Keywords

1 Introduction

Migration and multicultural communities are no longer an inherently urban phenomenon, and historical and literary accounts tell us that migrants have always also moved to smaller and medium-sized cities, whether to find paid work on farms or to seek out environments that resemble the landscapes they left behind. As geopolitical migration governance has become more elaborate over time and many governments in the Global North are honing and coordinating their efforts in tightening borders to admit only those migrants framed as ‘desirable’ and ‘needed’, some governments have also begun steering migrants towards provincial, regional, or rural areas. These efforts have been labelled partly as ‘spreading the burden of migration’ (Robinson & Andersson, 2003), partly as distributing its benefits from the centre to ‘peripheral’ regions (Akbari & MacDonald, 2014).

In Australia, which this chapter focuses on, such policy initiatives have focused on different groups of migrants and have overall gained positive connotations in the public debate on migration through references to addressing population decline and regional labour shortages. From Working Holiday visas to seasonal labour programmes designed to remedy Australia’s horticultural labour needs and from regional refugee settlement to relocation initiatives, the plethora of regional migration policies has grown and businesses still demand more visa options to attract ‘skills’ and ‘labour’ in locations and areas of employment that have increasingly been deserted by locals. The number of governmental actors in non-metropolitan migration has increased too. While the federal government is the legislative authority of the migration portfolio – which includes the design and size of different visa programmes – state governments have contributed to the shaping of regional migration flows, for example through taking up State Specific and Regional Migration Schemes (Hugo, 2008) and in part by championing multiculturalism. Finally, local governments, non-government organisations, and employers have increasingly influenced both the attraction, settlement experiences, and retention of migrants (Boese, 2015; Boese & Phillips, 2017; Wickes et al., 2020).

In this chapter I will review the key policy strands in Australia that have aimed for and partly achieved an accelerated movement of migrants to ‘the regions’, with a view to extend the analysis beyond individual, bureaucratically defined groups of migrants and draw attention to the ways in which a patchwork of policies produces differential – and at least to some degree unintended – outcomes for a variety of migrant groups. Following this review of policies and key findings from regional policy analyses, I will draw on qualitative interviews from two research projects funded by the Australian Research Council – one on regional migration (referred to here as Regional Settlement project) and the other on employment experiences of temporary migrants (referred to as Temporary migrant employment project) – conducted between 2009 and 2016 to introduce migrants’ and other regional stakeholders’ perspectives on regional migration. The Regional Settlement project was an early study of regional settlement of recently arrived migrants and refugees in rural Victoria and collected data in six regional and two metropolitan locations between 2010 and 2012. The project analysed the intergovernmental coordination of regional migration and the settlement experiences of recently arrived migrants and refugees. The research included an online survey of 106 settlement stakeholders, in-depth interviews with 85 recently arrived migrants and refugees, key informant interviews with 47 stakeholders, and 14 focus groups with 90 stakeholders from government, business, and the community sector involved in regional settlement. The more recent Temporary Migrant Employment project was a study of the employment experiences of temporary visa holders (including international students, skilled temporary visa, and Working Holiday visa holders) and their shaping by migration and employment regulations. It included semi-structured interviews with 22 horticultural workers, conducted between 2015 and 2016.

My analysis of interview data from these projects will seek to address the following questions: firstly, how do regional migration policies shape migrants’ experiences of regional migration? And secondly, what do their accounts suggest about the limitations and blind spots of these policies in achieving regional migration?

2 Literature on Regional Migration and Settlement Policies in Australia

The shift in migration patterns and policies towards regional migration has been reflected in growing research on non-metropolitan migration and settlement in many migrant destinations in the Global North. Demographers, rural sociologists, migration researchers, and human geographers have been at the forefront of studying the trend of non-metropolitan migration and the barriers and potentials for ‘successful’ regional migration and refugee settlement (Rye & O’Reilly, 2022; De Lima et al., 2022; Morén-Alegret & Wladyka, 2020; Simard & Jentsch, 2009). This section will review scholarship on regional or rural migration and settlement, with a focus on research that has considered the governance of this migration.

