Negotiating migration, labour market integration, identities and belongings: skilled Vietnamese migrants in Australia

This thesis aims to bring to the fore the diversity and complexity of the lived experience of the under-researched group of recent Vietnamese skilled migrants in Australia using qualitative research methods. The thesis focuses on the complex interacting influences of structural and subjective factors shaping migrant experiences in four research areas: migration motivations and decision-making, labour market integration, identity and belonging. It is informed by 25 semi-structured interviews with individual skilled migrants and 02 family group interviews each with 02 participants who are husband and wife, tracking pre-, post-, and during- migration experiences of total 29 skilled Vietnamese workers and spouses, spanning 15-20 years. The thick data capture processual changes in migration, economic and socio-cultural integration, identity reconstruction and belonging through time and space, which are essential for understanding the complexities and dynamics of migrant agency in mediating and negotiating the structural constraints and opportunities. The thesis draws on and contributes distinctively to broader academic debates on appropriate theoretical understandings in migration studies from Asia. It responds to the ongoing dominant economic frameworks with original insights into understanding migration from Asia to advanced industrial countries as integral to local, national, and global processes in which migrants are agentic mediators. The findings on migration motivations shed light on a nuanced picture of migrants’ mixed hopes and expectations, addressing emotions, temporality, and social and economic dimensions. The findings on possible pathways of migrant labour market incorporation demonstrate heterogeneous and hierarchical migrant labour markets rather than the extremes of highly skilled and unskilled markets. The migrant labour market is structured on the intersection of ethnicity, gender, skills, age and migrant status. Migrant legal and social status-making through immigration policy flux, restrictions and migrant labour stereotyping is a critical element in the intersectionality. It also elucidates how migrants reflect upon the intersecting structural challenges and draw on social, human, material, and cultural identity capitals to project their heterogeneous migration and market access trajectories. Finally, labour market integration experiences, new migrant identities, and belonging experiences unveil a multi-cultural Australian society with western assumptions embedded below the surface. This research offers a rich socio-cultural context for conceptualising migration, market integration, ethnic identity, and the belonging of Asian migrants as shaped by the complex interaction between subjectivities and broader social, cultural, and economic processes happening at local and (trans)national scales. Of which migrants are active agents operating within a system of constraints. Overall, it argues for an expanded socio-cultural perspective as a valuable way to expand understanding of migration as integral to broader local, national, and global processes in which migrants are agentic mediators. An expanded socio-cultural view, therefore, effectively helps mediate the extreme agency-structure binary in migration studies.