Status-making: Rethinking migrant categorization

Abstract

Migrants are increasingly categorized with different ‘statuses’ – that is, classified, quantified, coded and placed into hierarchies that are politically and socially determined and have embodied and material effects. However, scholarly critiques of status often remain focused on legal descriptors and dichotomous categories such as refugee/migrant or legal/illegal. Drawing on multiple examples from media and scholarly literature on contemporary Australian migration, I seek to show how diverse and complex forms of migrant status are ‘made’ in relation to both voluntary and involuntary migrant mobilities – that is, how they are produced, contested and contestable across fluid legal, political, social and cultural lines. In doing so, I argue that a critical sociological orientation towards ‘status-making’, rather than uncritical categorizing of migrants into ‘types’, may be conceptually useful in contexts of immigration complexity.

Keywords

Australia migrant status migration

Writing for Australia’s The Saturday Paper in 2014, journalist Max Orpay gave an account of the bureaucratic process of ‘age determination meetings’. In these meetings, the bodies and life histories of asylum seekers are assessed by Australian government agents, who then assign individuals the status of adult or child:

It is a remarkable thing: asylum seekers enter the room as children and emerge from it adults. Inside, a pair of immigration officials, the bouncers of Nightclub Australia, tasked with deciding if these youths are really the age they claim to be, study them carefully. […] Is there acne on the subject’s skin? What is their bone structure like? Do the females have an ample bosom? Are the boys muscular and tall? Do they have facial hair? What about grey hairs? […] Cross-examinations cover plenty of ground: when the subject started school, if they’ve ever worked, how old their siblings are. At the end of the meeting comes the decision. If both officials are convinced the interviewee is likely an adult, their birthdate is henceforth shifted to December 31 of a year that will make them 18. If one of the two believes the asylum seeker is in fact telling the truth, then the interviewee is permitted to go on with their childhood. (Orpay, 2014)

As Orpay (2014) goes on to explain, asylum seekers determined to have the status of ‘adults’ receive no financial support and no access to schooling, and are more likely to face detention in locked facilities or deportation. The assignation of the status of ‘adult’ or ‘child’ also has larger political import, with a ‘public relations’ advantage to reclassifying children as adults for the incumbent conservative coalition of the Liberal and National Parties (LNP).

As Crawley (2007) has noted in the UK context, such ‘age disputes’ and ‘age assessments’ in asylum claims are an increasingly fraught policy space. Yet, such policy concerns also reflect a more general problematic around the complexities of migrant classification and categorization. Assigning an asylum seeker with the status of either ‘adult’ or ‘child’ is just one example of how migrant bodies are increasingly classified, quantified, coded and subsequently placed into hierarchies of categorization that are politically and socially determined and have embodied and material effects. Such processes of codification are what I describe throughout this article with the short-hand term ‘status-making’. I use this term to describe the multi-situated processes by which different ‘types’ of migrants are socially, culturally and politically categorized in relation to each other – as refugees or economic migrants, skilled or unskilled, temporary or permanent, legal or illegal, child or adult.

Processes of migrant classification occur as a commonplace and often uncontested practice in policy and media discourse, and also often in sociological research. In the migration studies literature, the idea of ‘migrant status’¹ is usually used primarily to distinguish between differing legal statuses, most often to make distinctions between forced and voluntary migrants or between documented and undocumented migrants. The concept of status is thus most often used to classify differing modes of entry, and the subsequent rights, entitlements and vulnerabilities of migrant subjects. Such understandings, however, which focus on status as primarily legal and static, often fail to account for how the classification of migrants is a process that is dynamic (that is, variable over time and space), relational (that is, foundationally concerned with the creation of boundaries between different groups) and intersectional (that is, inextricably bound up with other categories of social difference). A migrant’s ‘status’ may in different contexts imply multiple forms of classification, including: the visa they hold, their position in labour hierarchies as ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled’, the legal entitlements they can receive, their rights as an ‘adult’ or a ‘child’, and their temporal trajectories as ‘temporary’, ‘permanent’, ‘newly arrived’ or ‘second generation’.

