially considered Australian citizens rather than British or Indian. When asked in more personal settings what their identifications include, they might be more likely to describe themselves as person from a particular locality, such as the British Midlands or Bangalore. They might at other times also choose to foreground different identifications in relation to their profession, social activities or family roles. Sassen (2002) suggests the institution of citizenship is no longer ‘unitary’ but has multiple dimensions, in which new locations for citizenship emerge outside of the boundaries of the nation-state (Isin, 2000; Jacobson, 1996; Soysal, 1994). There is a simultaneous multiplicity and dissolution of national boundaries, with implications for how, where and whether one feels like a citizen. Traditional conceptualisations of ‘citizenship’ as a governmental and bureaucratic concept no longer provide an adequate representation of mobile connections or peoples’ different emotional and subjective foundations for inclusion. Focusing on people’s citizenly identities inserts the person back into the exploration of citizenship and ties the concept more closely to broader discussions of belonging.

6.4 Destabilising and Reinscribing Citizenship As I’m writing this chapter the ‘dual citizenship saga’ involving a growing number of Australian politicians, who discovered they are potentially dual nationals and have since stood down from their positions, continues to unfold. Initially two senators

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resigned after learning that they held citizenship of New Zealand and Canada, followed by another who, though he had never been there, found out he was an Italian citizen. Seven cases were eventually referred to the High Court for deliberation. The court adhered to Section 44(i) of the Australian Constitution and disqualified five of the seven from Parliament. Some denied that they were dual citizens, some acknowledged that they were, with many attaining their non-Australian citizenship by descent and without their knowledge. After the High Court found Barnaby Joyce (leader of the National Party, whose father is from New Zealand) to be ineligible to hold his seat, he was forced to a by-election and the Turnbull Federal Government temporarily lost its tiny one-seat majority in Australia’s Lower House, until he was re-elected again. No one expected a century old constitutional law to suddenly rear its head and render numerous high-ranking politicians’ ineligible to hold their seats. While the constitution remains a static document, the populace and their feelings towards issues like citizenship, does not. Many have argued that the 116-year-old Section 44 of the constitution, precluding anyone holding dual citizenship from running for parliament, is out of step with the values of our supposed multicultural nation. Australia is a nation of nations. Our most recent national census (ABS, 2016) showed that 26.3% of Australians were born overseas and nearly half of Australians were either born overseas or had one or both parents who were. The ‘dual citizenship crisis’ raises interesting questions about citizenship and what it means in contemporary Australia and beyond. Can people be sure that those who are elected to represent their interests, do that, when they formally have dual loyalties? Is the requirement of our elected representatives, to be a citizen of one nation, an outdated idea or does it continue to have relevancy? Can having a singular citizenship prevent a parliamentarian favouring another country anyway? We know that, for example, political donations from foreign countries can sway decision making at the top levels of government. If a dual Australian-New Zealand national wants to serve in parliament does this conjure different structures of feeling to an Australian-dual national who was born in a nation with markedly different cultural values? Indeed, a participant in this research, reflected on the citizenship saga during a recent interview (2017). For her, it would be ok for a politician to have dual nationality if both nations subscribed to similar value systems. If you have say dual nationality and those two countries are committed to respect for human rights, respect for equality, justice… I don’t see a problem with holding citizenship of both countries. If you’re a citizen of two countries and one of those countries stands… for values which are in blatant breach and indeed the antithesis of the country where you’re standing for office, I think that does raise some difficult questions. How can you stand up and say, “Well, I’m here to represent the Australian people and justice and respect for the rule of law and fairness and a fair go,” if you actually also want to stand and ally and affiliate yourself with a country that actually doesn’t believe in those things? (Sharon)

The complexities of legislating different conditions for different dual nationals who want to enter politics would be a nightmare and most likely breach antidiscrimination laws if dual nationality was only granted to some politicians, based on national/cultural/ethnic/religious grounds. So instead, we have a one size fits all model. You cannot be a dual national politician so that it is clear to the Australian

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public, at least in principle, where your loyalties lie. This perspective is also reinforced through the Australian government’s announcement in early 2017 that they will be ‘strengthening’ the citizenship guidelines so that migrants to Australia will have to demonstrate that they embrace ‘Australian values’ and meet tougher English language requirements. Though the English language and value test was not passed by the Senate, the intent was there to make it much harder (for some) to become Australian citizens (i.e. for those whose first language is not English). In 2018, Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton, said that the government wants to ‘make sure we’re bringing the right people in’ and described ‘those people’ as those who ‘want to work, not be leading a life on welfare, people who want to integrate into our Australian society, people who want to abide by our values and our laws’ (Dutton cited in Gothe-Snape, 2018). This raises questions about what exactly constitutes ‘Australian values’ and furthermore, whether such values are actually unique to Australia at all, but instead, shared by many cultures, globally (Haslam, 2017). The purpose of this chapter has not been to examine citizenship through the lens of national politics but instead, has explored the everyday, personal lives of migrants and their citizenly and transnational attachments. Yet Section 44 and the proposed changes to the Australian citizenship test do indicate the national significance of such issues of citizenship and belonging. These issues also emphasize the contrast between formal Constitutional rules and attempts by the PM and Home Affairs Minister to legislatively tighten eligibility for Australian Citizenship, and the complex, messy ways, involving meaning, emotion and identity, in which people try to work through these issues in their personal lives. Participants in this research negotiate multiple translocal sites of belonging and identification through their multiple migrations, at the same time as they articulate how more traditional conceptions of singular citizenship and loyalty, often persist through time and space. So, on the one hand, we have witnessed an increasing erosion of the public sphere as a consequence of globalisation, privatisation and a decline of the state—‘we experience the civil sphere as strangers rather than as citizens who are deeply embedded within it’ (Turner, 2016, p. 691). On the other hand, through the dual citizenship saga and proposed changes to the Citizenship test, we see a discursive re-inscribing of citizenship as a national value. The need to be loyal to one place above all others, to put our country first, to protect and secure the nation (within a broader global climate of insecurity and fear regarding the cultural ‘otherness’ of migrants), to value civic integration and move away from cosmopolitan values. Even when states officially support policies of multiculturalism, public and political discourse often asserts that cultural diversity and a reluctance to assimilate to the host society culture, threatens the cohesion of the nation (ABC, 2017; Leitner & Ehrkamp, 2006, p. 1591). We live out these seemingly contradictory (i.e. plurality versus closure) impulses every day, through our private and public lives. Ong’s (1999, p. 6) notion of ‘flexible citizenship’ describes how people respond ‘fluidly and opportunistically’ to changing social, political and economic conditions that have enhanced people’s access to capital and mobility options. There are, of course, different degrees of flexibility depending on immigration/emigration contexts and the social location of individuals (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, class,

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profession). While some argue that sovereignty of the nation state has been eroded through processes of globalisation and increases in global mobility, terms like ‘global citizenship’ and ‘flexible citizenship’ discount the reality that citizenship can only exist in the context of the nation state (Turner & Khondker, 2010, p. 211). Turner (2016, p. 682, 987) instead prefers the term ‘denizens’, to describe people who have a legal right of residence (e.g. through a work visa) but who have limited rights to welfare or political participation. Their continued status in a country is usually intended to be short term, though many are seeking longer term options, and is conditional on abiding by the rules of the nation. As a nation, we rely increasingly on labor migration to serve economic interests, which as a by-product, increases the cultural diversity of the nation. We have a growing number of stateless people, be they temporary labor migrants or humanitarian entrants who are denizens or not-quite-citizens—people who pay taxes but have limited rights and are often subject to exploitation. As Turner (2016, p. 987) suggests, ‘denizens, as migrants, are often more dependent on human rights and not citizenship for protection.’ Globally, there is a growing category of long term temporary migrants, some of whose stories were told in Chaps. 2 and 3 (e.g. international students, working holiday makers and those on skilled labor visas). Some may work in a country for a period of time before returning to a previous home or move on to another destination, some may convert to permanent residency making them eligible to apply for citizenship status, and others may never be able to find a pathway towards permanent residency and citizenship in their destination country, instead living in ‘limbo’, indefinitely. Living in any country, for an extended period of time, across different visa statuses, is a precarious position to embody. It makes it difficult for people to make decisions about their futures and limits their access to social and political rights, even though they are paying taxes in a country and contributing socially and culturally to their communities. The temporariness of visa conditions provides less rights with respect to migrants in terms of labour, mobility and association, compared to permanent residents or citizens (Mares, 2018). These limitations might involve restrictions on the time someone can stay; employment may be limited to a particular employer or sector (e.g. in the case of the Australian 457 Visa); and who you can travel with may be restricted (e.g. low skilled migration schemes in Canada and Australia do not allow family members to join the lead applicant where as high skilled visas do). Temporary migrant workers hold a subordinated position within the nation, as non-citizens with less rights to move. Over time, citizenship has undergone a transformation from its traditional ideals of political participation and towards ‘labour citizenship’, emptying the term of meaning. As Arendt (1951/2004) contends, the value of a citizen is contingent upon their value as a worker. Emily, a participant in this research who was born in Zimbabwe and relocated to Australia on a spousal visa despite being highly skilled and educated herself, talked about living in ‘limbo’ for over a decade. She described the process of applying for Permanent Residency status in Australia, suggesting that her sense of belonging and citizenly identity did not fit into any of the prescribed categories on visa and immigration forms. Completing forms for her Australian visa, she was asked questions such as ‘what is your country of usual residence?’. Emily ‘usually’ resided in

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Australia, having lived there for ten years, but had to state ‘Zimbabwe’ because she was applying to be a Permanent Resident of Australia. She felt that questions on visa forms were ‘not applicable’ to her: It’s very limited, and there’s this question of belonging that is raised then, in not being able to fill out a form in a way that matches your experience. I have been living in Australia for so long, I already feel like I belong, as an unofficial citizen, but these forms they set it up so that it assumes you don’t belong yet. But I think I should be in a different category of people to fill this out, because I don’t feel like I am in sort of a limbo zone, but the form says I am. (Emily)

Her example demonstrates the powerful emotional consequences of social discourse and governmental policy that categorise people in ways that do not always correspond to their own experiences, sense of belonging and identification. The tangible passport, the visa, the citizenship document is bound up in a process of nation-state building that is often disguised by rules, regulations and statuses. Peter Mares (2016, p. 28) has argued that policymakers cannot neatly package up ‘temporary migration’ and keep it separated from issues of settlement, residency, citizenship, rights and obligation. When you admit someone to a country, even on a temporary basis, they inevitably develop strong localised and embedded connections to places and people in addition to contributing socially and economically to a nation. Over a period of ten years Emily embedded herself in her Australian life—she had a child, divorced, studied, worked and moved states in Australia, all under the official status of ‘temporary migrant’ though she had no intention of leaving and felt a ‘citizenly’ attachment to Australia. This example also shows how people who are ‘differentially located within and outside the [national] collectivity would view the boundaries of the nation in different ways—as more or less exclusionary, as more or less permeable’ (Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 91). For those who ‘tick the right boxes’ (Chloe), citizenship appears to be a straightforward process. For those who do not, citizenship becomes a process fraught with ambivalence. Similarly, Sophie (Anglo-Australian born in Adelaide) and her husband Daniel (born in Ghana, relocated to Australia with Sophie before both moving to the UK) talked about the terminology associated with particular migrant bodies and the level to which people can claim belonging or the right to long term residency. Now living in the UK, they often joke about how Sophie is described by those around her as an ‘expat’ whereas Daniel is described as a ‘migrant’. The terminology around expats and migrants in the UK does seem to have a rather racist ideology around it. People justify the language saying that expat’s intend to leave, but I think my husband expresses a desire to leave more than I do and somehow I’m an expat and he’s a migrant. (Sophie)

In this example, the concept of belonging can be taken up in two ways. First, it can be used to understand how migrants negotiate their citizenship and belonging at an individual level, how they understand their positioning in society and exert agency in their resettlement strategies (i.e. Sophie wants to stay in the UK and sees herself as a migrant whereas Daniel wants to leave and feels more like an expat). Second, it can be used to understand how the nation—through government and media

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rhetoric—positions migrants through discourses of belonging and citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, which are attached to different terminology and migrant classifications (i.e. the perception that Sophie, as a white woman is a skilled and educated ‘expat’ who will eventually return home while Daniel, as Ghanaian man, is positioned as an unskilled ‘migrant’ who is seeking long-term residency). While ‘expatriate’ literally refers to ‘a person who lives outside their native country’, the term is controversial because in contemporary usage it is largely reserved for ‘white Western migrants’ (Fechter, 2007; Fechter & Walsh, 2010). Both terms—‘expat’ and ‘migrant’—make assumptions about class, ethnicity, occupation and skill. Scholars have suggested that the social positioning of individuals around racial and gendered identities, for example, can shape their ‘differential inclusions’ in relation to belonging (Ho, 2009, p. 6; Leitner & Ehrkamp, 2006; Nagel & Staeheli, 2004). Belonging, with respect to citizenship, is not only a politicised construct but is also influenced by the ‘social location’ of individuals (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 1999). Not only does this have an impact on the physical mobility opportunities and levels of security, permanency and citizenship that individual migrants can expect but it also has an impact on the way some migrants are perceived by others that does not correspond with how they view themselves, their intentions and motivations for mobility. This section highlighted several tensions: (1) between the weakening of citizenship through processes of globalisation and privatisation and the concurrent re-inscription and strengthening of nationalist rhetoric through government policy and political discourse; and (2) between the ways an individual views their attachments, citizenly identities and sense of belonging in contrast to the ways they are perceived by others, which intersects with their social and cultural positionality.

