Introduction

We want to bring the next generation of migrants to regional Australia to grow agriculture and to grow regional Australia. Because it's not just unskilled workers, it's skilled and semi-skilled workers as well. So this is a significant structural shift. This is about migration to the bush, growing the bush's capacity to be able to grow the food and fibre they need. (The Hon David Littleproud MP)

This statement by the Australian Minister for Agriculture and Northern Australia, made in the context of promoting a newly introduced agricultural visa in 2021,Footnote 1 signals some of the diverse aims and target groups of regional migration policies in Australia. Long before this most recently announced visa, a multitude of federal and State policies in Australia have pursued the broader aim of directing migrants and refugees to regional areas (see f.ex. Hugo, 2008), partly to close short-term labour and skills gaps through different temporary visa schemes (Collins, 2013), partly to counteract the shrinking of resident communities through the long-term settlement of permanent residents (Withers & Powall, 2003). This co-existence of different but related policy objectives, with different temporal scales, yet overlapping in their concern with migrants as vehicles of economic growth, shapes the experiences of migrants as well as former refugees who move to the regions. Attention to this policy context is therefore central to an investigation of the factors that shape the retention of migrants in regional settings.

While migration has long centred on major cities for well-established reasons including the presence of established migrant communities and service infrastructures, migration beyond capital cities and governments’ interest in such migration are not new in Australia and other destinations that have long welcomed migrant workers in agriculture (Argent & Tonts, 2015; Kasimis & Papadopoulos, 2005; Wells, 1996). In Australia, ‘new arrivals’ in the language of government have either been channelled into this work through government, as in the case of migrants and displaced persons in migrant hostels in the 1940s and 1950s (Jupp, 1998) or they have ended up in this line of work because it was relatively more accessible than other jobs. The long-standing seasonal and partly long-term presence of migrant workers in Australia’s farms and orchards (Argent & Tonts, 2015) was furthermore preceded by the presence of forced farm labour of Pacific Islanders in Queensland’s sugar cane fields from the 1860s (Stead & Altman, 2019), mirroring the use of forced agricultural labour in other settler colonial settings (King et al., 2021; Rogaly, 2021). From the perspectives of government, farmers and families with migration backgrounds, migration to country Australia is therefore no novelty, and yet, the policy initiatives of integrating and welcoming migrants and former refugees in regional towns over the last decade indicate a transformation of the role of regional migration in regional Australia beyond the demands of capital, giving rise to manifestations of regional multi- and interculturalism.

This paper approaches the question of migrant retention in regional areas from the perspective of (former) migrants on skilled visas and refugees who settle in regional locations and explores three factors at play in their regional settlement trajectories which have emerged as decisive influences on retention: the policies that shape the mode of regional migration; the experiences of job search and employment in the context of life stage and household; and the situated knowledge emerging from these experiences over time. These factors assist in addressing the following questions: Which structural influences shape migrants’ secondary movements? What does the interplay of these forces suggest about the role of retention for sustainable regional migration policies in Australia?

The interaction between structure and agency has been a pertinent issue in the theorisation of migration more generally (Bakewell, 2010; De Haas, 2021) that is often discussed as separate from policy implications of and policy responses to specific migration phenomena. Understanding migratory agency in regional migration and settlement is central to both the theorisation of regional migration and the practice of policy design and implementation. The puzzle of migrant retention in regional towns, which increasingly occupies both policy makers and researchers, can be unpacked through the conceptual lens of structuration paying attention to migrants’ situated learning (O'Reilly, 2012). The paper starts by introducing O’Reilly’s theoretical framework before applying its insights on the interplay of structure and agency to the question of migrant retention in regional Australia. After providing a background on regional migration policies in Australia, the paper continues with a description of the research methods and research sites. The findings are discussed in three parts, the role of policies in structuring mobilities and settlement, the role of employment experiences in the context of settlement and, finally, the role of migrants’ and refugees’ decision- and sense-making of mobility and settlement in the context of structural influences. The paper concludes by arguing that any planning for regional migrant and refugee settlement needs to take seriously migrants’ situated learning despite and beyond federal population and labour market policy objectives. Migration, visa and settlement policies shape migrants’ modes of arrival, legal positions and lived experiences of settlement post-arrival and interact with the latter’s aspirations, pre- and post-migration experiences and trajectories over time. While this suggests that government ‘planning for retention’ is complicated by several unknown variables, it draws attention to the importance of centering migrants as agentic and relationally embedded subjects who navigate and respond to their lived and situated experience over time, when designing regional migration and refugee settlement policies.

Conceptual Framework: Beyond Structure and Agency Towards Migrants’ and Refugees’ Situated Learning

Over the last decade, the so-called structure-agency dilemma has received increased attention in migration scholarship. In 2010, Bakewell (2010, 1670) suggested that ‘theories of migration have tended to skirt around the problem of structure and agency’ and that they paid either too much or too little attention to individual choices. While the crude figure of the rational decision-making migrant individual has not entirely disappeared, the scholarly treatment of migrant agency has become much more nuanced (see, e.g. Halfacree & Rivera, 2012).

