Racialized citizenship : challenging the Australian imaginary

Citizenship is a powerful construct that is legally framed as denoting inclusion within a nation-state by birth or conferral, or as a force for exclusion that denies both granting of citizenship and the provision of rights afforded to others. We draw on the theorizing of Isin and Nielsen (2008, p. 12) to conceptualize citizenship ‘as mediated between lived experiences and formal entitlements in order to map out, confine, extend, name and enact the boundaries of belonging to a polity’. We highlight disparities for those designated by the state as temporary to reveal what these boundaries and borders entail in practice. From a legal perspective, holding Australian citizenship bestows specific rights such as the right to vote and the right to hold and Australian passport, but formal citizenship excludes those outside this legal provision who still have strong connections to the nation (Mares 2016). The aspiration to belong is differentially experienced by the three groups of our inquiry. For asylum seekers, depending on the politics of the time, citizenship is elusive. For international students there is an expectation that they will return to their homeland, even thought the reality is that many seek to stay on and acquire permanent status. Pacific Islanders who make a major contribution to the Australian economy are excluded, even thought they are not generally portrayed as a threat to the nation in the way asylum seekers are perceived and punished. The precarious situation of temporary workers discussed in our chapter, while exacerbated and amplified by COVID-19, a point we lightly touch o, are a result of longstanding inequalities in how temporary worker schemes in various categories have been designed and implemented.