Atrapados / trapped in space and time: protracted precarity in the homing of Argentine middle-class temporary migrants in Perth, Australia

ABSTRACT

In the past twenty years, Australia has re-directed efforts to diversify the recruitment of temporary labour and students, attracting middle-class migrants from new sources, such as Latin America. This paper explores how structural, political and socio-economic contradictions in countries of origin and destination shape Argentine migrants’ everyday experiences of trying to create a new home. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper builds on work on temporary middle-class migration to show how a ‘homing’ lens contributes to refining our understanding of how precarity can become protracted for middle-class migrants moving from the Global South to the Global North. The findings demonstrate that feelings of detachment from their past home but difficulty planning a future due to their temporary status exclude such migrants from the ontological stability necessary for homing. Using metaphors of ‘walls’ and ‘skidding’, we show how spatial and temporal precarity discourage emotional and material investment in their present homes.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporary migration
• home
• precarity
• Argentina
• Australia

Introduction

Temporary migration programmes in Australia have become a strategic policy instrument for the recruitment of skilled migrants in response to market needs (Boeri and Becker 2012; Boese and Philips 2017). Australia continues to transition from a permanent settlement model to one focused on temporary migration, with over 1.7 million temporary migrants living in Australia in 2021, significant in a country of just 26 million people. In the so-called global race for talent, the expansion of temporary migration opportunities has become less restrictive and more demand-driven, allowing new forms of migration (de Haas, Natter, and Vezzoli 2018). In Australia, this has resulted in a continuous intake of young middle-class skilled migrants on temporary visas responding to demand for low-skilled and short-term labour while contributing to the economy, with temporary migrants spending more money in the local economy than they earn (Tan and Lester 2012).

In studying these new forms of migration, scholars have gone beyond binary categories of forced/voluntary, illegal/legal or disenfranchised/transnational elites (Conradson and Latham 2005; King 2002) to re-conceptualise and explore the ‘social’ morphology of these emerging forms of mobility (Scott 2006). A new focus has been given to skilled migrants who are part of an increasingly significant post-industrial middle-class generation conceptualised in the literature as ‘middling migrants’. Middlings are characterised as well-educated, professional, trouble-free, and ordinary, having a middle socio-economic status in the countries of origin and destination (Clarke 2005; Conradson and Latham 2005; Mars 2005; Scott 2019). While this concept was widely used to challenge the binaries noted above, the result was a vague category that tended to focus on White migrants with an assumed fixed class position (Collins 2014; Robertson and Roberts 2022a). This failed to recognise what recent scholars have found to be a continuum of cultural, educational and socio-economic differences, resulting in differential experiences and outcomes (Baas 2017; Robertson 2021; Ryan, Klekowski Von Koppenfels, and Mulholland 2015; Wang and Connell 2021).

This is particularly relevant in the Australian context. In the past twenty years, Australia has re-directed its efforts to diversify the recruitment of temporary labour and international students, attracting middle-class migrants from new sources, including Latin America (Burges 2014; Paull 2020; Rocha 2008). Research on the community and identity formation processes of middle-class migrants moving from Latin American countries to Australia shows that these journeys are often contradictory cultural, economic and social experiences (Adler 2019; Duarte 2005; Roberts 2021; Torres 2017; Vazquez Maggio 2016; Wulfhorst 2014). These migrants often appear in the literature as well-educated individuals shaping their futures as students, travellers, professionals or lifestyle migrants following individual life projects driven by choice. But the reality is far more complex.

