Laboratorio Australia: Setting the benchmark

for world’s worst practice

par Damian SpruceIlaria Vanni | 10 March 2005 |
Translations: [italiano]

This month the British Government has announced the details of its new points-based system of
migration management [1]: the white paper Making Migration Work for Britain was released on 7
March. [2] The system consolidates over 80 different modes of work/study migration permits into a
single test, based on the accumulation of points in relation to skills. It is divided into 5 tiers, from highly
skilled down to students and unskilled workers and privileges those at the top end such as doctors and
entrepreneurs. [3] The new system follows in the footsteps of other points test immigration systems,
such as those of Canada and most notably Australia. In fact the Australian system was the model at the
centre of the debate on this issue when it was first raised by British Labour in the May 2005 election.

But at the same time as the points system is being implemented in Britain, it is being questioned and
changed in Australia. These changes are inextricably linked to the reform of the labour market which,
together with immigration, the privatisation of universities, schools and the public health system, formed
the new program of Australia’s Coalition Government after its re-election in autumn 2004. The
governing coalition is made up of just two parties, both of the reactionary right, the Liberal Party and the
National Party. From July 2005 they have controlled the Senate through an absolute majority, along
with the House of Representatives where they were already in power.

Immigration in Australia is divided into three principle sectors, in addition to which there is the
humanitarian program covering refugee flows, asylum seekers and those in the humanitarian aid
category. However this article will not deal with those in the humanitarian program.

The definition of migrant is itself regulated in a very precise taxonomy, articulated in three different
typologies: first, the skilled migration stream - for migrants with specialised skills; family reunion - in
which potential immigrants can be sponsored by a family relation who is an Australian citizen or a
permanent resident; and special eligibility migrants, reserved for ex-Australian citizens who want to
reacquire their citizenship, as well as for some citizens of New Zealand. The current government
privileges the skilled migration stream on the thinking that, as one reads in an informative brochure from
DIMA, attracting people with «outstanding abilities... will contribute to the Australian economy.» [4]

The current Minister for Immigration, Senator Amanda Vanstone, has explained how the skilled
migration program is driven by industry: «What we need to do with the immigration program is be
responsive to needs, and that means get the people with the skills that industry needs and get them
where industry is.» [5]

In the 2004-2005 year skilled migration amounted to 77,800 people, that is 65% of all migrants who
arrived in Australia, against the 13,178 who arrived under the humanitarian program. [6]

Within these three principal categories there are other categories and subcategories. Some of these
categories in the skilled migration stream work according to the point system and the accumulation of
points. The proliferation of typologies is reflected also in the variety of visas given out under various
categories which function in a progression from the temporary resident visas, such as the student visas or
certain work visas like the working holiday visa or guest worker visas to the permanent resident visa,
and up to citizenship itself. Only a few visas allow the completion of the cycle up to citizenship.

Both the points system and the variety of visas can be interpreted as a dematerialised version of border
controls that regulate not only the entrance into the country but, once within the territory, operate as
internal borders, producing a hierarchy in the type of participation allowed and access to the rights of
citizenship. For example if a person succeeds in passing the points system exam, once in Australia she
must wait two years before she can access forms of subsidy from welfare for citizens and permanent
residents. Other types of visa, like those for the spouses of Australian citizens, are staggered in two years
blocks with provisions that include the requirement of minute documentation of the couple’s life.

A summary of the regulations of the points system is illuminating in helping to understand both how it
functions in terms of border controls and its biopolitical aspects. [7]

Points are given based on particular characteristics of the applicant: skills, age, knowledge of the English
language, experience in the type of work, professional or academic qualifications obtained in Australia,
skills of his partner, bonuses for those who have investments of a minimum $100,000 (around 60,000
euro) in Australia, knowledge of a language spoken in the country, work experience in Australia, and
for those who are sponsored by a citizen or Australian resident, the relationship with that citizen. The
test is available on the DIMA website and functions like a game of monopoly.

For each attribute certain points are given, for instance in the case of the «skills» section, 60 points will
be given if the profession indicated requires professional knowledge, a degree and work experience, 50
points if the applicant possesses the equivalent of an Australian degree even if not connected with the
profession indicated etc.

The system is complicated with the introduction of «Occupations in Demand» - that is those professions
where there is a significant shortage in Australia, such as doctors and nurses but also cooks,
electroplaters, mechanics, hairdressers, upholsterers and panel beaters. If the profession indicated is
among those required, twenty points are earned if accompanied by a specific offer of work, 15 without.
Further if one has three or four years’ experience in the particular field of work, another 10 points are
given, or five if the applicant has worked in another field.

