How language and race mediate migrant inclusion

Editor’s note: Despite its diversity, Australia continues to be imagined as a White nation. In this post, which is also available as a 20-minute video, Donna Butorac explains how this idealized image of the White nation shapes the settlement trajectories of women migrants from Asia and Europe in different ways.

Teaching in Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)

I did research on language learning and identity among people who were studying in the Australian Adult Migrant English Program (we call it the AMEP for short), where I taught for 9 years. This is a federally funded and administered settlement English program that provides subsidised language classes for new migrants who have Beginner to Intermediate levels of English proficiency on arrival. The program is delivered by organisations that successfully bid for fixed-term contracts through a competitive tendering process, and historically it has most often been delivered by state-based post-secondary colleges of further education. However, during the time I was working at the AMEP we saw a successful move into the space by profit-seeking private sector organisations.

At the AMEP I often taught classes that were mostly made up of women and I developed a curiosity about what it was like to be them – to be sitting in that class, learning English in this context. I wondered how it made them feel about themselves and how it impacted their relationships and their sense of the future, of who they were and who they felt they could be in the world. This led me to design a study that was about language learning, identity and gendered subjectivity in the context of migration. I wanted to find out how developing a voice in English might impact a woman’s sense of self, her aspirations and also her key family relationships. I also wanted to understand how the way she was being constructed in Australian society might impact her aspirational sense of self and to compare this with her socialisation in her primary languages and country of origin.

English teaching in the AMEP for the labour market

The AMEP has been around in Australia since the late 1940s but it has evolved quite a bit over that time. Successive governments, whether they are conservative or centre-left, have always tied inward migration to economic development goals but in the time that I was working at the AMEP in the early 2000s, we saw this connection being more overtly expressed within the framing of the contract terms and in the design of the language courses we delivered. It was also expressed by politicians in their media statements and in their presentations to AMEP teachers and researchers. For example, one government spokesperson told us that new arrivals who had come from difficult circumstances were “very marketable in the workplace” because of their “willingness to do jobs that many Australians reject” (Andrew Robb, 2006) and another federal minister described the role of immigration as a “job-matching agency for the nation”, because “as Australians take up the skilled work opportunities available, shortages of labour in the service and regionally based industries will become more and more acute” (Chris Evans, 2008).

So, the government was increasingly seeing the AMEP as leading new migrants from “the airport to the workplace” (as another politician put it in 2007) and this put pressure on the settlement English programs to adopt this outcome as a goal for English language development. Remember that they have to bid every few years for a new contract, so they closely examine government messaging for clues as to how best to frame their programs in the next contract round so they can beat out the competition.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread 🧵

2nd: Lena from Russia
Lena realized her white privilege from observing casual racism and selective incivility towards Asian people at her new tennis club in Australia.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 8, 2023

An example of how this translated into program change while I was conducting my study of new migrant women was that some of the curriculum and assessment content was reframed to focus on gaining skills needed for applying for a job, doing a job interview or communicating in the workplace, and there was a strong emphasis placed on helping migrants decide on their future study and employment goals. Each student had to meet with a vocational guidance officer when they arrived and set up a learning plan. This plan was updated by teachers and vocational guidance officers over the course of their time at the AMEP and the students all met with the vocational guidance officer again when they were exiting the program.

Learning a language, when it’s framed like this, becomes a commodity to attain in order to achieve economic settlement goals rather than a way of seeking knowledge and personal growth and a sense of belonging through developing a voice in a new language and culture.

And the way that the migrant language learner is positioned in this kind of context is as someone who is deficient in English, rather than as someone who is an emergent bilingual or multilingual.

But there is no place in all of this where the deficiencies of the society or of the labour market are ever problematised or discussed.

So, for example, racism in the Australian labour market, which has been well attested in the research literature, is never discussed and new migrants are not given strategies for how to counter this. What is also not discussed is that Australia still has a persistent monolingual mindset, in spite of there being hundreds of languages spoken in the community. In this kind of context, people may be judged only for their proficiency in English, rather than for their combined language capital. But in the settlement English program, language learners are led to believe that if they develop English proficiency, they will be able to achieve their social and economic settlement goals. When they struggle to realise these goals even after they have achieved a good level of functional English, and this was the case for some of the women in my project, they may naturally assume that the failing is theirs, and that their English is not good enough, when it might actually be a failing of a prejudiced English monolingual labour market or an unwillingness of employers to adequately acknowledge the skills and qualifications that the person brings with them.

Doing a sociolinguistic ethnography in the AMEP

To realise my research goals, I carried out an ethnographic study of 9 women who had recently migrated from a range of countries and who were studying in an Intermediate level class in the AMEP. I wanted to research with them over an extended period during the early phase of their post-migration settlement because I wanted to find out if the development of their voice in English actually made changes in the way they saw themselves and their aspirations. There had been other interview studies done on language learning and identity following migration, but these had more often been a retrospective reflection on the process. I wanted to try to capture this as it was being experienced.

