Unravelling Identity - Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship In Australia (Introduction and Chapter 1)

Unravelling Identity IMMIGRANTS, IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP IN AUSTRALIA Trevor Batrouney and John Goldlust This publication has been supported by La Trobe University. Internet: http://www.latrobe.edu.au This book is published at theHumanities.com a series imprint of the UniversityPress.com First published in Australian in 2005 by Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd www.theHumanities.com Selection and editorial matter copyright © Batrouney & Goldlust All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Batrouney, Trevor. Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 86335 580 4. 1. Identity (Philosophical concept). 2. Citizenship - Australia. 3. Immigrants - Australia. 4. Option of nationality. I. Goldlust, John. II. Title. 323.60994 Cover designed by Katie Czerwinski. Cover image ‘Opera House Forecourt’ © 2000 by Cathy Henenberg Typeset in Australia by Common Ground Publishing. Printed in Australia by Mercury on 80gsm Offset. Table of Contents Preface by Sir James Gobbo, AC, CVO xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts Immigration to Australia: An Overview Immigration and Identity Immigration, Identity and Citizenship 9 9 19 24 Chapter 2 Telling the Story of Migration: Seven Voices Immigration to Australia: Seven Case Studies Some Key Themes in Migration 35 35 56 Chapter 3 Migration and Identity: The Essentialist Paradigm Immutable Core Identity 63 64 Chapter 4 Migration and Identity: The Non-Essentialist Paradigm Achieved Australian Identity Identities in Transition Cocktail or Hybrid Identity Cosmopolitan or Global Identity 85 86 94 97 104 Chapter 5 Migration and Identity: Situational Impacts Impact of Significant Occasions and Events Impact of Everyday Situations and Activities 111 112 120 Chapter 6 Not Taking Up Australian Citizenship Emotional Reasons Pragmatic Reasons 141 144 153 Chapter 7 Becoming an Australian Citizen Feelings of Attachment to Australia A Sense of Duty and Obligation Desire for Participation and Enjoyment of Rights Pragmatic Reasons Dual Citizenship 171 172 179 183 187 196 Conclusion 205 Endnotes References 215 221 Appendix A Research methodology and sample characteristics Research Methodology Characteristics of the final respondent sample 225 225 226 Appendix B The Respondents 229 Index 237 x Preface By Sir James Gobbo, AC, CVO The title of this book, Unravelling Identity, aptly evokes its central theme—the examination of the many and varied ways in which immigrants reflect upon their identity as they move from their country of origin to Australia. The authors provide many illustrative examples and enlightening commentary from a wide range of immigrants. The respondents’ views range from those who believe that their ‘core’ sense of identity has not been changed as a result of their migration to others who reflect on the obvious and more subtle ways in which their identity has been influenced by the cumulative weight of the many new experiences, interactions and social situations in which they find themselves. The authors have contributed to our understanding of the many complexities that characterise immigrant identities by showing the range of events (personal, national and international) and contexts (physical, social, occupational and religious) which can bring to the fore various elements that both sustain and challenge important components of an immigrant’s overall sense of identity. What the examples often bring out is the contemporary capacity to cope with ambiguity, multiplicity and alternation in relation to aspects of personal identity. As one respondent, Barbara, observed, reflecting on the fluid way many immigrants respond to the pulls of the various claims on their ‘exclusive’ loyalty to some particular form of collective identity: ‘It’s like listening to music. One day you’ll feel like heavy metal, the next day classical. It depends on your mood that day.’ One form of loyalty often perceived as an index of collective identity is associated with the modern status of citizenship. The two chapters on responses to Australian citizenship present immigrant accounts of their decision-making processes and explore the many (often surprising) reasons why they have or have not chosen to take Australian citizenship. The responses illustrate that some, but by no means all, assert that the decision to become an Australian citizen does indeed reflect a sense of loyalty and obligation to their country of adoption. In its examination of the interconnected themes of immigration, identity and citizenship Unravelling Identity allows us to hear first hand the personal expressions that make up the rich tapestry that is reflected in the reality of Australia as a multicultural nation. The exploration also allows us to contemplate the contributions towards the continuously evolving character of the Australian nation and of Australian identity that have accrued from this reality of a multicultural Australia. Questions of national identity are always difficult, even if these questions were asked of a person who has been established in Australia for a long time. They are even more difficult if asked of a recent immigrant. But here, direct interviews rather than hypotheses and theories are much to be preferred. We are therefore specially indebted to Trevor Batrouney and John Goldlust who are to be commended for providing us with the opportunity to listen directly to the voices of so many immigrants as they explore and reflect upon their own life trajectories and migration experiences in vivid, personal and often poignant terms. It is certainly the extensive citation of these personal accounts that adds an engaging and refreshing approach to the themes explored as well as drawing us into the inherent complexity associated with multicultural nationbuilding. xii Introduction The impetus for this book came about when the authors were working at the Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research (BIMPR) in Melbourne in the mid-1990s. The ‘Bureau’ (as it was often referred to by those who worked there) began its relatively short life in 1989 following a major review of immigration policies that was commissioned by the Australian Government and chaired by Professor Stephen Fitzgerald (CAAIP, 1988).1 Set up under the auspices of the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, the broad task assigned to the Bureau of Immigration Research (as it was originally designated) was to operate as a professional research body that would provide ‘objective data and information’ to help guide immigration policy. Under the leadership of its founding director, Dr John Nieuwenhuysen, the newly formed Bureau recruited a small number of academics trained in economics and the social sciences whose expertise was added to a small but well-trained core of researchoriented, permanent public servants in Canberra and Melbourne. By making use of focused secondary analysis of available census data and by commissioning a range of immigration and settlement-related research studies—often undertaken by university-based academics— the Bureau developed an ambitious and wide-ranging research agenda. From the results of this research an impressive body of informative, data-rich reports on a variety of topics and themes soon emerged. Some of the research documented the comparative economic, social and cultural characteristics of Australia’s immigrant communities (for example, birthplace-based community profiles, State-specific and Australia-wide social atlases, and academic and policy-oriented overviews of a wide range of immigration issues). Other studies focused on selected immigrant groups or sub-categories within the immigration program (for example, recent African-born communities, refugees, and small-business migrants). There were also numerous research-driven studies on significant problems and difficulties faced by particular sub-groups among the now significant Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia proportion of overseas-born in the Australian population (for example, unemployed youth, the elderly, and immigrants in regional Australia). In 1993 and 1994 the Government extended the Bureau’s research agenda to include first, population, and then, multicultural issues. It was within these broader guidelines that the two authors, then working as senior research staff in the Melbourne branch, developed a research proposal the broad aim of which was to elicit the immigrant’s firsthand experience towards a broader understanding of the concepts of national, ethnic and other related forms of collective identity— including, in particular, an investigation of the thinking surrounding decisions about citizenship. And, it is the findings that emerged from this study that make up the primary data reported in this book. The inhouse research project co-ordinated from within BIMPR emerged amid a noticeable upsurge of interest and ongoing debates around the issues of Australian citizenship and national identity. Debates around national identity had been an important focus of discussion in Australian public life since the mid-1980s. One critical stimulus had been the bipartisan support of successive Australian governments since the 1970s for the introduction of a broad range of multicultural policies and institutions, which were perceived by some to represent a challenge to Australia’s exclusivist Anglo-Celtic cultural core. This view was further reinforced after the late 1980s by the increasingly expansive promotion of Australia, both internally and overseas, as a multicultural society (Jupp, 2002). More broadly, the growing polarisation evidenced in the community over the question of what constituted a contemporary Australian identity received more extensive articulation following the fallout from the Blainey debate of the mid-1980s. This revealed the presence of widespread ambivalence, if not outright hostility in certain quarters, in response to suggestions that Australia’s present and future national identity might need some rethinking. Areas of concern for some people were the increasing proportion of new settlers being drawn from Asian countries since the abolition of the White Australia Policy in the 1970s and the government’s expressed desire in the 1980s for greater economic and political integration into the Asian region. (Jayasariya and Kee, 1999). A significant public debate that took place around the time of Australia’s bicentennial celebrations in 1988 came about as a result of the re-emergence of unresolved tensions with regard to the position of indigenous Australians. This debate was reinforced by a continuous 2 Introduction flow of research data, anecdotal evidence and official statistics that reaffirmed the continuing disadvantaged economic, social and civic status of indigenous Australians. The occasion of the bicentenary, which celebrated the date of the first British settlement, served as a provocation and reminder to indigenous Australians of their sense of collective alienation from the heavily European-centred connotations inherent in the meanings and content of mainstream evocations of Australian identity. A major constitutional debate also took place around the time of the bicentennial celebrations. It was centred on the question of whether Australia should move to become a republic or formally remain a constitutional monarchy. Strong views for both positions were expressed by the government, political parties, prominent Australians, the media and a range of advocacy groups. The contentious and potentially volatile aspects of contemporary manifestations of national identity were further highlighted by broader global events such as the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe that resulted in changed national boundaries; the rise of major conflicts, both in Europe and elsewhere, based on