In an analogous manner, points decrease according to one’s age, with a maximum 30 points for the age
group from 18 to 29 years to a minimum of 15 for the age group from 40 to 44 years. You can’t migrate
to Australia, in the General Skilled Migration stream at least, once you’re 45. Knowledge of English
brings another 20 points for those who speak it at the mother tongue level (established by another test,
one of linguistic competence, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS)).

We could continue the list of points to do with qualifications ad nauseam, but it’s important to also note
that, as well as the points accumulated in this system, one adds the state of health of the applicant and
certificates that demonstrate that the person making the application is not disbarred from entry. Every
migrant must put themselves through and pass a long series of medical exams to determine the state of
their health. Some diseases, like tuberculosis, hepatitis and HIV/AIDS immediately disqualify the
applicant from obtaining a visa, while other illnesses or particular conditions that might require care and
therefore put a burden on government finances are subjected to scrutiny. Whenever the doctor decides
that the costs associated with the disease could be too high, the migration application will be refused.

One can therefore say that the points system is one of the more important «filter functions of border
controls» [8] in the Australian immigration regime, and that its functioning depends on the application of
biopolitical categories to the life of the immigrant population, both before and after their arrival in
Australia. These categories include the medicalisation and the meticulous checking of the state of health,
the languages spoken, the choice of whether to reside in metropolitan areas or rural and regional ones,
knowledge of the language of one of the larger ethnic groups and so on.

The multiplication of these control filters enters into the dynamics described by the Canadian scholar
William Walters according to which the biopolitical management of Western societies is displaced from
the interior and occurs more and more at the borders of the nation-state. It happens through the control
apparatuses that are developed alongside the borders themselves such as medical authorities, customs
and immigration officials. It’s important to note how these biopolitical spaces are not purely restrictive
and repressive mechanisms but places where power itself is produced: borders can be understood as a
privileged institutional site in which political authorities can acquire biopolitical data about their
populations - their movements, health and wealth. In one sense, therefore, borders contribute to the
production of the population as a knowable and governable entity. [9]

The Australian points system in fact goes beyond this sense of the production of power and not only
serves as a means of gathering information on the biopolitical constitution of the nation but allows the
government to intervene directly in the constitution and the production of the population itself through
the management and fine tuning of the regulatory filters, such as by changing the «in demand»
occupations (that is, the most requested) or varying the categories of exams and the scores required.

In an analogous way, once admitted into Australia the biopolitical fabric of the immigrant population
will be scrutinized and ordered through a statistical system which, for example, cross-references their
linguistic skills with their country of origin, employment rate and income. [10]

Considering borders only as systems of control facing the outside, oriented towards the international
sphere, immigration and global flows, is to run the risk of not understanding the importance of borders
in the governance and biopolitical composition of the nation’s interior.

The points system, one reads on DIMA’s website, was created to attract a labour force «young, highly
skilled and able to contribute quickly to Australia’s economic growth» [11], but as shown by what we
have described here, the government makes use of a much greater number of criteria to regulate
immigration flows. These instruments of biopower are linked, from the very start, to the development of
the ideology of official multiculturalism of the Australian government. The points system started in
1973, between the last years of the «White Australia Policy» [12] and the beginning of the policy of
multiculturalism under the Labor Government of Gough Whitlam (1972-75) and the Liberal one of
Malcolm Fraser (1975-1983). This system can be seen as a progression from a politics of immigration
based explicitly on race to one based on economics.

The Asia Pacific Migration Research Network has said of it: «It is not discriminatory on racial, ethnic,
religious or political criteria, but it does discriminate in favour of young, economically productive people
who have been able to receive a good education. It tends to select either people from highly-developed
countries or an elite from less-developed countries, thus encouraging the ’brain drain’.» [13]

According to this system immigration is a way of importing economic resources into Australia according
to whatever is needed at that particular moment, through highly qualified and culturally diverse people -
a multiculturalism rooted in economic competition. The proof of this is in the recent announcement of
the raising of the quota of skilled migrants in response to the fears of an economic slowdown in
Australia.

Contrary to what one might think from reading the recent history of Australia, multiculturalism still
remains one of the founding myths of the nation, a multiculturalism often articulated in terms not of
difference but of cultural diversity. The semantic change between difference and diversity indicates a
series of displacements and reconfigurations that signal a passage from a social system where meaning is
produced through difference to one where this difference is no longer dynamic but presented as neutral.