This article draws on O’Reilly’s meta-theoretical framework of situated learning, which is informed by practice theory, which ‘perceives social life as the outcome of the interaction of structures (of constraints and opportunity) and actions (of individuals and groups who embody, shape and form these structures) in the practice of daily life’ (O'Reilly, 2012, 8). Reilly’s understanding of situated learning builds on Lave and Wenger (1991) theory of ‘learning as something we all do all the time, while co-participating in everyday situations’ (O'Reilly, 2012, 23). Her approach is aimed at telling ‘practice stories’ of migration and ‘describ(ing) some of the processes in a given migration in such a way as to respect the creative and processual nature of social life and to reveal the structuration processes involved as social life unfolds’ (O’Reilly, 2015, 31). Structuration theory as proposed by Giddens (1984) understands social structures as made and remade by individuals through their actions or agency. Bourdieu (1990) similarly understood structural constraints as inseparable from people’s preferences, choices, desires and actions. Bourdieu’s concept of practice speaks to the processes of making and acting out of daily life, which Giddens refers to as structuration. Bourdieu’s practice thus describes how structures become internalised, embodied and enacted by people. Based on this understanding, the practices and practical relations with the world are better understood as reasonable adjustments to the future rather than the product of rational decisions or plans (O'Reilly, 2012). Rob Stones’ (2005) stronger version of structuration theory builds on Giddens’ structuration theory and draws attention to the situated knowledge actors hold about the contexts within which they find themselves. The ‘conjuncturally specific knowledge’ actors have of external structures such as relationships, hierarchies and resource distributions are central to understanding people’s practices. O’Reilly combines Stones’ (2005) strong structuration theory with notions of communities of practice and situated learning in such communities as key influences on actors’ agency. It is this understanding of structuration that lends itself to the analysis of secondary movements and, vice versa, retention in regional towns.

Much recent scholarship on migrant agency has either focused on acts of international migration per se as expression of agency (see, e.g. Triandafyllidou, 2019) or on the agency of migrant workers particularly in response to poor employment conditions and opportunities (Papadopoulos et al., 2018; Rogaly, 2009). The latter draws on an understanding of agency as ‘both the intention and the practice of taking action for one’s own self-interest or the interests of others’ (Rogaly, 2009, 1975). In much employment relations and labour geography scholarship, collective agency is prioritised over individual forms of agency (but see Rogaly, 2009). Some authors have drawn attention to the key role of precarity in shaping migrant agency and mobilisation and argued for paying more attention to the mechanisms by which migrant labour struggles emerge (Papadopoulos et al., 2018, 209) including forms of individual agency. Della Porta and others (Della Porta et al, 2015; Papadopoulos et al., 2018) have pointed to the significant role of ‘potential of success’ which influences the access of migrants to institutional decision-making processes and systems of rights protection.

Another important influence on the agency of migrant workers is the embedding of their experience in the broader context of their life stage and household contexts. Feminist scholars have long highlighted the ways in which gendered power relations within the household and gendered expectations about productive and reproductive labour shape migration decision-making and experiences (Chant, 1998; Lawson, 1998) and how gendered economic opportunities and expectations structure migration (Curran & Saguy, 2001). In Australia, the significance of life stage and context in shaping migrants’ employment-related agency has been demonstrated in relation to Working Holiday visa holders who are generally young individuals, and many of them consider the work experience on the visa as a rite of passage to gain access to a second or third year on the visa. Recent research into these and other temporary migrant workers’ agency in the face of wage theft and other forms of exploitation has demonstrated that these workers tend to choose exit from jobs over resistance through seeking redress (Campbell et al., 2019). Clibborn’s (2021) research on the employment experiences of international students pointed to the role of migrants’ peers as a significant point of reference for migrants’ perceptions of their employment conditions and pay. Both examples highlight the role of migrants’ temporally and socially situated knowledge in exercising agency, knowledge on what can be expected to emerge from their agency and how important the benefits of that agency would be at that point in time.

A key insight from these different analyses of migrant agency is the importance of institutional contexts at the macro-level, life course contexts in which migrant experiences are embedded at the meso-level as well as intersectional identity dimensions at the individual level which shape experiences of adversity, expectations of potential improvements and, finally, agency. Institutional contexts such as migration regulations, described by O'Reilly (2012) as proximate structural layers, affect people differently depending on varying points in their life stages and household formation, generating ‘conjuncturally specific knowledge’ (O'Reilly, 2012), and together with identity features they shape migrant agency.