Most of the extant research on regional migration and settlement and related policies in Australia as well as Europe and North America has either focused on ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees’, and often on more specific groups of migrants or refugees, whether defined by bureaucratic or conceptual categories such as for example ‘skilled migrants’ (Schech, 2014) or ‘labour migrants’ (McAreavey, 2018; Rye & O’Reilly, 2022) or by geographic or cultural origin as in ‘African refugees’ (Correa-Velez & Onsando, 2009) or Syrian refugees (Haugen, 2019). This division of labour between migration and refugee/forced migration research corresponds to the binary treatment of migrants in policies, which are addressed to either ‘forced’ migrants or other, presumably ‘voluntary’, migrants. It should be acknowledged here that this binary has been challenged for some time, based on both epistemological and empirical grounds. Firstly, growing numbers of scholars have critiqued the uncritical adoption of bureaucratic categories because of its normalising effects and its reproduction of the categories of the very nation-state migration apparatus that it seeks to analyse (see for example, Dahinden, 2016). Furthermore, such labels cement one dimension of people’s lived experiences as the solely defining feature in the perception of non-migrants while obscuring their intersection with other dimensions such as ‘race’, class, and gender. Empirical arguments against upholding the binary between migrants and refugees in studies of settlement and post-migration experiences also point to the agency involved in the trajectories of people labelled as ‘forced migrants’ (Scott FitzGerald & Arar, 2018). The agency of people with refugee backgrounds is increasingly considered in studies of refugee settlement and secondary migration (Ahrens et al., 2016; Kelly & Hedman, 2016). Despite these contributions to a more agentic conception of refugees, research on regional settlement is still divided into studies of regionally settling migrants and those that focus on refugees.

Studies of regionally settling migrants in Australia have focused on employment and less so on other dimensions and outcomes of settlement. This can be explained with the policy-produced fact that the majority of non-humanitarian regional residents with migration backgrounds is in Australia on temporary visas, and temporary visas have largely functioned as short-term labour market-plugs. As will be explained further in the next section, this population ranges from very transient groups such as backpackers to skilled migrants with renewable visas lasting up to 5 years. Researchers have tended to focus on specific groups of visa holders and explored their employment experiences. This has included studies of backpackers, international students, and seasonal workers working on farms (Underhill & Rimmer, 2016; Howe et al., 2020; Reilly et al., 2018) as well as research on the employment experiences of spouses of skilled visa holders (Webb, 2015). With reference to skilled migrants, researchers have also investigated the factors that contribute to their retention and social inclusion in regional Australia, highlighting the importance of social connections (Wulff & Dharmalingam, 2008) and opportunities for social mobility (Boese et al., 2022; Webb et al., 2013). The question of retention has also emerged in studies of migrant labour shortages in agriculture, as for example post-Brexit in the UK (Milbourne & Coulson, 2021).

An important strand of policy-focused research in Australia and in Canada has highlighted how migration regulations shape employment experiences of temporary migrants. While these studies have not as such focused on regional destinations, the nature of the work done by some of these temporary migrants has meant that they are primarily placed in regional locations (Weiler et al., 2020; Strauss & McGrath, 2017; Preibisch & Otero, 2014). In Australia, both Working Holiday visa holders, who carry out 88 days of regionally located work to qualify for a one-year extension of their visa, and Seasonal Workers from the Pacific Islands, who participate in either the Seasonal Worker Program or the Seasonal Labour Scheme, tend to work on farms in regional Australia. The increasing attention to the former group in Australian scholarship was ignited by several investigative journalistic pieces on the considerable exploitation of this group of workers documenting how vulnerable backpackers were to economic and even sexual exploitation while working on farms. Socio-legal, employment relations, and labour law studies of the poor employment conditions imposed on backpackers highlighted how the 88-day rule manufactured vulnerability to exploitation (Howe et al., 2020; Campbell et al., 2019; Reilly et al., 2018) while providing a steady flow of labour to Australian farmers and growers.

A second strand of policy analysis in Australia focused on the seasonal worker schemes with several Pacific Island nations, querying the success and development outcomes of this programme, which was initiated as a development policy aimed at a flow of remittances from seasonal workers in Australia’s orchards to their Pacific home nations. Development scholars have pointed to the programme’s competition with the less regulated backpacker visas (Curtain & Howes, 2020), while political economists and anthropologists have challenged the notion that the programme was a success given the prevalence of exploitative employment relations (Rosewarne, 2019; Stead, 2021).

The third set of policy analyses in Australia and internationally has examined regional refugee settlement, including direct resettlement and relocations. Early studies in Australia were government-commissioned evaluations of direct settlement pilots aimed at identifying the factors that would make direct settlement of unlinked refugees in several regional towns successful (Piper and Associates, 2007, 2009). Research on individual refugee relocation initiatives in several regional towns also explored potential barriers to the longevity of such policies by pointing to the importance of employment and education opportunities (McDonald-Wilmsen et al., 2009; Stanovic & Taylor, 2005). While a growing body of social science research on regional refugee settlement internationally and in Australia has since examined various dimensions of settlement experiences and relations between refugee arrivals and their ‘host communities’ with less attention to policy (see for example Radford, 2016, 2017 on Australia; Glorius et al., 2020 on Germany), other research has highlighted the complex three-tiered intergovernmental coordination of regional refugee settlement (Galligan et al., 2014) and the variable yet potentially significant role of local government in shaping regional settlement outcomes (Van Kooy, 2022; Boese & Phillips, 2017 on Australia; Cullen & Walton-Roberts, 2019 on Canada) reflecting the recent ‘local turn’ and attention to multi-level governance in migration policy analysis (Oliver et al., 2020; Caponio & Borkert, 2010; Dekker et al., 2015). Scholars have also highlighted the limitations of governmental understandings of settlement success without consideration of refugees’ subjective experiences (Curry et al., 2018).