The type of diversity at the centre of making the Australian nation is precisely defined, as explained in
one of the principle objectives of Productive Diversity, the multicultural policy: «benefits for all.» This
objective is implemented through a particular program called the Productive Diversity Program, the
purpose of which is to «encourage and support business to harness and capitalise on the talents of
language and cultural diversity in the workplace and the community.» [14]

Cultural diversity comes to be analysed according to its productivity in purely economic terms, on the
basis of statistics that show that 29% of small businesses are in the ownership of people born overseas
and that 25% of the labour force is born outside Australia. The cultural diversity of the Australian labour
force thus becomes a resource on which business can draw for the development of internal markets
oriented to specific consumers, that is ethnicities, and above all for access to the global markets. In the
case of the internal market it is recognized that the significant proportion of 43% of the Australian
population that is born overseas or that have at least one parent born overseas, a number that breaks
apart the image of an internal homogeneous market and leads to the necessity of differentiating the
products and services on offer. In the case of overseas trade, cultural diversity transforms Australia into a
«microcosm of the global marketplace» [15], in a context in which 12 out of 14 countries to which
Australia exports are not Anglophone.

To this is added a transformation in a post-Fordist sense of the Australian market, with an emphasis on
the export of services rather than primary goods and the necessity of, on the one hand, acquiring more
and more detailed and up-to-date information on specific markets in order to develop products that
respond to particular needs, and on the other to develop capacities of reading, comprehending and
communicating within those same markets. Immigration of skilled persons responds to the need to
access at low cost these linguistic competencies, knowledge of specific markets, both in terms of laws
and protocols and in terms of consumption trends, and contacts with transnational networks. [16]

Ghassan Hage analyses the discourse of «Productive Diversity» introduced by the Labor Government
of Paul Keating in 1992 around the White Fantasy of multiculturalism of the Australian state, through
which the white Australians are able to manage ethnic groups as a productive resource. [17]

Cultures become goods and immigrant subjects become passive objects without citizenship:
economically included but politically excluded. The power of this type of multiculturalism presented as
«Productive Diversity», as a factor of production within the new capitalist order and connected to Hardt
and Negri’s analysis of marketing: «postmodern marketing valorises the differences of each commodity
and each segment of the population, fashioning its strategies accordingly. Every difference is an
opportunity.» [18]

This system is currently being contested with what could be unexpected results, and the challenge
comes from the system’s own sources of production. The protagonists of this challenge are the fruit
growers of an area of eastern Australian called the Riverina, many of whom are second-generation
immigrants who arrived many decades ago, politically aligned to the National Party, one of the two
parties in the Coalition Government,. Traditionally fruit picking was done by labourers and their families
and in more recent times by young people (under 26 years), tourists in Australia with working holiday
visas, the so-called backpackers.

The continual casualization of the labour market, according to current estimates at 27.6% [19] , has lead
in recent years to an abundance of «immaterial» jobs on short term contracts in Australian cities. The
young tourists that up to a few years ago did seasonal work in the fruit harvest now fill many of these
positions: better conditions of work and salaries, more flexibility and choice have led to the
disappearance of backpackers from the orchards of the Riverina.

The farmers have successfully requested a review of the law on skilled migration, to include also
workers without specific skills, who after having been «imported» from China, or other countries in
Asia or the Pacific can work on short-term contracts in fruit picking. This demand, apparently
innocuous, intersects with the reforms on union accords enacted recently by the Coalition Government.
One of the reforms provides for a federal accord in the place of the current state accords that regulate
among other things minimum wages, still calculated on the cost of living and not by market forces.
At the moment if workers from South East Asian countries and China come into Australia on contracts
they would be on a contract with Australian working conditions, including a minimum wage included, a
reverse process to that of the global capital that reproduces «Third Worlds», consequently casualizing
and reducing minimum wages within countries of advanced development. This, in theory, could lead to
the possibility of a new class of workers without specific skills capable of moving in transnational
networks following the demands of the market.