A further important context of migrant agency that is relevant for this paper’s focus on migrant retention in regional towns is place, understood as the specific interplay of physical and relational aspects of a location as well as its interlinking with wider processes (Amin, 2004). Research on regional settlement over the last decade has highlighted the significance of place-related factors including such as the demographic make-up of and social connectedness to the local population (Wulff & Dharmalingam, 2008); the spaces of intercultural encounters in and belonging to a place (Radford, 2017); the availability and quality of cultural infrastructures (from places of worship and community centres to recreational and cultural activities) (Krivokapic-Skoko & Collins, 2016); the natural environment, atmosphere and rurality of a place (Klocker et al., 2021; Krivokapic-Skoko & Collins, 2016; Schech, 2014); and the availability of education, training and employment opportunities (AMES and Deloitte Access Economics, 2015; Piper, 2017). How emplaced experiences matter over time in the context of broader policies and how both influence migrants’ agency need to be however better understood.

Regional Migration Policies in Australia

As in many other migrant destination countries, from migrant settler nations to non-traditional migration countries (Rye and O'Reilly, 2022), the inflow of migrant workers into regional and rural towns has increased substantially in Australia over time and occurs through different channels (listed in Table 1 below), facilitated by a range of dedicated visas and migration policies.

Table 1 Channels of regional migration in Australia
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Australia’s migration program has been separated from its humanitarian program in 1993 ‘to provide a better balance between Australia’s international humanitarian objectives and the domestic, social and economic goals guiding the annual Migration Program’ (DIAC quoted in Galligan et al., 2014). A review of recent regional migration and settlement policies therefore needs to begin by distinguishing between policies aimed at migrants, in particular labour migrants, and policies directed at refugees and humanitarian visa holders, even though these—internally highly diverse—groups often co-reside in many regional areas. The first group encompasses a variety of migrants in terms of visa purposes and regulations, particularly related to work and residency rights. Before the onset of the pandemic in 2020, there were—both temporary and permanent—regional skilled visas sponsored by either regional employers or State governments (Galligan et al., 2014); one-year working holiday visas for people aged 18 to 30 years old who worked on farms for 88 days to become eligible for a second or third year visa (Reilly, 2015);Footnote 2 and two different kinds of programs for seasonal workers from the Pacific Islands who arrive sponsored by employers and are expected to remit a part of their income to their families as part of a development policy (Doan et al., 2020), now known as PALM-Scheme. Another significantly sized group are secondary skilled visa holders, that is, partners and dependants of skilled visa holders who have a work right and mostly co-reside with their partner in the regional location where their employer sponsor is based (Webb, 2015). Beyond these regular routes to regional residency and work, there are also an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 undocumented workers on Australian farms (Howe, 2021).

Alongside policies related to the general migration program, Australia’s humanitarian program has involved direct regional settlement pilots of recognized refugees since the first decade of the twenty-first century, whereby unlinked refugeesFootnote 3 have been directly resettled in specified regional towns. This direct resettlement approach has been facilitated through a planning process at the federal government level which has responded to interest on behalf of local governments seeking to address population decline through the settlement of refugees (Galligan et al., 2014). By 2020, the number of direct resettlement locations involved 19 regional locations across several Australian states (Commonwealth of Australia, 2019). Alongside these direct resettlement initiatives, there are many examples of relocation, often referred to as ‘secondary migration’, whereby refugees initially settled in metropolitan locations have relocated to a regional or rural town (Galligan et al., 2014; Klocker et al., 2021). In some cases, these relocations have been initiated and facilitated by stakeholders in both metro- and rural locations, such as settlement service provider and/or a regionally based employer or local government (Broadbent et al., 2007; Boese, 2015; Boese & Philipps, 2017), who see these relocations as double or triple-win, for refugees themselves, for regional communities who seek to avoid the closure of schools and businesses and for employers/businesses (see, e.g. Collins et al., 2016; McAreavey & Argent, 2018). At a policy level, the regional settlement of arrivals with forced migration backgrounds has also been promoted through Safe Haven Enterprise (SHEV) visas which have been directed to those entrants who seek asylum onshore, which Australian governments have penalized by denying permanent residency. Instead, the SHEV visa allows those entrants a temporary residency right with a pathway to other visas including a permanent visa if they work and/or study in regional areas for a total of 42 months (3 and a half years) (see Reilly, 2018).

Alongside these policies aimed at directing migrant and refugee movements and settlement mostly at the federal level, State governments have played a growing role in supporting and complementing such efforts. The states of Victoria and New South Wales in particular have become policy actors in their own right in the area of regional migration. In Victoria, such policies included a regional skilled migration policy called Global Skills for Provincial Victoria in 2008, which instituted Regional Skilled Migration coordinators who assisted regional businesses in their recruitment of skilled migrants and the latter in their settlement. In addition to federal and State-level policies, many local governments from Victoria in the Southeast to Queensland in the Northeast have initiated multi- and interculturalism policiesFootnote 4 to respond to the changing demographic of their constituencies. Welcoming Cities, an initiative of the Scanlon Foundation and Welcome to Australia in partnership with.