6.5 Conclusion As skilled migration has traditionally been positioned as a practice of the elite, such migrants are often assumed to be flexible citizens who face minimal difficulties in terms of their physical mobility and mobile subjectivities. I have drawn upon participants’ stories to show that their conceptualisations of ‘citizenship’, and their decisions about gaining and relinquishing formal citizenship, demonstrate the emotional dimensions of, and difficulties associated with, such processes. Participants’ feelings towards, and decisions about, citizenship can be far more subjective and complex for them as individuals and for their families, when emotional and pragmatic motivations co-exist. The diverse characteristics of this research group has significance for the study of citizenship because their complexity allows for the exploration of this multidimensional concept from a range of perspectives (i.e. people of different social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds who have occupied a range of subject positions and migrant categories over their life-course). Participants negotiate multiple and sometimes competing identities in relation to previous and current homes and nations. These negotiations are influenced by participants’ particular social locations and migration experiences, which lead them to hold

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different dispositions towards the attainment or renouncement of citizenship and national belonging in both a formal and emotional sense. Ong’s (1999, p. 6) idea of ‘flexible citizenship’ describes how people respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing social, cultural, economic and political conditions. This chapter has shown that even notions of flexible citizenship are constrained by states, as people’s relative mobility is linked to their passports as the legal means for prescribing such movement. While some (Benhabib, 1999; Walby, 2003) have argued that the traditional idea of the citizenship, based on notions of a bounded society, is no longer relevant, ‘the resilience of the nation-state as the major tool of governance’ despite the influence of globalisation, persists (Yuval-Davis, 2011, pp. 48–49). From a disembodied view of citizenship that assigns belonging to a particular nation, participants’ mobility was of course constrained by the formal citizenship status they held. In this sense, participants were only ever formally recognised as a citizen of, at most, two countries. However, some participants developed citizenly identities through everyday practices that allowed them to contribute to, and participate in, the life of a range of countries, regardless of their formal citizenship status in a nation. Lan and Scott both described how they felt like a citizen of the US even though they were not formally recognised in this way, as the US was the social, economic and political locality in which they contributed on a daily basis for seven years. For them, there was a disconnect between nation and citizen, where someone may be born in one country but feel more of a citizen of another. Lan’s and Scott’s experience also showed how citizenship is felt in different registers, both formal and informal (e.g. political, social, and emotional), and how different registers of citizenship and attachment were satisfied in different locations. In another example, I described how Emily felt that at an informal level, she was a citizen of Australia, having lived there for over a decade, but formally she was not recognised on visa forms as an Australian resident. This example demonstrated how government policy plays a crucial role in inculcating a sense of citizenly belonging that is emotionally experienced by individuals at a personal level (Kumar, 2000, p. 801). Thus, while there were opportunities for flexible citizenship described in this chapter, there are also complex emotional processes that mean that a person’s formal citizenship status does not always correspond neatly with their emotional attachments. Indeed, the examples in Sect. 6.3.2 showed that even when participants held dual citizenship status, they often felt in-between two national affiliations and identities rather than comfortably occupying both. This chapter has examined how participants negotiate different levels of belonging in relation to governmental practices and their own understandings of their everyday emotional practices and identities as migrants. Rather than transnational identities deterritorializing attachments, such that national affiliations become irrelevant (Appadurai, 1996), migrants’ transnational lives remain connected to the national, though these connections may become dispersed and reconfigured (Leitner & Ehrkamp, 2006). Participants’ displayed diverse orientations towards their citizenship projects, which included instances of appropriation of culture, ambivalence and resistance towards the site of home and belonging. Sometimes biological and emotional ties to their children were the rationale for their change

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in legal citizenship (Sharon wanted to have the same citizenship as her child who was born in Australia). Sometimes the change of citizenship occurred in resistance to political and cultural values in previous homelands that no longer matched their own values (e.g. Andy and Sharon described wanting to relinquish citizenship ties following elections or policy changes such as Brexit; Emir felt that the nation had betrayed him; Daniel resisted being positioned as a ‘migrant’ who it is assumed, has long term plans for residency and citizenship in the UK). Feelings of belonging and citizenship transformed across socio-cultural backgrounds and in parallel with migrant’s shifting life circumstances. Others wanted to accumulate citizenships as their migration pathways unfolded. Claiming legal membership did not mean that they necessarily emotionally felt a sense of belonging to a nationalist identity but gave them options for future mobility (Sophie, Chloe). A range of emotions were also expressed in relation to the construction of citizenly identities. Participants described feelings of loyalty and betrayal (Mateo, Lan and Andy), apprehension and guilt (Lan), risk (Andy), fear and resistance (Emir and Mateo), as well as pride, belonging and freedom (Sophie and Chloe) in relation to their various citizenships (both formal and informal). Participants’ loyalties shifted over time as their migration pathways unfolded and immigration contexts and their own identifications changed. As highlighted in the introduction to this chapter, I have chosen the phrase citizenly identities because it acknowledges the agency of participants in shaping their translocal and transnational memberships and identifications. In terms of formal ties to nations, participants in this research held at most, dual citizenship, though they may have had aspirations for more (e.g. Sophie and Chloe). However, this would not account for the multi-level processes that all participants were engaged in regardless of their formal citizenship status. For instance, Nilaya had connections to India, the US, Switzerland and Australia as well as to more local areas within those nations. Yet she was formally only defined as an Australian citizen, as she was required to give up her Indian citizenship when she migrated to Australia. Yuval-Davis (1999, p. 119) discusses how, in a globalised world, citizenship is a ‘multi-layered construct’ where one’s membership at a local, ethnic, national, state and or trans-state level is influenced by one’s ‘relationships and positionings’ within and across these layers. This gives weight to the need for an agency-centred approach to citizenship in addition to a state and rights based approach. Participants may be better described as practicing long-distance nationalism, sometimes in terms of political rights and dual citizenship, but always in terms of social membership and relationship maintenance across and within borders. In this sense, migrants may be better positioned as developing and sustaining translocal identities to particular places and people within nations. As James described, he had been ‘denationalised’ and had ‘a broader base of identity’ that was attached to people in disparate places across the globe, rather than necessarily anchored by a specific nation. For James, nation-states and national identities have lost their significance relative to translocal attachments and identities. Constructing and experiencing citizenly identities and belonging to home in different countries, is a multilayered and situational practice. Participants represented citizenship as a legal process devoid of meaning, as well as a legal document that had deeply-felt emotional consequences. Even people like Sharon, who deny emotional

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attachments to citizenship status, then show they have certain investments in its meanings. While the granting or withholding of citizenship has certain practical outcomes, it does not mean that emotions do not attach themselves to these outcomes. My aim is not to separate the emotional from the official and practical (like standing in lines at passport control) but to show how these work together in complex ways. The objective has been to show the complexity of the participants’ migrant experiences, the subtle shifts over time or in different places, and the strategic versus the emotional and essential desire to belong that reveals the complexities of people’s decisions, their hesitations and ambivalences in relation to national identification. All of the participants’ experiences related in this chapter have emotional content, even when feelings expressed are related to denial of emotion. Their stories point to how we subjectively experience ideas and practices of citizenship. After all, formal citizenship is a rubber-stamping of a very emotional process that relates to identity, belonging, acceptance and freedom of movement. To conclude, I return to the experience of James. He might be considered a national outsider in the countries in which he has lived, and he suggests national identifications are no longer as meaningful to him. Sometimes being displaced can mean finding one’s own place—and he has found that amongst a translocal network of friends stretching across several countries. This is a cosmopolitan kind of imagining, where he chooses to identify in other ways than just through national identities. And yet, somewhat ironically, after all this mobility, he still desires to eventually return ‘home’ to Australia to ‘put down roots’ and be physically closer to family. Participants’ translocal connections did not necessarily render the nation-state irrelevant but that postnational forms of citizenship were developed in addition to and intertwined with nationally connected identities. The riddle of global mobility is that we always desire both—mobility when we want it and stability and security when we need it.

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Part III

Stories

Chapter 7

Mobility Narratives and Shifting Identities

Abstract This chapter examines how people perform and revise, through personal stories, their multiple identities and social locations. Participants draw upon narrative resources to interpret and re-construct their experiences while also struggling against their embodied lives as something not fully of their own making. I show how people occupy a range of subject positions and identities, which are constituted through their narrative practices and the intersection of their different life contexts (home, work, leisure) and social and cultural locations (e.g. ethnicity, gender, class, nationality, professional and familial roles). A double layer of identity formation exists: (1) the recounting of experience and (2) reflection and recalibration of the experience, over time. Drawing upon three participant case studies, I examine narratives told in relation to whether they describe their multiple attachments and identities as chosen for themselves, ascribed to them by others, or as a combination of the two. The chapter uses the metaphor of ‘cicatrix’ to represent the ways that narrative practices are used to mediate and make sense of mobile lives. Keywords Migration · Identity · Narrative · Storytelling · Time · Space

7.1 Introduction: ‘Small Stories’ and ‘Preferred Selves’ While stories are like journeys because of the effects they have on our lives and our imaginations (moving us, transporting us), they are also frequently about journeys (Jackson, 2013, p. 48). The mobility of participants in this research has forced them from places of certainty and familiarity to spaces of contingency and strangeness, where their stories allow them to reflect upon and grapple with this uncertainty. I have used their stories, over the past five chapters, to trace their mobility pathways around the world. They related archetypal narratives of losing their way (when Seb and Jen’s respective fathers passed away); tactical maneuvers (as Lan and Chloe described subverting the immigration system to extend their stay); trials and tribulations (Lan’s escape from Vietnam as a refugee; Seb’s deportation back to Venezuela when he breached his visa); lucky breaks and serendipitous happenings (Sharon’s © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 R. Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3164-0_7

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eventual relocation to Australian instead of Zimbabwe, Andy’s unanticipated insurance cheque that allowed him to buy a one way ticket back to Australia); as well as stories of closure and reaffirmation (when Sharon, after years of feeling betwixt and between homes, finally felt a sense of belonging in her migration country). In all of these instances, storytelling provided them with pathways for restoring imbalances and perceived injustices, claiming agency, and performing ‘preferred selves’ (Riessman, 2002) in different situations and through multiple retellings. Memory is constructive, storying together a series of fleeting moments, sensory snapshots, thoughts and feelings. These recollections are based on our own experiences, which in turn are shaped by our knowledge, cultural perspectives, mood, social context and our language (Loveday, 2014). Because context and knowledge change over time, so too can the memories of an event. Narrative has multiple uses: it is often a mode of inquiry or method, it can be viewed as a theory for looking at an aspect of the human condition (e.g. cognition or identity), and it is also a practice whereby people develop and live with narratives in their everyday lives (Freeman, 2015, p. 22). Narratives are viewed as a means of expressing identity, where the stories we tell shape who we are (Bruner, 1994, p. 53). Following the ‘narrative turn’ in the 1990s (Bruner, 1990), or ‘turns’ (see Hyvärinen, 2010), attention to narrative as a field of inquiry has continued to grow. Narrative based studies of identity are interdisciplinary (e.g. from psychology, linguistics, anthropology, cultural studies and history among many others), each with different traditions and methodologies (De Fina, 2015). There is, however, consensus that identities are not fixed or inherent characteristics ‘but emerge through semiotic processes in which people construct images of themselves and others’ (De Fina, 2015, p. 351). What is emphasised here is the self as plural and polyphonic, where contradictory identities can coexist within the same person and change over time in different contexts, as the self is worked with and revised through social interaction (De Fina, Schiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006; Giddens, 1991; Hall, 1996). My use of narrative draws on the understanding that it is fundamental to the ways people constitute themselves in interaction with others (Bruner, 2002; Crichton & Koch, 2011). We use narrative to make sense of ourselves through time (Ricoeur, 1984, 1991) and enact multiple identities that are ‘situated’, ‘accomplished with audience in mind’ (Riessman, 2003, p. 7) and are continually shifting and evolving (Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001, p. 8; Lemke, 2008). In addition, our stories are never able to be completed, but continually shot through with the voices of others (Bakhtin, 1981), the interpretations of a myriad of listeners and our own continual reformation of our experiences. Identities are dialogical in that they are both a reflection and construction of the individual and the collective and in an ongoing state of ‘becoming’, in which processes of ‘identity construction, authorization and contestation take place’ (Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 16). I began interviewing in 2010 and with most participants, had ongoing conversations with them, sometimes yearly up to 2017. This provided a unique opportunity to listen to how their stories changed over time, what new stories were told and preferred

