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In recent years, Australian nationalism has been increasingly framed against a dangerous Muslim 'other'. This paper offers a gendered analysis of this nationalism, arguing that a discourse of protecting women's rights has enabled Islam to be portrayed as inherently misogynistic and therefore a threat to Australia's egalitarian culture. This racialised paternalism was clearly articulated in debates surrounding the December 2005 Cronulla riots, a response to the alleged aggressive and misogynistic behaviour of 'Lebanese Muslim' males at Cronulla beach in Sydney. The paper shows that such discursive acts are part of a broader history of colonial feminism that legitimated Western supremacy through arguing that colonised societies oppressed 'their women' and were thus unfit for self-governance, a logic which has also been commonplace in the recent war on terror. It concludes by exploring how Muslim women themselves can speak publicly about women's rights without fuelling further anti-Muslim racism.

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Asian migration is transforming education cultures in the Anglosphere. This is epitomised in the mounting debates about 'tiger mothers' and 'dragon children', and competition and segregation in schools. Anxiety and aspiration within these spaces are increasingly ethnicised, with children of Asian migrants both admired and resented for their educational success. This paper presents some frameworks for understanding how Asian migration both shapes and impacts upon education outcomes, systems and cultures, focusing on Australia, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. It challenges the cultural essentialism that prevails in academic and popular discussion of 'Asian success', arguing that educational behaviour cannot be reduced to ethnic categories, whether these are ethnic 'learning styles' (e.g. the 'Chinese learner') or 'cultural' family practices (e.g. 'Confucian parenting'). In also presenting an overview of papers in this special issue, this introduction showcases the explanatory models offered by our authors, which locate Asian migrants within broader social, historical and geo-political contexts. This includes global markets and national policies around migration and education, classed trajectories and articulations, local formations of 'ethnic capital', and transnational assemblages that produce education and mobility as means for social advancement. These are the broader contexts within which education cultures are produced.

The Australian government claims that its emphasis on skills in the migration program has paid off, with recent migrants achieving superior labour market outcomes to previous cohorts, and contributing more to the ‘productive diversity’ of the Australian workforce. Such sentiments are supported by most contemporary scholars of migration. Their conclusions stem from the adoption of a human capital approach where migrants’ labour market outcomes are seen to directly reflect their individual skills and other attributes, as opposed to social and institutional practices such as discrimination or exclusion. In this article we subject the prevailing ‘success story’ about skilled migration to scrutiny, and point to alternative ways of interpreting the empirical evidence (namely, longitudinal survey data) as well as alternative ways of explaining the incorporation of migrants in the Australian workforce.