An obvious reason for the described separation of research on migrants and refugees in regional Australia is their respective treatment in the policies governing migration and settlement, which I will turn to next.

3 Review of Regional Migration and Settlement Policies in Australia

Research on migration has shown for a long time that migrants tend to settle in major cities rather than smaller and medium-sized cities or ‘the countryside’ due to a combination of factors including the presence of prior migrant communities, cultural infrastructures, and relevant services as well as greater opportunities for establishing themselves economically, whether through starting a business or by finding employment. However, migration to rural areas is not a novel phenomenon in many migrant destinations in the Global North including in Australia. In a settler colony all arrivals in what was to become Australia should be understood as ‘migrants’ who colonised not only coastal areas where cities were established but also invaded inland areas. Most accounts of early migrant settlement and ‘cultural diversity’ in what became ‘rural Australia’ tend to name Chinese settlers in the Goldfields or Afghan cameleers as examples of early culturally diverse migration to rural areas (Samad et al., 2022). Queensland’s sugar fields, on the other hand, were a site of bonded ‘temporary’ labour from the Pacific Islands in the 1890s, referred to as ‘blackbirding’ (Stead & Altman, 2019). These early, pre-Federation examples highlight the scope and limitations of migrant agency in moving to regional areas long before twentieth- and twenty-first-century migration policies started shaping and, in Australia’s case, tightly managing further migration to its settler immigration society.

Targeted government efforts at directing migrants towards rural areas in post-Federation Australia were evident as early as after the second world war, when Displaced Persons were resettled from European camps to former army camps in regional areas and bonded to work in rural areas (Jupp, 2007). Following agreements that the Australian government signed with Italy (in 1951) and Greece (in 1952), migrants from these countries were also accommodated in camps or hostels and directed to work in horticulture and agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s. Migrant hostels existed until the mid-1990s and in some areas migrants were able to buy land and establish themselves as growers, but by 1996, the share of all overseas-born persons living in rural areas had shrunk from a quarter in 1947 to 7.4% in 1996 (Hugo, 1999). In fact, the urban-centric settlement pattern among Australian-born residents was by far exceeded by migrants (Hugo, 2008).

Three developments in Australian migration policies from the mid- to late 1990s affected migration to regional areas either directly or indirectly. The first was a fundamental shift in the orientation of Australia’s migration programme from permanent to temporary migration, which eminent migration scholars in Australia have described as ‘immigration revolution’ (Markus et al., 2009). The second was the introduction of visas aimed at attracting migrants to regional areas (Hugo, 2008) and the third was the beginning of direct regional resettlement and relocation of refugees in or to regional areas (Shergold et al., 2019). Each of these sets of policies, listed in Table 5.1 and discussed below, has contributed to putting regional Australia on the map as a destination of people with international migration backgrounds.

Table 5.1 Overview of policies and programmes with regional migration significance
Full size table

Firstly, the shift towards temporary migration occurred through the introduction of new temporary visas and the rising number of arrivals of certain, mostly uncapped temporary visa contingents. The 1-Year-Working Holiday and Work and Holiday visas that could be renewed two times on the condition of working for 88 days in a regional area effectively provided an increasingly important segment of the horticultural labour force. Due to structural shifts in agriculture and horticulture such as mounting supply chain pressures (Howe et al., 2019; Curtain et al., 2018), human capital became the key factor for potential savings (Van den Broek et al., 2019). With fewer Australian-born people seeing a future in farming, migrants became increasingly relied upon as seasonal harvest workers, similar to other countries in the Global North (Kasimis & Papadopoulos, 2005). The numbers of WHM-visa grants almost doubled between 1997–1998 and 2001–2002 and grew 15-fold between 2005–2006 and 2014–2015 (Phillips, 2016). This exponential growth was also assisted by the introduction of a second-year and later a third-year visa on the condition of working for 88 days in a regional location. The realm of temporary visas through which horticultural labour has been strategically sourced was extended in 2008 through the introduction of the Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme (PSWPS) – a development scheme aimed at attracting temporary labour from the Pacific Islands that has since grown into the PALM-scheme (DFAT, 2022). More recently the industries in which PALM-scheme workers and also WHM are permitted to work have expanded to the care sector and hospitality in regional areas. At the time of writing none of these visas provides a clear pathway to permanent residency, but they have made a significant contribution to the growing number of migrants working – at least temporarily – in regional Australia. Due to the closure of international borders during the Covid-19 pandemic, this growth was halted and the number of WHM dropped from 140,000 at the end of 2019 to only 19,000 two years later, but since then the number of backpackers has risen again (DoHA, 2023).