This is not to say that formal, legal entitlements are not important – as Bosniak (2000) argues, particularly in relation to debates on migration and citizenship, legal formal citizenship cannot be overlooked in favour of substantive claims or social practices. The boundary of formal membership is arguably even more important today in the context of increasing complexity in migration policy and the multiplication of modes of entry and legal categories. I have, however, addressed questions of citizenship and non-citizenship elsewhere (Roberston, 2015), and in this article look more towards the multiplicities of status that exist across and between formal legal boundaries.

In this article, I therefore use the idea of ‘status-making’ to position status as inclusive of, but not reducible to, processes of legal and political classification. This is important because in contemporary migration processes, as the examples in this article will show, such processes do not permanently fix migrants into singular and static statuses, but rather continue to evolve over time. In fact, I seek to avoid dichotomizing legal, discursive and experiential or social modes of categorization. Rather, I see status-making as a process within which these modes intertwine and mutually produce each other. Drawing on multiple examples from media and scholarly literature on contemporary Australian migration, I seek to show how status is ‘made’ – that is, how it is produced, contested and contestable across fluid legal, political, social and cultural lines. In doing so, I argue that a critical sociological orientation towards ‘status-making’, rather than uncritical categorizing of migrants into ‘types’ is particularly important in contexts of immigration complexity (Castles, 2016) and ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007). Attention to the multiple and dynamic ways in which migrants are categorized and classified can enhance sociological analyses of the complex trajectories of migrants which are becoming increasingly common in countries like Australia – trajectories which I have explored empirically in previous work (see, for example, Robertson, 2015, 2016, 2017). I use Australian examples throughout the article because Australia provides a national context of rapidly emerging migration complexity and super-diversity, but also because Australian sociology has been somewhat slow in turning a critical gaze on taken-for-granted scholarly and political forms of migrant classification. However, the discussion will have relevance for other contexts. This article is based on analysis of secondary scholarly and media literature over the last two decades, rather than primary empirical research, but sits alongside over ten years of extensive empirical sociological analysis of migrants in Australia whose statuses embody complexity and fluctuation (see, for example, Robertson, 2011, 2014, 2015). This empirical work has been the foundation for my conceptual arguments in this article that ‘migrant status’ needs to be rethought. This article importantly offers such a rethinking that reaches beyond my own empirical work which has focused primarily on voluntary migrants.

First, I briefly outline some existing conceptual questions surrounding the classification and categorization of migrants, and how this article contributes to these debates. I then briefly outline the contemporary landscape of migration to Australia. Here, I argue that while classifications of migrants based on ethnicity, class and mode of entry have dominated Australia migration sociology, there are new complexities in the patterns of both migrant practices and migration governance, and such complexities make critical orientations that problematize conventional categorizations increasingly important. Then, I argue for the concept of ‘status-making’ as a way to more productively understand migrant categories sociologically in this context. I next turn to several examples from existing literature and policy within the Australian context, including both voluntary and forced forms of migration, that illustrate the potential importance of ‘status-making’ as a multiply situated approach to migrant categorization.

Migrant categorization as ‘status-making’

Collyer and de Haas (2012) note that ‘traditional understandings of migration and migrants have focused on predominantly dichotomous categorizations based on time/space, location/direction and causes’ (469). Such dichotomous modes of classification still tend to dominate Australian migration research, where ‘hard boundaries’ are often drawn between temporary versus permanent migrants and voluntary versus involuntary migrants. Such boundaries persist despite the increasing complexity of migrant mobilities, directionalities and experiences in Australia (which I describe in more detail in the following section). In the international literature, there is a substantial body of work that critically engages with migrant categorization across various contexts by identifying ‘a disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move’ (Crawley and Skleparis, 2017: 1). Much of this work, however, still focuses critiques around destabilizing dichotomous categories. In the European work the dichotomy of ‘migrant’ versus ‘refugee’ receives particular attention (see, for example, Crawley and Skleparis, 2017; Millner, 2011; Schuster, 2011) and in the North American and Asian cases the dichotomy of ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ tends to dominate (see, for example de Genova, 2002; Hsia, 2015; Yeoh and Chee, 2015). Often central to these critiques of classification is the important idea that policies produce the very categories (such as illegality) that they purport to police (de Genova, 2004).