Focusing on the home-making experience of Argentine temporary middle-class migrants living in Australia, this article approaches ‘middle-class’ and ‘home’ less as fixed categories and more as a lens to visualise how social markers such as income, country of origin, education levels, employment, housing, and legal status mediate homing experiences. The goal is to capture how past, present and future structural constraints shape precarity in the creation of home. By precarity, we mean not only insecurity in the employment market, but in terms of life circumstances more generally that are characterised by uncertainty and instability (Butler 2006). To define home, we turn to Boccagni (2017, 1), who defines home as ‘a special kind of relationship with place – a culturally and normatively oriented experience, based on the tentative attribution of a sense of security, familiarity and control to particular settings over all others’. For the migrant, the space associated with home changes, but these characteristics remain. Recently, Boccagni extended this definition to focus on ‘homing’ as a verb that suggests an incomplete action, a becoming. Rather than a return to something (as per homing pigeons), he sees homing as aspirational and based on ‘a set of home-related routines and practices, and as an underlying existential struggle toward a good-enough state of being at home’ (2022, 585). He asks how home, as a socio-material setting, comes into being. Homing requires a place: as classically argued by Douglas (1991, 289), ‘home starts by bringing some space under control’. It thus requires ‘territorialising’ (Boccagni 2022, 593). But it is not just about acquiring a house; it is also a set of practices and relationships. Homing is performative. It is a human need, which for migrants emerges as ‘the desire to feel at home achieved by physically or symbolically (re)constituting spaces which provide some kind of ontological security’ (Fortier 2002). Thus, home is a place to be achieved, with material and emotional dimensions, and to dismiss its value is to ignore the value attached to it by forced migrants, among others (Boccagni 2022).

To explore experiences of creating ‘home’, we apply Boccagni’s (2017) heuristic matrix identifying domestic, material, spatial and temporal dimensions of the homing experience, as well as his additional emphasis on emotional, imaginative, symbolic, and relational dimensions (2022). Adopting this lens contributes to refining understandings of how precarity is temporally and spatially reproduced and reshaped among middle-class migrants moving from the Global South to the Global North. Research suggests that temporary visa status (Anderson 2010; Baey and Yeoh 2018; Boese et al. 2013; Boese and Philips 2017; Campbell, Boese, and Tham 2016; Campbell et al. 2019; Fudge 2012; Piper and Withers 2018; Reilly et al. 2018; Robertson 2019; Stevens 2019), gender (Coppola et al. 2007; Piper and Lee 2016; Piper and Withers 2018), career goals (Leccardi 2005) and social mobility (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022), can reproduce migrants’ precarity across time and space. Precarity and home have been objects of empirical analysis among homeless middle-class migrants (Marcu 2022), and refugees (Brun 2016; Kabachnik, Regulska, and Mitchneck 2010; Kissoon 2015). In the current study, we explore the experience of middle-class migrants who are not homeless per se, but whose homing experiences have been less than ideal., those who move on temporary visas from the Global South to the Global North, and experience their whole lives as characterised by precarity in relation to home-making.

In the past two decades, there has been growing interest in re-thinking how middle-class migration reproduces privilege across borders (Amit 2007; Benson and Osbaldiston 2016; Robertson and Roberts 2022a). However, precarity is also reproduced among this group. Baey and Yeoh’s (2018) study of tertiary educated middle-class migrants in Singapore shows how precarious employment conditions are a cumulative process that become ‘a condition-in-the-making that has its roots in pre-migration impoverished circumstances, multiplies as migrant subjects become entangled with the migration industry, and is further deepened and made manifest in the work-place at destination’ (Baey and Yeoh 2018, 268). In this paper, we find similar precarity among middling Argentine migrants in Australia. When precarity is analysed as a protracted past, present and future condition, the stereotype expands beyond the idea of well-resourced individuals driven by choice, to a recognition of both the privilege and the precarity carried across time and space.

We argue that the past life of Argentine temporary migrants in the country of origin and the present and uncertain future in the country of destination present two distinct modalities of precarity (see also Piper and Withers 2018). In Argentina, everyday insecurity, unemployment, chronic political corruption, housing shortages, constant economic crises, ongoing health system deterioration, precarious employment and violence appear as (often intersecting) modalities of vulnerability in the narratives of the participants, influencing how they conceptualise the domestic, material, spatial and temporal dimensions of their past homes. In Australia, temporary migration regimes have disciplinary implications for the horizons (present and future) of these individuals, with biographical timelines and material attachments to home being paused. Ethnographic research demonstrates how a strong feeling of detachment from the past home, but the impossibility of planning for the future, excludes them from present stability, discouraging emotional and material investment in their present place of residence.

