Pacific Islands Guestworkers in Australia

Download or read book Pacific Islands Guestworkers in Australia written by Kirstie Petrou and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to examine the contemporary seasonal migration of Pacific islanders to Australia through the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP). It reflects on this new age of guestwork from a broad social, economic, political and cultural perspective in both source countries and destinations. In so doing, it offers a critical perspective on different phases of managed labour migration from nineteenth century practices of ‘blackbirding’ to the present day. This book examines why and how guestworker policies and programmes have developed, and the impact this has had in Australia and for the people, villages and islands of the sending states. It particularly focuses on Vanuatu, the main source of labour, and draws upon studies based in Australia, Vanuatu and other Pacific Island countries. The book therefore traces new patterns of migration, with intriguing economic and social consequences, that are restructuring parts of rural and regional Australia in response to labour demands from agriculture and evolving regional geopolitics.