ethnic and religious loyalties; a consequent upsurge in the number of people seeking refuge and asylum; the growth of a highly mobile international workforce; and the increasing pressures on nation-states to facilitate the wish expressed by many immigrants to hold dual (or multiple) citizenship (Castles and Davidson, 2000). All were part of a growing awareness that there were very different conceptions of nationhood and citizenship in certain Asian and European countries and also contributed to a re-examination of Australian conceptions of national identity and citizenship (Day et al., 1993). In relation to the revival of interest in Australia into the nature of contemporary citizenship, the same review of immigration policies in 1988 that had led to the establishment of the Bureau of Immigration Research had also noted with concern that more than one million eligible immigrants had chosen not to take up Australian citizenship. The report included the recommendation that the government should consider whether certain privileges (access to social benefits in particular) extended to all permanent residents should in future be limited solely to citizens (CAAIP, 1988, pp. 18–20). But the government rejected this proposal on the grounds that the decision to become an Australian citizen should remain a free choice of the 3 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia applicant and reflect the individual’s positive commitment to Australia. Prime Minister Bob Hawke designated 1989 as the Year of Citizenship. It was supported by a major publicity campaign and included measures designed to facilitate and encourage qualified migrants to take up Australian citizenship. Further, and in the light of the national and international changes outlined above, the terms of reference provided to a number of parliamentary committees established by the federal government in the early 1990s ensured that the issues surrounding the current meaning and content of citizenship remained on the political agenda (Centenary of Federation Advisory Committee, 1994, Joint Standing Committee on Migration, 1994, Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, 1996). In a nation in which high levels of immigration had been a topic of intense sociological and political interest over many decades, the issues of identity and citizenship had inevitably come under constant academic and public scrutiny and have clearly stimulated a multitude of excellent research studies. What would our study be adding to this body of knowledge and how could we avoid merely retreading welltravelled ground? We sought to distinguish our own research endeavour by noting that one feature of recent debates around the topics of national identity and citizenship was the notable absence of the views and perspectives of the immigrants themselves, particularly those who had arrived in Australia relatively recently. We deliberately chose, therefore, as our research technique the semi-structured, qualitative interview in which interviewers are requested to undertake extended conversations with respondents and through these to pursue broad themes and issues, rather than following a fixed questionnaire or pre-designed interview schedule. One of the principal advantages of this technique is that the style of questioning is designed to allow for greater flexibility of both questions and responses than the structured survey style.2 The themes to be explored in the interview were designed to elicit from each interviewee their personal consideration of the entire immigrant experience as a social process. Through these reflections we would seek to gain further insight into the dynamics and the details of personal and cultural change that has often been observed to accompany the immigrant experience. Our interests included the ways in which most immigrants must constantly negotiate the inevitable dilemmas and cross-pressures in relation to their country of origin and 4 Introduction to Australia that often result in a process of continuous renovation in terms of their notion of personal identity. Interviews were completed in late 1995 with 128 immigrants then residing in Sydney, Melbourne or rural Tasmania. Most had settled permanently in Australia after 1984. Each interview (recorded on audio tape) sought to explore five interrelated themes. In the first part of the interview respondents were asked to reflect upon their childhood and youth, which for most of them did not take place in Australia, with particular reference to their feelings of national and group identity when they were growing up. The second theme examined the story of their actual migration to Australia and included their feelings, hopes and expectations. The third theme related to the respondents’ life in Australia, especially in terms of their feelings for Australia. The fourth theme explored the ways in which the respondents’ sense of identity developed in response to the particularities of their biography and their life experiences. The fifth theme explored was that of Australian citizenship. The first part of this exploration examined why some immigrants (around a quarter of our total sample) who were eligible at the time of interview for Australian citizenship had chosen not to take it up. The second part of this exploration focused on the respondents’ decisions about applying for and gaining citizenship.3 One of our considerations in organising the material included in this book has been to strike a balance between an analysis and interpretation that engages with the conceptual, abstract and academic concerns associated with the themes outlined above while also providing the reader with a more immediate and direct entry into the words and thoughts of the immigrants themselves as they reflect upon their lived experiences and how they felt these experiences have influenced and affected them. In this sense we are working within the well-developed interpretivist tradition in the social sciences, which proposes that one of the more effective ways of understanding the social world is by examining how individuals respond to and reflect upon their experiences and, in particular, the manner in which they construct their own meanings of such experiences. Such an approach often tends to favour qualitative rather than quantitative techniques of data gathering and often reports its findings by citing the words of respondents rather than by the cumulation, categorisation and numerical quantification of survey or interview data. 5 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia In opting for this methodology for our study we are revisiting and seeking to adapt a technique that was pioneered extremely effectively in Australia by Wendy Lowenstein and Morag Loh. In their book Immigrants (1977) they presented 17 autobiographical case studies which vividly brought to life the details of migration and settlement as experienced by immigrants who had arrived in Australia between 1890 and 1970. The criticism most often levelled at the extended case-study approach to social research is the problem of how representative of the broader population are the cases and therefore how reliable are the findings when one generalises from the responses selected and cited. A defensible sampling strategy is important in any form of research and we were fortunate to have two extensive population bases available with reliable address records from which we were able to select a smaller sample of respondents. Using random selection procedures, 95 of the respondents in our study were chosen from the records of the Australian government’s citizenship branch from the lists of all immigrants who had taken up Australian citizenship in the period 1985–1995. A second sample consisted of immigrants who, although eligible, had chosen not to take up Australian citizenship. The 33 respondents in this category were randomly selected from a sample of 5000 recent immigrants who had arrived since 1990 and who had agreed to participate in an ongoing longitudinal survey initiated by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. Care was also taken to ensure a relatively even distribution of male and female respondents and a broad range of birthplace and age groupings and ages were represented in the sample. (See Appendix A for further sampling details.) Furthermore, while it is not practical to include material from all who were interviewed, we have endeavoured to incorporate, from the hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, the thoughts, reflections and perspectives of as many respondents from as varied a range of backgrounds as possible. In the following chapters we hear from the respondents themselves about how the process of immigration has impacted on their lives and how they are managing the various components of their often multifaceted, social identities. Our emphasis throughout is on the complexity, fluidity, multiplicity and changeability inherent in the lifelong process of identity construction and identity negotiation. We seek to employ the reflections and perceptions of the immigrants 6 Introduction themselves to illuminate and illustrate the complex and multifaceted relationships between immigration, identity and citizenship within the contemporary Australian context. While the data reported in this book were collected almost a decade ago4 and the observations are in some way closely tied to the immigrant cohort of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to the entry of this group into Australian society during a particular historical period, we also believe that the issues, dilemmas and cross-pressures around questions of identity have in no way lessened for more recent immigrants to Australia. The last decade has seen the rise (and equally rapid fall) of the Pauline Hanson One Nation phenomenon; the failure of a proposed agenda championing a move towards a future Australian republic to win sufficient support at the national referendum of 1999; the increasing dissatisfaction expressed by indigenous Australians concerning the issues of reconciliation, land rights and representation; the retreat from the multiculturalist version of Australian identity to a more militant re-affirmation of the nation’s ‘essential’ Anglo-Celtic cultural core; and a relatively new tension concerning the place of Islam within Australian life. These developments have all been further stimulated and exacerbated by larger and more far-reaching events on the international stage. The questions and dilemmas addressed by the immigrants in our study are still very much alive and unresolved as are the issues about national identity and the nature of citizenship. On these matters much of what our respondents have to stay is still relevant and poignant, as well as rich in detail, complexity and nuance, and ultimately also informative and illuminating. 