IMMIGRATION IN AUSTRALIA

Immigration in Australia

Immigration in Australia

Research Question

The trend of immigration has been quite high in Australia for the past several years. It has a long history of various immigration movements throughout the country. The research question for this assignment is to assess the historical background of Australian immigration from gold rushes to European movement to Asian immigrants in all these years. There is a need to analyze the policies and changes for Asian countries particularly Student Industry boom in Australia. Firstly, an overview of the immigration concepts would be discussed and then the issues related to Immigration in Australia would be highlighted in detail.

Defining Immigration Policy

Conventionally, immigration policy is considered to refer primarily to the responses of governments in developed countries to migratory pressures from less developed countries post-1945. These essentially “rich” developed countries can be further subdivided into three broad categories. First, predominantly Anglo-Saxon immigration countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have traditions of accepting immigration that long predate 1945. Second, Western European countries have since 1945 been transformed from countries of emigration to countries of immigration. This transformation has not been uniform: Thus, France, the United Kingdom (UK), West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria all experienced mass immigration during the 1950s and 1960s, while countries such as Spain, Italy, and Ireland have only become destinations for immigration since the end of the Cold War. Lastly, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have themselves also become destinations for migration since the turn of the millennium and especially since becoming member states of the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007. Notably, the developed countries of Asia, particularly Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, have only experienced comparatively minimal levels of immigration (Bauman, 1990).

Despite constituting just a relatively small element of human migrations, both historically and contemporarily, immigration to developed countries has become one of the most sensitive, controversial, and, therefore, weighty domestic political issues. For this reason, the area has attracted increasing attention from scholars across a range of cognate disciplines, including economics, sociology, development studies, anthropology, geography, demography, history, education, psychology, and political science. Within political science, scholars of local policy, political theory, comparative politics, political economy, and international relations have all contributed to our understanding of this field. At its most elementary level, immigration policy addresses the control of entry to a state's territory. The physical control of borders, through passport controls, visa requirements, or quite simply a barrier, remains one of the key deliverables for any government and indeed constitutes one of the fundamental elements of state sovereignty. In this context, the EU's policy in recent decades of removing border checks between its member states (the ostensible Schengen Agreement) and replacing them with a closely guarded external border vis-à-vis third countries are particularly significant. However, and especially in the modern age of global travel, a high degree of control over frontiers, although repeatedly promised in election campaigns, is seldom easy to deliver, and borders, whether they are ...