Thesis abstract:

A new vein of global marxist migration theory seeks to contextualise the politics of migration within a global system of imperialism, settler-colonisation, and capitalism. Theorists proffer a variety of explanations for the driving forces of migration: precarisation and cheap labour, the production of a racialised labour heirarchy, the production of a global reserve army of labour, settler-colonial domination, the demise of Westphalian states. This opens an exciting set of research questions about the historical interaction and logical ordering of these factors, and the local sufficiency and necessity of these factors in describing migration in particular contexts or regions. It drives my research question: what explains Australian migration policy?

Australian migration history challenges some of the usual suppositions about migration and provides a challenging testing ground for these perspectives. Australian migrants have, perplexingly, a higher average wage than 'domestic' workers. Far more than a drive to "cheap labour", it was the ruling class will to rule the Pacific that necessitated building a White Australia, the central tenet to Australia's migration policy for over a century. And today's amalgam of world-leading anti-refugee policies and the mass incorporation of immigrants through temporary and permanent migration, produces ideological contradictions of its own.

My research aims to provide an answer to the question of what drives Australian migration policy through four themes and four key periods. I argue that in increasing order of abstraction immigration policy acts to: produce and regulate a domestic labour market, produce racism and capitalist nationalism, facilitates geo-strategic demography, and enact the segregation of a global labour market. To do so, I argue that today's migration regime came about as a stumbling result of Australia's nascent ruling class in response to international and domestic pressures through four key periods: systematic colonisation, White Australia, political reconstruction, and economic rationalism. Australia's working class was produced and calibrated by immigration policy, and these decisions were key to the national integration of Australia's ruling class. The story of immigration is class formation on 'both sides'.

Migration policy reinforces and allows not only the efficient operation of national capitalism, but also the nationalist and imperialist wars of position. But precisely because of its role in reinforcing Australian capitalism, the inevitable contradictions of immigration policy provide potential for workers resistance, as well as workers cooptation.