This article first outlines the context of contemporary migration between Latin American countries and Australia, pointing out how negative macro-social transformations in countries of origin serve as ‘push’ factors, generating the growth of temporary middle-class migrants in Australia. We then outline the ethnographic approach used, and the key domestic, material, spatial and temporal dimensions of their homing experiences, demonstrating how insecurity, unemployment, exploitation, and disrupted aspirations extend their precarity. We conclude with consideration of policy implications.

Argentine middle-class migrants moving from Argentina to Australia

The Latin American temporary labour force in Australia has grown rapidly in the past two decades due to a shift to demand-driven temporary migration policy with options to become permanent (Boese and Philips 2017; Hugo 2004; Khoo, McDonald, and Hugo 2009; Walsh 2014), combined with an expanded presence of Australia’s educational institutions and recruitment agents in Latin American countries (Burges 2014; Del Rio 2014; Paull 2020). Macro-social transformations in sending countries have also been important as push factors. At the beginning of this century, Latin America as a region experienced economic changes in public policies, resulting in an overall improvement in the welfare of its populations (Kessler and Benza 2020), including a reduction in income inequality and transformation of the class structure, with an emerging middle-class. This group saw a marked improvement in access to education, social capital and financial resources – factors that typically increase aspirations and capabilities to migrate (de Haas 2014). The transformation of socio-demographic patterns, such as decreases in mortality and fertility rates, also impacted the family orientation of this population, with a change in values and preferences from family projects and commitments to a search for personal fulfilment (Kessler and Benza 2020).

In countries like Argentina, increased purchasing power and new class preferences combined with growing dissatisfaction with the police and justice systems, corruption, lack of access to a job, perceived government authoritarianism and other human rights abuses (Castellani, Parent, and Zenteno 2014; Stamatakis 2017; Ozarow 2019). As a result, migration became a potential pathway to a better life for many.

The synergy between deteriorating living conditions, lack of opportunity, the aspirational values of the new middle class, and the availability of temporary pathways to Australia is partly behind the growth in migration to Australia from Latin American countries such as Argentina. In only two decades, the Latin American region has become a significant source of migration to Australia, with a higher growth rate than migration from Europe, Africa or Asia (albeit from a low base). Latin American countries are a key source of labour, particularly in the hospitality, rural and care sectors. As well as temporary labour visas, education visas have also supported this growth. Between 2012 and 2020, 256,394 Latin American migrants entered Australia on student visas (DHA 2018, 2021), with Brazil and Colombia among the top five source countries, along with China, India and Nepal, for student visas since 2017.

In the past two decades, the academic literature has dedicated particular attention to the increase in temporary migration in Australia (Hugo 2006, 2014a) and its implications for the everyday lives of migrants. However, it has mainly focused on migrants from the Asia-Pacific (Collins and Shubin 2015; Khoo, McDonald, and Hugo 2009; Robertson 2019, 2021; Robertson and Runganaikaloo 2014; Stevens 2019; Wang and Connell 2021) and European countries (Campbell et al. 2019; Clarke 2005; Khoo, Hugo, and McDonald 2011; Tan and Lester 2012). With the exception of recent research on students (Paull 2020; Rocha 2019) and multi-stage migration practices (Roberts 2021), the growing interest in Latin American migration to Australia has focused on permanent settlers, with little attention paid to temporary migrants (Dewey 2022).

To better understand the settlement experiences of one such group, ethnographic research was undertaken focusing on temporary Argentine migrants’ exercise of agency (i.e. the capacity to act to achieve one’s desired ends) in the construction of home – their homing experiences.

Methodology

This article draws on formal and informal semi-structured in-depth interviews (N = 37) with Argentine temporary migrants living in Perth, Australia. Home visits (N = 21), participant observation, photos and memos extended the data. Fieldwork was undertaken between December 2019 and May 2021. A biographical approach was adopted to explore home-making practices, focusing less on ‘dwelling in place’ and more on how participants navigate their past ideas of home, their present situation and future aspirations within their transient legal status (Boccagni 2017). Participants were revisited on multiple occasions for unstructured conversations, drinking mate (traditional Argentine tea), Christmas, New Year’s Eve, birthday parties, ‘arrivals’ parties, ‘visa-granted celebrations’, and farewells. This, along with shared first language and country of origin, allowed close, long-term relationships based on trust to develop with the first author, enabling intimate and provocative questions to be asked. All interviews were conducted in Spanish, transcribed and coded with memos and photos using NVivo12.