The second migration policy trend to note here is the introduction of skilled visas aimed at influencing not only who migrates, but also where they settle (Hugo, 2008). Australia has long applied a very selective, human capital-based points-system for screening skilled migrants, adjusted from the Canadian system, but a new suite of visas introduced in the early 2000s introduced points allocations for regional residency. These visas were clearly aimed at ‘attracting global talent’ to regional sites in Australia. While the factors impacting the retention of these visa-holders in the regional areas beyond the first three years are contentious, with studies pointing to either predominantly economic or social factors (see Wulff & Dharmalingam, 2008; Wickramaarachchi & Butt, 2014), their very rationale set these visas apart from previous place-independent migration polices. Another change that accompanied this shift was the increasing entry of policy actors at the state and even sub-state regional level in shaping migration destinations (Hugo, 2008; Boese, 2015; Boese & Phillips, 2017). Programmes ranged from visas within the State-Specific and Regional Migration Scheme in the early 2000s, which directed migrants to areas of economic need (Hugo, 2008) to the Skilled Regional Migration initiatives of Victoria in the 2010s (Boese, 2015), which were aimed at assisting regional employers in sourcing skills in demand from overseas. A key difference between these temporary skilled and the earlier mentioned visas are that they provide a pathway to permanent residency.

The third set of policies that have contributed to the migration significance of regional Australia are part of the Humanitarian Program, which has been separated from the general migration programme 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, p. 68). Policy initiatives to be mentioned here are threefold; they include direct resettlement pilots of so-called ‘unlinked refugees’, relocation initiatives of former refugees settled in cities, and Safe Haven Enterprise Visa or SHEV visas for on-shore asylum seekers. Direct resettlement pilots of refugees without prior family connections in Australia began as federal government-directed pilots in the mid-2000s that sent refugee arrivals straight from the airport to several small and medium-sized regional towns. Evaluations of these pilots provided important knowledge about the necessary conditions of regional refugee settlement (Piper and Associates, 2007, 2009). Since then, the federal government has announced that 50% of refugee arrivals shall be resettled in regional Australia. Alongside, former refugees have been resettled in several relocation initiatives, which have been facilitated by varying partnerships between city- and region-based service providers, government agencies, employers, or a combination of these actors (Galligan et al., 2014). These primarily respond to the difficulties of finding work or suitable accommodation in cities and the increasing labour demands of regional businesses. The third channel to regional towns for people with forced migration backgrounds has been the SHEV, which was introduced in 2014 as a legal pathway to residency for people seeking asylum on-shore. Based on Australia’s very contested deterrence policies, on-shore asylum seekers are ineligible for refugee status. The SHEV explicitly combines labour market and protection outcomes by making a visa pathway to a non-humanitarian visa conditional upon work or study in designated regional areas for three-and-a-half out of the 5 years of the visa duration (Reilly, 2018).

Alongside these attraction and settlement policies and initiatives, there is another set of policies that has accompanied, responded to, and partly shaped regional migration and settlement particularly over the past 10–15 years in Australia. These are multiculturalism, interculturalism, and cultural diversity policies in regional cities and towns (see for example Moran & Mallman, 2015). Whilst not as such aimed at promoting migration, these policies have clearly grown in number and importance as a consequence of increasing regional migration for settlement. Such policies have mostly been established at local government-levels, ranging from more specific initiatives in the community development space to whole-of-government initiatives such as Greater City of Ballarat’s Intercultural Policies (City of Ballarat, 2018, 2022). At the national and international levels, some of these local-level policies have been inspired by movements such as the Welcoming-Australia movement (Wickes et al., 2020) and the Intercultural Cities Initiative (Council of Europe, 2008). While state governments have been variably supportive of regional migration and multiculturalism, with Victoria and NSW at the forefront, it should be noted here that Australia’s federal government has paid more attention to the regulation of regional migration as quasi-labour and population policy than the governance of regional multiculturalism.

This overview of key policy areas and mechanisms such as visas provides the context of regional migration experiences discussed in the remaining sections of this paper.