7 Chapter 1 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts Immigration to Australia: An Overview The first human migrations into the Australian continent probably took place via an existing land bridge from South-East Asia about 40 000 years ago. These original settler groups developed as seminomadic hunter/gatherers and, over many thousands of years, they established a range of distinctive tribe or clan identities, each of which maintained strong attachments to particular areas and regions of Australia. However, the beginnings of British colonisation in 1788 very swiftly brought to a rude and abrupt close the millennia of continuous and relatively undisturbed occupation by the original settler peoples. At that time it is estimated that there were about 300 000 Aboriginal Australians scattered across the continent. From a contemporary perspective, the pivotal relationship between subsequent patterns and sources of immigration to Australia and the ongoing questions, debates and issues surrounding Australian identity can clearly be traced to the very beginnings of European settlement. Most obviously, for example, current political and public debates about land rights and reconciliation illustrate the lasting significance of the initial policy established by the British colonial authorities that denied the existing inhabitants a legal basis to ownership of land (in recent times widely labelled the principle of terra nullius) and sought to maintain a clear social, political and cultural separation between persons perceived to be European and those designated as Aboriginal. This policy took place within the context of an increasing focus within European intellectual circles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the task of applying scientific rigour to the exercise of dividing and classifying humanity into a hierarchy of races. It is the residues of these perspectives and of associated legalistic rationales that have helped to ensure that contemporary descendants of the Aboriginal population are still administratively as well as culturally differentiated from the rest of the population, and collectively identified under the currently fashionable nomenclature of ‘indigenous Australians’. Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia The European colonisation and settlement process that began in 1788 initiated a flow of new arrivals to the Australian continent that has continued virtually unabated. Initially, Great Britain sought to secure a permanent presence by establishing convict settlements in eastern Australia. Until transportation to the eastern Australian colonies ceased in the 1840s a total of 156 000 British and Irish convicts were transported, and small numbers continued to be sent to Western Australia until the 1860s. By the early 1800s, a European population that consisted almost exclusively of convicts and the military and administrative apparatus required to maintain authority and control over them was already being supplemented by a small number of free settlers. Some of these were individuals from more ‘respectable’ social backgrounds in Britain and Ireland. The attraction of becoming landowners in Australia was further enhanced after the establishment of new convictfree colonies in Victoria and South Australia. European settlement in Australia was even more profoundly stimulated by the gold discoveries of the mid-nineteenth century, and the resultant inflow of people from Europe and North America provided a huge boost to the local population. However, the overwhelming majority of both arrivals and those who chose to remain in Australia were from Great Britain or Ireland. Overall, from 1788 until the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Australia attracted around two million settlers from the United Kingdom. Most came from England but there were also substantial minorities from Scotland and Ireland. Throughout this period there were only very small numbers of permanent settlers from other parts of Europe, mostly from Germany, Italy, Greece and Malta. Of greater significance, from the perspective of the emergent Australian identity that began to form towards the end of the nineteenth century, were the more than 30 000 Chinese, the majority of whom arrived during the gold-rush period, and the Pacific Islanders who came as indentured labourers in the late nineteenth century mostly to work in the sugar cane plantations in north Queensland. Increasing inter-group friction, punctuated by explosive outbursts of violent hostility and mounting fears accompanied the growing presence of these groups. To the already clear-cut differentiation between Aboriginal and European Australians was added a strong antipathy by the Europeans towards the idea of Asian or coloured 10 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts peoples securing any permanent place in the future of the new Australian nation. Following the agreement by the six colonies to form a Federation—the Commonwealth of Australia—this issue was addressed within the first few months of the Federation’s existence in the form of an overwhelming endorsement by the newly elected members for the Immigration Restriction Act (1901). The aim of this piece of legislation was to secure a foolproof mechanism for effectively excluding non-Europeans from settling in Australia. This was to be achieved by the use of a patently transparent administrative strategy that provided relevant officials with the discretionary right to require that any prospective immigrant successfully pass a dictation test in any European language. This legislation was soon followed by the Pacific Islanders Labourers Act, which put an end to the further importation of ‘kanakas’ (Melanesian labourers) and required that all those already present in Australia be deported before 1907. These foundational pieces of national legislation were unabashedly nominated by Alfred Deakin, one of Australia’s leading politicians of the era, as ‘the high-water mark of racial exclusiveness’.1 This legislation formalised the widespread popular support for what became universally referred to as the White Australia Policy. Furthermore, for more than half a century this virtually sacrosanct principle articulated the assumptions firmly entrenched across a broad spectrum of Australia’s political culture, and for many even came to define the essence of Australian identity. The White Australia Policy remained the unchallenged core of national immigration policy and was supported by all the major political parties until well into the 1960s. So effective was its application that, by the late 1940s, with Australia about to embark on a new and ambitious scheme to attract widespread mass immigration, there was an almost total absence of non-Europeans (and only a very small number of any other non-Anglo-Celtic group) in a total Australian population of fewer than eight million.2 As a further consequence, between 1901 and 1947, the number of persons born in China and residing in Australia declined from around 30 000 to 6 900 due to the combined effects of natural attrition and the fact that very few Chinese were granted permission to enter Australia,. During the Second World War, in which Australia fought for Britain as one of her Allies, Japanese troops advanced through SouthEast Asia reaching almost to Australia’s northern coastline before 11 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia being halted and eventually defeated. After Britain’s withdrawal from Singapore in 1942 Australia’s defence was tied very heavily to the large numbers of troops, ships and planes assigned to fight the Pacific war by the United States. By the end of the war a strong, and politically bipartisan, view had emerged that Australia must initiate new policies that would result in a significant acceleration in its population growth. With a huge land area, a relatively tiny population and a declining birth rate this was also perceived as an extremely urgent priority in order to improve Australia’s defensive capabilities and ensure that it might remain both a secure and economically viable European nation perched geographically on the fringes of a heavily populated and potentially volatile Asian continent. However, when Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first federal minister for immigration, first introduced and subsequently defended the deliberately sketchy outline of the Australian Labor Party government’s new plans late in 1945, he was careful to allay any fears that mass migration might mean any dramatic change in the composition of the Australian population. In his subsequent public utterances, particularly in the first few years after the war, Calwell would constantly reiterate to other members of his own party, to the opposition and to the Australian people in general that potential British settlers would always be given priority, and that, in terms of the numbers he envisaged, for every European migrant attracted to Australia, there would be 10 from Britain. In reality, British settlers have rarely constituted more than half of the annual intake of immigrants to Australia since 1945. Already by the late 1940s the new immigration program very quickly began to turn to other European sources in order to sustain its projected targets (initially set at an annual intake of around 70 000). By the 1950s, the recently arrived immigrants, supported by a generally buoyant period in international markets, had very quickly stimulated an expanding period of growth in Australian industry and the economy. Initially, for several years after 1947, the major driving force of the immigration program was the Displaced Persons Scheme, through which the Australian government, by agreement with the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), was able to recruit settlers from among the several millions of post-Second World War refugees, unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin and still living in refugee 12 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts camps scattered around Western Europe. However, for anyone seeking to make a new home in Australia a condition of entry required agreement to enter into an indentured labour contract with the Australian government. This meant that for a period of two years the new immigrant could be directed to work anywhere and in any type of job in which labour was required. Furthermore, the Australian government was quick to establish a number of qualifying criteria for use by recruiting officials sent to the refugee camps in order to ensure that only prospective settlers who were least likely to diverge from the existing physical type associated with the ideal image of a White Australian were the ones who were selected. As summarised by Lack and Templeton (1995, p. 11): Between 1947 and 1954 Australia received 170 000 displaced persons of enormous variety of ethnic and occupational backgrounds. The undertaking to select ‘without discrimination as to race or religion’ was initially dishonoured. There was a blanket ban on Jews, and a clear ethnic picking order was exercised among the rest. Only when the supply of blonde and blue-eyed Baltic people dwindled were other groups accepted: Poles, Ukrainians and Slovenes at the end of 1947, Czechs and Yugoslavs in early 1948, and so on, to a point in 1949 where virtually all European refugees were regarded as acceptable. Australia was among the countries accused of ‘creaming off’ the single and healthy (especially fit men for labouring work) before it would consider family units, lone women with children, and the hard to place elderly dependants and disabled. After 1950, with the supply of IRO refugees already beginning to dry up and the number of British attracted to Australia insufficient to meet the projected targets, the government began once again to look for countries that could provide an acceptable new source of immigrants. For the governments of a number of European countries, with social and economic conditions still languishing as a result of the aftereffects of the Second World War, emigration as a means of easing domestic pressures was an attractive policy initiative. The Australian government was therefore able to enter into a series of agreements with a number of European governments, the purpose of which was to spell out the mechanisms for mutually sharing the subsidisation of administrative, promotional and transportation costs of the migration process for interested nationals attracted by the prospect of settling permanently in Australia. In this way Australia continued to negotiate particular assisted migration 13 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia schemes with a number of Western European governments: Netherlands and Italy (1951); West Germany, Austria and Greece (1952); Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1954); and Spain (1958).3 Until 1947, during more than 150 years of European settlement, only British or Irish settlers had been considered sufficiently desirable to justify encouragement via incentives, subsidies or