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selves were enacted. Georgakopoulou (2006) makes the distinction between ‘big’ and ‘small stories’. Big stories are those that describe ‘life determining (or threatening) episodes’ where speakers are asked to bring these episodes together into a life story that is usually long, teller-led and relatively uninterrupted. By contrast, small stories are relatively short and constructed through interaction. They do not represent a whole life but are the kinds of stories we tell in everyday settings as well as in research interviews. They are stories that reflect on mundane, ordinary experiences, ‘that seem to pop up, not necessarily even recognized as stories, and quickly forgotten’ (Bamberg, 2006, p. 63). Small stories research emphasizes plurality, identities-in-interaction, fragmentation, context-specificity and performativity (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012). People ‘do not “reveal” an essential self as much as they perform a preferred self, selected from the mulitiplicity of selves or persona that individuals switch between as they go about their lives’ (Riessman, 2002, p. 701). As Goffman (1969) suggests, people perform desirable selves in order to preserve ‘face’ in challenging situations and manage ‘spoiled’ identities. This chapter examines how people perform and revise, through personal stories, their multiple identities and social locations. Participants draw upon narrative resources to interpret and re-construct their experiences while also struggling against their embodied lives as something not fully of their own making. I show how people occupy a range of subject positions and identities, which are constituted through the intersection of their different life contexts (home, family and work, local, national, transnational scales) and social and cultural positionalities (e.g. ethnicity, gender, socio-economic standing, nation, profession, familial roles). Not only do their stories describe physical events, actions and motivations but these experiences have also been partly constituted and produced through narrative recollections and representational practices. In this chapter, I examine a double layer of identity formation: (1) the recounting of experience in the present and (2) the continual reflection, retellings and re-using of the past, over time. The research participants formed a socially, culturally and linguistically diverse group of highly mobile settlers whose identities were ‘multi-layered’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘changing’ (Braidotti, 2002, p. 2) and whose identities were often formed in the spaces between categories—between here-there, foreign-familiar, skilled-unskilled, temporary-permanent and self-other (acknowledging that none of these terms are bounded). Some participants felt free to evoke particular identities in different situations, while others found that identities—which they had spent their entire lives constructing up to that point—were not available to them post-migration. Taking an interactionally (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012) oriented approach, this chapter is concerned with the ways these mobile settlers use narrative practices to claim, reaffirm and contest specific identities in dialogue with me, as the interviewer, with the people who were present in the events they were describing, and other implied audiences. Participants’ stories are not necessarily ‘coherent wholes’ or ‘wholly true’ (Gardner, 1999, p. 65), though they are true to them at the time of the telling, but function as myths or partial fictions, which are used to rework their realities—‘what

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is forgotten [or I would add, put aside] may be as important as what is remembered (Gardner, 1999, p. 65). As Jackson (2013, p. 14) suggests in his analysis of the politics of storytelling, people learn to ‘select, censor, and misrepresent’ their realities in order to ‘escape from terror, to cross a border, to be selected for emigration, to avoid racist insults…’. In this way, stories become defence mechanisms—cover stories told to transform and reconfigure experience as a form of protection, of healing, and of re-calibration. Reflecting upon the stories they tell, I develop the metaphor of ‘cicatrix’ to represent the effects of mobility on migrant identities and the role of storytelling in mediating and symbolically altering their relations, in the face of powers that render them inactive/silent and as having singular, monolithic identities. Their representations of leaving, arriving, loss and gain, home and away, foreign and familiar, locations and dislocations, become marks on the ‘skin’ of the mind. Derived from Latin, a cicatrix refers to a mark or impression resembling a scar of a healed wound (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2002, p. 409). In English, scarring is often perceived negatively as the lasting effect of a negative experience. To be scarred implies a trauma with which the self may struggle to come to terms. But scarring, or cicatrices, can also be seen as a process of healing and joining of different parts as new ‘tissue’, where new ways of being grow together over a recovering wound or dislocation. A scar also implies that something remains—it is never erased even though its meaning and significance may change over time. Mobility and its consequences, or cicatrices, are rarely neat, and there is always a mark left by the process of healing to remind us of our past and what it represents. Like a palimpsest, people’s stories, through successive tellings, bear traces of earlier stories, perspectives and experiences. Though the preferred self and the story may be re-cast over time, it always brings with it reverberations from the past. It is a narrated history of ourselves etched onto our very being, not cut away from oneself but a part of oneself. This perspective on the role of storytelling in migrant lives is explored in relation to what the stories are, how they are told and how they might shift over time. I begin by discussing the currency attributed to storytelling, as described by participants. I then analyse the identity projects of three participants (Emily, Amar, and Sharon) who, through narrative practices, represent a range of positions in relation to chosen, ascribed and resisted identities. These examples demonstrate that while these participants display some agency in shaping their social worlds, they also operate in a world that is regulated by a range of socio-structural arrangements that enable and constrain possibilities for belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Their narratives continually provide conduits between the personal and the public, the individual and the social (Radstone, 2008). I have chosen to focus on a small number of participants so that their experiences and stories can be interpreted within the rich contexts of their overall migration pathways, everyday lives and social locations. I conclude this chapter by returning to the metaphor of ‘cicatrices’ as a way of thinking through the storying of translocal practices and identity in contemporary society as a process of scarring, joining and healing, remembering and forgetting, covering and revealing.

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7.2 The Currency of Story-Telling While language may seek closure and unambiguous meaning, it is also polysemic and open to multiple interpretations as time passes and the contexts of interpretation between the teller and the receiver continue to change (Pellauer & Dauenhauer, 2016). The production of meaning through language is, as a consequence, continually transforming in response to the historical nature of discourse and subjects. While each of us have our own identity, it is bound up with the lives of other people—where ‘the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other’ (Ricoeur, 1960, p. 138). Literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, pp. 176–179) proposes that one’s inner dialogue with oneself and outer dialogue with the ‘other’ are inseparable; they intersect, interrupt and support one another. People ‘give themselves shape’ in relation to others. Thus a word is always the territory of both addresser and addressee (Volosinov, 1973, p. 86). All stories are told with the tellers’ intention to insert themselves in some way, into their relations, positions and dialogues with other people. Participants’ stories were often interlaced/shot through with references to other texts and voices. Although, unlike Bakhtin’s perspective, they are not only subject to the voices of others but simultaneously have their own agency in articulating their identities and enacting ‘preferred selves’ (Riessman, 2002). The proliferation of travel and migration literature over the past few decades signals something about the increasing normality of global experiences of displacement, as well as the role of the medium (writing) in processing such foreignness. Migrant writing is saturated with reflections on arrivals, departures, returns, homecomings, homelessness, journeys, exile and the paradoxes of migration experiences. In this study there were numerous times when participants’ responses were intersubjectively woven in with the prose of other writers. For example James, a participant who was born in Scotland, grew up in Australia, went to University in the US and worked in Australia for a decade before working in Japan and Macau for many years, referred to Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Death of a Hired Man’ to convey his feelings about homecoming. Similar to the poem, he was trying to decide whether to retire where he had spent thirteen years of his life (Japan) or return to Australia where he no longer had strong connections to family or friends. He referred to E. M. Forster when discussing his hierarchy of belonging suggesting he would rather betray the nation than a friend. He also referred to Robert Frost’s description of home. I guess the closest definition is one I can borrow from Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Australia fits that more than any other place. There is an imperative to belonging, which is satisfied here. (James)

Each of these literary references works as a dialogic form of sense-making, opening up new meanings and interpretations of experiences by drawing upon the voices and perspectives of others. It also gives stories an added authority in the same way academic research draws upon theoretical perspectives. Not only did participants tell stories about their experiences but they also consciously acknowledged and reflected upon the significance of storytelling in their

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everyday lives, as a means to actively re-work their experiences in conversation with others, both real and imagined. I did not explicitly ask participants about the role of storytelling in their lives but the following statements were provided by them either during the course of the interview or afterwards when, after reflecting upon our discussion, they voluntarily emailed me to add further information. I definitely use my stories to express my identity, and preserve my history (Eva). I think story is important, because it allows you to compare your experiences, your wants, and your crises with integrating. (Heikki) I think stories make the unfamiliar more familiar. A lot of stories come from the transitional time when everything was new, and what that was like. I think, at that time, stories helped to take the pain out of it, of being in this place and everything being so foreign. I would try to make a funny story out of an embarrassing situation where I showed my lack of understanding of the new cultural context I was in. (Jen) Story is important. I tell a lot of stories, it helps to make people understand me. I also used them to justify my migration, often telling negative stories about my life in a previous country. (Scott) I feel that the hundreds of personal narratives we build (whether we know we are doing this or not) are very close to our sense of self and try to describe our place in the world. I am not sure that a migrant has to visualise more self-stories than someone who is monocultural, but he or she certainly has to write different ones. It is common to tell stories about places you have lived because they are part of you… Without your narratives of self, there can be no idea of identity or belonging. (James)

In the first comment, Eva refers to her stories as ‘my stories’, recognising that she has a reserve related to different aspects of her life that she can draw upon, when required, as a tool for reinforcing particular identities in the present by remembering her past and retrospectively justifying and making sense of the decisions she has made. Stories become an important form of symbolic capital. Other comments reinforce this sentiment, whereby story provides a strategy for working through ‘crises in integrating’ and ‘transitional time’ and making the ‘unfamiliar more familiar’. Such stories serve the purpose of partially domesticating the foreign. James consciously articulates why stories matter—they are part of you, they are born out of one’s connections to place and people, they describe and produce our identities and locate us in the world. Importantly, he also indicates that while everyone tells stories, even if they never leave home, increased mobility in contemporary society has necessitated the need for migrants to have more stories of self in order to make sense of contingent lives, multiple attachments and frequent experiences of departure and arrival. Lastly, Scott’s assertion that he often tells negative stories about homes in previous countries also signals the power of story in allowing him to live in the present, with the way things are, by framing the past negatively. Scott is ‘better off’ having moved and even if he does not always feel this way, it is what he tells himself and me. Perhaps it is a story to convince himself as much as anyone else. He certainly contradicts himself when he reminisces about life in his country of origin later in our interview. He admits he felt regret about moving as a child from the UK to Australia. His parents had ‘demonised’ the UK and painted Australia in a very favourable light—a practice he now appears to engage in as an adult. Reflecting on the government housing where they lived when his family migrated to Australia he said:

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We divided the room I shared with my sister with a sheet strung across the room in an attempt to give us privacy. I hated where we lived and became ashamed of it, it was embarrassing to bring people home, and I hardly ever did. When I was 15 and my sister was 19 we moved into a housing trust property. I hated this too, it seemed just another stamp of my family’s inability to provide for themselves. I wished my parents had put their efforts into making life work for us in the UK rather than thinking migration was the magic bullet to fix our woes. (Scott)

Storytelling was also used in collective contexts to co-construct narrative recollections. Participants spent time with people who had experienced the same events in order to share stories about what happened, filling in the gaps in one another’s often selective and fragmented recollections. Emir, for example, who came to Australia from Bosnia as a humanitarian entrant, described seeking familiarity and comfort in Australia by regularly connecting with people from his hometown who had also migrated and could connect with his understandings of home. He said it helped him to remember and remain connected to his past: There are some Bosnian families here, they lived here since 1995 and the father and son came straight from a camp, the mother came later. So they are from the same town, same place that we are, where I am and my family, so I knew them. When I was a kid my very good friend was their older son who died, he was killed in conflict…so from time to time, at least once per month I went to their house and I’m enjoying foods from their mum because she reminds me of my mum and we talk a lot. Because we have something in common, we can recognise now that we know common people who lived there before. So that’s my place and my way of memorising it through talking, and trying not to forget the names of the hills, the properties, where my grandfather was neighbouring their property. Sometimes talking about such a topic, it’s about war, it’s about moving from a place, it is hard but it’s also part of memorising something not to forget, just not to forget people or my places. (Emir)

Memory narratives exist in the space between forgetting and the imagination (Dosse & Goldenstein, 2013). For Emir it is important to be around people who share the same language, who have a connection to the same places and familiar people and have shared similar experiences of the war. Engaging in conversations with people about the past so one does not ‘forget’ was also raised by Lan (who was born in Vietnam and relocated to Australia as a refugee before moving to the US for work). She said that participating in the research interview provided ‘important reflective time’ and prompted conversations she had not previously had with her family to try and recall and memorise her history. Such reflectivity is integral to her narrative identity formation. She said she is ‘scared [this memory] will be lost’ and that she ‘feel[s] anxious that with time [her] memory of the stories will fade’. Lan asked for six months to write and re-write the narrative she provided (in Chap. 3), which described her escape from Vietnam with her father, by boat. The narrative, she said, was based on repeated conversations with her family. I wished I had seen the different versions of this story as she was writing it, but it was important to her that I saw the polished piece. In this sense, it was a significant identity making process. One of the functions of narrative is that it allows one to restore memories in particular and sometimes selective, ways. Remembering previous homes and feelings of belonging is important to participants and they fear that without these narratives, they will lose connection with their past and with themselves. As James said above,

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there is a need to tell stories about the places where you’ve lived ‘because they are part of you’. In this sense, stories are not just retrospective tales but occur in the thick of experience—they are always part of the production of our social, cultural and political worlds in the present (Bruner, 1991; Gergen & Gergen, 1988). Telling stories about former home/s is an act through which people can imaginatively re-visit past connections and memorise the places, people and activities that connect them to some semblance of the familiar. The examples in this section demonstrate participants’ conscious recognition of the need for storytelling in their lives. They view storytelling as a practice and process that provides the possibility of transforming experience. Their stories are deliberately interlaced with the voices of others to give added authority and explanatory power. Their stories also help them work through transitional times, preserve memories and reconnect with the familiar by remembering and narrating events with people who had similar experiences. In the next section, I examine the identity narratives of three participants (Emily, Amar and Sharon) who represent a range of positions in relation to chosen, ascribed and resisted identities. These examples demonstrate that while these participants use stories to exert a degree of agency in shaping their social worlds, they also operate within complex socio-structural contexts, where representations from other people are continually placed upon them.