In Australia, critical engagement with the production of migrant categories and their consequences, particularly in the sociological literature, has been limited. While Berg’s (2015) work on temporary migrant workers notes the way that policies produce unauthorized status, and work by Mares (2016) and Robertson (2013, 2014) has begun to explore the lived experiences and political consequences of migrants who jump across legal categories, overarching sociological frameworks that can critically engage with the processes of categorization of migrants (particularly beyond dichotomous legal boundaries) are still lacking. This is an important task, as engaging with how categories are constructed and their consequences – what Crawley and Skleparis (2017) call the ‘denaturalization’ of categories – can work to diminish their capacity to divide and exclude. This article draws on an analysis of emerging categorizations of migrants in Australia to problematize how such statuses are ‘made’, and, concurrently, to position ‘status-making’ as a potentially valuable sociological lens. It seeks to show the temporality and dynamism of migrant status, in terms of how individual migrants transition between statuses over time, but also in terms of how the political and social value and meanings of categories can also transform over time.

Throughout the remainder of this article, I use the term ‘status-making’ to foreground the production of migrant typologies and labels. First, I argue that a ‘status-making’ approach understands migrant status as ‘doubly’ intersectional; that is, intersecting with other social categories of difference like race, class, gender, age and ethnicity as well as comprised of mutually constitutive legal, discursive and social processes that label migrants into ‘types’. Second, I argue that ‘status-making’ understands categories as both spatially and temporally dynamic. I then draw on various examples of contemporary migration processes and experiences in Australia to illustrate how status-making occurs in practice. I begin with examples of status-making in relation to ‘forced’ migrations and then move on to ‘voluntary’ migrations. While I acknowledge that this division is itself a potentially problematic classificatory artifice, it works to order two examples with contrasting political implications for the sake of simplicity, rather than to reify these groups as necessarily fixed categories. Throughout this analysis I seek to argue for thinking through ‘status-making’ as a way to move beyond the critiques of migrant classification that only address dichotomous categories and also beyond the critiques that only contrast legal status with everyday experiences. I seek to show instead the multiple and variable points of contestation at which different statuses are produced and at which they can thus be productively problematized. I argue that the intersectional, but also the temporal dimensions of status need to be brought more to the fore, not only to more fully understand migrant experience, but also to understand the political significance of categorization within contexts of super-diversity and immigration complexity.

I proceed with the caveat that classification and codification of migrants is always, and inherently, problematic and potentially exclusionary. However, such classification is an ingrained and largely inevitable mode through which migrants as research participants, political subjects and social subjects are configured, including through their own modes of representation. I seek in this article to put forward an argument to not take categorizations as self evident in any given context, nor to see them as neutral or static signifiers. Instead, I seek to rethink migrant categorization as ‘status-making’, and in doing so to find a way to reflect how migrant statuses are constructed, multiple and unstable.

New landscapes of Australian migration

Despite a large national field of migration research, how and why migrants are classified and categorized has not been given significant critical attention in Australia. Much existing empirical research in Australia has categorized migrants based on ethnicity or country of birth, or linguistic or religious background. Such categorization reflects the quantitative categories in national datasets, specifically the Australian Census, which measures self-reported ancestry, birthplace, language and religion, and where an individual’s parents were born. In the social services and social policy sectors, designations such as Non-EnglishSpeaking Background (NESB) and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) have been used to categorize individuals and communities for service needs and to distinguish migrant ‘ethnic’ groups from indigenous Australians and from the English-speaking White majority. As Sawrikar and Katz (2009) note, these terms, although widely used, encompass conflicting definitions and have been subject to critique.