assistance. In this context the Australian government’s participation in the Displaced Persons Scheme after 1947 and the positive incentives associated with the government-to-government immigration agreements of the 1950s marked the beginnings of a important shift in long-standing immigration priorities. Although never openly acknowledged at the time, this shift may appear to represent the first symbolic cracks in the Anglo-Celtic exclusiveness repeatedly proclaimed as the essence of Australian identity. However, despite changing immigration patterns, the view that the essence of Australian identity was Anglo-Celtic was widely shared and continued to fuel an accompanying suspicion that any further ‘lowering’ of immigration standards would inevitably endanger the ethnic integrity of a White Australia. Furthermore, the publicly proclaimed aim of post-Second World War settlement policy, that of assimilating new Australians to the Australian way of life, firmly articulated two important principles that it was assumed would continue to remain unchallenged by any slight shift in emphasis with regard to the sources of the more recent immigration. These were, firstly, that in selecting eligible settlers the process must always ensure that they should not differ significantly in physical characteristics from Anglo-European racial norms; and, secondly, that it was the responsibility of new immigrants to become Australians as quickly as possible after their arrival. They should avoid forming ethnic enclaves by dispersing themselves among the existing Australian population; they should desist from using foreign languages in public and learn to speak Australian;4 and, they should learn about and endeavour to embrace the attitudinal and behavioural attributes and values broadly characterised as being the Australian way of life. Throughout the 1960s, immigration to Australia continued to draw primarily from the United Kingdom and the recently established European sources, with increasing numbers of settlers coming from the Mediterranean countries (Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Malta). Most 14 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts new arrivals chose to reside in the major capital cities. However, the decade also brought significant challenges to traditional Australian views about the future of the immigration program and vigorous public debates about the future of the White Australia Policy. In 1964, one early political response that reflected a very slight but symbolically significant relaxation of the racially exclusionist barriers permitted the permanent entry of several thousand ‘mixed race’ migrants—mostly Anglo-Indians and burghers from Ceylon. However, these arrivals rarely received assisted passage and were not the subject of any government-to-government agreements. Furthermore, almost all were English-speaking Christians and therefore ‘often easily assimilated into existing cultural, and behavioural practices and institutions’.5 Around this time, research emanating from academic sources as well as from the increasingly strongly voiced observations of many educationalists, social workers, health professionals and others was beginning to cast considerable doubt on the previously vaunted national benefits and social effectiveness of persisting with the culturally insensitive policy of assimilation for new settlers. An early sign that the critique of existing policies was being taken seriously in high places was the decision in 1964 to change the name of the ‘Assimilation Section’ within the Department of Immigration to the slightly less harsh-sounding ‘Integration Section’. In 1965 the collective retreat by the major political parties from any further public support for racially discriminatory immigration policies and their decision to remove henceforth any reference to ‘White Australia’ from their policy platforms signalled an important shift in priorities. In 1966 came a much more substantial initiative with the decision by the government to amend immigration guidelines to allow application for permanent entry into Australia by nonEuropeans with professional credentials and qualifications that were in high demand. But, perhaps the most significant rupture to the fortifications which, for more than half a century, had operated in the form of clearcut visual and cultural cues6 that had guided immigration officials in determining the sort of persons that qualified as racially acceptable Australian settlers came with the decision in 1966 to grant entry to 10 000 Lebanese. This was followed in 1967 by the signing of a migration agreement with the government of Turkey. 15 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia As a result, by 1971, in addition to the Lebanese (most of whom, as it turned out, were Christians), Australia had accepted a further 10 000 mostly Muslim immigrants from Turkey. In the space of less than five years, a number of the racial, religious and geographic markers that had for so long signified persons as being clearly unacceptable for permanent settlement in Australia had been well and truly breached. The Australian census of 1971 provides a succinct summary of the broader population outcomes that were the result of post-Second World War immigration in the first quarter of the twentieth century (see Table 1 below). At that time residents born overseas numbered 2.58 million (20.2% of the total population) and, of these, a little over 40% were from Britain and Ireland. The largest non-British birthplace groups were immigrants from Italy (290 000), Greece (160 000) Germany (110 000), and the Netherlands (99 000). It is of considerable significance that the presence in Australia of non-White settlers was still quite small when, in 1973, the newly elected Labor Party government, under the leadership of Gough Whitlam, put a public and definitive end to the White Australia Policy by formally rescinding the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 and declaring unambiguously that no future Australian immigration policy would discriminate on the basis of race, colour or nationality. As illustrated in the census data included in Table 1 below, in the 30 years since this declaration, the number of immigrants from nonEuropean sources who have settled permanently in Australia has been steadily growing. Starting from a very small numerical base in the early 1970s, the first major boost came in the years after 1975 with the intake of considerable numbers of refugees from Timor (following the Indonesian invasion), Vietnam (in the aftermath of the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime and the formal end to the fighting there) and Lebanon (mostly Muslims escaping from an increasingly turbulent civil war situation). The continuing flow of settlers into Australia since the 1970s has included a substantial number of highly educated and credentialled entrants from all parts of Asia who qualified for permanent residence by meeting the universal criteria set out under the skilled migration program. The non-European component of the more recent immigration intake was further boosted by the family reunion provisions of the program, which allowed new settlers, albeit often 16 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts under quite stringent qualifying conditions, to subsequently sponsor entry into Australia of close family members. Overall, since the mid-1970s, the number of non-European immigrants in the annual intake has continued to increase almost every year. In the late 1970s, the major source countries in Asia were Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia and Malaysia. Table 1 illustrates the extent of the geographic (and racial) shift in the type of immigrant coming to Australia from 1947 to 2001. By the 1970s, immigration from Western, Central and parts of Eastern Europe began to slow considerably. This pattern is reflected in a comparison of the number of settlers from these regions resident in Australia in 1971 and 2001. But concurrently, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which Australia attracted almost two million immigrants (an average yearly immigration of around 80 000), more than a third of this total were from Asia (excluding the Middle East) while only around 16 % were from the United Kingdom and Ireland. Table 1: Number in Australian population from selected overseas birthplaces according to Australian censuses of 1947, 1971 and 2001 Birthplace 1947 1971 2001 English-speaking countries United Kingdom and Ireland 586 774 1 048 032 1 086 480 43 610 74 050 355 765 United States of America 6 232 26 816 53 694 South Africa 5 866 12 233 79 425 14 567 110 028 108 220 2 174 98 633 83 324 33 632 288 252 218 718 New Zealand Europe Germany Netherlands Italy Malta 3 238 53 471 46 998 Greece 12 291 158 969 116 431 Poland 6 573 59 471 58 110 803 28 095a 33 432 1 886 23 864 71 349 252 11 352 29 821 Middle East Egypt Lebanon Turkey 17 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia Birthplace 1947 1971 2001 Asia Cambodia Vietnam 200b 666b 22 978 154 831 Indonesia 918 7 664 47 158 Malaysia 1 768 14 392 78 858 103 942 Philippines 141 2 332 Singapore 1 127 5 289 33 485 China 6 404 17 085 142 780 762 5 398 67 122 8 379 38 955 8 160 28 656 95 452 694 9 018 53 461 1 508 3 867 44 261 105 3 638 23 420 Hong Kong Korea India Sri Lanka Other Fiji Chile a This figure is for all persons born in the United Arab Republic, which at the time was the entity formed as a result of a short-lived, political merger between Egypt and Syria. b In these years a combined number was provided for all of Indo-China, which included Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Sources: 1947 figures: Shu, J. et al, 1996, Australian Population Trends and Prospects 1995, Canberra: AGPS, p. 68. 1971 figures: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Historical Population Statistics, Cat. No. 3105.0.65.001, Table 79. 2001 figures: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census 2001, Basic Community Profile: Australia, Cat. No. 20010, Table BO6. In summary, since 1947 Australia’s population has almost trebled from less than eight million to more than 20 million due largely to more than six million immigrants from over 100 countries who settled in Australia over these five decades. To assess the broader sociocultural and demographic impact of post-Second World War immigration on Australia we need to consider the following: a) in 1947, 90% of the population were born in Australia and, including immigrants, more than 97% were of Anglo-Celtic background; b) in 2001, 22% of the population were born outside Australia and of these only 39% were born in the UK or Ireland; and c) the proportion of the Australian population born in Asia rose from 0.3% in 1947 to almost 5% in 2001. However, to place these demographic changes in a broader perspective it should also be noted that in 2001, even after adding 18 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts together all first-generation Asian immigrants, all settlers from Middle Eastern countries, all other non-Caucasian immigrants and all indigenous Australians—the total number of non-Whites (applying the definitional criteria prevalent during the White Australia Policy period) was still below 10% of the Australian population. Immigration and Identity Over recent centuries, nationality, race and ethnicity have all operated as influential conceptual signifiers, each of which continues to represent a distinctive form of both objective characterisation and the subjective experience of collective identity. All three forms of social categorisation might also be considered variations of the broader (if less precise) collective notion of peoplehood. Within the social sciences two very different theoretical paradigms have emerged that seek to explain why these ‘meta-manifestations’ of ‘collectivity’ continue to have such a significant impact on contemporary social and political organisation as well as on most people’s sense of personal identity. Briefly, these might be designated as reflecting primordialist and constructivist orientations. Primordialist perspectives emphasise that individual attachments to particularistic collective identities are based on ‘sentiments, ties and obligations, and an unquestioned sense of identity which are embedded in the individual from an early age and remain as a fixed point of reference’ (Fenton, 2003, p. 12). This approach is itself deeply rooted in the historical concerns of anthropologists and sociologists with the bases for social cohesion.7 For, as noted in an overview of recent sociological research on identity, the earlier literature: …approached these attributes as ‘natural’ or ‘essential’ characteristics-qualities emerging from physiological traits, psychological predispositions, regional features, or the properties of structural locations. A collective’s members were believed to internalise these qualities, suggesting a unified, singular social experience, a single canvas against which social actors constructed a sense of self. (Cerulo, 1997, p. 385) Thus, considerable research and inquiry has therefore focused on examining the apparent strength of individual attachments to family, kin and the local community (particularly in traditional as contrasted with modern societies). 