Welcoming America, and the Intercultural City movement imported from Europe have further served to promote the multi- and intercultural place-making efforts at the local level (Van Kooy et al., 2019), adding to pre-existing local narratives of regional multiculturalism (Wilding & Nunn, 2018).

Overall, regional migration and settlement policy in Australia can thus be described as a multi-level and multi-dimensional government-effort, which is not without its coordination and implementation flaws and gaps (Galligan et al., 2014), but mostly promoted as a panacea solution to many economic problems in regional Australia.

The Research: Methodology and Sites

The research on which this paper draws stems from two collaborative studies on regional settlement and secondary migration of people with international migration and refugee backgrounds. The earlier project, referred to here as Regional Settlement project, was conducted between 2009 and 2013 in six regional and two metropolitan local government areas in Victoria. It was one of the first comprehensive qualitative studies of regional settlement in Australia and explored the social, economic and political factors that affect the resettlement experiences of recent visible migrants and refugees. The focus was on intergovernmental policy coordination of regional migration and settlement, employment pathways and questions of belonging. The more recent project (referred to as Regional Mobilities project) was conducted between 2016 and 2017 in one regional town in Victoria with a long history of culturally diverse labour migration as well as more recent refugee settlement in the aftermath of conflicts in Iraq and Syria.

The later project built on two key insights from the Regional Settlement project that are critical to the discussion in this paper. Firstly, that regional settlement is frequently preceded or followed by other spatial movements within Australia; and secondly, that these movements are always also shaped by migrants’ agency rather than only governmental migration management. The Regional Mobilities project pursued the question: How do migrants’ spatial mobilities in regional Australia interrelate with their social mobilities? The focus was on the ways in which geographical moves shaped and were shaped by employment pathways and other dimensions of migrants’ lives. The nature of regional settlement as a potentially only temporary stage in migrants’ and refugees’ post-arrival trajectories in Australia rather than a final outcome of settlement was hence a premise of the latter project.

Both projects involved semi-structured interviews with former migrants, refugees and other stakeholders in the respective research sites; the Regional Settlement project also included focus groups with stakeholders. More specifically, data collection in the earlier project comprised of an online survey of 106 settlement stakeholders to scope key concerns in regional settlement from a government and service provider perspective; in-depth interviews with 85 recently arrived migrants and refugees to explore their regional settlement experiences; and key informant interviews with 47 stakeholders and 14 focus groups with a total of 90 stakeholders involved in regional settlement, from government, business and the community sector. The interviews were focused on eliciting experiences of regional migration and settlement including employment experiences and questions of belonging, while the focus groups sought to examine place-based stakeholder relations and local initiatives related to migrant and refugee settlement in specific migration and settlement destinations. A key insight from these focus groups which informed the later research was that secondary or onward migration was often perceived as negative and disappointing by local stakeholders in the face of their efforts in assisting new arrivals to integrate.

The Regional Mobilities project data collection comprised of 18 in-depth interviews with people with international migrant backgrounds and 10 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders whose work was related to migrant or refugee settlement in the regional town and its adjacent small towns. The focus was on migration in and out of the research site and the factors that shaped these and prior movements post-arrival in Australia. We asked participants about their geographical moves and their employment pathways, eliciting migrants’ motives for these moves, their interpretations of outcomes and their hopes and aspirations related to various mobilities.

Both projects deliberately included participants with a diversity of migration backgrounds and motives, countries of origin and visa types rather than focusing the inquiry on a specific bureaucratic or ethnic category of migrants. While the pre-arrival experiences of different groups and individuals tend to vary significantly and different sets of policies apply to different visa holders and permanent residents (such as recognized refugees), both projects aimed to capture that these different groups resided—at least temporarily—in one location, used local services, looked for work and worked and interacted with other people in the same location. Aiming to capture the diverse population with migration backgrounds in regional towns, the studies hence included skilled visa holders as well as humanitarian/refugee/asylum seeker entrants, working holiday visa holders on 1-year visas as well as permanent residents with migration backgrounds. Table 2 provides an overview of both samples in terms of visa stream, ethnicity and gender.

Table 2 Research participants with migration backgrounds
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Participants were recruited through community information sessions where the researchers presented their research aims inviting participation, through members of Local Settlement Planning Committees (in the Regional Settlement project) and through regionally based service providers and community organisations (in both projects).

An important aim in both projects was to understand the perspectives of migrants and refugees as well as those of local people without migration experiences, who were related to these groups through their work, for example, as service providers, employers, educators or local government representatives. Both studies conceived regional migration and settlement as a place-based migration phenomenon that is shaped by multiple stakeholders and at the intersection of political, economic and social interests and concerns. This paper draws on interviews with skilled visa holders and people on refugee visas as well as some interviews with regional stakeholders.

