‘Surrounded with so much uncertainty’: asylum seekers and manufactured precarity in Australia

ABSTRACT

In Australia, nearly 30,000 asylum seekers have the legal right to work, but their temporary and conditional migration status exposes them to work-related precarity. This article draws on a small qualitative study that examined asylum seekers’ experiences of seeking work and achieving economic security. Over an 18-month period, 29 semi-structured interviews with asylum seekers who had work rights in Australia were conducted. It provides insights into how restrictive immigration policies manufacture precarity through short-term, conditional visas, resulting in employer risk aversion, segmentation into insecure work, and in-work instability and mistreatment. Asylum seekers manage their experiences and feelings of pervasive insecurity through individual coping and survival strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum seekers
• economic security
• employment
• migration
• precarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

John van Kooy http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4668-261X

Notes

1 Available data suggest that no unauthorised boats have arrived in Australia since the naval interception/turn-back policy was introduced in November 2013. However, the Coalition government also does not release details of ‘on-water’ matters conducted as part of ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, except in ministerial or departmental statements, casting some doubt on available figures (Phillips 2017).

2 Government figures as at 4 September 2017 indicate there were 18,480 people living in the community who had arrived via unauthorised boats (‘illegal maritime arrivals’ or ‘IMAs’) and had not yet had a protection visa application finalised. An additional 9,554 people who had arrived ‘lawfully’ (by plane) applied for protection visas in the 2015–2016 financial year. Major source countries for boat arrivals included Iran, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, as well as stateless people, while for plane arrivals the top source countries were Malaysia and China (DIBP 2017b, 2016c).

3 The institution is a community-based not-for-profit organisation guided by a vision of an Australia ‘free of poverty’. The institution houses the largest and oldest community-based research centre in Australia and is affiliated with a Melbourne-based university.