19 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia More recently, the primordialist approach has come under considerable attack, sometimes perhaps unfairly, for providing an intellectual rationale for what are considered conservative or even reactionary assumptions often expressed in political discourse and public life that posit innate or pre-rational forces as the cause for the inevitability of group differentiation and for ongoing inter-group conflict. However, primordialism continues to remain influential, particularly considering the undeniable empirical evidence of the continuing strength of group ties based on ethnicity. This is even more the case in the light of the seemingly inexorable (and almost universal) historical trend over recent centuries towards the emergence of larger, broader and more powerful forms of collective identity—as represented by the rise of the European and post-colonial nation states—that invariably sought to repress and usurp particularistic local allegiances. From the perspective of our study, ‘primordiality’ remains important because such strongly held views often inform the intuitive basis from which many modern individuals still conceive of their own sense of deep attachment to and identification with particular national, ethnic and religious identities. A belief in primordiality is often contingent upon what has been labelled the ‘essentialist’ assumption that ‘individual persons can have singular, integral, altogether harmonious and unproblematic identities’ (Calhoun, 1995, p. 198). And, as Anthony Smith (2000, p. 20) points out, ‘primordial attachments rest on perception, cognition and belief’ and ‘possess a power beyond rational calculation and interest—because people attribute that power and meaning to them, not because of the nature of the primordial tie in itself’. On the other hand, constructivist approaches, many of which owe a great deal to the pioneering analyses presented by Max Weber early in the twentieth century, prefer to emphasise the contingent and mobilisational aspects associated with strong group identification. Weber proposed that most of the more familiar forms of collective identity referred to above are dependent upon the adoption and maintenance, for the group in question, of a particular set of beliefs that encompass the collective’s origins, history, essential character and boundary definitions. But more importantly, this group-sustaining ideology is often maintained without recourse to any objectively verifiable supporting evidence for the bases of this shared sense of communality. 20 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts Weber argues that, as comparative inquiry will invariably confirm, almost ‘any kind of similarity or contrast of physical type or of habits can induce the belief that affinity or disaffinity exists between groups that attract or repel each other’.8 And while Weber’s original discussion focused on the importance of the subjective element in racial and ethnic affinities, he also noted that the belief of many groups in their common descent (despite considerable evidence to the contrary) often lies at the root of the construction of nationality. A number of the more recent influential works on nationalism and national identity have further extended these Weberian insights as emphasised, for example, in the titles and central arguments of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm and T. Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983) and, from a slightly different perspective, in Anthony Smith’s The Ethnic Origin of Nations (1986). Perhaps what is most significant about how these experiences of identity are currently theorised is the extent to which many of the characteristics that were previously perceived as being ascribed at birth or ‘primordial’ in the deepest sense of the word are now conceived as being subject to individual construction and personal choice. Thus, ‘the social constructionist approach to identity rejects any category that sets forward essential or core features as the unique property of a collective’s members’ (Cerulo, 1997, p. 387). More and more, both intellectual and popular views emphasise the extent to which individuals are now responsible for shaping their own identity. This has been reinforced by recent research that documents the relatively minimal residues of ethnicity still remaining among third and later generation descendants of European immigrants to North America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the findings of a number of studies have reinforced the observation by Herbert Gans (1979) that already by the 1970s what he called ‘symbolic ethnicity’ had allowed individuals to maintain some sense of difference and acknowledgement of their heritage but was accompanied by very little ethnic content in their lives. Particularly influential in reinforcing these views of symbolic ethnicity were the research studies of Richard Alba (1990) and Mary Waters (1990). Following Gans, Alba affirms that the symbolic aspects that remain for descendants of European immigrants in the United States have resulted in the emergence of a European-American identity, an important facet of which is to distinguish this group from 21 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia ‘less desirable’ collective identities such as ‘Black’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Latino’. Along similar lines, Waters’ research study led her to conclude that for most third and later generation descendants of White European immigrants in the United States, the extent to which they continue to maintain a connection and identification with their ethnic roots had become purely an optional affair. Yet, few would consider that the relationship to one’s ethnic identity is completely voluntaristic and open-ended. Most researchers recognise that the form of collective identity salient to any individual is inevitably shaped by the particularities of his or her personal background tempered by the vicissitudes of his or her life experience. Furthermore, this is likely to be either expanded or constrained by the range of collective identities open or available to them. Therefore, particularly in comparison to European immigrants, the relative element of free choice realistically available to African-Americans and to Asian-Americans in defining their ethno-racial self has been the focus of considerable recent research and debate (Tuan, 1998; Kibria, 2002; and Song, 2003). However, these qualifications notwithstanding and distilling much recent thinking on the subject, Woodward (2002, p. xii) proposes that: ‘Identity is historically specific; it can be seen as fluid, contingent and changing over time.’ And, as Anthony Giddens (1991) has observed, there is now a much greater emphasis on the obligation of individuals to manage this self that is of their own construction. Furthermore, as most of us generally undertake our own construction in the context of ‘multiple memberships in social collectivities, we tend to develop multiple identities, often organised in hierarchies and “enacted” according to social situations’ (Pakulski and Tranter, 2000, p. 206). Certainly, as the interviews that form the basis of our study often affirm, most migrants are confronted with a range of collective identity markers, including nationality, religion, race, ethnicity, geographic region and citizenship (not to mention class, status and gender). These impose themselves as an inevitable part of the individual’s socialisation experience (both independently and, more often, in varying combinations and permutations) as specific historical, geographic, political and cultural forms to be incorporated, negotiated or rejected by each individual as a component of their personal identity. However, even if we accept that constructivist premises lie at the heart of many forms of contemporary collective identity (in particular 22 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts nationality and ethnicity), this is further complicated by three other important contemporary trends: the continuing and, some would suggest, increasing tension between personal commitment to individualistic goals in opposition to more traditionalist norms that emphasise obligations and loyalties to the collectivity; the widespread experience of geographic mobility that is documented in the increasing growth in the volume of international migration; and the social, cultural and political impacts of globalisation. For many of the respondents in this study, therefore, the socially ascribed circumstances of where and when they were born, the socioeconomic and historical position of their family of birth, when combined with the experience of temporary or permanent migration has often thrown into question a previously assumed primordial attachment to a national and/or ethnic identity. The way they report their experience leads us to consider another strand of recent research that has focused on the phenomena of hybridity and diasporic identity. Both these concepts refer to the capacity of individuals to sustain or combine more than one significant collective identity. Diasporic identities are formed where members of some groups, through a combination of internal and external circumstances, have been able to preserve a sense of difference from the mainstream or majority identity over many generations or even centuries, even while remaining geographically separated from their original homeland and therefore also from the principal sources of their cultural roots. Originally applied to the relatively coherent collective identity maintained by Jews, despite their extensive geographic dispersal from Palestine since the first century AD, the idea of diaspora has more recently been extended to include other minorities of long-standing such as the Chinese communities in South-East Asia since the nineteenth century, the descendants of the Indians brought by the British to their colonies in East Africa and the Caribbean, and the descendants of African slaves in the Americas. More recently Africans have settled in Europe and maintained a diasporic identity. Stuart Hall described diasporic communities as ‘fashioning new kinds of cultural identity by…drawing on more than one culture’. An emergent form of hybridity is often the outcome for people from such communities. They ‘speak more than one language (literally and metaphorically), inhabit more than one identity, have more than one home’ and ‘have learned to “negotiate and translate” between 23 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia cultures’. They ‘represent new kinds of identities’ and relate ‘to culture and place in these more open ways’ (Hall, 1995, pp. 47–8). At the same time, within the officially secularist ideology of the modern nation state, religious identity has been moved from a central collective component inextricably intertwined with the particularities of nationhood, as, for example, in the essentially Christian character of much of Europe since medieval times, to a question of personal faith to be adopted, embraced, discarded or changed on the basis of individual free choice. For some immigrants this introduces the potential of a three-fold level of voluntarism in relation to their former religious identity. Will they continue to affirm and sustain the faith into which they were born and raised (sometimes accompanied by the pragmatic difficulties and disincentives that must be overcome in order to maintain and practice minority forms of worship and belief)? Will they transfer their personal religious allegiance, perhaps embracing a more widely shared and more popular form of religious tradition in their new homeland? Or will they choose to reject any form of religious identity and seek to join the growing number of people in the societies they have entered who espouse a secular, individualist, personal lifestyle and consider it either as a voluntary choice or completely unnecessary to identify with any religious beliefs or to remain connected to a religiously based community? Immigration, Identity and Citizenship Certainly since the latter part of the eighteenth century and in the context of the increasing global significance of the nation state, the particular form of identification associated with the term ‘citizenship’ has added a new dimension to the ways in which individuals may incorporate and express their collective social identities. At its most basic, common citizenship refers to a category of persons granted membership of a particular society. The origins of the modern idea of citizenship can be traced to the quite sophisticated form of social and political organisation established in some of the Greek city states more than 2 500 years ago. From the time of its earliest appearance, the status of a citizen has signified that the individual has the rights to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society such as a city, a state, a kingdom or an empire. However the modern version of citizenship began to be formulated in Europe, where, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authority of hereditary monarchies and their feudal hierarchies were 24 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts increasingly under challenge. With the growing importance of nationalist political movements that often sought to mobilise support around a struggle to create a new political entity based on greater equality, freedom and self-government, a revival of the ancient institution of citizenship was increasingly perceived as having a central role to play. Hereditary and hierarchical forms of status distinction would be replaced by the egalitarian concept of citizenship, a status shared by all members of the nation. Following the French and American revolutions, this new conception of citizenship was the centrepiece of the national constitutions of the newly created republics of France and the United States of America. Although the word ‘citizenship’ is sometimes used interchangeably with the word ‘nationality’, the two have separate and distinct histories and tend to evoke significantly different emphases when discussed in academic and in popular discourse. In particular, more recently ‘citizenship’ is often perceived as primarily a formal and legal status conferred by a state in assigning to individual recipients clearly defined rights and benefits. The reciprocal aspects of the arrangement also imply certain formal obligations and expectations of individual citizens in relation to the social collective that conferred the citizenship. On the other hand, the concept of ‘the nation’ often invokes a sense of primordial attachment associated with ‘a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related’ (Connor, 1991, p. 6) and who therefore form a community ‘bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness’ (Seton-Watson, 1977, p. 1). The extent to which ethnic communality lies at the centre of the populace’s sense of national identity often reflects, as Castles and Davidson (2000, pp. 13–15) suggest, the ideological and juridical emphasis placed on the cultural nation (for example, in Germany) in comparison to the civic nation (for example, in France). Where the idea of a nation being primarily defined by its culture prevails, individuals are assumed to form part of the organic whole and freedom requires ‘acceptance of one’s role in the greater organism’. Where the idea of civic nation prevails, it is assumed that citizens ‘form a community because they constantly express the will to do so’ and that this provides ‘the basis for a republican form of government, which should be capable of assimilating ethnic or religious minorities’. 25 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia As Castles and Davidson note, however, most contemporary nation states mix elements of both cultural nation and civic nation, and often the claim of transcending culture is less than convincing. For example, historically, while vigorously championing the (civic) republican model of the nation ‘the French experience was actually based on linguistic homogenisation, political centralization and compulsory assimilation’ (Castles and Davidson, 2000, p. 14). The conceptual distinction between culture (or ethnic) nation and civic nation is of particular resonance in the contemporary era of large-scale international migration, the challenge to the autonomy of the nation state resulting from the impact of globalisation and the widespread debates taking place in many countries about the desirability and viability of the multicultural nation. However, certainly within most of the emerging nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the meaning assigned to the legal status of citizenship provided the basis for the struggles that eventually resulted in citizens acquiring an expanding set of civic, political and social rights (Marshall, 1950). But increasingly, the privilege of citizenship carried with it the widely shared assumptions that all who are citizens of a nation should also be participants in a common culture and share a strong sense of personal loyalty and commitment to the national community. On the Australian continent, following British settlement and prior to Federation, citizenship, and therefore full membership, of colonial society was legally attained either by birth or through becoming naturalised as a British subject. It is therefore not surprising that strong pressures soon began to emerge that sought to ensure universal adherence to the expectation that all citizens would participate in and identify with a common culture. And, equally unremarkable, the ongoing construction of this common culture was shaped through the derivation and adaptation of institutions, principles, values and mores most closely associated with the society’s dominant founding group. These settlers and their descendants saw themselves (and therefore the nation), for the most part unequivocally, as both British and Protestant. Certainly by the 1880s and in the following decades, public rhetoric in Australia increasingly emphasised the desirability of the assimilation of all residents to this majority culture, and directed such expectations not only towards the relatively small number of nonBritish immigrants but also to indigenous Australians and even, in 26 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts some instances, to Irish Catholic settlers. As a result, at the turn of the twentieth century, the new nation of Australia was publicly declared to be 98% British. This was certainly strongly affirmed in the results of Australia’s first census in 1901, which reported that, of the 3.8 million persons counted, probably around 90% of the non-indigenous population was of predominantly British or Irish descent. Furthermore, as certain ‘racial types’—although present in the Australian colonies—were widely considered to be unassimilable, individuals that were identified as being from such groups were generally discouraged, or more explicitly prohibited by law, from becoming a naturalised British subject. In the context of colonial Australia the groups most comprehensively denied access to naturalisation were, on the one hand, indigenous Australians (Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders) and, on the other, racially distinctive foreigners, in particular Asians and Pacific Islanders. Indeed, the subsequent implementation of the White Australia Policy following Federation was consistent with the premise articulated in 1888 by the colonial politician Sir Henry Parkes that no race should be admitted to Australia ‘whom we are not prepared to advance to all our franchises, to all our privileges as citizens, and to all our social rights including the right of marriage’ (cited in Yarwood and Knowling, 1982, p.187). For several decades following Federation the cultural and legal understanding attached to Australian nationality overwhelmingly reflected this country’s membership of and commitment to the British Empire. In this context it is of particular significance that, as the founding document of Australian nationhood, the Australian Constitution chose to make no mention and provide no definition of the term ‘Australian citizen’. A major, although not the only, rationale for this was that at the turn of the century the concept of ‘British subject’ was uniformly applicable throughout the whole of the British Empire and, consequently, specific citizenship legislation was not considered of great urgency by those who drafted Australia’s new Constitution. So, throughout the document the terms used to describe the category of person who was considered to be a member of the community were ‘British subject’ or ‘subjects of the Queen’. The Naturalisation Act of 1903 did acknowledge that overseasborn residents of Australia who were of predominantly European origin and descent would, after two years residence, be eligible to become British subjects through naturalisation and upon doing so 27 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia would acquire all rights accompanying such status. Equally important, in the context of the normative notions of citizenship, was the introduction of the term ‘alien’ (meaning ‘belonging to another’), which first appeared in the Commonwealth Nationality Act (1920). This term recognised the existence of persons resident in Australia who were clearly ‘not members of the community’. The finely nuanced differentiations—in terms of racial and cultural characteristics—familiar to most Australians and used to distinguish between the various categories of outsider who sought membership of the Australian nation are adroitly summarised in the following paragraph from the work of a prominent Australian historian writing in the 1930s: In Australia, by ‘aliens’ are generally understood persons substantially different in race and culture from the British, and by ‘foreigners’ those who differ only in regard to nationality. Scandinavians, Germans, French, etc., are ‘foreigners’, whereas Indians, Chinese, and other coloured people are ‘aliens’. Southern Europeans, though members of the family of White people, are sometimes designated ‘aliens’. The same inconsistency exists in the relationship between ‘foreigner’ and ‘Britisher’. Legally a foreigner becomes a Britisher through the act of naturalisation; yet, having been born a non-Britisher, in the consciousness of the general public he remains a foreigner. (Lyng, 1935 p. 237) The creation of Australian citizenship We make two things clear, first to the