In sociological studies, migrants in Australia are most often differentiated and categorized along ethnic and cultural, or occasionally class (see for example Colic-Peisker, 2011; Collins, 2003; Limpangog, 2013) lines. Ethnic and cultural identities in Australia, however, are becoming increasingly complex, multiple and hybrid due to diversification of migration patterns, inter-marriage and generational change (Ang et al., 2006; Harris, 2009). Internal differentiations within ‘ethnic communities’ based on regional, linguistic, religious, political, or generational affiliations are increasingly important, as communities become more heterogeneous over time and operate within increasingly globalized scapes of mobility and diaspora. Here, it is not just hybrid ethnic and cultural identifications that are significant, but also the timing and structural conditions surrounding migration. This is demonstrated, for example, by Baldassar and Pyke (2014), who engage with the intra-diaspora frictions between different cohorts of Italian migrants, as well as by Lakha and Stevenson (2001), who question the homogenization of ethnicity in relation to the internal diversities of the Indian ‘community’ in Melbourne. Understanding ethnic and cultural identities in concert with other forms of classification can thus be valuable in unpacking some of this heterogeneity and its consequences and in avoiding the kind of essentialised ‘groupism’ that often underpins ‘diversity’ politics and policy (see Anthias, 2012).

New complexities in everyday diversity – what Vertovec (2007) has termed, in the UK context, ‘super-diversity’ – are linked to more heterogeneous forms of migration. Australia has been heavily impacted by global shifts, described by Hugo (2004) as a ‘new paradigm of international migration’, towards increased complexity around categories and types of movement. Modes of entry have diversified rapidly over the last fifteen to twenty years. ‘Settler-citizen’ pathways, which guarantee immediate or rapid transition to social and political inclusion via permanent settlement, are no longer the norm (Mares, 2016). Migration processes now heavily feature transience, circularity and ‘staggered pathways’ across visa categories (Robertson, 2015; Mares, 2016). Rather than part of 20th-century ‘nation-building’, 21st-century migration is increasingly a quest for flexible labour and transnational economic capital, reflected in the proliferation of temporary visa classes, the domination of skilled migration over family and humanitarian migration, and the creation and expansion of new classes for investor migrants, business migrants and international students who bring significant capital into the Australian economy.

As modes of entry and visa classifications within the immigration system have multiplied, particularly in relation to temporary migrants, migration researchers in Australia have increasingly begun to highlight the experiences of migrants with specific visa statuses or within specific visa streams. There are now, for example, a significant number of studies that engage with the experiences of student visa holders (Campbell et al., 2016; Nyland et al., 2009), skilled temporary workers (Boese and Macdonald, 2016), or working holiday makers (Reilly, 2015). Labour relations and work experiences have tended to be a main focus of this research, as migrants have differentiated encounters with the labour market based on the specific conditions attached to their visas. Mansouri et al. (2006) have also demonstrated the impact of different visas categories (temporary or permanent protection) on refugee integration.

However, grouping migrants based on Department of Home Affairs (formerly Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP)) terminologies, including specific visa classes and specific visa streams (such as temporary, business, skilled or family) tends to leave several important considerations hidden. First, categories commonly used to distinguish groups overlap considerably in practice. For example, a migrant who enters Australia on a humanitarian or family visa may be a skilled worker or entrepreneur (Hugo, 2014; Tilbury and Colic-Peisker, 2007); a ‘temporary’ entrant on a student or working holiday visa may be seeking to settle permanently (Robertson, 2015); and a ‘permanent’ visa holder may in fact be engaged in patterns of circularity and return (Hugo, 2008; Ley and Kobayashi, 2005). Similarly, a skilled visa does not mean migrants are necessarily engaged in skilled work, with deskilling and precarious employment an increasing feature of migrant experience, especially for those on temporary visas (Dauvergne and Marsden, 2014). There is thus increasing contestation in Australia between policy statuses and how migrants can potentially be classified based on their experiences and trajectories.