Participants were recruited using a snowball technique. All were living in Perth on temporary visas – some in their first year and others still trying to achieve permanent residency (PR) after eight years. A majority were either on a Working Holiday Visa (WHV) (N = 21), Student (N = 9) or Sponsored visa ( = 7). During the course of the research, two participants had their PR applications rejected after more than four years of living in Perth, resulting in them having to leave the country within 30 days. The ages of participants ranged from 27 to 38 years, with an even gender distribution (F = 20 and M = 17). Almost all (N = 34) were highly skilled, with a tertiary degree obtained at an Argentine university, and previous professional work experience, hence we characterise them as middle-class migrants. Apart from two participants, all were working in Australia in low-skilled jobs in the hospitality, retail, construction, horticulture or care sectors. Four couples (out of seven) had children.

Many arrived in Perth with their partners, en busca de una mejor vida (in search of a better life). None had migrated previously. Even those who had arrived simply to enrol in an English course hoped to stay in Australia de alguna manera (somehow). None had shared a house in the past, not even as university students, but in Perth, all were renting, and 33 of the 37 were living in shared housing, somewhat unusual for those in their late twenties and early thirties.

‘Our future is … a wall’

I’m constantly stressed when I think that time moves forward, and I see myself in the exact same place where I was three years ago. With the passing of time, the options for me to stay are fewer and fewer, and the idea of having to return to Argentina makes me feel depressed. I’m 33 years old, living in a shared house with horrible furniture [laughs], you understand what I mean? This is not the home I was dreaming of when I moved here. But what I have there [Argentina] is not better, you know? And then you have these guys [Australian Government] that have these visas that don’t let you plan much your future. So why would I decorate my home or buy furniture?

Paola is a journalist who, besides writing a blog for a not-for-profit organisation, has been on a WHV visa (1 year) and a sponsored visa (2 years) as a manager at a Perth hotel. Prior to this, back in Parana (Argentina), her hometown, Paola had worked in four different companies, en negro (cash-in-hand), as an administrative assistant. Paola did not feel she could create a home in Parana, as no hay lugar para desarollar mi profesion (there was no place to develop her profession). However, Paola’s major concern prompting migration was gender-based, specifically her own safety and the increasing cases of gender-based violence in Argentina, where in 2020 alone, there were 287 gender-related deaths (Nación 2020). Like most female participants, Paola’s past idea of home is attached to a feeling of insecurity associated with this increasing gender violence. Since arriving in Australia in 2019, Paola has experienced constant reversals and re-routings of her opportunities due to the ‘hegemonic flexibility’ of the visa system (Robertson 2021), something over which migrants have no control (Collins and Shubin 2015; Roberts 2021; Robertson 2021; Robertson and Runganaikaloo 2014). The insecurity she lived with in her hometown and her inability to achieve her aspirations are distinct modalities of vulnerability. The connection between the temporal and the spatial is clear in her narrative – time passing and liminal spaces are fundamental to her homing experience with age and life stage (specifically the passing of time, for a 33 year old) significant in shaping Paola’s perception of her ability to create a home. ‘Time matters to migrant’s experience of home’ (Boccagni 2017, 65), especially when timescales are impacted by institutional policies. The impossibility of planning ahead, together with the lack of opportunities in her past, present and future, challenge any possibility of security, familiarity or control (Boccagni 2017). Paola’s story shows how the uncertainty, ambivalence and constant waiting that characterise her ‘liminal times’ (Cwerner 2001) impact on her home-making practices, resulting in her feeling psychologically disconnected, losing her sense of life, and ‘floating’ or ‘drifting’ in the present (Collins and Shubin 2015).

