This article provides an analysis of 'being temporary' in the context of two forms of migration that are of increasing significance to Australia: temporary graduate workers (TGWs) and working holiday makers (WHMs). Recent policy changes to these visa categories allow for extended periods of work and residence in Australia, primarily among young people who are seeking an overseas work/life experience or a pathway to more permanent migration. The article brings the various temporal dimensions of these migration processes to the fore, asking how time functions as both a disciplinary practice of the state and as part of the life and labour experiences of migrants. In doing so, it problematises the idea of temporariness as both a normative constraint and a qualitative experience in a national context in which paradigms of permanent settlement and full citizenship continue to dominate discursive constructions of migration. It creates a framework for understanding the key temporal aspects of TGW and WHM migration processes: temporal eligibility and migrant subjectivities; temporal constraints and differential inclusion; and the contingent boundaries around temporariness, extended temporariness and permanence. This has salience for continued understandings of emerging forms of temporary migration in wider contexts.

Since the late 1990s, the intersection of education and migration policies in Australia has shifted international students from transient consumers to potential citizens. This article analyses responses to the 'problem' of international students as consumers, workers, and migrants, particularly the conceptualization of their rights and protections, and the ways students have been positioned as both passive subjects and activist citizens. The article provides a theoretical review of academic, government, community, and media responses to international students in general and the consequences of the education-migration nexus in particular. It argues that discourses of human rights and consumer rights have become increasingly interconnected in these debates. This analysis adds to the emerging literature on changing conceptions of rights and citizenship in neoliberal contexts, and also illuminates the social and political consequences of the education-migration nexus in Australia. This will have resonance for countries who have implemented a raft of similar policies.

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Like many OECD countries, Australia has, over the last 15 years, experimented with ‘the education–migration nexus’: policy frameworks that create pathways for international students to become skilled migrants. This article draws on student-migrant narratives to highlight some key aspects of migrant experience within the education–migration nexus, most notably extended periods of temporary status and the frequent need to adapt life and education goals around migration policy changes. The analysis finds that the uncertainty and precariousness inherent in the student-to-migrant process create significant tensions in the daily lives of most student-migrants, both as individuals and as members of transnational families with long-term collective migration strategies. Yet, uncertainty also resulted in some strategic responses to mitigate risk and attempts to transform waiting times into opportunities. We also argue that student-migrants represent a ‘middling’ experience of migration. Although they have access to various resources as educated and skilled migrants, they are far from experiencing a true form of elite and mobile ‘flexible citizenship’.

The mobilities of increasing numbers of ‘middling’ migrants from Asia to Australia involve complex trajectories that encompass multiple transitions across statuses and places as well as ambiguities around temporariness and permanence. This article argues that during these ‘staggered’ migrations, intersections between multiple ‘timescales’ – institutional, biographic and everyday – produce specific experiences of time for migrants that interrupt teleological imaginaries of both life transitions and migration outcomes. Drawing on data from in-depth narrative interviews with middling migrants, this article focuses on two such temporal experiences, ‘contingent temporality’ and ‘indentured temporality’, and seeks to demonstrate how these experiences are produced through the overlaps and intersections of institutional, biographical and everyday timescales. The article seeks to advance empirical understandings of the temporalities of new forms of migrant mobility between Asia and Australia, as well as to contribute new conceptual approaches to scholarship on migration and time.

Since 1998, policy changes to Australia's skilled migration program have favoured international students as potential skilled migrants. This has included legislation allowing holders of an Australian tertiary qualifi cation to apply for permanent residency (PR) onshore within 6 months of completing their study. This process, dubbed 'student switching' (McLaughlan and Salt, 2002) has created a distinct migration process through which increasing numbers of international students use their study in Australia as a pathway to residency. In this paper, I will address how individuals experience the bureaucratic processes of application for PR, in that the granting or denying of visas involves the interface between government and individual. I will explore how individuals' interactions with the power of the state as gatekeeper impact on their experiences as transnational subjects, and their social positioning within the new society. Copyright

Contemporary processes of international migration are often heterogeneous, circular and varied in terms of stages and durations, with the boundaries between permanent and temporary mobility becoming increasingly porous and contingent. These processes are driven by systems of governance that privilege 'just-in-time' immigration and gradations of partial and temporary membership over full citizenship. In light of this tension, there is emerging theoretical and empirical interest in the temporalities of international migration. Yet, methodologies that continue to work under assumptions of migration as temporally linear and spatially unidirectional movements from home to host country fail to capture much of the complexity of these processes. This paper addresses some of the implications of this complexity, focussing in particular on the temporalities of migration in the context of ethnographic research methods. It argues that traditional ethnographic approaches, such as interviews and participant observation, are limited in their ability to capture the dynamic temporalities of international migration. Using a conceptual framework of 'time tracks' (temporal paths of social behaviour) and 'timescales' (scales of social and political temporal ordering), the paper then discusses some of the core methodological issues around the temporal dimensions of contemporary migration. It also suggests some alternative ethnographic research practices which could engage more fully with these temporal dimensions.

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