While there is awareness of both increased cultural complexity and increased complexity in migration processes in sociological research, there is no coherent agenda around how we can rethink migration categorization in this context. What I suggest in this article as a starting point for this agenda is that ‘migrant status’ should be considered not as a category in itself, but rather via a lens of ‘status-making’, in order to draw out how various categories are produced and how they intersect.

‘Status-making’: rethinking migrant status as intersectional and spatio-temporally dynamic

Debates on intersectionality have been central to the theorization of gender and migration over the last 25 years, drawing on the arguments of North American anti-racist and queer feminist scholars including Crenshaw (1989), hooks (1981) and Butler (1990). It is beyond the scope of this article to engage with these debates in their complexity. However, I base my approach to intersectionality here within its use in migration sociology and citizenship studies, particularly from European gender scholars such as Yuval-Davis (2006, 2007) and Anthias (2012), who position intersectionality within transnational, as well as local, politics of belonging. In particular I draw on Anthias’s (2012: 106) approach to intersectionalism as ‘the importance of attending to the multiple social structures and processes that intertwine to produce specific social positions and identities’. Important to my arguments is Anthias’s (2012) claim that intersectionality is not simply an interplay of fixed group identities like race, gender and class in the construction of inequality and disadvantage, but rather an ongoing process that can place actors in contradictory locations within social structures at different moments.

While intersectional approaches have most often examined the foundational sociological axes of gender, class and race, there have been recent calls in empirical literature to integrate migration statuses within intersectional approaches to the production of difference and inequality, especially in relation to migrants and work. Datta and Brickell (2009), for example, have shown that visa statuses intersect with race, gender and class to construct hierarchies of worker rights and value in London’s construction industry, while Dyer et al.’s (2010) work on the hotel industry, also in London, argues that migration status should be understood in terms of its intersection with gender and the subsequent production of a gendered performance in the workplace. Similarly, Sargent and Larchanché-Kim (2006) have argued that forms of state control of ‘illegal’ status migrants intersect with the gendered production of migrant identities. Across these studies, however, migrant status is still often conceptualized primarily as a relatively fixed legal category. I argue in this section, however, that a ‘status-making’ approach understands migrant status as ‘doubly intersectional’. As the examples I unpack in subsequent sections will show, status is ‘made’ via intersections across two layers of difference. First, legal migration categories intersect with other categories of social difference like gender, race and class. Second, status is itself a category produced by intersecting (and often contesting) legal, discursive and social processes, rather than simply legal or policy labels. Understanding status-making as a process by which migrant categories are multiply constructed through the interaction of the legal, the discursive and the social takes account of the fact that migrant status operates contemporaneously as both political and social, collective and individual. This approach assumes that legal, discursive and social definitions of a migrant’s status may variously align with, inform or contest each other. It also understands conventional sociological categories of difference as further intersecting with these definitions. This layered entanglement of status-making and its consequences thus becomes an aim of migration sociology.

Status-making positions the categorization of migrants as doubly intersectional, but also implicitly frames status not as static or fixed, but mobile across both time and space. Globally, migrants increasingly transition across legal statuses over time but also up and down policy hierarchies of migrant desirability (Baas, 2017; Schuster, 2005). I argue that understanding migrant status via the idea of status-making allows for status transitions and mobilities to be integrated into migration sociology, not only in terms of transitions between legal statuses (such as from temporary migrant to permanent resident), but also in terms of the spatial and temporal dynamism of discursive and socially constructed categories. In short, status-making occurs via intersections of legal, discursive and social categorizations of migrant ‘type’; which in turn intersect with other social classifications, and these doubly layered processes of intersection also, in accordance with Anthias’s (2012) conceptualization of location and relocation, evolve across time and space.