4 Unintended Consequences of Skilled Regional Labour Migration Policies

Visas in the temporary skilled migration scheme, which have also included the designated area visas, allow the primary visa holder to work either for an employer sponsor or in a specific geographic area. These visas also allow the primary visa holder’s partner and dependents to reside and work as secondary visa holders. On the one hand, this is an advantage that sets temporary skilled migrants apart from most other temporary visa holders who cannot bring their family to Australia. For example, Pacific Island nationals who come to Australia on the PALM-scheme for periods of between 6 months and 3 years have had to leave their families behind, and it was only in 2022 that the right of family members to join Pacific Island nationals was for the first time considered by the new Labour-government.

The right of temporary skilled migrants to bring their partner and children to live in Australia is a visa feature that many regional employers appreciate, especially in the context of skills shortages since it makes the residency of the valued employee more likely to last. Somebody who migrates with their entire family is thus considered a safer long-term investment in the business. A Victorian state-government initiative in the early 2010s funded a network of Regional Skilled Migration coordinators as part of Victoria’s Global Skills for Regional Victoria policy. Their work involved liaising with both employers and sponsored migrants to facilitate bureaucratic processes, and depending on how individual coordinators implemented their role, this could also involve facilitating smooth regional settlement outcomes. One of these coordinators, whom I interviewed for the Regional Settlement project, highlighted that some employer sponsors of skilled migrants went above and beyond their role as employers in supporting the migrant’s family in getting settled:

I’ve got employers who people are staying with, you know, until the husband comes back [to bring his family]. He lives with the employer, the employer helps them find a house in a nice area, then bring out the wife and kids and you know that’s something and might put the worker in, organise English classes and sit close to the kids.

However, Australia’s regional migration policies, which are designed at the federal government level, focus on the primary visa-holder’s employment for a specific employer sponsor, which is the condition of the temporary skilled visa. This single focus ignores the question of the partner’s employment pathway or career which often falls by the wayside in a regional town due to the more limited range of available jobs. In the case of highly qualified partners of skilled visa-holders, this can mean that their career gets compromised by taking on jobs for which they are overqualified or it is put on hold for the visa duration of the regional employer-tied visa and until a less restricted visa is gained (Boese et al., 2022). This can be illustrated by Sushila, an interview participant in the Regional Settlement Project. While her husband enjoyed his work in the area of his qualifications, for which both had been granted the visa, Sushila only found work as cashier in a local supermarket in the regional town, despite her double undergraduate and post-graduate degrees. In the interview she shared what this experience of underemployment meant for her:

when I was walking from my home to the [supermarket] for my very first day when I had to start my job, I was crying and thinking that I worked so hard all my life, and I worked in the top most industries and in the top most school, never ever thinking that one day I’ll stand here serving people…at the front desk…it was not something to earn the bread of the family, of course he is the bread winner, but I wanted that independence, I wanted that identity, that I have, I can work and I have to work. So for all those things I went, but yes, I was very disturbed by working there.

The underemployment and its associated emotional toll are all unintended consequences of Australia’s regional skilled migration policies that focus on the individual skills-bearing migrant as bearer of ‘skills in demand’ while providing a potential visa pathway to permanent residency for the migrant and their immediate family members. From an economic perspective, the potential resulting problem is the partner’s skills wastage. From the perspective of migrants residing in regional towns, the challenge of underemployment can lead to frustration and onwards migration to larger cities with more employment opportunities once another visa is secured. From the perspective of regional communities, whose hope lies with the population and skills growth outcomes of the policy, any doctor, engineer, or other highly qualified resident who arrived as a skilled migrant and leaves the town is a loss.

5 How Labour Migration Policies Structure Regional Labour Markets

Another consequence of Australia’s regionally focused migration policies relates to the schemes aimed at attracting horticultural labour to regional Australia and their differential outcomes based on nationality and legal status.

Schemes like the Working Holiday and Work and Holiday visas have contributed a significant share of the seasonal horticultural labour force in Australia until its interruption by the pandemic (Reilly et al., 2018). Alongside these visas for ‘backpackers’, the predecessors of the PALM-scheme aimed at placing workers from the Pacific Islands in Australian farms for a temporary period of time have gained traction over the years, first only slowly and recently more markedly (Curtain & Howes, 2020). Beside these migrants– with more or less restricted work rights – another important segment of the horticultural labour force has been so-called ‘undocumented workers’ (Howe et al., 2020). These are migrants without work rights and often without valid visas, such as for example tourist visa overstayers. Due to their irregular legal status, these workers are vulnerable to deportation and remain unaccounted for in the Census and other population estimates, although there have been various efforts at estimating their numbers (Howe et al., 2019; Howells, 2011). As workers these migrants are most vulnerable to being exploited by employers since they have no access to rights protection (Underhill & Rimmer, 2016). The resulting co-presence of different groups of transient workers in the same location has made access to horticultural jobs more difficult for regionally settled people with refugee backgrounds who look for entry-level labour and compete with other groups.

