Education, real estate, immigration : brokerage assemblages and Asian mobilities

Mobilities of people and capital from Asia to Australia now encompass policies and practices that link immigration, citizenship, international education and real estate investment in complex and entangled ways. These mobilities are mediated by 'brokerage assemblages' that cut across state, non-state, human and non-human actors and processes. This article's primary contribution is to establish how assemblage thinking can be productive for understanding how such complex and interconnected mobilities are mediated. It then illustrates the potential of this approach with a preliminary empirical analysis of a selection of online content that forms part of the brokerage assemblages that link, facilitate and create education, immigration and real estate mobilities from Asia to Australia, primarily from China. We focus on online materials that circulate through three key platforms: (1) a major online investor portal based in Hong Kong and Shanghai that targets transnational investors and brokers (2) a smaller Australian-based property portal utilised by Australian real estate brokers and (3) one mainstream and one industry specific Australian media outlet. We use assemblage thinking to show how forms of information are coded and recoded across different platforms not only to represent, but also to constitute, the links between education, real estate and migration mobilities.