Gender, Age, and Ethnicity in Immigration for an Australian Nation

Since the Second World War, large-scale immigration has been promoted by successive Australian governments as vital to national development. Most accounts of the content and implementation of the resulting immigration policies, particularly until the demise of the White Australia policy in 1972, have emphasised their racism. The ideal immigrant under these policies, however, was not merely of particular birthplace and ethnicity, but also had specified gender and age characteristics. The author proposes that selection of immigrant settlers in Australia since World War 2 has been gendered as well as racialised, often combining particular sexisms with particular racisms and specifying the ways that ethnicity and gender should coexist in immigrants of different age groups. She notes implications for immigrants once in Australia (especially women) of the category under which they have entered the country. And she suggests that a new phase relating immigration to redefinition of the Australian nation, in which the temporary migration of skilled workers is preferred to their permanent migration, may be beginning; a phase whose modes of regulation and outcomes are as distinctively gendered as were those of their predecessors.