The migrant narrative is an oft-told tale of struggle, dedication and triumph. People from developing countries move to the West with nothing, and through grit, determination and hard work, fulfil their Australian/American dream, usually with the aim of building wealth and giving their children a better life. In Australia, however, a detailed look at migration pathways since the 1980s reveals an emphatic trend towards skilled migration visas, which clearly leads to the modern-day reality of ever-tightening immigration regulations, inhumane refugee policy and over-inflated visa application fees.
More and more, cherry-picked migrants from upper class communities dominate Australia’s migration demographics to fit the restrictive and exclusive occupations chosen for the Skilled Occupation List by the Department of Home Affairs. And yet migrant narratives continue to exclude understandings of the way in which class privilege plays a role in their relationship to Australian life. An attitude of “If we can, why can’t they?” often prevails, jumping straight to their own stories of ‘hard work’ and success without acknowledging that their class privilege has insulated them in ways that hasn’t been possible for other communities, such as First Nations peoples and refugees.
Victim-blaming the poor runs deep into the core of our nation, where, supposedly, every Australian gets ‘a fair go’ and we are what we make of ourselves. This ignores how capitalism traps people into cycles of poverty by creating structural barriers to education, health and employment.
All societal institutions are mediated through wealth, and the starkest material impact of racism and how racial prejudice becomes a systemic issue is through the concentration of wealth in a racial hierarchy. From the dispossession of Indigenous land to the practice of kidnapping and slavery called ‘Blackbirding’ that built the sugar cane industry, the hoarding of capital by colonialists and development of racist economic systems has been fundamental to Australia’s nation building. The White Australia policy similarly gave privileges to European, particularly British, migrants in the wake of anti-Chinese sentiment and riots. Racism in Australia therefore has a long history of being underpinned by capitalism, and buying into capitalist ideology only bolsters White Supremacy.
The ‘migrant narrative’ therefore has a distinctly capitalist function, perpetuating the idea that poor and working class people are “lazy”, and middle class migrants are hard-working achievers who have managed to “overcome” their obstacles, when in fact it is structural barriers that often lock working class communities into cycles of poverty. As the skilled migration visa grants climbed to almost 130,000 in 2015-16, which is almost double the amount of family visa grants, Australian immigration policy has ensured that people migrating to Australia in the last 30 years are more likely to be upper-middle in their country of origin.
From financing $7000 visa applications to purchasing plane tickets, the capital required to make the initial move to a Western country can be exorbitant. Those with family members already in Western countries, a privilege overwhelmingly benefitting the middle and upper classes, will find the process easier, as already settled migrants can send back money and legal advice, as well as a home on arrival. With more and more background checks and pre-requisites, as well the labyrinth of legal hurdles, most people from low socio-economic backgrounds do not have the opportunity at all, to move to a country like Australia. The 2014-2015 Migration Programme Statistics again show that 68% of all migrants from the period were skilled migrants, a trend crafted by Australian government policy.
This illustrates how skilled migrants, who already have access to tertiary education and capital, ride the coattails of economic privilege to settling in Australia. Then, young first and second-generation migrants grow up with capitalist migrant narratives and aspirations to becoming part of Australia’s ruling class, which only serves to turn them against undocumented immigrants, refugees and Indigenous communities, and into supporters of assimilation, neoliberalism and consequently the White Supremacy on which the Australian state is based.
Migrants need to challenge the ideology upon which “humble origins” and “hard work ethics” are based on, and recognise that capitalist systems that value profit above all will never be a solution to racism or poverty. Upper-middle class relationships that are commonplace in developing countries, such as having maids, servants and chauffeurs, need to be recognised for the stark inequality and exploitation it represents. We must confront our complicity in the occupation of Indigenous land and how this informs our existence in Australia. We can no longer ignore the unacceptable labour practices within our communities in Australia, including wage theft, against newer migrants without access to education and legal support.
These kinds of exploitative economic relationships contribute to the promotion of respectability politics and ruling class aspirationalism. The rhetoric becomes a push to differentiate ourselves from more stigmatised people of colour, to promote that we are not “criminals”, that we are educated and have jobs in finance, IT, law and medicine and that we are not like refugees, or “illegals”, Indigenous people or communities who still struggle with poverty and crime.
As writer and feminist academic bell hooks wrote in Where We Stand: Class Matters:
While all our rage at racism is justifiable, it undermines anti-racist struggle and the call for social justice when well-off black folks attempt to create a social context where they will be exempt from racist assault even as the underprivileged remain daily victimised.
As migrants and people of colour, we should not want equal representation amongst the rich; we should be striving for an end to wealth inequality altogether. Buying into an economic system that prioritises profit over people and actively concentrates poverty within racially marginalised groups is not liberation. Migrants need to change their definition of success from class mobility and keeping our heads down to solidarity and standing with other groups who are oppressed. Pursuing the migrant narrative of working hard to achieve the highest possible class status is not anti-racist: it only gives White Supremacy more power over us.
Working class migrants and racially marginalised communities living in poverty need solidarity, not complicity in a hierarchy of inequality created by White Supremacy. Class aspirationalism reinforces the pyramid structure of oppression, in which different groups are concerned only with retaining their position in the hierarchy. By glorifying initial poverty and rise to success stories, people of colour hold on to their oppression while never acknowledging how class ascension and individualism perpetuates capitalist systems that restrict access to wealth and prosperity for other racial minorities.
Our only way forward is active re-imaginings among us all for an end to class, and a commitment to organising with and for all people suffering from poverty. Our collective empathy and capacity to end material oppression must lie with class struggle.
In the words of Kwame Ture:
If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.
Cover image via DevPolicy
About the author
Bridget Harilaou is a mixed-race Asian-Australian with a single-minded passion for intersectional social justice and trouble-making (aka activism). She writes extensively about politics and race, and has been published in Junkee, HuffPost Blog and Honi Soit. As a radical anarcho-feminist things can get heavy; Bridget likes to unwind by enjoying the finer things in life, like spicy ethnic food and male tears.