Multi-local settlement mobilities

ABSTRACT

Policy and recent scholarly understandings of settlement have both neglected continued movements of international migrants post-arrival in their destination country. The concept of settlement appears tied to outdated sedentary social science approaches that recent mobilities scholarship challenges. Rather than contrasting internal movements with settlement, we argue settlement is better understood as a social process involving spatial movement as well as stasis. The conceptual value of settlement can be enhanced by understanding it as entailing temporally, relationally, and politically bound practices of spatial mobility and immobility. These settlement mobilities are long-term processes often involving multiple localities. Drawing on a qualitative study of international migrants and key stakeholders residing in and near a rural town in South Eastern Australia, we examine how multiple moves are a regular part of post-migration journeys of settlement. While settlement already includes core concerns with new arrivals’ establishment of employment, family, and place-based community, our findings show that those with migrant and refugee backgrounds experience these multi-locally, as intersecting factors in decision-making and practices of moving between cities and rural areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Internal migration
• mobilities
• rural/ regional
• refugee
• settlement
• skilled migrant

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We adopt the notion of ‘arrivals’, despite its connotation with bureaucratic discourse, to refer to people who crossed international borders in the past and engage in processes of emplacement in the arrival country. ‘Arrivals’ include people with different migration experiences and visa status, from forced migration ending in a permanent visa to migration for work on a skilled temporary visa. We also note that ‘settlement’ is a politically and analytically contested concept in settler-colonial countries such as Australia, where ‘invasion’ could be used in its place. We use settlement because of its ubiquity in research fields we address, and we challenge accepted understandings of settlement and settlement ‘success’.

2 We use the notion of im/mobility exclusively in its spatial sense in this paper while acknowledging that settlement involves other dimensions of mobility (social, economic, etc.).

3 The serial intra-national mobilities of Working Holiday visa holders who travel from one farm job to another, and the circular mobilities of Fly In-Fly Out-workers who travel between home and mining sites, are rare examples of recent research on intra-national movements of international migrants in Australia (Hanson and Bell 2007; Argent and Tonts 2015).

4 We use a fictional town name to preserve the anonymity of our participants.

5 The research was funded through the ‘Transforming Human Societies Research’ Focus Area at La Trobe University, approved by the La Trobe University Human Ethics Committee and adhered to ethical protocols. We would like to also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the earlier version of this paper.

6 ‘Skilled migrants’ encompass temporary and permanent, independent and employer-sponsored visa holders, whose visa is granted on the basis of qualifications, language and other skills. The category of humanitarian entrant encompasses refugees with permanent residency status and former asylum seekers who have become permanent residents. Working Holiday visas are temporary.

7 We refer to this as a local (multicultural) community because the immigration history of the town means the population of ‘locals’, post colonisation, has included people from many European migrant backgrounds apart from British, going back generations. As we show in our discussion, whether this means the community is multicultural beyond its demographic sense, for example as truly accepting and embracing cultural diversity, and providing equal opportunities for people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, is also contested.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by La Trobe University.