Findings

Whether people with international migration backgrounds remain in a regional location or not is often a combined outcome of their actual experience in that location which is shaped by policies, employment and other place-based dimensions of settlement and their anticipation of future experiences in the same or a different location. In this paper, the focus is on the sense-making of situated experiences or situated learning as a key influence on future movements. The following sections discuss selected findings from both projects that demonstrate the structuring effects of federal policies and of local employment experiences on migrants’ agency, followed by a discussion of how regionally setting migrants draw on situated, conjunctural knowledge (O'Reilly, 2012) in their deliberation of future movements. Rather than being the only influences, they have emerged as key influences on the consideration of future movements among the research participants.

Structuring Effects of Policies

Regional migration and refugee settlement policies, designed at the federal government level, play an importantrole in attracting—and partly in retaining—migrants from various migration backgrounds, as has been illustrated in the earlier review of Australian policies. In some of the research sites in the Regional Settlement project, this was evident in the co-presence of a range of visa holders at any one time. In several locations, this was even true for certain workplaces such as the local abattoir, where temporary skilled visa holders worked alongside refugees who had relocated from Melbourne. In many rural areas, horticultural growers employ working holiday makers alongside people with refugee backgrounds and seasonal workers from the Pacific islands (see also Howe et al., 2020; Underhill & Rimmer, 2016). Beyond the initial attraction of migrants and refugees to regional locations, these policies continue to affect post-arrival pathways in various ways, some of which may be unintended by government. Regional migration and refugee settlement policies thus provide a central structural layer (O'Reilly, 2012) that shapes the experiences of regionally settling secondary migrants and refugees.

The first policy example to be mentioned here is that of skilled regional visas which are designed to attract migrants to areas of regional skills shortages. These visas are available to partners, spouses and dependants who accompany the primary visa holder. This feature of the visa is popular with employers who are hoping to attract ongoing, highly qualified staff and know that settling with a partner and children signifies long-term commitment to a job and a place. Secondary applicants also enjoy work rights, and they may be as qualified as the primary visa holders but lack the certainty of a skills-based job with an employer sponsor. In practice, secondary visa holders often compromise their career in order to stay with their partner whose job is the condition of their residency right.Footnote 5 The regional residency condition of the visa can become a detriment for the skilled visa holder’s partner when they are unable to source a suitable employment position in the same regional town as their partner or spouse. An additional policy-related disadvantage is that secondary skilled visa holders were not eligible to access employment service support in their search for skills matching employment. While the outcome of these regulations is more likely to be the couple’s or family’s retention in the regional location, this retention often comes along with the secondary applicant’s skills wastage and compromised employment pathway. Migrants whose skills and educational qualifications may meet skills demands in the city and thus end up staying in a regional town without fulfilling their full potential due to the visa regulation.

This was the case for Lilly, a female participant in the Regional Mobilities project, who had migrated from the Philippines in her 30 s to explore new opportunities in Australia together with her husband, who secured an employer-sponsored skilled regional visa. Like her husband, Lilly held a university degree and had employment experience from her home country but she was unable to find a job in her area of expertise in the small regional town and the skilled visa did not entitle her to receive employment assistance.

I don’t fall under the criteria [to receive employment assistance] so they can't. The only help I got from them is getting, I don't know, some information and some templates and I'm thinking, I don't really need this. (…) Volunteering appeared to be only way to get ‘experience’ locally. Yeah, I was just on my own, basically. I realised the only way for me to actually get anywhere is if I try and do volunteering. That was really important that I did that. Because then people sort of knew who I was, people started noticing.

Lilly’s internalisation of this structural constraint was to adjust her expectations and ‘learn how to go on in the given circumstance’ (O'Reilly, 2012, 105) by exploring alternative pathways to establishing herself and making herself known through volunteering.

Another example of regulations that structure settlement pathways is the federal government managed direct resettlement of unlinked refugees. The accounts of several directly resettled arrivals in our Regional Settlement project sample suggested that they were not provided with sufficient information about their destination prior to arriving. Olivier, a Congolese man in his 20 s who arrived with his family but without prior connections to Australia, was told pre-arrival that he would go to Melbourne but found out after arriving that he was in the suburb of a regional city and not in Melbourne.

We were taken from the airport to the hotel and nobody told us we are in [a regional city in Victoria] afterwards when we went out we read the hotel it says [name of the city] and we say ah where is Melbourne? They told us Melbourne is there (far).

Olivier described not knowing the language (the interview was facilitated by an interpreter), not having work and not knowing Australian culture as his main problems, while acknowledging he was grateful for being safe with his family. While he was keen to build on his carpentry skills, a settlement service had placed him in training on a farm. When asked if he was planning to stay in the area, Olivier reflected:

The first thing for me is to stay here. I need to know the good to actually make - to live long here so that I can know which is good and which is bad about here. Because I could move to another place and find other bad things there.