Refugees, asylum seekers, illegal maritime arrivals: status-making and forced migration

Current contestations around the classification of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia provide fertile ground for illustrating the contours of status-making in Australian migration processes. Asylum seekers, especially those who arrive by boat, provoke a public anxiety out of proportion to their actual numbers (Stratton, 2009). Much of the anxiety attached to this group of migrants is also linked to intersections of (perceived) ‘illegal’ status with religious and racial categorization, produced by the rising Islamophobia of the ‘War on Terror’ era (Klocker and Dunn, 2003). ‘War on Terror’ politics has created complex intersections between the legal position of asylum seekers and their racial Othering as non-White and Muslim. Although the population of undocumented status migrants in Australia includes high numbers of White ‘visa over-stayers’ from the US and the UK, these migrants do not experience the same associations of illegality and criminality as boat arrivals (Wazana, 2004). As such, categories of ‘asylum seeker’ or ‘refugee’ are more than legal classifications in Australia, but are rather embedded within complex and fundamentally intersectional processes of ‘status-making’.

Moreover, legal statuses themselves are radically dynamic across space and time. Writing for Eureka Street in 2014, refugee lawyer Kerry Murphy (2014) outlines the story of a refugee ‘Ali’, who fled Iraq and was classified as a genuine refugee under Geneva Convention criteria by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Indonesia. After waiting several years for resettlement without success, Ali boarded a boat to Australia, where he was detained as an ‘offshore entry person’ and later described in paperwork as an ‘irregular maritime arrival’. Irregular or illegal maritime arrival is a category that illustrates the capacity of policy-makers to construct new statuses. In 2013, a month after the commencement of the LNP Coalition government’s ‘zero tolerance’ asylum policy, Operation Sovereign Borders, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison enforced new terminology in the DIBP for asylum seekers who arrive by boat – ‘illegal maritime arrivals’ or ‘IMAs’. Under Operation Sovereign Borders policy, the government’s commitment was that no IMAs would be eligible for settlement in Australia and that all boats intercepted carrying IMAs would be turned back. These policies were enforced even though the term ‘illegal maritime arrival’ did not exist in Australian migration law (Murphy, 2014) and in spite of the legal right of these migrants to claim asylum in Australia under international refugee law (De Silva, 2014).

The ‘invention’ of the IMA category meant that even after the Australian government accepted that Ali met the criteria of a refugee, his mode of arrival via boat meant he could not be granted permanent protection under Operation Sovereign Borders policies, and he was moved to a Temporary Safe Haven Visa (TSHV). Ali’s case was caught up in a time of policy flux, in which the government was in the process of reintroducing Temporary Protection Visas (TPV) and Safe Haven Enterprise Visas (TSHEV) which would deny refugees permanent visas and force them into rural or regional resettlement for specific time periods. Murphy (2014) writes that Ali remained suspended after the expiration of a bridging visa, technically unlawful and deportable, and without the right to work, despite two positive assessments, in Australia and in Indonesia, as a genuine refugee. With a partner and child in Australia, he could be eligible for a partner visa (thus becoming in policy terms a ‘family migrant’ rather than a ‘humanitarian migrant’) but this would require returning to Iraq to apply. He could also possibly qualify for the TSHEV but only if he left behind his social networks and relocated his young family from the city to the country. Ali’s case shows how the ‘grammars of security’ (De Silva, 2014) employed by successive Australian governments since the early 2000s have reframed the discursive status of the asylum seeker into one of security threat and criminalization, subsequently making asylum mobilities pathways of fractured and increasingly insecure transitions across legal statuses that often offer limited rights. Not only do statuses shift over time, but they are place-dependent – Ali’s location in different countries and regions and his capacity to be mobile across them also impacted on his status transitions.