The local coordinator of an employment programme in a small regional town in the northwest of Victoria, with a population of just over 10,000 inhabitants, illustrated this underacknowledged problem of competition between different groups of workers based on their legal status, when recounting the employment search experience of one of his clients with a refugee background who had gained Australian citizenship.

Some months ago a Sudanese fellow came in, he spent three days driving around the district looking for work on horticulture farms. Two farmers he spoke to, said to him, first question, ‘are you an Australian citizen?’, and when he said ‘yes, I am’, they said ‘no work for you’. Now how do you interpret that? What does that mean? That’s from a farmer, or from farmers. Now not all farmers are doing this, not all farmers are saying this, but the fact is that the labour market is severely distorted by people who are employing those without valid visas, or who are accepting below the proper rate of pay.

Horticultural employers’ preference for workers on temporary visas over Australian citizens also emerged in other research and can be further differentiated by visa type and ethnicity (Howe et al., 2020). The tighter regulation and monitoring of the implementation of the Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) and Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS) meant that – until the pandemic – many employers preferred to rely on the ongoing flow of backpackers rather than trying to meet the accommodation and minimum employment provision regulations associated with the Pacific labour-programmes (Curtain & Howes, 2020). Investigating employer demand for different categories of workers, Howe et al.’s (2020) national survey of vegetable growers indicated that Pacific seasonal workers were considered as more ‘productive and reliable’ than people on working holidays, and many more (72%) employers found workers ‘from Asian backgrounds’ ‘very productive and reliable’ than was the case for workers from European backgrounds (only 48%).

While recruitment patterns had to change with the onset of the pandemic and associated border closures, together with exceptions made for seasonal workers from the Pacific Islands, it is crucial to note the close relationship between the regulation of migration, employers’ perceptions of different groups of workers (whether based on visa status or perceptions of race and ethnicity), and the demographic composition of horticultural labour markets in small and medium-sized towns in regional Australia. Even within the ‘backpacker’ segment, which encompasses 47 countries from across the globe – 19 mainly European and other Global North countries for the Working Holiday visa and 28 countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia – employers have been shown to prefer some nationals over others.

A British backpacker, who participated in the Temporary migrant employment project offered this explanation for the ethnic segmentation of the labour force on different farms:

I think – I think it’s what the farmer wants – if I think, ‘cause Asians are like very quick with the whole like packing and sorting, so I think that’s why like,’ cause I remember like I’d go in the office and I’d be like, ‘Have I got a job yet?’ And she’d be like ‘Oh they just want Asians at the moment’. And I’d be like ‘Oh’.

A Canadian backpacker shared a similar experience after having worked for different contractors of horticultural workers:

Certain contractors would only hire Asian workers. Whether or not they were being paid as fairly I’m not sure, but maybe because they had a different work ethic that they preferred as well. The same thing. Some people wouldn’t hire French people because they come from a country that has like incredibly high standards of work and this kind of thing, where they were like, ‘Oh no. They’re going to be too troublesome and like I’d rather not deal with them…’

While the demand for workers based on their ethnicity or nationality is often justified by employers through ascriptions of a ‘better work ethic’ or their better suitability based on essentialising and racialising ascriptions of physical attributes such as height, such ascriptions are more likely to reveal employers’ perceptions of compliance with poor employment conditions in combination with racialisation (Nishitani et al., 2023; Anderson & Ruhs, 2010; Maldonado, 2006).

In a country that has officially abandoned its racialising migration policies – commonly known as the ‘White Australia’ policy in the early 1970s – it is striking that the complex set of labour migration schemes aimed at bringing workers to regional farms and orchards has contributed to a diversity of, more or less, temporary migrant flows differentiated by legal status mapped on to nationality. Farm workers from Australia’s neighbouring Pacific Island nations with highly restricted options for internal mobility co-reside with two sets of Working Holiday Makers who are legally free to move between employers across the country but whose experience is highly marked by their ethnicity and processes of racialisation.

6 When Migration Governance Meets Mobility-Agency

A paradox at the core of migration policies aimed at steering migrants to regional locations, whether targeted at humanitarian migrants or ‘skilled migrants’, is the very attempt to steer the movements of subjects with high levels of what I describe here as mobility-agency. I understand mobility-agency as the capacity to enact preferences for movement or lack of movement to another location. Similar to Borrelli et al. (2022), I understand such agency not simply as resistance towards the governance of mobility but as shaped and co-produced by this governance. In this final section I will explore examples of such agency drawing on the reflections of mobile subjects and argue that these indicate an important challenge, if not frontier, of regional migration governance.