7.3 Active Stories 7.3.1 Emily: ‘I’m Black, Not Deaf, So You Don’t Need to Shout’ Identities are narratives that we tell about ourselves and others to claim who we are and who we are not, and such stories are always dynamic, subject to change and reinterpretation (Hall, 1996; Yuval-Davis, 2011). Stories, as a mode of action, reveal knowledge about our unique personal identities as well as our connections to others (individuals, communities, nations) and the environmental/contextual forces surrounding us (Arendt, 1958; Jackson, 2013). Arendt (1958) describes this as the ‘subjective-in-between’—how our existence is shaped through interaction, dialogue and the perspectives of others. Stories enable us to ‘live with ourselves as well as live with others’ (Jackson, 2013, p. 16, 35) so that even if we don’t wholly determine the trajectories of our lives, we have a role in defining their meaning. Emily and her husband relocated from Zimbabwe to Australia so that he could undertake postgraduate study. They had a child soon after their arrival and while their original intention was to stay for four years, she has now lived in Australia for over a decade. Emily arrived in Australia on a spousal visa. After separating from her husband she moved onto a temporary labour visa for many years before gaining Permanent Residency status and more recently, Australian citizenship. Emily worked in the health care sector for several years before undertaking postgraduate study in the

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social sciences. During our interview she draws upon different identity categories to claim and perform identities and create or resist insider-outsider boundaries (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998, p. 2). In the following excerpts, Emily portrays identity as a highly situational project that is often dependent upon how she is being positioned by others. She was born in a colonised society in Zimbabwe, educated under the Cambridge system and follows a Christian faith, yet because of her skin colour she is still seen as ‘other’ in the Australian context. However, she is seen as ‘other’ only in particular situations, which makes her skin colour either relevant or irrelevant. She says that when she is at her university in Australia, she is seen as a PhD student, which gives her a particular status and ‘puts [her] in a particular box’. At university, she is known as ‘Emily, the PhD student or Emily the tutor’ and so she feels ‘at home’, ‘comfortable’ and ‘on par with everyone else’: There are times when I draw on my academic identity when I think my intellect is being questioned because I’m African, you know, I’m an African woman. The parts of my identity that I draw on, they do change. (Emily)

For Emily, class and education form significant intersections with racialised identity and when she ‘steps outside’ into her local community, she feels she cannot go anywhere without ‘experiencing all these issues of race’. Emily argues that she feels more Australian when others question her Australian identity. She takes a defensive position: The times I identify as really being Australian is when I’m actually being defensive, about someone who’s trying to tell me that I’m not. I draw more on my Australian identity when it’s being questioned. (Emily)

During the interview, Emily often described herself as a ‘black-African-woman’, evoking a racialised identity that white participants felt was unnecessary (acknowledging that white is a socially constructed and complex category in itself). Whiteness is rarely viewed as a racialised subject position by people who are in this category (Dyer, 1997). Instead, it is a norm against which difference is constructed. Yet people of ‘colour’ often cannot escape the experience of being an embodied subject where ‘hegemonic discourses of gender and race’ continually reinforce the centrality of the body (Weedon, 2004, pp. 14–17). Emily claims an identity for herself as a ‘blackAfrican-woman’ that she simultaneously tries to resist. While choice does play a role in identity construction, people are not entirely free to reflexively recreate their identities. Describing herself as a ‘black-African-woman’, she is acutely aware of the inescapable embodied aspects of her identity. Emily explains that she can call herself a ‘black-African-woman’ but does not appreciate being called ‘black’ or ‘African’ by other people. She also identifies more as Zimbabwean because ‘African is so vague, it’s so diverse’. Mohanty (2003, p. 17) argues that Western feminism has constructed the ‘third world’ woman as a ‘singular, monolithic subject’ rather than taking account of the diversity of their social, economic and cultural contexts. In addition, a ‘black-African-woman’ is not a hybrid identity that assumes the intersection of separate, bounded and homogenous identities. Each category is always/already hybrid and fractured along lines of class,

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gender, age, nationality, etc. (Barker & Galasinski, 2001, p. 159; Bhabha, 1994). The temporary combination of different elements of identity creates a perceived unity that under alternative historical and cultural circumstances could be articulated in different ways. Hall (2003, p. 91) has described the ways in which the culturally and politically constructed category of ‘black’, became a unifying framework that homogenises identities and erases ethnic and cultural differences between different communities, rather than recognising the ‘diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category “black”’. While Emily said that she identifies more as a Shona (traditional Zimbabwean religious identity) woman, she also identifies as an African woman in her ‘everyday contexts, [her] everyday talk’ because, she suggests, it is often easier to take the identity that is being ascribed to her rather than continually fight embedded stereotypes. As such, identity is inextricably intertwined with structures of power, which regulate the self and enable particular kinds of knowledge and identities to surface while others are refuted. Through experiences of migration and differential power relations within different contexts, the capacity for individuals to claim complex identities for themselves is often eroded. Paradoxically, migration simultaneously increases the complexity of identities (through the development of translocal connections) whilst also denying this complexity for some people (when simplistic and reductive identities are ascribed to someone even when they don’t correspond with how they see themselves). While Emily says that she used to resist being called African, at a certain level she now accepts this label but continues to resist being called black: I can call myself black but no one else can call me that. If someone says ‘Oh’, you know, ‘I like black girls’ I’m like ‘yeah, well I don’t know what that is but I’m not black, I’m brown, if you need to colour me, otherwise call me African’… But now I think I draw more on that identity, which I used to contest so much, but that’s the identity I draw on because people don’t really know one African from another. I am thinking it might be a losing battle but in everyday discourses it’s not worth it. I’m trying to fight them and I’d rather have that than be called black. So that’s the identity I think that I’ve drawn on a lot and it’s a bit obscure because it encompasses a lot, it’s quite diverse. (Emily)

Such stereotypes both enable and constrain linguistic identity construction. Here we see the relationality of Emily’s identity narratives in terms of not only claiming particular attributions but also defining herself in terms of her rejection of some attributions. Faced with both attributions (black and African), she also makes decisions about which one she feels is more important to resist. Meaning-making is a two-sided relationship between speakers and listeners and Emily does describe instances where she speaks back to particular constructions of her identity that are ascribed to her by others but she ‘picks her moments’ to resist such discourses because as she says, it is often ‘not worth it’. Anthias (2002, p. 499) has described how narratives of location are often narratives of dislocation that are framed more in terms of denial ‘through a rejection of what one is not rather than a clear and unambiguous formulation of what one is’. Emily says that she ‘hates the word black’ but she cannot help but ‘keep using

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it’, even when she resists these discourses and is herself ‘othered’ by such ways of speaking (Spivak, 1988). Such discourses, regulated by power, structure who can speak and what one says, when and where. The discourses Emily uses perform the dual function of interpreting and positioning herself in relation to broader social structures but such stereotyped identity categories also pervade her own discourses, which she tries to resist. The ‘word in language is [always] half someone else’s’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293), ‘overpopulated’ with the intentions of others (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 273). The very discourses one resists are often accidently and involuntarily used to characterise oneself—sometimes because short hand is easier but also because there is no language to do otherwise. There also exists a dialogical positionality in Emily’s expressions of her social position and the agency she exerts. She recognises a kaleidoscope of intersecting layers of voices and identities, which intersect in different ways that she might choose or resist depending on the setting (e.g. African, intellectual, Australian, woman, mother, academic, Shona, Zimbabwean, black). She states: I straddle two worlds, every single day I go back and forth between these boundaries. I take on different personas depending on the situation that I’m in. So it’s not a physical sort of change or crossing borders physically, but it is a crossing of borders on that sort of cultural level if you want. (Emily)

Drawing upon the work of Appadurai (1995), Conradson and McKay (2007, p. 168) employ the phrase ‘translocal subjectivities’ to describe the way migrant subjects are multiply located with grounded attachments to family, friends and places around the world. Similarly, Anthias (2001, p. 634) utilises the term ‘translocational’ to describe the complex matrix of positionality experienced by those who are ‘at the interplay of a range of locations and dislocations in relation to gender, ethnicity, national belonging, class and racialisation’. Notions of home, community and identity have been reconfigured through processes of globalisation and increasing mobilities, opening up new registers of identification and attachment across time and space. For example, Emily described being Zimbabwean as different, depending on whether she was located in Australia, in her homeland, with her family or friends, at her local church, or at her workplace. Her experiences highlight how migrants often negotiate concurrent processes of belonging and non-belonging in their everyday lives (Gilmartin & Migge, 2016, p. 158; Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 200). She feels she belongs at home in her house in Adelaide, in her local church and at university but often does not feel she belongs in public spaces like shopping centres or at her work place. As Yuval-Davis (2011, p. 12) suggests, people can belong ‘in many different ways and to many different objects of attachment’ from individuals, to groups, in concrete and abstract forms, from self-ascriptions to those of others and such forms of belonging might be relatively stable, contested or fleeting. Emily also discussed how experiences of racism have become ‘part of [her] everyday existence’. Two examples are illuminating. In the first narrative below, Emily describes working at a healthcare organisation in Australia where a customer refuses to be served by her because of her skin colour and in the second narrative, she

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describes being spoken to slowly and loudly by nursing staff at a local hospital who assumed she could not understand English. I include both narratives in full because there is a temporal connection between them, as well as dialogic shifts occurring within them that would be lost if paraphrased (i.e. speech to other/speech to self). Narrative 1: There’s moments, like when I worked for a company in Customer Service, and I had a customer who refused to get served by me because they said “Well, get me somebody who speaks English” and I said “Well I speak English” and he goes “No, I want someone, I want an Australian”, and I said “Well I am Australian. I mean you don’t know who I am, you can’t just come in and say ‘Look, I don’t want to be served by you’”, and he said “Well I’m not going to talk to you. I need to speak to someone who speaks Australian”, and I’m like “But how are you communicating with me right now? I do speak Australian. I mean I do speak English. It might not be Australian but I do speak English”, so I remember I went to the toilet and I cried and cried and cried… It will be a decade next year that I’ve been in Australia, and it just seems very unfair for someone to judge me just because of the colour of my skin.

Narrative 2: Sometimes I really feel like “Why did I come to Australia?”. I could have gone to a place like America where they have a longer history of blacks living there. I hate the word black but I keep using it. In 2005, I had to go into hospital for an operation. I’d had my daughter in 2001 at the same hospital and I’d worked for a private healthcare fund so I knew how it works in terms of the healthcare system and claims. So when I went to hospital I go into the front desk to check in and the woman there, I just go there and I said “Hi”, you know, “my name is Emily, I’m here for an operation with Dr …”, and she looks up and goes “Hello, how are you today” [said very loudly and slowly], and I look at her and I’m going “What is wrong with you?” (laughs). So anyway my sister is standing next to me, so I thought “OK, we’re used to this, we can handle this”, so I said to her “Hi, I’m good” and I tried to make conversation to get her to see that OK, you have this image of this person that you have in your mind is African who cannot, would need that sort of attention. She goes “Do you know what you need to do?” [slow and loud voice again] and I said “Yeah, well I mean I’ve been here before, I had my daughter like five years ago in this hospital, so I’m pretty familiar with the hospital” and dah, dah, dah, so I tell her my doctor has explained to me what’s going to happen, “All I need really is for you to tell me where I should be going”, and she goes “Do you know what you should be doing?” and I’m like “I just explained to you what I should be doing”. So you see, getting in my car and coming straight to uni then, that’s OK, or getting in my car and going to my daughter’s school because people know us there, that’s OK, or getting in my car and going to church, people know me there, so there are comfort areas that I have, those are OK, but the minute you step out of those comfort areas it just makes you feel like “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Part of me goes, “You’ve been here for ten years, you’ve already invested nine years of your life in this country so you might as well stay”, but then there’s moments that I think “Why did I stay that long? Why did I put up with that for nine years?” The other thing is now I’m also a bit assertive as well. I’m just realising, “No, I’m not going to take this lying down”, “You can’t put me in this box and let me stay here without actually knowing who I am”. So now if someone says that to me I can actually say to them “Excuse me, I’m black not deaf, so you don’t need to shout”.