British people, and then to other peoples who might make good Australian citizens. The one is that Australia wants, and will welcome, new healthy citizens who are determined to become good Australians by adoption. (A. A. Calwell, Ministerial Statement on Immigration, 1945) The initial movement towards the establishment of a distinctive Australian citizenship just preceded the major social impact of postSecond World War European immigration. In 1947 a meeting of legal experts from the Commonwealth countries had met to draft a new scheme that would allow each dominion to enact legislation defining its own citizens. Australia’s Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 came into effect on 26 January 1949, and created a distinct status of Australian citizen. However, even then it ensured that, in addition, Australian citizens also remained British subjects. The legislation also spelt out the 28 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts mechanisms through which permanent residents of Australia could apply to become Australian citizens. It specified that most European immigrants would become eligible for naturalisation after five years of residence and also allotted responsibility for regulating the admission of aliens to Australian citizenship to the newly created Department of Immigration. However, officers of the Department of Immigration, similar to most Australians, had little or no conception of what being an Australian citizen, as distinct from being a British subject, actually meant. For most, citizenship was still conceptualised in relation to British culture and ethnicity, not in terms of the rights and responsibilities of citizens of the State. Therefore, ‘the image of Australians enshrined in the original Australian citizenship legislation was that of an Anglo-Celtic people’ (Jordens, 1995, p. 1). Also, for the following two decades the basic tenets of the White Australia Policy remained undisturbed. Thus, resident non-Europeans continued to remain ineligible to apply for naturalisation until 1956, and, even then, the residential qualifying period prior to application for non-Europeans was 15 years, as opposed to five years for others. British and Irish residents required only one year of residency in Australia prior to application. So, until the 1960s—a decade that saw a wider range of citizenship rights extended to indigenous Australians and the first serious cracks in the previously broadly based support for the White Australia Policy—the concept of Australian citizenship continued to be understood in strongly ethnic terms. The long-term implications of these assumptions were undoubtedly quite significant. For, as one recent observer has noted: ‘Australian citizenship for a long time assumed racial homogeneity and was understood only in the weak sense as something akin to patriotism.’ As a corollary, in contrast with the widely held view of citizenship in the United States, the attachment to an ‘active citizenship, conceived as a political settlement guaranteeing certain rights, and spelling out the bargain between citizen and nation, was rare in Australia’ (Walter, 1998). During the 1950s and 1960s, there were a couple of isolated and conspicuously unsuccessful attempts to stimulate public discussion that might result in the formulation of a charter which could provide more detailed content and meaning to Australian citizenship. However, the Department of Immigration preferred to focus its energies on administering the less contentious and more concrete 29 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia bureaucratic regulations governing the conditions of new immigrants’ access to or loss of Australian citizenship (Jordens, 1997, p. 172). This, together with the widespread lack of awareness, understanding and, particularly for many European immigrants, appreciation of the historical and cultural resonances associated with acquiring both the status of Australian citizen and British subject, made the task of promoting the benefits to aliens of applying for citizenship ‘extraordinarily difficult’ (Jordens, 1997, p. 173). By 1960 only about half of the non-citizen permanent residents then eligible to apply had sought and obtained Australian citizenship. In reality, for most immigrants the decision whether or not to take up Australian citizenship (which in many cases also necessitated the relinquishing of their current citizenship) meant weighing up the particular personal costs and benefits associated with such a decision. Some of the more significant reasons for the widespread reluctance among immigrants to embrace Australian citizenship during this period are well summarised by Jordens (1997, p. 174): Many who came to Australia as refugees had long cherished the dream of returning when when things improved in their homeland. Others had contributed to pensions which they would lose on becoming Australian citizens, or wished to retain the option of retiring to a country whose language, institutions and customs were familiar. For many, the costs of relinquishing their former citizenship were obvious, and the benefits of attaining Australian citizenship remained obscure. They did not understand the political system in which they found themselves, and could not comprehend why they were required to take an oath of allegiance to the British monarch before they could become Australian citizens. For many migrants the requirement that they renounce their former allegiance was either a psychological disincentive to acquiring Australian citizenship or completely meaningless, as the laws of many countries did not allow them to relinquish their citizenship. By the early 1970s it was estimated that, on average, post-war immigrants were waiting longer than nine years before applying for citizenship. ‘Greeks, Italians and Yugoslavs were the largest groups granted citizenship with Germans, Dutch and Poles well behind’ (Jordens, 1997, p. 186). Furthermore, while the British were by far the largest single immigrant group, making up more than half the total number of new migrants to Australia throughout the period, they also recorded one of the lowest group rates of taking up Australian 30 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts citizenship. This was despite the fact that until the 1980s, British- and Irish-born residents were merely required to register for Australian citizenship (rather than apply to be naturalised), could gain citizenship after one year of residence and were exempt from having to take the oath or affirmation of allegiance. Certainly until 1973, after which successive Australian governments continued to make numerous and significant changes to the citizenship legislation, special favourable conditions of the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 had applied specifically to the citizens of the United Kingdom and to other Commonwealth countries, and consequently provided the majority of these immigrants with little incentive to become Australian citizens. For example, until 1984 they were permitted to vote in all elections and to occupy permanent positions in the Public Service, two important privileges that were only open to other immigrants subsequent to becoming naturalised Australians. The changes to Australia‘s citizenship law and practice over recent decades reflect a general movement from an Anglo-Celtic-centred, mono-cultural conception of citizenship to one that recognises the multicultural character of the Australian community and, in general, have sought to encourage a broader basis for social and political inclusion.9 One important principle driving many of these changes has been that of progressively eliminating the distinctions that applied between the immigrants from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries and the immigrants from all other countries. Consequently, all immigrants are now subject to the same regulations in relation to residence requirements prior to eligibility for applying for citizenship. Since 1984 the eligibility requirements have been reduced to two years residence with the aim of encouraging more immigrants to apply. While all who take out Australian citizenship are still obliged to swear an oath affirming their allegiance, since 1994 the wording of this pledge of commitment has been changed and now emphasises loyalty to ‘Australia and its people’ and to ‘upholding and obeying its laws’. Thus, while the British monarch still remains Australia’s official Head of State, new citizens are no longer required to swear allegiance to the Crown. In the spirit of the broad initiatives and policies that support the view of Australia as a multicultural society and that have been re-affirmed by all Australian governments since the mid-1970s, the citizenship requirements are now more sensitive to 31 Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia the desire by some immigrants to maintain emotional attachments to other cultures, customs and languages and no longer require prospective citizens to renounce ‘all foreign allegiances’. Alongside these changes, more overtly since the mid-1980s (when it was revealed that there were more than one million eligible immigrants who had chosen not to apply for Australian citizenship) and further stimulated by the bicentennial celebrations of European settlement of Australia in 1988, there has been a concerted and ongoing, bipartisan, government-initiated policy that seeks to encourage all immigrant settlers to take out Australian citizenship as soon as they qualify. The results indicate that the campaign had some initial success with the overall proportion of eligible immigrants in Australia who remained non-citizens declining from 43% to 29% between 1981 and 1994 (Goldlust, 1996, p. 24).10 The drive to encourage resident non-citizens to take up Australian citizenship took place in the context of a revival of a broad public debate—one that had noticeable echoes and stimulated remarkably similar political divisions within the population to the ones that had emerged in the decades preceding Australian Federation—about precisely what should currently constitute an Australian identity. A number of reasons for the re-emergence of this debate at this time were identified in a recent article by Zappalà and Castles (2000, p. 36) and included the impending centenary of Federation, which was seen as an opportunity for reviewing the Constitution and finally enshrining a more contemporaneous conception of citizenship; a political initiative which began to build in the 1980s and moved increasingly to the centre of Australian public life by the early 1990s that proposed that ‘Australia should sever the connection with the British monarchy and become a republic’; greater public concern about the position of indigenous Australians, with particular reference to the extent to which they still remained socially and economically marginalised and without real attainment of substantive citizenship rights; and finally, considerations of the relationship between national identity and citizenship, with particular reference to the sort of desirable content in the area of civic education and civic values that was deemed necessary to create good citizens, and the vexed question of whether a strong national identity precluded a tolerance towards Australians who wished to maintain dual or multiple citizenship. Most significantly, in the light of what follows in subsequent chapters, these debates about questions of national identity were 32 Unravelling Identity: Historical and Theoretical Contexts perhaps at their most publicly prominent during the decade—between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s—in which most of the respondents in our study first arrived to settle in Australia. In an Australia that, in official rhetoric at least, was proudly multicultural, but also enmeshed in arguments about whether it should maintain its British connection or become an independent republic, and in