To begin with, it needs reiterating that the common distinction between refugees and migrants based on binary ascriptions of agency in their movements is deeply flawed. Both the assumption of refugees’ lacking agency in moving to another country and the assumption of pure volition in the case of (‘economic’) migrants’ movements are simplistic since the movements of both bureaucratically defined groups include experiences of decision-making, choice, and aspiration as well as constraint and external pressures. Agency and more specifically, mobility-agency is therefore in the mix of both kinds of international movements, and it does not end with arriving in a specific destination. The underlying motivation for crossing borders to seek ‘a better life’ either for oneself or for one’s children also gives rise to internal movements including those to and away from small and medium-sized towns.

Alongside the previously-mentioned direct resettlement policies at the federal level, there has been a growing number of relocation schemes initiated by various combinations of stakeholders such as regional employers and metropolitan community sector organisations or municipal governments in regional towns and settlement service providers (AMES Australia and Deloitte Access Economics, 2015; ICEPA, 2007). These initiatives often target specific groups of residents with refugee backgrounds who have not been able to secure employment in their current location and are willing to relocate for a job. One such initiative was the relocation of Sudanese men with refugee backgrounds to a regional town in the Goldfields region of Victoria. The local abattoir sought workers and many of the Sudanese men who relocated there because they had struggled to find work in Melbourne were assisted by a Melbourne-based settlement service provider. While the employment opportunity was attractive to the men, their families initially stayed in Melbourne and some partners and children who relocated to the regional town decided to go back to Melbourne. Moses described his family’s experience of navigating opportunities:

It was hard coming here, going back, and I decided to bring my family. I was one of the first people to take my family, settled my family here. And they live here until now my family went back because we had a lot of difficulties. My wife wants to learn English and there is no [English language provider], there is no way you can start English from low level so they went back to Melbourne because…my wife cannot work in the factory because they said they need someone who knows English and my wife doesn’t know English.

Moses’s story illustrates how the basic need for a couple with children to find work may necessitate movements beyond the initial settlement location. The well-documented vexed problem of finding employment in a new country in the absence of local employment experience and the additional challenge of poor recognition of skills and qualifications from overseas, especially for people with refugee backgrounds (Correa-Velez et al., 2015), is not easily solved by a relatively low-paid regional employment offer. In Moses’s case, his wife’s need to have access to English language training, which was not met in the regional town, caused her to move back to the city.

In another small town in northwest Victoria, an employment service provider reflected on former clients who were no longer around:

That’s what I have noticed about the migrant community, if they can’t find a job they might come to say [this town] but if they can’t find a job then they are quite mobile they will go to the other end of the country if they need to, because they just so badly want to work and get money and settle and look after their families basically.

The issue at stake here is the consideration of other family members and their needs and agency in addressing these needs. This is not only true for the partners of skilled migrants and may cause the move of a family to a bigger city with more employment opportunities and career pathways, following on from conditions of underemployment as described earlier. It applies even more so to people with refugee status whose internal mobility in Australia is not restricted thanks to their permanent resident status. Listening to the aspirations and plans of former refugees in different regional towns it is clear that they consider and weigh opportunities locally and elsewhere in the context of different family members’ needs, from education to employment, accommodation and community resources, safety and supports, and the likelihood of a happy life in different places. These opportunities and the potential to benefit from them is furthermore shaped by gender, class, ethnicity, ‘race’, and other intersecting identity dimensions.

In a 12,000-people town in the southwest of Melbourne, to which many migrants and former refugees moved to work in the local abattoir, some left and moved on to other places because they did not gain access to sufficient shifts. A settlement service provider suggested:

I’ve just settled four Afghani men who came down to work at [the abattoir]; they did some of their settlement in Melbourne. One of them arrived, I think he arrived in Hobart, went to Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and then came here. And now he’s in [another regional town] where he’s got the job of his choice, which is fantastic, because his speciality was textiles and he got a job at the textile mill in [another regional town] and his job is also driving trucks up there as well to fill in his spare time because he’s not 9-to-5. And the issue with the work down at [the local abattoir] is when they were told about the work and they came down to work it was explained to them that there were two shifts, a morning shift of eight hours and an afternoon shift of eight hours and they assumed from what they were told that they were going to get eight-hour shifts. Well, they didn’t, [they got only] four hours. And if they worked any more than four hours the other people that worked, the other full-time people, complained about them.