These two narratives of location tell a story about Emily’s practices, the practices of other people (in these two examples) and wider social practices within the sociocultural context in which she is living. Bakhtin (1986) and Ricoeur (1984) have described how a speaker’s utterance and discourse is never removed from its context

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but shaped by the cultures and societies in which they participate. Even when dialogue takes place only with oneself, it occurs when we ‘imagine a space in which different speaking participants are positioned toward each other’ (Hermans, 2004, p. 302). This was often demonstrated in interviews with participants who would ask rhetorical questions like ‘I often ask myself’ (Eva) and ‘I try to convince myself that this is home but it doesn’t last’ (Sharon). Different positions are continually enacted and evaluated by participants in their ongoing dialogue in relation to me, the interviewer, others outside the interview and themselves. In the second narrative in particular, Emily’s language signifies a similar ‘heteroglossic’ and reflective process. For example, she uses ‘self talk’ such as ‘we’re used to this, we can handle this’, ‘it makes you feel like I don’t want to do it’, ‘why did I stay that long?’ and ‘you can’t put me in this box…’. Such statements are not necessarily directed at the person present in the situation she is describing, or to me as the interviewer, but signal broader questions she is grappling with in relation to a perceived audience who might position her in a particular way. She is practising her position and defence every time she tells this story. Participants’ experiences of migration and heightened mobility only intensify such ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin, 1981) as a result of their negotiation of a diversity of perspectives in different cultural contexts. Such conditions confront and extend their dialogical practices and capacities to self-position and navigate their complex social worlds. Emily also makes sense of her identity through ‘emplotment’ in time. She switches between the past and the present by describing the events that took place in the hospital, the period of time that has passed since the event (ten years) and the current situation in which she is performing her identity and, through her reflections, deciding what her response to a situation like this will be in the future (e.g. ‘now I’m also a bit assertive’ and ‘now if someone says that to me’). As Ricoeur (1984–1988) argues, we experience time not just as a linear succession of passing hours and days but also as phenomenological time, experienced in terms of the past, present and future. Here, Emily understands herself in reference to what has been, what is now and what will be in the future. As time passes, between the event and each re-telling, the circumstances are also changing, giving rise to new experiences and opportunities for reflection. In these two narratives of location, Emily also uses story to describe the ways she has been positioned in relation to different social categories (e.g. nationality, ethnicity, gender) in specific places and times (i.e. at work soon after her arrival in Australia, and in a hospital after being in Australia for nearly a decade). In the first narrative, she describes feeling a sense of powerlessness in the face of the ascriptions of others and her response was to go into the bathroom and cry. In the second narrative, she asserts more confidence in speaking back to how she was perceived. As stated, this is not so much speaking back to the person who was specifically addressing her in that situation (e.g. hospital staff) but of resisting the process of othering and the way she is being positioned. There appears to be different tactics for withstanding othering and re-instating her sense of self. In the second narrative, Emily speaks from a more empowered position. It is not that she denies ‘otherness’ but accepts that it has become part of her ‘daily life’ and so carefully chooses particular moments to take a stand and

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position herself. Her initial reaction is to un-other herself (e.g. ‘I am Australian’, ‘I do speak Australian’) but in the second narrative she appears to have reached a level of acceptance in how other people perceive her (‘we’re used to this, we can handle this’). This acceptance comes over time, as Emily becomes used to being perceived as different and as this level of perceived difference becomes a normalised experience. It is also worth noting that she conflates ‘Australian’ with an English and Anglo-Celtic mainstream position rather than a multicultural view of what it means to be Australian. The politics of belonging, as Yuval-Davis (2006) has described, is concerned with the boundaries that separate people into ‘us’ and ‘them’. In Emily’s narrative, the imagined community of ‘Australia’, as represented by the man in her story, did not include her, and she was thus constructed as outside of the imaginary boundary of the nation (i.e. where ‘us’ is constructed as homogenous and white and ‘them’ as diverse and non-white). Indeed, one of the critiques of Australian multiculturalism is that mainstream Australians have come to view multiculturalism as a concession made by them to immigrant minorities. And furthermore, Indigenous peoples are sometimes included in this national framing and sometimes absent (Dunn, Kamp, Shaw, Forrest, & Paradies, 2010). Narrative identities are entwined with constructions of the embodied subject in specific contexts. Even as a highly educated and articulate woman, the signification of Emily’s skin colour meant that hospital staff and the customer she served refused to ‘hear’ that she could speak English (even though, ironically, she has a distinctive formal English accent through her schooling in Zimbabwe, and most likely sounded more ‘British’ than the ‘Anglo-Australian’ who refused to be served by her). Subsequently, she was positioned as outside the dominant national ideology of who belongs in Australia and who does not. While the profile, by nationality, of the highest number of visa ‘overstayers’ in Australia has shifted in recent years to include those from Malaysia, China and the US (DIBP, 2016), traditionally the largest number have come from the US and the UK. As a 2007 report noted, the percentage of illegal immigrants in recent times are largely ‘white’ British migrants who have outstayed their visas (DIAC, 2007). However, they are never the focus of media attention because their ethnicity renders them invisible. While some migrants are praised for their social, cultural and economic contributions to society, others are seen as a drain on a nation’s resources and a threat to national identity. Furthermore, the ‘skilled migrant’ as an analytic category has its own internal stratifications. Some skilled migrants move quickly through visas statuses toward permanency whilst others live in limbo, for up to ten years, as temporary labour migrants (Mares, 2016). This raises fundamental questions about who we think of when we use the term skilled migrant and which bodies are visible, invisible and why. As a skilled migrant, Emily is rendered invisible, yet she is made visible through her skin colour as someone assumed to not speak English and most likely to be perceived as unskilled and uneducated. She remarks: Everyone I speak to, I have to let them know that I’m a skilled migrant if they start questioning my identity. You see a Zimbabwean and they’re most likely a skilled migrant, but you have all these ideas about Africans, but we are actually contributing to the Australian economy. So if I had to write who I am, like part of my identity, in the Australian context that is, I’d refer to myself as African, a skilled migrant, cross-cultural being I suppose. (Emily)

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When they see you they expect that you cannot speak English, particularly with the African woman. I think the image of the African woman out there is the one who is uneducated, you know, oppressed and all that kind of stuff, so that’s the picture that you’re put into, even before you open your mouth. (Emily)

De Certeau (1984, pp. 115–116) argues that ‘every story is a travel story’ that can produce ‘geographies of action’. Narratives are fundamentally mobile because they allow for multiple possibilities in the telling and positioning of selves and they are particularly mobile because they travel with the storyteller and change over time. Through a process of consolidation, Emily has most likely reactivated, rethought and retold these stories over and over. While we may not remember the unremarkable or insignificant, we often hold onto the moments that shape us in fundamental ways. And with every retelling of these stories, Emily is reconstructing her memories in light of the current context and constantly changing knowledge base and perspectives. She is making sense of her past in the context of her present and using stories to represent the complexities of her experiences and identities in the face of ascriptions that seek to stereotype her.

7.3.2 Amar: ‘Somebody like Me with a Turban, with Skin Colour That’s Different… People Are Always Going to Assume Something About My Identity’ Participants reflexively narrate an understanding not only of who they feel they are, but also how they believe other people see them. Like Emily, Amar’s stories relate the ways that our everyday lives unravel in the fluid space between ourselves and others, ‘where our original intentions are often confounded and our assumed identities eclipsed’, forcing us to continually rethink who we are (Jackson, 2013, p. 18). Amar was born in Kenya, grew up in Canada and has lived and worked as an academic in the UK, US and Australia. He talked about the acceptance of ascribed identities over time. He says his turban constitutes ‘this great marker of identity’, even though he was not born in India and when he visits, India does not feel like home. Although he had no attachment to his identity as a Sikh, he draws on the work of Edward Said when stating that it is his ‘uniquely punishing destiny to be a Sikh’ and it has become a religious identity that he has come to accept more over time. While previously Amar would not have described himself as a religious person, ‘over time it’s become an important part of [his] persona.’ People continually define their identities in dialogue with characteristics that other people ascribe to them. Amar’s social and spatial mobility, based on particular skills and educational capital, does not necessarily erase the challenges associated with incorporation and acceptance in a different society. Favell, Feldblum, and Smith (2007, p. 17) have discussed how even though mobility has become a form of privileged capital, ‘not all other forms of capital are as mobile as elite status is supposed to guarantee’ and that ‘the real power of the global mobility myth stems from its individualist faith: the idea

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that the human capital of education can take you where you want to go, regardless of social structure or social reproduction’. Indeed, much of the literature on the skilled migrant experience does not account for the differentiated ways through which skilled migrants are included and excluded in new locations because of their gender, race, age, nationality or ethnicity. These discussions have generally been reserved for the study of unskilled migrants. For Amar and Emily, their human capital does not automatically remove them from experiences of discrimination or exclusion. Favell et al. (2007, p. 17) elaborate that those with human capital mobility are presumed to be able to live outside of society and yet be able to integrate in a new location whenever required, where integration, ‘would somehow escape the coercion of a sociological process, and become more of an à la carte set of individualistic choices’. Amar provides an example of someone whose imagined identity does not fit what is ascribed to him. He says that he will always have a hyphenated identity, whereas if you are ‘white and you come from a particular background’, you can actually ‘drop your identity at some point if you want to’ (Amar). He explains: …different people can always drop that identity, depending on where they’re from. Whereas somebody like me with a turban, with skin colour that’s different, I just can never do that…people are always going to assume something about my identity when I walk into a room. There’s no choice of ever dropping that identity in a way. It’s ascribed. Whatever way I choose to imagine my identity, it’s never going to match up because there’s always that question, ‘Where have you come from?’ (Amar)

He highlights that there are limits in the extent to which people can pick and choose within the construction of their identities. Giddens’ (1991) and Beck’s (2000) conceptions of reflexive modernity, which describe a world where individuals and their identity projects are free-floating and inundated with choice, is easier for some to realise than others. While processes of globalisation may have reconfigured or established new networks of attachment across space and time, people are also born into particular localised communities that are marked upon them (e.g. social, cultural, economic and political) and that constrain their ties and actions in particular ways. Shani (2011, p. 394) argues that ‘there are clear limits to the degree to which “thick” identities based on ethnicity, gender, language, nationality, relation and socio-economic status can be negotiated’. Amar’s hyper-mobility as a mobile-academic has opened up a plurality of social worlds, locations for attachment and potential identities, but there are limits to the extent to which he can choose such identities. In a form of everyday resistance, he describes how he takes pleasure in claiming a ‘world’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘decentered identity’ (Amar) which does not have a territorial sense of belonging and is not related to ethnic or nationalistic categories. He talks about identity being ascribed to him because of the way he looks, yet he believes that he personally transcends the idea of localised identities and chooses not to compartmentalise his identity as Sikh, African or Indian. He rejects, on the one hand, this sense of multiple/micro identities and replaces them with a more cosmopolitan/global/world identity. Narratively replacing localised identities related to race, ethnicity and nationality in favour of broader world, cosmopolitan and transnational identities becomes a personal form

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of resistance against those who position him in particular ways. Claiming a world identity works as a discursive and narrative tactic for manipulating Amar’s public sense of self. Amar, like Emily, also draws attention to the different layers of identity that shift through experiences of migration and mobility: When I get to Canada I’m called an East Indian. I didn’t even know what the term East Indian meant and then, I get to Australia and all of a sudden I’m an Indian. Here I am, in my imagination, well in every kind of sense, I felt like I was born in Africa, I have an African identity, and of course in Africa I was also seen as an Asian, so there’s all these kind of different layers of identity that operate. (Amar)

Particular identities (e.g. Indian, Asian, Sikh, male, skilled migrant) are more salient in some situations than in others, depending on the country in which he is located and his localised context (e.g. work or home). He also makes the point that he ‘cannot easily drop these identities’ when and if he wants to. Amar’s discussion highlights how identity is more than simply self-proclaimed. It is also regulated through different intersubjective contexts where he is mis/recognised as having a particular identity. His representations of his identities show that while ethnic identities may be accepted as social constructions, they come to be embodied in sedimentary ways and regulate our perception so that people cannot easily discard one self-description for another.

