Immobility–mobility nexus: the opportunities and challenges of the Australian COVID-19 visa for temporary migrant workers

Migration studies have discussed the regime of (im)mobility and the impacts of COVID-19 on temporary migrants' life chances.Fewer studies, however, have examined the potential opportunities, challenges, and consequences based on timescales and spatialities in unusual times, such as COVID-19.This paper focuses on the Australian government's COVID-19 temporary activity visa (subclass 408)-a contingent visa that allowed temporary migrants whose visas were expiring, and who were unable to depart Australia, to stay and work in Australia until they could return to their home country.Drawing on interviews with 22 temporary migrant workers from China and Taiwan who shifted to this visa for an extended stay, I show how the extended stay in Australia during the lockdowns could be reconfigured into desirable social mobility, yet the extended temporariness and spatial containment also led temporary migrants to be 'stuck' in certain jobs and hindered their accumulation of needed capital for the next stage.As a contingent policy response, the migration regime revealed the intent of filling workforce needs without considering policy impacts on migrants' lives in the longer term.This paper proposes a concept of 'immobility-mobility nexus' , to illustrate the unique temporariness and spatial experiences associated with the COVID-19 visa.