Negotiations between the government, which has announced an increase in the number of skilled
workers in response to a lack of economic growth, and the growers are not yet finalized. In October
2005 the Foreign Minister for Papua New Guinea and other leaders from Pacific nations lobbied hard at
the Pacific Islands Forum for Australia to open its doors to seasonal workers from their countries. [20]
The proposal was rejected by Australian Prime Minister John Howard, but support for a seasonal
worker scheme remains strong among the fruit growers of the Riverina and many other parts of the
agricultural sector in Australia. [21] The Pacific nations continue to press their case, and now a Senate
Inquiry is touring rural Australia investigating labour shortages and the possibility of a seasonal worker
program. [22] In the meantime DIMA has reformed the working holiday visa to give more generous
terms to those who agree to do seasonal agricultural work (such as the opportunity to apply for a second
visa once the first one expires) [23] in an attempt to try to win back some of the old backpacker
workforce in this area. The Senate Inquiry will give its report in August 2006 -the spectre of migration
continues to haunt Australia (and the world).

Ilaria Vanni works at the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney. Her
research interests include the analysis of the multicultural and transcultural discourse especially in
relation to visual cultures. Email: ilaria.vanni@uts.edu.au

Damian Spruce is a lawyer and political consultant. He is currently undertaking doctoral research at
the Institute of International Studies of the University of Technology, Sydney. His research is on the
influence of the Australian government’s Pacific Solution on European politics and in particular on the
recent agreements between Italy and Libya on border control. Email: damian.spruce@studio.unibo.it

Notes

[1] Travis, A. 2006 Immigration shakeup will bar most unskilled workers from outside EU The
Guardian, March 8, 2006

[2] Home Office 2006 A Points-Based System: Making Migration Work for Britain press release
March7, 2006

[3] BBC News 2006 Clarke defends immigration plan March 7,2006

[4] Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Fact Sheet 24 Overview of
Skilled Migration to Australia

[5] Stephanie Peating 2005, Union fury at tax lure for immigrants Sydney Morning Herald, March 7,
2006

[6] Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs 2006, Population Flows:
Immigration Aspects 2004-05 Edition, February 20, 2006

[7] See the Fact Sheets dedicated to Skilled Migration on the DIMA website

[8] Den Boer 1995, "Moving between Bogus and Bona Fide: The Policing of Inclusion and Exclusion
in Europe", in Miles R., Thränhardt D. (eds) Migration and European Integration: The Dynamics of
Inclusion and Exclusion, Pinter, London, 92
[9] William Walters 2005, «Welcome to Schengenland» in Sandro Mezzadra (a cura di) I confini della
libertà: per un’analisi politica delle migrazioni contemporanee DeriveApprodi, Roma, 68-69

[10] Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Statistical Focus - 2001
Classification of Countries into English Proficiency Groups

[11] Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Fact Sheet 24: Overview of
Skilled Migration to Australia

[12] See Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Fact Sheet 8: Abolition
of the "White Australia" Policy

[13] Asia Pacific Migration Research Network 1995, Migration Issues in the Asia Pacific: Issues Paper
from Australia

[14] Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Fact sheet 7: Productive
Diversity, Australia’s Competitive Advantage

[15] Ibid

[16] Ibid

[17] Ghassan Hage 1998, White Nation, Pluto Press, Sydney, pp.128-133

[18] Michael Hardt and Toni Negri 2000, Empire, Harvard University Press, p.149

[19] Iain Campbell Casual Work and Casualization: How Does Australia Compare? paper presented at
the conference Work Interrupted: Casual and Insecure Employment in Australia, Melbourne, 2004

[20] ABC News Online 2005 Seasonal work no solution to Pacific unemployment: PM October 26,
2005

[21] ABC Rural 2005 Disappointment over PM’s rejection of Pacific labour October 28, 2005, and
ABC Rural 2006 Pacific solution for farmers March 17, 2005

[22] Parliament of Australia, Senate 2006 Inquiry into Pacific Region seasonal contract labour

[23] Vanstone 2005 Working Holiday Maker Visa - Meeting the Needs of Growers October 31, 2005

Damian Spruce

Envoyer un mail à l'auteur

Ilaria Vanni

Envoyer un mail à l'auteur

Home page
Migreurop network
Camps maps
Fundamental texts
Campaign «For a right of access inside migrants detention centres»
Borders Observatory
Borders Observatory
Policies and stakes (by country)
Europe
Maghreb
Afrique
Australie
FICHES PAYS
Externalisation
Meetings and Initiatives
Resources, sites
migreurop mailing-list
Bibliographie sur l’enfermement des étrangers
CHRONOLOGIES
Délit de solidarité
Groupe de travail sur les Accords de réadmission
Migreurop dans la presse

Contact
Search