For others, like Carlos and Silvia, the idea of home is centred on detachment from a geographical location – Argentina. When Carlos (27) and his partner Silvia (28) were interviewed in March 2020, it had been almost five years since they had left their hometown. Australian migration policies allow Argentines to move to Australia on a WHV and extend it up to three years if they have first obtained a tertiary degree. Carlos and Silvia’s recollection of their past life in Argentina revolved around uncertainty, precarity, vulnerability and poor environments. Both had had enough of their hometown of Rosario, the third most populated city in Argentina, which was seen as dangerous due to criminal elements (between 2014 and 2020, there were an average of 378 recorded crime victims annually from drug trafficking alone) (Seguridad 2020). One afternoon while talking at a popular Perth beach, Carlos explained:

My life in Argentina was like living in a war zone. I was a prisoner inside my own house. There was something I had very clear, I didn’t want to raise my future child between huge concrete walls with razor wire everywhere with a big chance of having to organise his own funeral one day.

He had a sad smile on his face, describing such a horrific scenario, and formed his fingers to mimic a handgun, shooting the horizon where, some thousands of kilometres away across the ocean, this is a reality for many Argentines

But there were a range of ‘push’ factors making homing impossible, and that had triggered participants’ migration. During the interviews, participants continuously referenced political, personal safety, environmental and socio-economic issues such as corrupcion (corruption), muertes en las calles (deaths on the streets), desocupacion (unemployment) or contaminacion (pollution) and other forms of precarity that are part of structural conditions they have lived under, that affected their quality of life in Argentina, and over which they had no influence, contributing to their decisions to migrate. As Boccagni (2022, 597) eloquently puts it, ‘What we are homing towards cannot be disjointed from what we are [un]homing from, or against’.¹ Homing thus ‘starts at present, is oriented to a future achievement or becoming, and yet is constitutively shaped by (the recovery of) the past’ (Boccagni 2022, 596). For many of our participants, as these examples attest, the present home is being built in contrast to the past, and is the starting point for the future – a ‘waiting time’ for something better (Boccagni 2017). In the interviews with Paola, Carlos and Silvia, every time the idea of home was revisited, a feeling of ‘double displacement’ emerged in their life narratives (Kabachnik, Regulska, and Mitchneck 2010). Home was first displaced from their past in Argentina to their present in Perth, a new start to contrast with negative memories. This requires a spatial and temporal dislocation (Boccagni 2017); and a rupture, or discontinuity, in their personal biographies (Ahmed 1999). Second, they postpone their dream of home into an uncertain future that, from their current vantage point, continues their insecurity, unfamiliarity and lack of control. This triggers previous feelings of precarity. Their frustrated aspirations are linked to interruptions to the usual linear life-course progression, which they see the visa situation as blocking.

This experience is shared by Rodrigo and Jimena whose story exemplifies how their present living situation reproduces this limited capacity to aspire after four years of living in Australia on a temporary status:

We try to spend most of our time surfing or doing outdoor activities because that is the only thing we can do now. The only reason why we’re working in hospitality is to see if one day there is a door open to get the PR. But other than that, there is not much to think about our future because we cannot simply think about it, because our visas won’t let us do it. We know that we are going to stay somehow. We know that. We would love to buy a house or develop our professions but we won’t be paying thousands of dollars to enrol in another course study. I spent five years at university to become an architect. That was enough for me. So, if you want to know what we think about our future it is exactly that, a wall. We have a wall in front of us, and we cannot see to the other side.

The wall is a poignant metaphor for the blocked opportunities and temporal obstruction that many temporary migrants experience. They feel trapped by forces that are not theirs to fully control (Collins 2018), using the phrase ‘our visas won’t let us do it’ to illustrate a perception of a reversal of the usual locus of agency – the visa appears to have agency over their actions, the visa being the active party. The insights of Actor Network Theory are useful here, to understand how material, or in this instance political, objects, come to have a determinative effect on life chances. Rodrigo and Jimena normalise their everyday life surfing and enjoying Perth’s outdoor spaces, yet, in line with previous research (Collins 2014) the choice to shape their domestic routines in this way is not really theirs, but a response to institutional policies (Robertson 2019). ‘Decisions’ such as investing significant funds to undertake studies as international students, engaging in unskilled work, not buying a house or developing their professions, are all shaped by macro-structural forces, which they find themselves in a network of relationships with, constraining their actual choices.. While this does not negate migrants’ capacity to tactically work with policy through, for instance, visa hopping or seeking care through local or transnational networks, it does demonstrate how migration policies over-determine the everyday actions of temporary migrants.