Many people from refugee backgrounds who leave smaller towns to return to major cities do so to support their children’s education opportunities. These choices are often not as straightforward as they may sound since lifestyle advantages of a small regional town may be weighed against the higher education opportunities the city offers. Mobility agency is thus exercised based on navigating different family members’ needs at a specific life stage and in the context of cultural customs, class, and gender expectations, as in the case of Mohamad from Afghanistan:

Actually I have to leave [this town] for [studying at the university]. Like, my family wouldn’t let me to go alone, they want us to be together with them, and so I have to move and there’s heaps of other families that have, they’ve finished year 12 last year, last year their families move because of them and now they are not happy in Melbourne, like, they’re not with happy with the environment, it’s bit busy, is hard to find a house, too much expense. Yeah, so that’s the reason they are moving, like, for their further educations.

These examples illustrate how the governance of regional migration and settlement may influence the circumstances of initial movements to regional locations while decisions to stay or move on from regional towns are strongly embedded in people’s family and household needs, aspirations, and priorities, which are in turn shaped by life stages and cultural norms and expectations. If place-based opportunities – particularly in the areas of employment, education, and training – do not allow for the fulfilment of needs, aspirations, and priorities, then mobility capital trumps any governance objectives to keep migrants or refugees in a place.

7 Concluding Remarks

Regional migration and refugee resettlement are no novel phenomenon in Australia, nor is the governmental promotion of non-metropolitan migration. From the bonded labour-schemes that brought Pacific Island nationals to work in sugar cane fields in Queensland pre-Federation (Stead & Altman, 2019) to the labour camps for displaced Europeans after World War II and later Italian and Greek seasonal workers in regional Australia (Jupp, 2007), Australian migration governance has long extended to places beyond the major cities. What makes regional migration governance in the 2020s different from earlier versions is the complex and highly differentiated policy patchwork with partly competing objectives and outcomes that different federal governments have created over time in an increasingly employer-demand-driven migration regime. This patchwork includes temporary skilled migration policies that are aimed at directing healthcare professionals, engineers, and migrants with other sought-after qualifications to regional towns with an eye to their ongoing settlement and notwithstanding the temporariness of initial visas. It also includes nominal and de facto labour migration policies (Tham et al., 2016) aimed at attracting horticultural and increasingly also hospitality and healthcare workers for short periods to regional Australia without granting them a pathway to permanent residency. Finally, regional migration is governed by direct resettlement pilot schemes for refugees as well as relocation initiatives aimed at attracting former refugees for long-term settlement. Co-existing with these different migration policies are regional welcoming, multi- and interculturalism policies at the municipal level that are variably aimed at facilitating integration, social cohesion, and wellbeing of increasingly culturally diverse communities (Van Kooy, 2022; Wickes et al., 2020; Moran & Mallman, 2015, 2019).

In 1999, eminent Australian demographer Graeme Hugo (1999) observed that the

the relative lack of success of schemes in Australia and elsewhere to encourage migrant settlement in non-metropolitan centres suggests that the future of Australia’s population distribution is more likely to be shaped indirectly by policies which encourage (or discourage) economic development outside core regions of the country rather than by direct interventions to influence where new immigrants to Australia settle.

Two decades later the assessment of such initiatives of encouraging migrant settlement beyond the metropole would look quite different. There are ever more regional migration and relocation initiatives (even though an agricultural visa that was announced under the Coalition-government in 2020, was immediately abandoned by the subsequent Labour government in 2022). The success of refugee settlement in strengthening regional communities and economies has been promoted by government and documented in evaluations of such initiatives (see, for example, AMES and Deloitte, 2015).

What this chapter has sought to highlight is the need to look beyond individual success stories of the ‘triple-wins’ of regional settlement to the sum of policies that seek to redirect migration from major to smaller cities and towns in what is referred to as ‘regional Australia’. Such a holistic view allows the identification of some unintended policy outcomes for the target groups of other policies, illustrated by the example of local citizens with refugee backgrounds who compete with temporary, transient, and undocumented workers in horticultural labour markets. The analysis provided has also illustrated the creation of inequalities between different groups of migrants through visa policies and their effects on regional labour markets. Finally, the chapter has drawn attention to mobility agency as a real frontier of any geopolitical migration governance within one country, which emerges from the movement trajectories and reflections of mobile subjects who vote against short-sighted regional population or labour supply-policies with their feet. To conclude these reflections on twenty-first-century regional migration policies in Australia, I would like to paraphrase the Swiss writer Max Frisch’s much quoted commentary on twentieth-century ‘guestworker’ policies in Europe (‘They called for labour but people came’): ‘They called for either regional guestworkers, or skilled and refugee settlers, but people came, who make their own calls on staying or leaving often despite migration policies.’