Having been placed without prior knowledge in the regional place, Olivier readied himself to learn and see while staying put for now, knowing that he needed time to experience life in a new place before taking action and potentially moving elsewhere.

In both cases, that of Lilly as a secondary or dependent skilled visa holder and that of Olivier as directly resettled refugee-visa holder, policies structured their entry into life in Australia, connecting them and practically tying them to a place, opening some (volunteering, training) and closing other (skills matching employment) opportunities. Notwithstanding other differences in their positioning and opportunities based on their intersectional identities, one factor that emerges as meaningful parameter of settlement pathways in both examples is the access to adequate employment opportunities. The following section will explore the role of labour markets and workplaces as key sites of migrants’ situated learning about their place in and belonging to a local community.

Employment as Site of Situated Learning

Employment is a well-established vehicle and consequence of successful refugee integration (Ager & Strang, 2008) and also plays an important role in migration movements, both international and within destination countries. It is not only a source of income but generally considered an important source of belonging, a sense of connection, self-worth and confidence (Boese et al., 2021). It is hence unsurprising that employment opportunities have played a significant role in various community-sector and employer-facilitated refugee relocation initiatives in Australia, including those that had occurred in two research sites in the Regional Settlement project. One was led by a Melbourne-based settlement service provider and a local church leader in the regional town who co-facilitated the initial visits of a group of South Sudanese men whose families were based in Melbourne and who ended up relocating to the regional town to take up work in the local abattoirs. Some of the men’s partners and children remained in Melbourne and some relocated to the regional town. Despite their eligibility to English language classes as part of the Humanitarian Settlement Services, the reality of navigating irregular shiftwork often hollowed out that entitlement since the few available classes clashed with work shifts and the participation in the relocation initiative required the men to prioritize work.

Another barrier to establishing themselves in regional towns was employer attitudes. A seasonal labour migration program facilitator observed that employers often lacked understanding of and interest in their labour force from migrant or refugee backgrounds:

I would like to see some education for the farming community on, some training, if you like, on the circumstances on which people come here so they are perhaps a little more understanding and tolerant. Again, I’m not saying they’re out right racist but some of them simply, some of them have an attitude and that is this: all we want is people to do the job. And that is literally all it is, they don’t want to talk to them, they don’t want to find out anything about them, they don’t want to understand what or why they are here, and that is something I’d like to see changed. [Pacific seasonal migration pilot facilitator]

While the widespread stereotype that country people are racist ‘rednecks’ was countered by examples of supportive employers in both projects, several participants acknowledged that they felt stuck trying to establish themselves employment-wise in the regional town. Race- or ethnicity-based discrimination in recruitment is notoriously difficult to prove but it emerged in the narratives of both skilled visa holders and humanitarian visa holders, among more and less qualified people, even though the expression of such discrimination often varies between industry sectors and between different racialized or ethnicized individuals. The earlier quoted secondary skilled visa holder Lilly from Southeast Asia found that locals had a better chance in securing the few job opportunities in the regional area she lived in:

And plus, being in the regional area, competing with a number of people, a number of other local Aussies anyways. (…) And I find that with regional areas, there's still that bit of – it’s not really unspoken but they’ve still got that bit of stigma for people from a different ethnic background, so working in areas where they’d expect someone from a local background to be filling.

Access to employment is critical, and adverse experiences in trying to find employment clearly influence future plans including movements to other locations. Susan, a Sudanese woman, who worked in aged care, had no intention to leave the regional town where she had managed to secure a job and was aware that others moved on because they struggled to find employment. She also referred to the implicit cost of starting anew somewhere else but did not exclude a future move if required for employment reasons.

Susan: I’m happy to be in [this town] now. I never think I have to go somewhere else. (…) I got all the services and I don’t know much about other places and I knew more about [this town]. If I should change I don’t know if I could get this one and this one. (…). I’m happy to be here.

Interviewer: So you are not looking for a move

Susan: No not really yeah. (…) Because in [this town] it’s so hard to find the job, but for me because I never trying to find a job and rejected. And I think is okay I can try it, and when I have a fear, do I have to get a job or not, maybe I decide if I move or not if I couldn’t find a job I want in [the town].

The examples in this section demonstrate that the experience of job searches and of specific workplaces that contribute to situated place-based knowledge of opportunities over time, informed by their own and by peers’ experiences (see also Clibborn, 2021), shapes migrants’ expectations about what is accessible to them. The key finding here is not related to differences between different groups based on their migrant status, ethnicity, racialization or gender, but rather that what is considered possible—or a ‘potential success’ (Della Porta et al, 2015; Papadopoulos et al., 2018)—and where, shapes migrants’ residential movements across different categories.