which new immigrants were strongly encouraged to take up the Australian citizenship offered to them at the earliest available opportunity, the respondents tell us in their own words how they feel about the issues of identity and citizenship and how they experienced them in the light of their own unique social history and particular biographical trajectory. As will emerge in the following chapters, in drawing upon interviews with more than 100 recent immigrants in order to unravel the complex tapestry of collective identity, one constantly encounters contradictory strands that derive from each of the two major paradigms discussed above—the primordial and the constructivist. Each paradigm has been extremely influential and very often lies at the heart of the way in which each of us subjectively reflects upon, experiences and articulates our views about the often emotionally tinged and morally charged questions concerning our collective identity (or identities). Perhaps more profoundly, it is most often persons who have experienced the identity-challenging experience of international migration, who also invariably find that they are now constantly expected to balance and juggle competing requests, expectations and demands concerning their relationship to more than one significant manifestation of collective identity. Thus, questions and dilemmas that may remain relatively submerged for individuals who live all of their lives within the same nation state take on a far greater significance following the experience of migration. Often with considerable urgency, new circumstances, new pressures and new experiences push these questions and dilemmas to the forefront of the consciousness of the recent immigrant. For each individual, is there only one ‘real’ and ‘immutable’ collective identity? If it is possible to have more than one identity, are they equal, alternating, hierarchical, nested, hybrid or situational? If my citizenship changes, will my identity also change? How do recent immigrants to Australia deal with these questions? 33 Endnotes Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. Officially called the Committee to Advise on Australia’s Immigration Policies, the findings and recommendations that emerged were widely referred to—following the name of its chairperson—as the Fitzgerald Report. The recommendation in the report that led to the Bureau’s creation was itself a response to the, at times extremely volatile, public debate around the government’s current immigration and multiculturalist policies. The debate included, at its broadest, questions about the relative positive and negative economic, social and cultural impacts of the post-Second World War immigration program on Australian society and how such impacts could be measured (Jupp, 1998; Burnley, 2001). More acutely, the temper of public concern was fuelled further by remarks expressed in the course of a public speech in 1984 by one of Australia’s leading historians, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, to the effect that the overall number of Asian immigrants allowed into Australia since the mid-1970s had been too high and had become unacceptable to general public opinion (Blainey, 1984; Markus and Ricklefs, 1985). See Appendix A for a more extended discussion of methodological rationale, research strategy and related issues. A summary of selected characteristics of the respondents who made up our research sample is presented in tabular format as Appendix B. In May of 1996 the ALP government was defeated in the federal election and replaced by the coalition Liberal/National Party government under the prime ministership of John Howard. Before the end of the same year the new government had decided to close down the BIMPR. As the principal researchers on this project the two authors sought and received permission to access the data collected for the purposes of further analysis and possible future publication. Both authors proceeded to other tasks and responsibilities and, at least until very recently, were only able to return to the project sporadically and for brief periods. This book is the sixth (and final) major publication based on research projects stimulated and sponsored by the BIMPR that has emerged subsequent to the Bureau’s closure. The other five publications were: Immigration and Schooling in the 1990s by Desmond Cahill (1996); Many Religions, All Australian edited by Gary Bouma (1996); Sporting Immigrants by Philip Mosely, Richard Cashman, John O’Hara and Hilary Weatherburn (1997); Pluricentric Languages in an Immigrant Context: Spanish, Arabic and Chinese by Michael Clyne and Sandra Kipp (1999); and The Australian People edited by James Jupp (2001). Chapter 1 1. Deakin’s words in an article in the London Morning Post, 12th November, 1901, cited by Lack and Templeton, 1988, p. 13. Alfred Deakin, prime minister of Australia for three terms during the first decade after Federation, Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 216 forcefully came out in favour of ‘a White Australia in which the absolute mastering and dominating element shall be British’ (see James Jupp, 2002, p. 11) when campaigning for a seat in Australia’s first national parliament in 1901. In the 1947 Australian census, in a population of 7.75 million persons, more than 90% were born in Australia, and most of these were of British or Irish background. Of the 744 200 persons not born in Australia, 80% were born in the UK, Ireland or New Zealand. Therefore, overall, probably around 97% of Australia’s population was of British or Irish ancestry. The largest ‘other’ groups were those who were born in Italy (33 632), in Germany (14 567) and in Greece (12 291). Jupp, 1998, p. 109. Lack and Templeton, 1995, p. 13. Jupp, 2002, p. 23, citing Lack and Templeton, 1995. These clues seemed to work in a manner similar to the oft-cited example of a judge asked to rule on a case involving pornography. Finding himself unable to establish consistent criteria as to what constituted pornography, the judge was still sure that he would know pornography when he saw it. Two of the seminal works on this theme in sociology and anthropology respectively are Edward Shils (1957), ‘Primordial, personal, sacred, and civil ties’, British Journal of Sociology, 7, pp. 13–45 and Clifford Geertz (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures, Fontana, London. See Weber, M., 1997 (1922), ‘What is an ethnic group’ in Economy and Society, reproduced in M. Guibernau and J. Rex (eds), The Ethnicity Reader, Polity, Cambridge, United Kingdom, pp. 15–26. For example, for persons applying for Australian citizenship, basic knowledge of English is not tested formally but is interpreted as the ability ‘to speak and understand sufficient to be able to work, obtain necessities of life and to demonstrate an understanding of responsibilities of citizenship’. To place these figures in some broader cross-national context, comparisons from the mid-1980s suggest that, compared to other notable ‘high immigration’ countries, the overseas-born residents of Australia have been taking up citizenship at a slightly lower rate than those in Canada, but a higher rate than those in the USA or Sweden (Brubaker, 1989, p. 119). In Australia, census data and survey sample research studies have consistently reported that some overseas-born groups take up citizenship at faster rates than others. In general, the fastest and highest rates of taking up Australian citizenship have been among refugee groups (including those who arrived earlier from Eastern Europe and more recently from Indo-China and the Middle East), and by immigrants from Mediterranean countries and from economically less developed countries (Third World immigrants). Overall, immigrants from English-speaking countries (in particular those from the United Kingdom and the USA) remain less likely to take up Australian citizenship, and settlers from some other Commonwealth countries tend to be slower in their take-up of Australian citizenship than the average. After 20 years of residence more than three-quarters of immigrants from the majority of birthplace groups have chosen to become Australian citizens (Goldlust, 1995, p. 29). Since 1949, well over three million immigrants have chosen to become Australian citizens. However, according to the 2001 Australian census, there were more than 900 000 eligible permanent Endnotes residents who had chosen not to apply. It also should be noted that residency rather than citizenship status is the basis for eligibility to many of the entitlements available and for determining the obligations to be met in dayto-day life in Australia (for example, social security and taxation). All legally resident persons (this includes non-citizens with the status of permanent resident, temporary resident and visitor) are entitled to most civil, political and social rights. Australian citizenship is necessary for some areas of public employment and political participation (voting in an election and being eligible for election to public office). It is also a condition for joining the armed forces and for eligibility for jury service. Chapter 2 1. Throughout the following chapters, wherever interviewee transcript material is used, the respondent cited is identified by a standard set of personal characteristics. These include first name (pseudonym), country of origin, age in years at the time of the interview and age in years at the time of arrival in Australia. Of the 128 interviewees, 63% had been in Australia for 10 years or less, 22% for 11 to 20 years, and 15% for more than 20 years. As at the time of interview, 96 respondents had taken out Australian citizenship while 32 respondents had not. For a complete summary and overview of the major personal characteristics of all respondents in the study, see Appendix B. Chapter 3 1. 2. 3. 4. Throughout each interview the respondent had numerous opportunities to reflect on his or her relationship to a broad range of potential ‘group identity’ markers. Thus, for example, early in the interview participants were asked: ‘In terms of your “identity”, when you were an adolescent (in your teens) how would you have described yourself?’ Later they were asked about their attitudes and feelings to their former national and/or ethnic identity after immigration to Australia and how their sense of identity might best be expressed now. A final section of the interview focused on Australian citizenship and also provided ample opportunity to reflect upon issues of identity. It is important to note, at the outset, that one of the principal findings of this study was that variables such as country of origin, age at immigration, sex, educational level and years in Australia did not appear to have any consistent relationship with the respondents expressed views on issues of identity and citizenship. Thus, the examples have been chosen to best illustrate the range and variety of responses on these issues. Ellipsis points consist of three full stops (…) and are used to show the omission of a word or words from quoted material. They can also be used to show indecision and incompleteness in dialogue, such as when a respondent pauses in his or her responses or trails off. If a section is omitted from the interview, the ellipsis points are placed on a line of their own. In these interviews, the ellipsis points are also used if the responses on the cassette tapes are inaudible. Recent reference sources indeed report an extensive diversity within the small Mauritian population of 1.2 million, differentiated in terms of the following social characteristics: (a) ethnic groups: Indo-Mauritian (68%), Creole (27%), SinoMauritian (3%), and Franco-Mauritian (2%); 217 References Alba, R. D., 1990, Ethnic Identity: the Transformation of White America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Anderson, B., 1983, Imagined Communities, New York/London: Verso. 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