7.3.3 Sharon: ‘I like the Flexibility that These Different Personae Offer’ Sharon, of Anglo-Celtic background from the UK, moved to Australia with her husband and child over ten years ago. She works in journalism and public relations and has lived in several European countries before relocating to Australia for a ‘better lifestyle’. She discussed the freedom of having multiple identities, which give her the ability to pick and choose which ones to evoke at a particular moment. Sharon states: I have many identities. Sometimes I am Australian. Sometimes – though rarely these days – I am British. Almost always I am a journalist (that one is important to me). Sometimes I am a lecturer, a writer, a columnist or a businesswomen. Sometimes I am an Oxford woman. Sometimes I am an ‘Essex girl’. Always I am a mum and a wife. I’m also a daughter, cousin, friend, granddaughter. I like the flexibility that these different identities and personae offer. (Sharon)

Sharon recognises the multiple identities and memberships she can switch between. Transculturality is part of her individual everyday experience and here she invokes memberships that are national, professional, gendered and subcultural. Hall (1992, p. 277) views the self as composed of multiple shifting and often-contradictory identities, which can be assumed at ‘different times’ and are ‘not unified around a coherent ‘self”. However, unlike Emily and Amar , Sharon’s positionality as a white-

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educated-English woman allows for her to embody a multiplicity of identities in ways that they could not. Participants’ multiple identities are not constituted as a fixed form but as ‘as a weave’ of narrative accounts of the self (Barker & Galasinski, 2001, pp. 125–126). Through language, we do not describe who we ‘really are’ but use language as a tactic to manipulate what we consider to be more relevant descriptions of ourselves in particular contexts. Becoming Australian, British, a journalist, a mother, an ‘Essex girl’ or an ‘Oxford wife’ involves a constant process of transformation, whereby ‘fixed identities are relinquished in favour of a flux of multiple becoming’ (Braidotti, 1994, p. 111). As Sharon’s response above shows, identities are rarely constructed singularly through one category but are actively constructed along multiple axes of difference such as location, gender, class or profession that themselves exist in shifting hierarchies. Sharon’s example shows that some relatively bounded identities do persist (i.e. she still considers herself Australian, British, a journalist, a mother, a daughter etc.) and similarly, Emily’s example shows that her identity as ‘black’ will more-than-likely persist through time and space. A more nuanced position is therefore an even messier, more paradoxical one: that the self is a confluence of both relatively fixed identities persisting through time (though not all of them persist) and newer identities intermixing with them. There is no total relinquishing but rather mutability and ongoing re-construction and re-identification over time and space. Sharon said she feels relief when she is spending time with other migrants at her surf club. The common experience of being a migrant, of having multiple attachments, and of wanting to escape the pressure from ‘locals’ to say where she is from and where she ‘really belongs’, brings this culturally diverse group of people together: I feel most at home with my Pommy friends, when we get together, and with my swimming friends and rowing crew at the surf club. My surf rowing crew is made up of migrants: two Poms, one Dutchwoman, one Scot and one Australian with “Pommy” ancestry. When I hang out with my swimming and rowing buddies no-one cares who I am or where I’m from. They just take me for who I am in the water and whether I can swim or row. It is such a relief sometimes not to be anyone except a swimmer or a rower. (Sharon)

Sharon can claim many identities that other participants may not have the opportunity to claim because she does not have particular markers of difference that are identifiable in an Australian context. However, she is not exempt from feelings of not belonging. Even for those who have no visible markers of difference, there remains a desire to escape having to constantly self-define, pick and choose, and defend one’s position, beliefs, attachments and loyalties. Migration simultaneously produces more sites of attachment across time and increases the complexity of identities available whilst also denying (for some) this complexity, when ascriptions of identity attempt to render some people as having singular and monolithic identities. Yet others, like Sharon, who are able to claim multiple identities in a relatively uncomplicated way still find the plurality of identities, conflated through experiences of migration, wearing. Sometimes, it is a relief ‘not to be anyone except a swimmer’ (Sharon).

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7.4 Conclusion Migrant stories are manifold texts involving an entanglement of identities, voices, intersecting stories, networks of relationships and an infinite layering of time, histories and spaces that produce the multiplicity of the narratives told. Telling stories is never merely a form of expression but a complex interaction between self/other, speakers/listeners. Dialogicality is embedded in particular contexts and shapes what is voiced, what is heard and the extent to which socio-cultural locations and positions can be negotiated. I emphasise that the act of migration forces people to become highly articulate about ideas associated with identity, attachment and self in relation to others and place. It is by living in other parts of the world and re-inhabiting translocal memories through narrative practices, that the participants who informed this research came to know previous homes and selves more intimately. As they journey, their stories journey too. The challenges associated with reconciling multiple identities and attachments through experiences of migration have become a common theme in both academic research and literature. Maalouf (2000), for example, argues in his book In the Name of Identity, that identity cannot be compartmentalised. He writes: ‘You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. I haven’t got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in a mixture that is unique to me.’ Expressed slightly differently in her short story Salsicce [Sausages], Igiaba Scego (2005, p. 28) writes about a young Somali Muslim woman living in Rome, based partly on the author’s own experiences. The protagonist feels as if she is forced to choose one identity above others. She wonders: ‘Am I more Somali? Or Italian? Maybe ¾ Somali and ¼ Italian? Or vice versa? I cannot answer! I have never fractioned myself before… I think I am a woman with no identity. Or rather with many identities…’ While each of these authors has a slightly different perspective on identity, ultimately it may not matter whether we speak of identities as a singular multiplicity as Maalouf infers or as a multiple singularity as Scego represents, as long as the paradox and ambivalence of hybridity is maintained. As our experiences accumulate over time, more layers are added to our narrative identities. We are able to enact multiple ‘preferred’ selves over time and have the capacity to move between them in different contexts and for different audiences. However, as I have argued, migration on the one hand increases the complexity of translocal identifications that are available to us but on the other hand, denies this complexity for people who cannot easily discard or ‘throw off’ particular identities. Global mobilities cause both the proliferation and reduction of identities—free floating and inundated with choice for some and reductive and monolithic for others. Acknowledging this tension, I make three observations on the value of storytelling as restorative praxis. Storytelling is consciously recognized by mobile settlers as a resource used in their daily lives to restore order and familiarity for themselves in an increasingly fragmented and foreign world and to negotiate and speak back to identity ascriptions from others, that do not fit with their own perceptions of self.

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This chapter has shown how identity narratives are not just a statement of affiliations but stories about contradictory identities, relationships with other people and sense of place within these relations. They are narratives of action and by including the dimension of time, they are narratives of change, which provide a resource for the speaker to position themselves in the immediate conversation as well as within social discourses; evaluating, rehearsing and refining their positioning in relation to others and one’s self. The examples examined have highlighted some of the situational, temporal, relational and locational ways in which people construct their identities. Recognising that as their social contexts and knowledges change over time, so too do their stories. Emily, for example, did not just state she was a ‘black-African-woman’ but described the contested nature of such a label, which she both inhabits and resists. Through her stories, she seeks to regain some purchase over the events that occurred, revising the experience in order to claim a sense of control in defining and interpreting her ‘self’. She does not reflect on her social and cultural identities as static or singular but instead contests such bounded terms, complicating what they mean to her, revealing their permeable borders and showing how they intersect in complex ways in different contexts. These ascriptions of personhood also have different consequences depending on the context and her positioning in that context (at work her identity is questioned, at university it is not). From a Bakhtininan perspective, such cultural identities are heteroglossic, they are multivoiced productions resulting from participants’ reflections, evaluations, and enactments of multiple representations of selves and others, both here and now and there and then (Koven, 2015, p. 389). Emily and Amar’s social and spatial mobility, based on particular skills and educational capital, does not necessarily erase challenges associated with incorporation and acceptance in a different society. Indeed, much of the literature on the skilled migrant experience does not account for the differentiated ways through which skilled migrants are included and excluded in new locations due to their gender, race, age, nationality or ethnicity. These discussions have generally been reserved for the study of unskilled migrants. Their human capital does not automatically remove them from experiences of discrimination or exclusion. Emily’s stories, in particular, seek to redeem her from the control of stereotypes and prejudices, to restore her humanity, as a complex person with multiple and shifting identities, when recalling situations that rendered her ‘one-dimensional’ and ‘lacking volition’ (Grossman, 2008, p. 49, 51). Amar’s response to the ascriptions of others is to vocalise a broader global identity rather than complex micro-identities attached to religious or national affiliations. While they are both responding to the ways they have been positioned by others, this is enacted in different ways. The commonality inherent to both ways of negotiating their positionality is their use of narrative and language to re-claim agency in defining their sense of self. People may never transcend their social locations and the complexities of their positionality in various spaces, but they learn to understand these tensions as part of who they are. Cicatrix is a process of healing and becomes a metaphor for what participants are doing (their identity practices) and how they are doing it (storying).

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Stories aid the process of healing by reconnecting us with and often recalibrating how we think about past homes, selves, languages and practises. Their stories do not necessarily change the way they are perceived by other people but they reinforce their own positioning in the face of such ascriptions—claiming space for themselves and revising and moving between their different identities and orientations to the world. However, just like scarring, these stories, reveal as much as they cover, join as much as they mark a disjuncture. Participants’ narratives provide opportunities to both mourn and revise—and hence heal or repair—their relations to something lost or gained.

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Crichton, J., & Koch, T. (2011). Discourses of deficit. In C. Candlin & J. Crichton (Eds.), Narrative, identity and care: Joint problematisation in a study of people living with dementia (pp. 101–118). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Fina, A. (2015). Narrative identities. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis (pp. 351–368). West Sussex: Wiley. De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2012). Analyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Fina, A., Schiffrin, D., & Bamberg, M. (Eds.). (2006). Discourse and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DIAC. (2007). Overstayers: Population flows immigration aspects. Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Retrieved January 24, 2013 from http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/ statistics/popflows2006-7/ch3pt10.pdf. DIBP Department of Immigration and Border Protection. (2016–17). Annual report. Retrieved February 28, 2018 from https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/ReportsandPublications/Documents/ annual-reports/complete-annual-report-2016-17.pdf. Dosse, F. & Goldenstein, C. (2013). Paul Ricoeur: Thinking memory. Seuil: Paris. Dunn, K., Kamp, A., Shaw, W., Forrest, J., & Paradies, Y. (2010). Indigenous Australians’ attitudes towards multiculturalism, cultural diversity, ‘race’ and racism. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, 13(4), 19–31. Dyer, R. (1997). White: Essays on race and culture. London: Routledge. Favell, A., Feldblum, M., & Smith, M. (2007). The human face of global mobility: A research agenda. Transaction Social Science and Modern Society, 44(2), 15–25. Freeman, M. (2015). Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Gardner, K. (1999). Narrating location: Space, age and gender among Bengali elders in East London. Oral History, 27(1), 65–74. Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 122–130. Gergen, K., & Gergen, M. (1988). Narrative and the self as relationship. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 17–56. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the later modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilmartin, M., & Migge, B. (2016). Migrant mothers and the geographies of belonging. Gender, Place & Culture, 23(2), 147–161. Goffman, E. (1969). Strategic interaction. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Grossman, D. (2008). Writing in the dark: Essays on literature and politics. London: Bloomsbury. Hall, S. (1992). The question of cultural identity. In S. Hall, D. Held, & T. McGrew (Eds.), Modernity and its futures. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, S. (1996). Who needs identity? In S. Hall & P. du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage. Hall, S. (2003). New ethnicities. In L. Alcoff & E. Mendieta (Eds.), Identities: Race, class, gender and nationality. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Hermans, H. (2004). The dialogical self in a global and digital age. Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 4, 297–320. Holstein, J., & Gubrium, J. (1997). Active interviewing. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research: Theory, method and practice (pp. 113–129). London: Sage. Hyvärinen, M. (2010). Revisiting the narrative turns. Life Writing, 7(1), 69–82. Jackson, M. (2013). The politics of storytelling: Variations on a theme by Hannah Arendt. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Koven, M. (2015). Narrative and cultural identities: Performing and aligning with figures of personhood. In A. De Fina & A. Gerogakopoulou (Eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis (pp. 388–407). West Sussex: Wiley.

