Abstract

Australia’s immigration policy has always been an economic concern, whether in restricting Chinese merchants and labourers in the early 1900s, populating post-WWII Australia for large scale industrialisation, or facilitating Asian business migration in the 1980s and ‘90s. Up to the mid-1980s, however, immigration policy did not systematically require nor mobilise ethnicity as a productive resource, nor was ethnicity important to national consumption. This paper reflects on Australia’s entry into the global market-based economy through its combined immigration and multicultural policies. With the trend towards business and skilled migration programs an emergent feature of a number of industrialised economies at this time, the ‘quality’ of diversity assumed a significance hitherto irrelevant to economics of migration. By linking diversity with individual productivity, the paper problematises multicultural policymaking within neoliberal market economics.