The past and present situation of these participants demonstrates how precarity is reshaped across time and space. Each interview about present home-making experiences in Perth simultaneously covered navigating the temporal and spatial dislocations from their past in Argentina to their present in Australia and future (where even country of residence was indeterminate); between what it meant for them to grow up with insecurity or corruption, but unable to move forward, as temporary migrants, with the expected progression of life-stages frozen in their present life in Australia. They face a wall, over which they cannot see.

We first met Pablo at his ‘student visa granted party’ when he was celebrating a visa allowing him to extend his time in Australia for another two years, the duration of his Diploma in Hotel Management. Pablo arrived in Australia in 2017 after discontinuing his university studies in agronomy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. From a middle-class family, Pablo was one of the suertudos (lucky guys) in his family and in his town, where studying English and accessing tertiary studies – two main requisites for the WHV – were uncommon. He migrated due to la crisis economica y politica constante (the chronic political and economic crisis) back in Argentina, where growing up in the southern suburbs of Buenos Aires often means lack of professional opportunities and unemployment. Affording life as a university student, together with the constant difficulties of finding a job eventually led Pablo to discontinue his university studies and consider migrating. When we met Pablo for a second interview at his shared house in East Perth, he confessed that he did not want to migrate to Australia. But in 2016, both he and his father became unemployed making the financial and everyday living situation extremely difficult for his family. Pablo spent almost a year without a formal job, living at his parents’ home, sharing a bedroom with two of his younger brothers and relying on his mother’s single household income. At a university open day, Pablo heard of the visa de trabajo para ir a Australia (the work visa to move to Australia) which in fact was the WHV, a visa scheme many Argentine migrants use as an entry point to Australia and the starting point for the multi-step visa process to achieve PR. Pablo’s father insisted he apply for this visa.

As is the case for many participants, Pablo’s story problematises the stereotype of the middle-class migrant as a privileged subject with global aspirations, seeking career-related goals, whose migration is driven by choice. Pablo is far from being an individual in search of a ‘global life experience’. In fact as noted, for all those in this study, this was their first experience of migration and like many migrants moving from the Global South to Australia, their aim is to achieve permanent residency (PR), not to see this as a first step in a globe-trotting trajectory, but an opportunity to develop the ontological security of successful homing. The majority migrated on WHV or Student visas, enrolling in English courses (ELICOS) or VET courses (DHA 2018) which, as with temporary Indian students (Baas 2017), they are not really interested in. These courses are simply a possible pathway to achieving PR. Most temporary migrants from Latin American countries to Australia are highly educated and belong to the middle and upper classes in their country of origin (Adler 2019; Rocha 2008, 2019; Torres 2017; Vazquez Maggio 2016). It is their class status that enables them to afford the upfront costs of migration such as study fees and other major outlays (travel, visa and settlement costs). Some, like Pablo, borrow money from family members, promising to return it once they find a job in Australia. They are thus relatively privileged, but also precarious.

While skilled and middle-class migrants like Pablo are indeed somewhere in-between being elite and disenfranchised, these narratives show that their migration is in part an attempt to avoid the precarity associated with the ‘periphery’, thereby escaping material and social hardship. These findings are supported by previous research on Mexican, Chilean, Colombian and Brazilian migrants (Adler 2019; Collin 2006; Vazquez Maggio 2016; Wulfhorst 2014) that also identifies structural socio-economic issues of insecurity, violence and trauma back home as push factor for middle-class migrants to migrate.

But precarity does not belong only in their past life in Argentina – it becomes a continuum, a ‘structure of feeling’ (Baey and Yeoh 2018) that compounds over time and space, associated with increasing insecurity (Standing 2011) and lack of social and political rights (Piper and Withers 2018). As Piper and Withers (2018, 560) argue:

A holistic view of migrant precarity reveals how experiences of transnationalism can be inherently forced by adverse political and economic structures, while transnationalism meaningfully extends protracted precarity by emphasising how migrants navigate and contest spatially distinct modalities of vulnerability.

