Haunted borders: Temporary migration and the recalibration of racialised belonging in Australia

Abstract

The shift away from a focus on permanent settlement and towards a temporary migration paradigm is remaking Australia’s borders in the twenty-first century. Through an empirical case study of Indian migrants in Australia this thesis examines the implications of the shift to temporary migration for the racial belonging of migrants in Australia. Adopting an intergenerational approach it examines data from interviews conducted in Sydney with Indian migrants who are long-term settlers in Australia, as well as those who migrated from India from the year 2000 on temporary visas. Interviews with key informants, government officials, and local service providers are also analysed to provide insights into the governmentality of temporary migration. The relative paucity of theorising on race in studies of contemporary migration gives race a spectral quality that is ever-present but barely articulated. This thesis seeks to render speakable the ghost of race in migration. Firstly, I analyse the nation’s border as a space haunted by the ghost of race. I argue that historicising the use of temporary migration in transnational settler colonial contexts, including through a comparative study of temporary migration in Canada, is crucial to illuminating the contemporary function of temporary migration as a racial biopolitical technology of the border. Secondly, I analyse three key ways in which temporary migration functions as a racial biopolitical technology. The biopolitical modality of chronopolitics produces temporary migrants as precarious subjects by conditioning their relation to the present and future. The system of governmentality through which temporary migration is administered further conditions the precarity of temporary migrants, while ensuring their externalisation from national social policy frameworks for migrant integration. The Australian state then regulates the link between temporary and permanent migration using the body of the temporary migrant to draw the racial fault line between the ‘desirable’ settler subject and ‘undesirable’ disposable migrant subject. Finally, I examine how Indian migrants negotiate haunted borderscapes to make their own futures through temporalities of hope that exceed nationalist constructs of belonging.