Investors, students and Golden Tickets: status-making and voluntary migration

In this section, I provide further examples of the processes of status-making in Australia, by drawing on relatively new discursive categories: investor migrants and student migrants. Although foreigners have entered Australia with the motivation to invest in property, industry and business since the colonial era, ‘investor migrant’ is a relatively new status in terms of its codification through explicit policies, beginning initially via the Business Skills Program, launched in 1992. This program was superseded by an expanded Business Innovation and Investment Program in 2012. Currently, eligibility for Significant Investor Visas (SIV) and Premium Investor Visas (PIV) in Australia (so-called ‘Golden Ticket’ visas) requires significant financial resources – $AU5 million in complying investments for the SIV and $AU15 million for the PIV. As such, the official policy status of ‘investor migrant’ via these avenues remains restricted, more or less exclusively, to a particular class of transnational elites. Foreign citizens living in Australia on other visas, however, including student and temporary work visas, are also entitled under foreign investment legislation to invest in property and in businesses. As such, ‘investor migration’ as a lived practice exists outside the legal status of specific investor visa subclasses, particularly for more middle-class migrants who do not meet the eligibility criteria for the SIV and PIV (Robertson, 2017).

Discursively, the category of investor migrant has become politically controversial in terms of whether investors are desirable migrants in both economic and social terms. When the SIV was introduced in 2012, prominent migration scholars were cited in the press on both sides of the debate, some condemned the program as ‘buying a visa’ and treating Australian residency ‘as a commodity’ (Birrell, as cited in Fyfe and Millar, 2012), while others noted its benefits in bringing in an ‘entrepreneurial and innovative’ class of migrant (Collins, as cited in Fyfe and Millar, 2012). The status of investor migrant is also heavily racialized in the public imagination, associated almost exclusively with wealthy Chinese migrant investors, who are often scapegoats for housing affordability problems in Australian cities. Media content analysis by Wong (2017) shows that not only does media reporting frequently single out the Chinese and position ‘the racial origin of property buyers as if it was the cause of the housing problem’ (109), but also that Australian permanent residents and citizens of Chinese background are sometimes also portrayed as ‘foreign investors’. Overlapping migrant practices, racial identities and legal labels thus muddy popular classifications of who migrants ‘are’. Offshore foreign investment (which may form part of long-term migration strategies), investment to meet immigration criteria via the SIV and PIV, and property purchases by long-term residents and citizens of Chinese origin become conflated within the discursive ‘making’ of the invetsor migrant category. Migrants who practise investment as a core part of their migration strategies may enter under official investor visa categories, or they may have other visas. They may be legally ‘foreign investors’ while living and working onshore, or they may be permanent residents purchasing property like any other Australian citizen, but discursively ‘marked’ as ‘investor migrants’ because of their visible ethnic difference. The label of ‘investor migrant’ can thus be critically problematized when it is understood as a process of ‘status-making’ – that is, as an evolving form of classification that is simultaneously legal, discursive and social, and fundamentally intersectional with racial and ethnic boundaries. Breaking apart how the status of ‘investor migrant’ is made serves to highlight and potentially challenge the racialized anxieties that underpin the production of this category. Investor migrants are an emergent category on which there is little research overall, and as such we lack a sense of whether investment practices or investor identities matter, subjectively, to migrants’ individual and collective meaning-making and social relations within Australia. However, there is emerging research on overall public attitudes to foreign investors (Rogers et al., 2017) that signals that such classifications and their construction have significant import to intercultural relations. Such research further highlights the value in looking at categories like investor migrants through the lens of status-making that this article puts forward.

Student migrants are another example of a migrant status that moves in complex ways across multiple and evolving discursive positionings and social categories as policies and public consciousness transform over time. Policies were put in place to enable the quick transition to permanent residency for international graduates of Australian degrees in the late 1990s. Migrants who moved from student visas to permanent residency were initially positioned in political discourse as elite, ‘designer migrants’ who would be a boon to the knowledge economy (Kell and Vogl, 2008; Ziguras and Law, 2006). After a series of scandals surrounding the policies that enabled these status transitions in the mid-2000s (including accusations of private colleges acting as ‘PR factories’ and incidents of violence against Indian international students) discursive constructions of student migrants in the media transformed. They were increasingly reported as either ‘backdoor migrants’ who were exploiting the immigration system or ‘cash cows’ who were hapless victims of a corrupt nexus between international education and skilled migration (Robertson, 2013). These shifts in status also aligned with shifts in the perceived racial and class identities of international student – from wealthy, elite East Asians to indebted and impoverished South Asians (Baas, 2014). Like refugees, student migrants’ capacities to transition across different statuses can also be dependent on their capacities for intra-national mobility, due to the increased regional visa opportunities in ‘going bush’ (Baas, 2012).

