Preserving White Hegemony: Skilled Migration, 'Asians' and Middle-Class Assimilation (Essay‪)‬

For three decades asylum seekers arriving by boat have provoked anxiety in Australia out of all proportion to their numbers. This anxiety was fanned after the election of John Howard's coalition government in 1996 (McMaster, 2001). At the same time, during the time of Howard's government, Australia rapidly increased its migration program for skilled labour. Historically, since the post-Second World War migration period, there has developed a race-based class system where the middle class has remained predominantly white, indeed Anglo-Celtic. The new skilled migration program, focusing on the development and use of the 457 Visa and on skilled migrants originally coming to Australia as international students, is transforming the racial organisation of the middle class. This article brings into Australian usage ideas that have been current for some time in the United States, the notion of a model minority which has been given the status of honorary whiteness, as a way to understand the effects of continuing discrimination, and the emphasis on assimilation, which pervade employment in the skilled, middle-class workforce. The public discussion of asylum seekers has especially focussed on those described as boat people--men, women and children crowded onto small, often only putatively sea-worthy fishing boats struggling to make the journey from Indonesia to landfall within the Australian migration zone so that they can ask to be considered for the status of refugees. In 1992 Paul Keating's Labor government introduced mandatory detention for asylum seekers heralding an increase in the number of detention centres across Australia. The Port Hedland Immigration Reception and Processing Centre had been opened the previous year. Woomera and Curtin were both opened in 1999. Through the 1990s and early 2000s politicians and the media ramped up the anxiety of Australians over the 'threat' posed by those boatloads of asylum seekers. Yet, in 1999-2000 the total number of asylum seekers arriving by boat was only 4,174. This was less than a third of the total number of asylum seekers, 13,100, who came to Australia in 2000. To put these figures into perspective, we need to know that in 2006-07, for example, around 177,000 people were allowed to enter Australia on a permanent basis, of these, over 148,000 migrants were granted visas giving them permanent residency under the Skills and Family visa groupings and over 493,000 people were allocated temporary entry visas for a variety of purposes from three-year work visas to short-term tourist visas.