Policies of Backlash: Recent Shifts in Australian Migration Policy

The article analyzes the development of Australian migration policy in the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, particularly highlighting the shift to a predominantly economic rationale of immigration regulation under the conservative Howard governments. These changes in the migration program encompass the preference of skilled migration over family reunion, the facilitation of temporary migration as well as the introduction of particularly restrictive regulations in the field of asylum policy. It is argued that especially the restrictive regulations of unauthorized migration cannot sufficiently be explained by referring to the redistributive and regulatory character of the policy implications. In order to explain the particularly restrictive response to unauthorized migration in Australia, one also has to relate public debate and policy changes to a fundamental transformation of national identity. The former racial understanding of the Australian nation as a “white nation”, an understanding that was officially abandoned with the end of the White Australia Policy in the 1960s, is underlying populist notions that are particularly widely spread among the rural population and lower middle classes of the metropolitan centres.