Conclusions

There has been a tendency in much Australian migration sociology (and I include some of my own work to date in this critique) to classify migrants according to either ethnicity/country of origin or visa status/visa stream. Such classifications have obscured how migrant status encompasses more than static sets of rights and entitlements and fixed social categories. Further, although international migration studies literature has turned a more critical gaze towards migrant status, this has often been limited to contesting dichotomous legal divisions or highlighting disjunctures between legal categories and everyday experiences.

I have sought to contribute new directions to this existing literature by showing how status is ‘made’ – that is, how it is produced, contested and contestable across fluid legal, political, social and cultural lines. I have drawn on examples of both voluntary and involuntary migration to Australia to argue that ‘status-making’ is a potentially productive way to understand the categorization of migrants and the consequences of these categorizations. I have unpacked current scholarly analysis and media and policy discourse on asylum seekers and refugees, investor migrants and student migrants to highlight the overlapping and often mutually constitutive legal, discursive and social classifications of migrants into types, which are in turn embedded with other sociological categories such as race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, religion and nationality. I have argued that this entangled ‘package’ of classification processes is then overlaid with the dynamism and contingency of status across time and space.

My aim in this discussion has been to problematize migrant categorization, in order to understand its explicit but also hidden functions, particularly the politicizing function of the ‘naming’ and ‘renaming’ of categories of migrant mobility and experience. Through complex processes of classification, a migrant can enter a room a child and leave an adult. Arrive as a (desirable, elite) student and become a (problematic, ‘backdoor’) settler. Be considered a genuine refugee under the international law to which Australia adheres, then become a criminalized and insecure subject when they travel by boat into Australian waters. Racialization, as well as constructions of class and gender, also intersect with the production of migrant status, whether for marginalized migrants like refugees or for migrants commonly understood to be more privileged, such as investor migrants or students.

The approach to migrant categorization I have proposed here potentially raises many new areas and agendas for research. It presses sociological studies to look beyond conventional classifications in the way research subjects are defined, challenging researchers to no longer look at taken-for-granted ‘types’ of migrants in isolation, and to begin to approach the classification of research subjects in ways that can take into account the contested and dynamic nature of their status(es). The most crucial task that this article has not been able to achieve is the inclusion of the voices of migrants themselves, and a sense of how ‘status-making’ impacts on their own everyday practices and subjectivities. By drawing specifically on some of the illustrativecases I have outlined above, examples of emerging research questions that could mobilize the concept of status-making productively include: How are different visa categories interconnected in terms of strategies for financial and cultural capital accumulation across borders or strategies for escaping conflict or political uncertainty? At what points in migrants’ journeys do decisions to switch to new visas, or to accumulate or discard different transnational memberships take place, and what influences these decisions? How do migrants of all kinds become caught in policy fluxes that transform their statuses and what political rationalities and motivations underpin the creation of new categories and new terminologies? How do changing constructions of migrants as skilled or unskilled, business or investor, family or humanitarian, intersect with racial and gender identities to structure migrants’ inclusion and exclusion? What specific role do policy and media discourses play in the construction of categories and hierarchies? These questions are relevant not only to Australian migration sociology, but potentially to many other contexts globally where migration complexity and policy flux are on the rise.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: This research was supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award DE150100748.

Notes

ORCID iD

Shanthi Robertson

Author Biography

Shanthi Robertson is a senior research fellow in migration studies and globalization at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.

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