Situated Knowledge Shaping Decisions to Leave or Remain

Across the two research projects, most participants described settlement as a journey that occurred across different sites over time and often included continued mobilities. This has been described elsewhere as ‘multi-local settlement mobilities’ (Boese et al., 2020). Most regionally residing migrants had temporarily lived in one or more other locations in Australia, often a major city, before they moved to the regional town. The exceptions of employer-sponsored migrants or directly resettled refugees who had not resided elsewhere in Australia are however as relevant for an investigation into the role of migrants’ agency in remaining in a town, since skilled migrants are free to move wherever they want to, once they transition to a non-employer-sponsored visa or a permanent residency, and recognized refugees with permanent residency rights are always entitled to move wherever they like.

When asked about their initial settling plans and how these have changed, many participants recalled a ‘wait and see’-attitude. A couple from Sri Lanka who had originally arrived in Melbourne before moving to a regional town for a job on a regional skilled visaFootnote 6 remembered how they initially went back to Melbourne every weekend before realizing that they enjoyed the regional town as ‘a nice place to settle down’.

During the first few weeks of course we travelled into Melbourne every weekend, after about six months, I think we sort of reduced it quite a bit, and I think about after about a year in [the regional town] we, we thought that this is a nice place to settle down, finally, it’s peaceful, it’s calm and quiet, not hustling, hustling, driving around, the only thing is you have to have a car that you will be driving, because public transport is not good.

However, the couple became also aware that incomes were lower in the regional town which might influence them to move back to the city eventually as their visa allowed.

Sandra: We still do want to live in [this town].

Roshan: Yes, provided we get, one other thing is the salaries that you get in… It’s not up to city standards. It could be about $20,000 difference.

This reflection highlights that migrants’ benchmarks for assessing their life post-migration change over time. This significance of time in changing frames of reference was established several decades ago by economist Piore (1979) who observed that migrants tend to use the incomes and conditions in their home country for comparison with their post-migration employment conditions which generally leads them to accept below average conditions in the destination country. As suggested by Piore, over time, this frame of reference changes and migrants’ readiness to accept the pay differentials with local workers diminishes. A similar phenomenon applies to the case of regional migrants who begin to compare their opportunities with those of city residents.

Another important dimension of place-based settlement as situated within a settlement trajectory is that migrants’ mindsets towards places are affected by where they are on this trajectory and whether their visa or residency status allows them to plan into the future beyond a mere short-term residency.

Sunita, the spouse of a temporary skilled visa holder from India, highlighted the difference this temporal context and the associated mindset makes when migrants experience and assess a place, when she compared her post-arrival experience in Melbourne where her family initially went in search of a suitable job to the regional town where they eventually settled.

Interviewer: how did for you, how did [the Country town] compare to Melbourne? (…)

Sunita: Look when we came to Melbourne at that time, we were still new so we put into learning new stuff, and it was a new town and it was a foreign land. So I don’t know, we didn’t, hadn't made, when we were in Melbourne we didn’t make many friends, because we weren't in the settling mode, we were here for, in a way, that’s sort of from my point of view, we were here on holiday and if [my husband] could get a job we’d settle, otherwise we would go. So we weren’t investing so much on making friends, so we were having a good time in a way. But when we went to [the regional town] we wanted to make friends, because it was getting -, otherwise it would be very lonely for us. We needed that emotional support, so, the way we were thinking was different, like in Melbourne we weren’t there to make friends, we were here for three months. So our focus was different.

Moving one’s residency within Australia remains a possibility especially for those recently arrived refugees who had been resettled directly in a regional town by the government without any influence on their destination, as mentioned earlier. However, leaving for another destination and starting anew takes both material and mental resources. When we asked directly resettled participants, whether they considered moving somewhere else, some confirmed that they deliberated such moves and their costs, like Thida, a Karen woman who had been directly resettled in a regional town less than one year before the interview:

Interviewer: Do you think, are you planning to stay in [this town] or are do you think you might be going somewhere else in Australia?

Thida: I think at the moment, (…) not maybe, not easy to move one place to the other place. He told me that, (when) our younger daughter has got maybe a job or something like that we move to another place to Queensland to because the nice weather. (…) So maybe it’s not easy to move just thinking just stay in [this town] because we are used to staying here. We feel like our home in [this town].

Many of the regional residents with refugee backgrounds had moved multiple times before arriving in Australia, including between different refugee camps or different places in transit. Thida’s statement above hints at her awareness of the efforts involved in starting anew alongside her consideration of different family members’ needs over time.