Ontological skidding: precarity in homing and life-course progression

In their present lives, new modalities of vulnerability emerge as a result of temporary status. These middle-class migrants experience ‘occupational skidding’ (Hugo 2014b), with degrees in medicine, accountancy or engineering from their country of origin being unused. Instead, they work in hospitality, on farms or in the care sector, even when this means being vulnerable to exploitation (Campbell, Boese, and Tham 2016; Campbell et al. 2019; Reilly 2015). The experience of downward occupational and educational mobility with reduced income, decreased job security, loss of status and mental health issues (Gans 2009; Nicklett and Burgard 2009) shapes the precarious present of temporary migrants, impacting their homing experience. Fragmented and routinised schedules in the hospitality and horticulture sector, leave participants disconnected from the mainstream (see also Robertson 2016), interrupting their sense of security and control, and leaving them struggling to achieve a ‘good-enough state of being at home’ (2021, 585). But this skidding is not just occupational, it extends to all elements of life and the home-making process.

Federico, for example, has been living in Perth on a temporary visa for over 6 years and, together with her partner attends counselling due to personal challenges resulting from their transient status. Both have faced reversals and multiple uncertain transitions which interrupted their biographical and biological plans, with negative consequences for their mental health, presenting as anxiety, distress and depression, and ability to create a sense of ontological security in their new homes.

If our life would rely on what we want and not on a visa, it would be totally different. In these 6 years we would have been able to have a house, have our own business and we would have even accomplished our main objective now which is to have a baby. But we cannot think of all these now. We have a student visa and bringing a child to this world thinking that tomorrow we can receive a rejection letter and have to return to Argentina is not very wise.

Here again we see agency transferred from the person to the visa (life relies not on what they want but on the visa; they cannot think of achieving their objectives). Thus, not only material factors such as investing in a home or business, but domestic and personal decisions such as having a child, are blocked. Home is experienced by these temporary migrants as ‘precariousness and uncertainty … living in limbo’ (Robertson and Runganaikaloo 2014), affecting domestic life and wellbeing. The precarious and uncertain present for this couple is partly gendered, given the devalued and feminised division of labour in the care industry, where Federico’s partner works, which is sometimes a site of exploitation and abuse (Anderson 2000).

Similarly, Paola’s transient status has implications for her homing practices, including vivir en una casa de backpackers (living in short-term shared backpacker accommodation) without feeling any emotional attachment or familiarity with the particular setting. The absence of a sense of home is not a deliberate choice for a ‘non-home’, but rather a result of unsettling and insecure circumstances (Boccagni and Miranda Nieto 2022). Unlike the evidence in some literature, this was clearly not ‘a purposeful choice not to make themselves at home in a particular domestic space’ (Boccagni and Miranda Nieto 2022, 529) but rather ongoing instability creating a feeling of homelessness, in a context where home is desired.

Research on homing reveals the key role that domestic objects play in shaping migrants’ home-making practices (Walsh 2006) and reproducing their cultural identity (Giorgi and Fasulo 2013). According to Paola, her material home vive en una valija (lives within the size of a suitcase), as she sees no point in investing savings in material objects, knowing that she may have to leave Australia. This limits the creation of a sense of home through objects, pictures or other material elements. Homing as a future-oriented experience where she develops an identification with a place – in decorating the interior of her dwelling or establishing un lindo jardin (a nice garden) – is constantly disrupted by job and visa changes, preventing her from having the time, energy and positive expectations necessary to make her environment homely (Kirsten and Claus 2012). Yet she also cannot return ‘home’ to Argentina. Thus, past and present precarity generates a limited ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2004, 59) to a future home. The fact that these migrants are not legally settled leads to emotions of stress and anxiety as well as the disruption of domestic and material future plans (Robertson and Runganaikaloo 2014; Rocha 2019).