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Chapter 8

Conclusion

Abstract The group of people who participated in this research are tertiary educated, have professional experience in their field and have all lived in Australia at some point in their lives. In other ways, however, they are a diverse group of people whose stories interweave in intricate patterns, sometimes showing a degree of commonality in their experiences but more often showing the different, shifting and situational experiences of migration, and always revealing the intensely emotional work that underpins the desire to belong. Through in-depth narrative analyses this book contributes to an understanding of the ways skilled migrants experience their mobile trajectories and histories. The life course approach provides an alternative to transnational research that focuses on linear links between a singular origin and destination country or a single migrant classificatory scheme. I show the productivity of viewing Australia as one site within a global network of relations. Notions of who constitutes a skilled migrant in contemporary society are unsettled, demonstrating the diversity of different mobility patterns, identities, sites of connections and visa categories that reflect the continuum of migration experiences over time and space. The research shows the various transitions that happen before and after political designations of ‘skilled migration’, which may include a range of temporary visas, long-term residency opportunities and often, though not always, citizenship. Reframing skilled migration discourses in this way involves reconsidering neo-liberal conceptions of human capital and knowledge transfer to include the embodied, affective, social and cultural consequences of mobility. Keywords Skilled migration · Mobility · Life-course · Trajectories · Narrative Time · Space

8.1 Introduction Over the past few years researchers interested in migration have begun to consider the complexities of the migrant experience in ways that broaden the boundaries of traditional migration models and categorisations (e.g. Carling & Collins, 2018; © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 R. Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3164-0_8

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Collins, 2017; Collins & Shubin, 2017; Findlay, King, Smith, Geddes, & Skeldon, 2012; Migge & Gilmartin, 2013; Ryan & Mulholland, 2014). In Chap. 1 I emphasised recent literature that moved the discussion towards a lifecycle approach to the lives of the skilled migrants, as well as towards a broader understanding of skilled migration as a phenomenon not only practised by the ‘elite’ but by a growing number of ‘middling transnationals’ (Conradson & Latham, 2005), a categorisation that is increasingly understood as being crosscut by its own internal diversities (Baas, 2018). By taking a longitudinal and retrospective approach to migrant lives, over a seven-year period, this book has shown how participants’ migration trajectories involved a range of differing pathways, motivations and identities over their lives. The spatial and temporal lens utilised in this research unsettles binaries between student/worker, tourist/worker, skilled/unskilled and temporary/permanent within contemporary migration policy contexts. How individuals respond to their changing circumstances, weaving courses through official immigration regimes while also negotiating and re-visioning material, imaginative and mnemonic constructions of places, are all vital components of the stories they tell. The group of people who participated in this research are tertiary educated with professional experience in their fields and have all lived in Australia at some point in their lives. In other ways, however, they are a diverse group of people whose stories interweave in intricate patterns, sometimes showing a degree of commonality in their experiences, other times showing the different, shifting and situational experiences of migration, but always revealing the intensely emotional work that underpins the desire to belong. Despite theoretical calls for research which investigates the complexity of contemporary migration and mobility, much more empirical work is needed to understand the experiences of skilled migrants, who are part of the ‘mobile middle’ (Baas, 2018), in ways that are attentive to the spatio-temporal dynamics of people’s experiences and which can challenge the directionality of movement and the categorisations of migrants over their lives. Although researchers have begun to recognise the complexity of migrants’ relocation experiences over time, studies continue to limit participant research groups to those defined by relatively linear mobility patterns or specific visa, ethnic or national categories. What I have argued in this book and sought to demonstrate through the experiences and narratives of the participants, is that despite the diversity of the participant group (in terms age, gender, educational background, profession, cultural and linguistic background) they represent growing numbers of transnational migrants who are often engaged in temporary and multi-stage migration trajectories. This book has argued for the importance of examining participants’ experiences longitudinally and biographically to take account of migrants’ shifting intentions as well as looking at migration decision making processes within social and familial contexts, rather than as isolated individuals. Different mobility categories, such as international student, tourist, working holiday maker, accompanying spouse, refugee, temporary graduate worker and skilled migrant, are formally constructed by institutions and governments in ways that make assumptions about the different forms of mobility practiced by those who occupy such categories. The participants represented in this book provide lived empirical understandings of those who occupy the

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vast category of middling transnationals, inhabiting a range of migrant subjectivities (both claimed and resisted), as people who are able to enact agency through mobility experiences whilst at the same time are subject to a range of risks and vulnerabilities. Inviting participants to tell their stories of relocation provided an account of the diverse and embedded approaches to migrants’ own mapping of life histories and geographies. These mobile settlers are transnational, with connections to multiple locations and homes within and across national borders and their migration trajectories are sometimes linear, more often repeatedly circuitous and sometimes ongoing, as they move to multiple destinations over their lives. While they are a seemingly disparate group, their stories can be read in the context of global movements of people that are increasingly heterogeneous, often involve long term designations as ‘temporary’ migrants and require them to actively and intentionally try to navigate migration policy to reduce risk and precarity when there is often an unknowability of migration outcomes. The migration programmes of states, aimed at attracting labour, increasingly produce ‘staggered’ (Robertson, 2013) or multi-stage migration practices, which simultaneously intersect with claims to belonging and citizenship, complicating traditional linear-settler-citizen narratives and paradigms (Mares, 2018). Conceptually reframing our understanding of skilled migration through a spatiotemporal, emotional and relational lens may have significant implications for both migration research and policy. When we include the not-quite-skilled-migrant positionality of, for example, people who are motivated to undertake international study primarily to seek long term migration options rather than for education purposes or skilled people who migrated as spouses, then understandings of who constitutes a skilled migrant in contemporary society become increasingly blurred. As participants stories have shown, their middling status included instances of both upward and downward social mobility. Sometimes they worked in jobs below their skill level while during other relocations, they were able to secure employment commensurate with or above their level of skills and credentials. Through their stories, deskilling is understood as a tactical move on the part of migrants (e.g. though they were already educated and skilled they utilised student visa categories to gain entry to Australia, which may be perceived as a step backwards in terms of career progression but had the potential to open long-term migration possibilities). However, de-skilling was also experienced negatively as some tried to enter the labour market but came up against discrimination where employers were resistant to hiring migrants without PR status and whose first language was not English. Another important finding was that participants often relocated for reasons other than work so that while there may be a state-based, neo-liberal capitalist demand for workers, those involved in this research also had their own motivations for migration including family obligations, international study as a pathway to long-term settlement, to escape political unrest in their country of origin and a range of emotional/symbolic attachments to different places and people creating multiple home sites and drivers for relocation. Using methods of narrative inquiry, I have analysed the empirical data from three perspectives. These perspectives focused on the trajectories of people (Chaps. 2 and 3), their embedded practices of home-making, citizenship and translo-

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cal belonging (Chaps. 4 and 5), and their shifting narratives of identity (Chap. 6). While these perspectives intersected in all chapters, each was chosen as a focus for a section because of its capacity to illuminate the practices and conditions surrounding contemporary skilled mobility. This final chapter draws these perspectives together to discuss three key ways that this research has contributed to the field. First, I have sought to complicate simplistic notions of who constitutes a skilled migrant in contemporary society and to demonstrate the diversity of different mobility patterns and visa categories that reflect the continuum of migration experiences over time and space. Second, I have demonstrated how skilled migration is not undertaken just as a labour-centred activity but also intersects with migrants’ complex and often translocal connections to home and belonging and their multiple and shifting identities. Third, I have shown how participants interpret and theorise their identities, sense of belonging and social locations, using narrative as a performative mode of becoming and making sense of lives lived in foreign locations.

8.2 Ongoing Trajectories and Temporary Migration Empirical research on human mobility often focuses on a community of people defined by their nationality and visa classification, who move to a specific location. While this linear representation of mobility might constitute the pathway taken by some migrants, this research has shown that in many cases such representations exclude a whole range of pathways and complex cultural affiliations that exceed simplistic representations of movement from country A to country B. Participants’ movements were shown to often involve a series of moves through different countries rather than a single beginning or end point. This book has made two related observations in relation to this theme. First, that a longitudinal approach to skilled migration research has shown that people engage in a continual process of moving and skilling over time and through places and therefore occupy a range of visa categories over their life-course. Second, that while migrants possess relevant skills and credentials, they may not be recognized as ‘skilled’ by a nation’s immigration regime, depending on the circumstances under which they migrated. In this way, my research adds to the growing field of research that employs a ‘trajectory perspective’ to analyse tertiary educated and skilled migrants (e.g. Ho, 2011; Robertson, 2014). E. Ho (2011) and Robertson (2013) undertook research that emphasised the changing trajectories and visa categories that migrants inhabit over time and space. Both scholars argue that research should not be limited to visa or occupational categories as this conceals the ‘changing episodes’ (Ho, 2011, p. 116) that construct migrant experiences. However, Ho (2011) focuses on a particular nationality migrating to a specific second country in a fairly linear representation of movement. Robertson (2013) expands this to include migrants from a range of source countries who migrate to Australia. This book has sought to further develop their trajectory perspectives to show the experiences of a differently constructed group of participants. For this group, Australia constitutes a site through which participants move, often multiple times in their lives. Their

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departure from a range of source and destination countries unsettles the binaries of home and away and emigration and immigration contexts that is characteristic of global mobility flows. These skilled migrants are part of what Baas (2018) defines as the mobile middle. They are not ‘elite’ and use temporary migration sometimes as a pathway to permanency and sometimes as one location amongst many in their unfolding itineraries. By reconceptualising skilled migration as a biographical and temporal project, involving diverse pathways towards becoming skilled, bureaucratic and static conceptualisations of this classification are expanded and re-contextualised. I introduced the phrase middling ‘mobile settlers’ to take account of the diversity amongst skilled migrants and to describe the practices of people whose life histories have been interspersed with repeated relocations, both circuitous and ongoing. The phrase also sought to highlight the interplay of mobility and fixity, mooring and mobility where participants developed deep embedded connections to places and people, despite their frequent mobility. As argued in Chap. 1, traditional paradigms of linear migration patterns leading to settlement and permanency have become increasingly challenged where migration is more often understood as temporary and involving multi-directional migration trajectories. In the Australian context, we are no longer a settler nation, with temporary migration now outstripping traditional models of citizenship-multiculturalism (Mares, 2018). International students, working holiday makers and skilled workers, as a combined group, have a growth rate approximately three times the number of permanent visas (Mares, 2016, 2018). For example, temporary migrants in Australia, as non-citizens, have differential social and political rights compared to permanent residents and citizens (e.g. they don’t have access to Medicare, unemployment, sickness or other government benefits, nor study assistance or commonwealth rent assistance). Symbolically and practically they are constructed outside of the Australian nation, whose contribution is largely viewed in terms of their labour capital (i.e. the recent implementation of the Temporary Skills Shortage visa and its tightened regulations have made transitioning towards permanent residency much harder). As Chaps. 2 and 3 show, there is often a reluctance from employers to hire temporary graduates and temporary labour migrants because they don’t have Permanent Residency status. The significance of migrants’ formal status in shaping the normative perceptions of employers, is one that this project has identified as needing further examination. Additionally, how might policies around multiculturalism be reframed or reinvigorated within the context of complex mobility practices? Such policies were developed when most migration was relatively linear and built around an understanding that people would predominantly have social relationships and loyalties in one country (Castles, 2004, p. 212) and that temporary migration would ultimately turn into permanency and citizenship. The experiences of participants in this research are shaped as much by government immigration policy as they are by their own agency, unsettling demarcations between those who are constructed as temporary migrants and those constructed as permanent settlers. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrated that whilst these participants provide examples of middling transnationals who have a greater degree of choice relative

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to other migrant categories (such as those on unskilled labour visas or refugees), a close analysis of their narratives shows that their mobility and resettlement/s still involved experiences of social, financial and psychological risk. Many were trying to gain local qualifications and demonstrate their skills in employment markets within temporal limitations, to increase their chances of moving along the continuum from temporary to permanent resident. However, while they may be in a liminal zone of temporariness for extended periods of time, they also attempted to reduce risk by tactically working with the boundaries and opportunities of migration policy to secure long term living options for themselves. Their narratives show how they navigated structures of power through their own practices and working of various policy constraints (Baas, 2018; Robertson, 2013). Temporary migrants are moved through policies designed to meet the needs of global capital and skills shortages but they are also reasoning individuals who tactically pursue opportunities, put down roots and continually evaluate and readjust their plans, even within a relatively limited range of choices. More research is needed in this space to examine the ‘potential freedoms’ associated with ‘temporal limbo’ (Griffiths, Rogers, & Anderson, 2013) alongside its restrictions. However, as Chap. 3 demonstrated, converting temporariness into more secure options for long term settlement and citizenship does not rule out future mobility. While ongoing mobility pathways were sometimes motivated by job opportunities overseas, they were more often related to non-labour rationalities such as: expanding their options for living overseas in the future, collecting passports as they go (as was the case with Chloe and Sophie); returning to previous homes to retire or be closer to family (acknowledging that home was often fragmented); relocating for emotional and religious reasons (e.g. as a Muslim woman, Nahid relocated on several occasions to countries with a dominant Muslim culture so that her Australian born children could be exposed to their cultural and religious roots); or moving because they were unable to find appropriate employment in a destination country. Migrant subjectivities such as international student, temporary graduate worker, working holiday maker or tourist were inhabited and contested through the practises of individuals (e.g. rather than for travel/leisure, Chap. 3 showed how tourist visas were sometimes used to extend participants stay in a country in the quest towards permanency). Decision making processes within family and friendship groups were also shown to be critical to their mobility experiences. Many drew upon friendship networks to provide a pathway for migration in the first place (e.g. they had a friend with prior experience in a destination country, friends provided the financial means to migrate) or to make post-migration life easier (e.g. living together in larger groups to reduce the cost of rent, lending one another money to pay for study in order to transition onto another visa). The needs of partners and children were also part of deciding when to leave, where to go, when to stay and under what conditions. Some female participants gravitated away from the professional sphere to care for children and support their husbands who relocated as the ‘lead’ migrant. Their migration meant a shift in how they identified with their roles as mothers, wives and workers, as personal priorities overshadowed more professional ones in particular contexts. However, for other participants in my research (e.g. Sharon and Nahid) it

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was extremely important to maintain their careers post-migration. Sharon, in particular, took into consideration the relative financial cost of childcare in destination countries because, in her own words, she wanted to ‘keep her career going’. However, it is important to acknowledge that her perspective on both work and family changed over time and these shifts were captured over the seven-year period of interviews. Importantly, this research also demonstrated that we cannot simply assume that the ‘lead migrant’ is necessarily male (as traditionally has been the case) and if they are, this can shift over time as the heterosexual couples involved in this research ‘took turns’ shaping their migration trajectories in line with their career aspirations and major personal transitions, at different points in their lives. Rather than individual trajectories, the narratives in this research show that mobility is often a relational project, involving people in complex negotiations with family, friends, government policy and their own social locations and identities.

