Explaining australian immigration

Abstract

This article reviews the post-Second World War literature on explanations for Australia's immigration program. It discovers three main schools of thought based on net pull factors: the official explanation and two unofficial explanations which focus on migrants as workers and on migrants as consumers. However the growing importance of net push factors after 1974 means that some of this work is less relevant today. Explanations focusing on net push factors have yet to cohere into a distinct perspective (or perspectives) but some research has been done on chain migration and family-based migration strategies, asylum seekers, temporary movement, and migration and the law. Immigration research is sometimes controversial and politicized. While intellectual integrity must always take priority, the values of civility and tolerance are also important.

Nowhere is as at home: adjustment strategies of recent immigrant women from the former Yugoslav Republics in southeast Queensland

“…Hence, reactive migration may be considered as a survival strategy: push factors (related to the country of origin) rather than pull factors (related to the country of destination) predominate in the decision-making process (cf. Betts 1996). In addition, a country of destination for humanitarian settlers and refugees is often 'a game of chance' (Volek 1978: 46); immigration quotas, selection criteria, availability of transport and so on may all determine immigrants' opportunities.…”

Interculturalism, multiracialism and transculturalism: Australian and Canadian experiences in the 1990s

“…Similarly, the Australian precursors of multiculturalism did not favour state-sponsored pluralism but rather made privileged the concept of equality of opportunity for all immigrants regardless of their ethnic background. 3 In both cases there was the underlying notion of an existing mainstream culture. However, by emphasizing the notion of ethnic communities both the Whitlam and the Trudeau government contributed to the fact that integrationism was rapidly superseded by a second trend of cultural pluralism.…”