Discussion and conclusion

This paper has demonstrated how precarity is perpetuated for some middling migrants across time and space in complex ways, affecting opportunities for successful homing generating ‘security and comfort,  … recognition and self-achievement’ (Boccagni 2022, 587). We have argued that this is experienced as ‘an attempt to tread the fine line between past ascriptions and future-oriented potentialities’ (Boccagni 2022, 585), which ultimately fails. The metaphorical skidding and walls demonstrates a stark difference between experiential and aspirational homes. They experience ‘protracted precarity’ (Piper and Withers 2018) where their ‘homing capability is critically shaped by their unequal access to infrastructural opportunities and resources, including societal recognition, to make themselves at home’ (Boccagni 2022, 595, emphasis added).

Rather than (re)creating home, their lives are in limbo, temporally connected to, and partially determined by, the past, and limited by current structural constraints, particularly the temporary visas that require them to study or engage in precarious work and result in temporary housing and stalled relationships. Gender, lower socio-economic status, age and length of residence are additional complicating factors. Their current situation and future prospects are less about path dependency and more to do with these barriers, blocking future orientation and imaginings. The lack of clarity about the likelihood of success in potential pathways to residential permanence means that the prospect of a better life recognised in the literature as sustaining migrants and providing hope begins to dissolve, leaving a sort of lethargy, hedonism or anxiety evident in participants’ narratives around their sense of being trapped, unable ‘to see the other side’ or to take home-making action. Their only choice is to wait, surf and hang out with friends.

As new forms of transient mobility emerge, there has been growing interest in understanding the migrant’s experience and aspirations of home over time and space (Ahmed 1999; Allen 2008; Boccagni 2017; Dovey 1985; Mallett 2004; Robertson 2021). This use of a spatiotemporal lens for the study of the home-migration nexus has allowed scholars to deepen understandings of the varied meanings of everyday home-making practices as well as the symbolic power that resides in the memories of multiple spatial and temporal locations imagined as home. For our participants, memories of their past home constantly referenced multiple and inter-related modalities of vulnerability – lack of opportunities for independence, gender violence, insecurity, chronic economic crises, unhealthy daily routines, and always the falta de algo (lack of something). Economic insecurity is one among many of these dimensions, and ironically, recurs, in modified form, after migration, due to the visa and qualification recognition regimes. Thus, unlike the experiences of some other temporary middling migrants, such as Chinese Malaysians working in Singapore (Lam and Yeoh 2004), for our participants nostalgic memories of their past home are not a source of comfort to revisit during their unstable present in Perth. While many referred to Argentina nostalgically as a place where la familia (the family) and amigos (friends) live, they all agreed that migrating was a strategy to achieve a better home, offering safety, security, stability, economic opportunities and a healthy lifestyle. What they encounter, however, is a wall and a sense of limbo.

The concept of home is often recognised as complex, conflicting and multifaceted but not necessarily negative or unhealthy (Allen 2008). However, for our participants, the idea of home itself is a source of anxiety and frustration, as it appears increasingly remote. If home works as a spatial and temporal orientation (Dovey 1985), participants’ inability to find stability in their staggered migration pathways (Robertson 2021) means home feels (at this point in time) forever out of reach.

A recent report from an Australian government committee set up to consider temporary migration (The Senate 2021) highlights the need to understand the negative social implications that temporary visa pathways have on Australia’s social cohesion. This is a welcome move, but it focuses on internal cohesion and not the experience and wellbeing of migrants themselves. We hope to have contributed to this project by offering analysis of the precarious homing experiences and ontological insecurity of a specific group of temporary migrants. Australia’s flexible migration system, which reduces temporary migrants to an economic value, leaves them dispossessed of their capacity to achieve the material, biographical and biological goals necessary for constructing ‘home’. With temporary migration programmes now a permanent feature of Australia’s (and other countries’) migration policy landscape, the denial of rights and entitlements will continue reproducing precarious homing experiences. A successful rearticulation of the Australian migration system requires a sustainable approach that generates positive social and economic outcomes related to migrants’ integration, settlement and wellbeing (Koleth 2017). Our findings suggest this is currently not the case.

Ethics approval

RA/4/20/6020 – University of Western Australia.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the comments we received from our colleagues Dr Catriona Stevens and Dr Rosie Roberts, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their commentary and guidance on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Western Australia.

Notes

1 We believe there is a typographical error here, as this quote comes from a section on ‘unhoming’. We have thus added the ‘un’ in square brackets.