8.3 Multiple Home Sites, Connections and Citizenly Identities Not surprisingly, research on skilled migration has been dominated by labourmarket studies, focusing on the ‘migrant worker’ (e.g. Bagchi, 2001; Peixoto, 2001; Remennick, 2003). In particular, these studies tend to focus on wage discrimination, career transition outcomes and occupational adjustment for migrants in a new country (e.g. Gandini & Lozano-Ascencio, 2016). However, relatively few studies have shown the experiences of skilled migrants as (i) a diverse group who move through a range of official visa categories and locations over their lives, and (ii) as people who understand their experiences of resettlement as related to social and cultural fields including but not restricted to labour outcomes. A broader approach to the lives of skilled migrants should include an examination of their shifting and multiple identities as middling mobile settlers, their agency in migration decisions, and their embodied and imaginative attachments to home, belonging and citizenship that affect their migration experiences. This is not to deny that employment is meaningful to their migration experiences but that their work identities intersect with many other identities (e.g. gender, ethnicity, age, lifestyle and family roles). While structural and institutional processes, such as visa regulations, formal citizenship and a nation’s immigration regime, will always influence the degree to which someone feels they belong or do not belong, participants displayed a degree of agency in constructing sites of belonging. Their surroundings became an expression of their identities through their everyday practices and routines, as they simultaneously negotiated transnational links and local belonging/s. For example, I described how Nilaya integrated Indian, Australian, American and Swiss artefacts into her home space and infused Australian cultural traditions such as ANZAC Day with Indian ‘flavours’. Eva tended her garden, creating an intimate space of belonging and an expression of self in a place through her investment of time and her sensory connection to the

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earth, which connected multiple home sites together. Sharon inserted herself into dominant ‘Aussie’ narratives of belonging through her participation in the Country Fire Service and her local Surf Life Saving club. Through these kinds of practices, participants were able to construct new spaces of belonging. However, analysis of stories and memories has shown that ‘belonging’ is an ongoing process of negotiation and ambivalence. Even Sharon acknowledged that participating in such activities (i.e. CFS and Surf Life Saving) did not provide an uninterrupted sense of belonging and she often felt she was merely ‘playing’ at being Australian rather than fully inhabiting this identity. Belonging is a fluid and temporal process where people sometimes felt they belonged and sometimes did not, at different times, in different contexts and amongst different social relations. Participant’s small stories, of emplaced, everyday and often mundane encounters, revealed the complex and contradictory identity practices involved in home-making in new contexts. Memory is shown to be a crucial facet of home-making, linking them to a prior sense of self and transplanting old practices into new contexts (like Seb fixing cars to remind him of his brother in Venezuela or Sharon visiting surrogate landscapes in Australia that reminded her of the rolling green hills of Britain). Memory was used by participants to try and develop a sense of continuity between old and new homes and selves but equally, memories also engendered experiences of dislocation in places that never quite fulfilled the expectation of home—‘it’s like a switch goes on and then it’s cut off’ (Sharon). Participants interstitial living between current and older home sites has changed them and the people and places left behind. I also argued that home-making is determined as much through everyday, local practices in new homes as it was by frequent experiences of leaving, arriving and returning for short and long/indefinite periods of time. Homecoming in particular, was experienced from different subject positions, as experiences of being a local, resident, visitor, insider and outsider shift over time. Rather than an uncomplicated return to one’s origins, homecoming was often experienced as more dislocating than moments of arrival in new locations because the homecomer is forced to confront and revise old memories and conceptions of self and place (Bielsa et al., 2014; Dürrschmidt, 2016). The ‘idea of home is like a myth’ (Emily), where previous ‘points of reference’ (Jen) no longer exist outside their imaginations. I also described how ongoing migration journeys challenged traditional representations of return migration as a straightforward transition from arrival to resettlement to closure. Drawing upon Hannah and Pete’s story, when this couple returned to Australia—as they have done multiple times—it was Hannah who was returning home, and when they returned to Germany—as they have done multiple times—it was Pete who was returning home. However, as time passed and they shared the experience of multiple resettlements, the lines began to blur for both around whose ‘home’ it was to which they were returning. Focusing on practices rather than categories of people allows for an analysis of the range of positions, identities and pathways that people occupied over their life-course. This approach demonstrated how skilled mobile settlers experienced their resettlement not as a singular shift from one place to another, but as active trajectories through both personal and professional identities over their lives. The ways in which homes are

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enacted, negotiated and revised over time and space, reframes ‘home’ as a series of dynamic locations, both imaginative and material. Identifications of home and significant sites of belonging/connection were also explored in relation to participants citizenly identities. This framing dissociated the discussion from a purely bureaucratic and institutional conceptualisation of the term to an understanding of citizenship as an identity and practice that is fluid and rhizomatic and which produce different relations between people and places. Their conceptualisations of citizenship, and decisions about gaining and relinquishing citizenship, show that it was both a symbolic and mechanistic process (Ho, 2009). In some cases biological and emotional ties to family were the impetus for gaining and relinquishing citizenship status, sometimes people relinquished citizenship because they felt the values of their country of origin no longer aligned with their own and others wanted to accumulate citizenships, where possible, to provide future migration options and security. The book also highlighted that whilst all participants were educated and skilled, some were able to move easier than others. James, for example, was framed as an unproblematic skilled migrant whose visa status was never questioned in terms of number of renewals, whilst others sought alternative pathways as students despite their relatively high level of skills/qualifications, to produce migration possibilities. Whilst participants’ mobility was constrained by the formal citizenship status they held, they were also able to develop citizenly identities through everyday practices (with or without this formal status). Contributing to a country in various ways, even without citizenship status, shaped their feelings of belonging and connection to a country. Lan and Scott, for example, both described how they felt like citizens of the US even though they were not formally recognised in this way, as the US was the social, economic and political locality to which they were contributing on a daily basis. Their informal citizenship ties to the US preceded any formal recognition. Their example also showed how citizenship was experienced in different registers, both formal and informal (e.g. political, social, and emotional) and how diverse registers of citizenship and attachment were satisfied in different locations (e.g. political and social in the US, emotional in Australia and Vietnam). The research shows how people’s formal citizenship status does not always correspond with their emotional attachments. Regardless of people’s citizenship status, participants were involved in multi-level processes of attachment that operated across and within nations and many described how translocal attachments to people and places often figured more prominently in their thinking than national ties. Participants described a constellation of attachments, in which spheres of belonging in different registers overlap from self and family to ethnic group, national ties and global identities. As James said, he had been ‘denationalised’ and had ‘a broader base of identity’ that was connected to people in different places around the world rather than secured to a specific nation; or as Nahid described her intersectional identity, as a ‘Bangladeshi-Australian Muslim woman’. However, within the context of growing temporary migration schemes particularly in the UK, Canada and Australia , the development of unofficial or symbolic citizenly

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identities, despite official designations, requires further exploration. When migration can no longer be equated with settler-integration-citizenship narratives, how will this transform people’s connections and obligations to the nations they are living and working in when pathways towards citizenship are minimised?

8.4 Narrating Experiences of Mobility and Resettlement This research engaged with methods of narrative inquiry in order to understand participants’ experiences of mobility over their lives. My project has involved illuminating both the ways in which these people live as well as how they represent this living to themselves and others. Their narratives capture their placement within social settings at different points in time and space. In this way, identity narratives were not just a statement of affiliations but stories about ambiguous and conflicting identities and about their relationships with other people and sense of place within these relations. Participants used their stories to describe how they were often positioned under particular categories in ways that did not always correspond with how they perceived themselves or where they felt they belonged. Participants narratives were not simply recollections or statements of affiliations but were stories of action and by including time and space, they were narratives of change—as their social contexts changed as well as their knowledge and experience, so did their stories. What emerged was a double layer of identity formation where they recounted experiences (through both big and small stories) at the same time as they reflected upon and recalibrated their experiences over time. Their stories were used to position themselves, to reclaim some identities whilst resisting others, and to work through crises in integrating, making and leaving homes. Chapter 7 reflected on the mobility of stories and the role of narrative in the construction and interpretation of participants’ social locations and positions in different contexts. Their identities were shown to be in a continual state of becoming, influenced by how they perceived themselves and how others constructed them. The production of knowledge through stories is itself a spatial practice, which is conducted in relation to particular contexts and experiences of social location. De Certeau (1984, pp. 115–116) argues that ‘every story is a travel story’ which produces ‘geographies of action’. Narratives, like migration pathways, are fundamentally mobile, allowing multiple possibilities in the telling and positioning of selves because they travel with the storyteller.

8.5 Reshaping Migration Research Governments will always categorise migrants and this is necessary in order to manage population flows. In addition, as a researcher, I cannot escape the use of categories for analytic purposes. However, unsettling the boundaries of normative categorisations and understanding the ways in which people move within, across and between them shows the human dimension of the migrant experience. An examination of skilled migration requires research that not only attends to macro-social forces but also the

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experiences and identities of individuals and their communities. The collection of people whose stories I have drawn upon are not special or unusual cases: most people have complex identities made up of different—often conflicting—attachments. However, their descriptions do bring to the surface the contradictory and multivocal experiences of migration that are less frequently included in official migration discourses. That is not to say that we are left with a cacophony of individual voices and stories that have no theoretical potential. It is precisely the contradictions of migrant experience that unsettle official understandings and problematise accepted ways of speaking about tertiary educated and skilled migrants who may or may not ‘officially’ be recognised as such. Policy implications might involve the reconceptualization of skilled migrants as mobile settlers, which infers the potential for continuous mobility. Such a perspective could transform discussions centred on the attraction of skilled migrants to Australia (for the first time) or the attraction of skilled migrants back to Australia, to thinking about mobile settlers as maintaining ongoing connections to multiple locations and open-ended mobility itineraries. Such a view would require governments to acknowledge the complex attachments, loyalties and identities that mobile settlers experience and to work with them rather than in spite of them. This means transcending linear understandings of the direction of movement. Reframing skilled migration discourses in this way also involves reconsidering neo-liberal conceptions of human capital and knowledge transfer to include the embodied, emotional, social and cultural consequences of mobility. If, as I have argued, the binary of skilled/unskilled is an unhelpful distinction, future research might consider how policy-makers could more adequately acknowledge and plan for not only the currently possessed skills of migrants but their pathways to this point and their future trajectories. As this book has argued, the pool of potential skilled migrants is much more expansive than simply those who fall under the government’s definition of ‘skilled’. More research is also needed which examines migrant lives biographically, by attending to their retrospective narratives and taking account of the temporal and spatial dimensions of migration experiences. Such research has the potential to further complicate binaries like tourist/worker, student/worker, citizen/foreigner and temporary/permanent. Future research should also continue to explore the narratives, practices and challenges that are located in the specificities of migrants’ everyday lives. This includes taking account of their social, cultural and material spaces, their memories and imaginations, the ways their social locations intersect with experiences of mobility and how migrant decision making takes place within relational contexts (family and friendship ties, personal and professional contexts). As highlighted in Chap. 3, decisions about where to move, under what conditions and for what opportunities are often negotiated differently by couples over their life course, as people ‘take it in turns’ to drive their migration futures (Shinozaki, 2014). Detailed narrative and ethnographic research in this area would allow for a more contingent and complex rendering of migrants’ connections, practices, stories and identities and the meanings they attach to them. To represent someone’s life in writing can impose a linearity that is not always there by fixing words, identities and ways of being to pages. The challenge, there-

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fore, has been to write in ways that avoid unnecessary categorisation, reduction and containment and to celebrate the dynamism of people’s everyday experiences. As Deleuze (1997, p. 1) has stated, ‘to write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience’ but to instead move in the direction of the ‘ill-formed’ and the ‘incomplete’. Emphasising lived heterogeneity is important because social fields always ‘leak out’ on all sides (Deleuze, 2006, p. 127). One of the dangers of exploring the immigrant experience is that in order to make sense of the inherent complexities, there is a compulsion to separate concepts as a way of mapping their difference and containing their meaning. Instead, research writing should be read as a process of unsettling the stability of what we have come to accept as fixed categories and identities and to disengage the ‘sedentary nature of words’ and their common-sense meanings (Braidotti, 1994, p. 15). Participants’ representations of their experiences, and my own interpretations of them, I hope are read as open texts, unfinished business and mobile utterances—always open to reinterpretation and shifts of meaning. Narrative representations should not be interpreted as crystallisations but just like migrant categories and experiences, should be understood as shifting, contingent and open to change and reinterpretation.

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