Another participant with refugee background in the Regional Settlement-project described his stay in a regional town to which he had moved as part of a relocation initiative, in very strategic terms, as a place to make money to travel back and see his family. Zacharia, yet another former refugee participant of the Regional Settlement project, had worked as a teacher before coming to Australia and moved on from his job at an abattoir in a regional town to another regional town to take up university studies while working as disability support worker:

Yeah because I was thinking that if I continue doing or working in meat company I will have no time to do the study that’s why I decide to leave working in meat company and come to [this town] and do a study. Because we are learning or we want to learn more. Where I come from there’s a war (…) and many people (had) not got education or were not educated. If I come to Australia so I need to do a study so that I can assist my family here or maybe I can go back and assist people back home there.

Both participants had started as meatworkers in a regional town, and both exercised agency to achieve their ultimate goal, in the former case through staying in order to save enough income to travel internationally, in the latter case through moving elsewhere to improve their qualifications and future employment opportunities.

Discussion and Conclusion

Which factors get migrants or refugees to stay in the regional locations where governments have directed or settled them is a question underpinned by interests on behalf of the so-called host society or community which view the ongoing settlement of migrants or former refugees as, either, economically, useful or, culturally, challenging or enriching. Research into migrants’ motivations for moving or staying has long been shaped by public policy interests in such explanations, so they can inform migration and settlement policy development (Wulff and Dharmalingam, 2008; Krivokapic-Skoko, 2018). This paper challenges the presumption of retention as desirable outcome of regional migration based on an analysis of migrants’ reflections on their post-migration experience and their consideration of past and potential future movements. I argue that migrants’ agency is shaped by their situated learning in a regional town, drawing on O'Reilly’s (2012) and Stones’ (2005) concept of structuration. I have discussed three key factors that have emerged from qualitative research with people from migrant and refugee backgrounds in regional Australia. I have firstly explored the structuring layer of migration and settlement policies and secondly the role of job search and employment experiences in one place, which provide the context and sites for situated learning among regionally settling migrants. Thirdly, I have analysed migrants’ reflections on their—imagined or actual—movements in the light of situated learning over time. The experience of blocked employment opportunities, whether conditioned by visa regulations and/or a scarcity of skills-matching jobs or ethnic or racial discrimination in recruitment, which cuts across different visa and migration stream categories, and the learning from experience in the town or from peers all contribute to decisions to move or to stay. These learnings are furthermore structured by people’s life stage and situated in their household contexts over time (Boese et al., 2020). The findings from this research build on scholarship on migration and settlement that has drawn attention to the perspectives of migrants and refugees themselves (Schech, 2014; Colic-Peisker, 2009) and encouraged a critical perspective on governmental definitions of settlement ‘success’ (see Curry et al., 2018). It extends extent scholarship on migrants’ agency (Della Porta et al, 2015; Papadopoulos et al., 2018) by drawing attention to the emplaced nature of situated learning about what is possible in one place or another.

Skilled regional migration policies, direct refugee resettlement and refugee relocation from major cities in Australia differ in their design, yet all these policies are aimed at long-term settlement and are therefore potentially compromised by onward or secondary mobilities. The findings discussed in this paper indicate that such mobilities ought to be seen as expectable outcomes of policies geared at matching ‘new arrivals’ with regional places where the latter might need them. Where regional migration or relocation policies are underpinned by the expectation that migrants remain in jobs that local workers shun or compromise their dreams, they fail to consider the latter’s situated learning over time and their agency, whether it is skilled visa holders who move on after the period in which they are tied to a regional employer or whether it is former refugees. As others have highlighted, migration should not be seen as a movement from A to B and as outcome but as an event that evolves over time (Halfacree & Rivera, 2012), including migrant learning and reflexivity based on their knowing which may lead to further movement. Many regionally settling migrants may not engage in collective labour agency if they encounter precarious conditions (Papadopoulos et al., 2018) especially if they work in sectors with low levels of unionisation such as agriculture (Campbell et al., 2019), and they might not complain if they experience closed doors in their job search, but they may act by moving on to another location based on their situated learning. The same reasons that have led to the out-migration of regional, Australian-born residents over past decades, such as a scarcity or lack of adequate employment, education or training opportunities, also lead some highly mobile people with international migration backgrounds to considering better options elsewhere.

However, not every shattered migrant dream or disappointment with the employment opportunities in a regional town leads to onward migration. Where migrants forfeit their mobility right by staying put despite blocked employment pathways, their retention ought therefore also not be misread as a straight indication of regional migration policy success. Depending on life stage, family context and overall settlement experiences over time, regionally settling migrants consider and reconsider their options, opportunities and priorities over time and perceive and realise varying scope for agency through on-migration based on that situated knowledge in combination with shifting needs and dreams and in the context of significant relationships and life stages. Evaluating the quality of a regional migration policy therefore requires more than measuring retention. Instead, benchmarks for regional policy success should include outcomes such as social mobility, wellbeing and equitable access to skills-matching employment as well as fair employment conditions in regional labour markets. Even if such policy outcomes were achieved, onward migration is likely to always remain one likely expression of migrant agency.