I used qualitative methods of inquiry and data collection and this included two semi-structured personal interviews with each woman at the beginning and end of a 22-month data collection period, and I held a series of focus groups in the first year of the project; I also gave them an essay task at the beginning and end of the data collection period, in which I asked them to write about their aspirations for the future. In the final interview, I gave each woman the same broad prompts I had given them in the first interview because I was curious to know if their ideas had changed over the intervening period, perhaps as a result of changes in their sense of self from learning and using English. I also asked them to keep an email journal of their experience of learning and using English and how they felt about their lives. Because they were emergent users of English, I had thought that they might find it easier to write in English than to speak it; however, I was proven very wrong because for the most part they didn’t really engage with the journal task but seemed happy to talk to me and to each other! So, I ended up covering this topic in a third personal interview that I set up in the middle of the data collection period.

What emerged from the first stage analysis of the raw data was that the impact of language learning on identity could be usefully organised into three domains where the self is both constructed and performed – the self in key family relationships, the self in wider social interactions, and the self in work. I analysed each of these domains to identify sub-themes related to language, race and gender that emerged from across the data set. I was exploring identity and language learning, but this was also a way in to understanding what it’s like to be someone who has undertaken transnational migration involving language change and who is trying to find inclusion and belonging in a new society.

Migrant trajectories to social inclusion

Michiko from Japan cultivated a unique English language learning and practice strategy: she set up stalls at flea markets. In addition to interaction opportunities, she also gained insights into everyday life in Australia, including casual racism …
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 22, 2023

Social inclusion is a term that has been in use since the 1990s to convey ideas about the goal of creating pathways for economically marginalised people to achieve greater participation in society through employment. It is also used to refer to the inclusion of people from diverse cultures and languages within the mainstream in multiethnic societies. We might think of people who have migrated to a new society as being on trajectories of belonging and inclusion, where they might be on the social edges when they arrive, especially when the dominant language is not one they use well, but eventually the idea is that they will gain acceptance and inclusion and a sense of belonging within the mainstream of that society, in part through developing better competence in a dominant language.

What studies like mine have found is that this trajectory towards social inclusion is not always straightforward or complete for many migrants, often due to things a person may have little control over, like the way their race or their gender is viewed, or the way their language proficiency is judged, as a result of ideologies and prejudices within the receiving society.

Experiences of everyday racism shape pathways to inclusion

In my study I didn’t actually set out to explore race and prejudice but to explore the way a woman’s sense of self was being impacted by language learning in this cultural context; however, as I listened to the experiences of the women who participated in the study, both in interview and in conversation with each other, I realised that race was something I needed to discuss because it was a determiner of differences in the experiences and imaginings of inclusion and belonging that the women were reporting. For example, the women from European countries all expressed the realisation that they were just like everyone else because it seemed to them that most people in Australia came from families that had at some point in their history migrated from somewhere else.

These women felt despondent in the early settlement period about their English proficiency and how hard it was to communicate with others, but they could easily imagine becoming a part of the mainstream as their English improved. This kind of trajectory is normalised in the history of European migration to Australia and in the lives of the people they interacted with. So, the European women communicated a sense of optimism about their trajectories of inclusion and belonging in Australia. In contrast, the Asian women in the study did not express this kind of optimism about their settlement trajectories and they talked about the everyday racism that they and people they knew experienced, as well as what it was like trying to gain meaningful employment.

In the focus group discussions, some of the Asian women expressed the feeling that they might never achieve settlement success and might end up leaving Australia to have a better career. This really surprised the European women, who would say things like “But your English is really good; I don’t understand why you feel so hopeless about your future”.

Actually, one of the Asian women did end up going offshore, soon after the project ended, because she was offered a job with a global company that valued both of her languages, instead of just her English. In Australia, where only her English proficiency was being judged, she had constantly been rebuffed in the labour market and told that she needed to brush up on her English, which was functionally very good and certainly adequate to the jobs she was applying for. But offshore, she was being judged for her entire language capital, which included Japanese and English, and she was seen as a ‘fantastic bilingual’ as she described it.

When a migrant’s full language capital is being considered, as was the case with another Asian woman in the study, the employment outcome was quite different. This woman had migrated from China and she had a similar English proficiency to the woman I have just described, but when she began exploring professional employment opportunities she was immediately successful because the first company that interviewed her for a legal role was trying to build their client list in China and so they saw her as a bilingual, bi-cultural asset to the team instead of someone who was deficient in English. Actually, in the entire hiring process they never once commented on or asked about her English proficiency.

Tina from China already had two law degrees and experience as a corporate lawyer when she arrived in Australia, but she could only get work as a paralegal because her degrees were not recognized.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 20, 2023

Another finding from the study related to how new migrants might feel socially excluded by the language practices of locals. Some of the women in my study reported that in social situations with locals, for example at Church or with fellow students in post-secondary courses, locals in the group would speak in rapid colloquial English, using lots of idiomatic expressions, or they would speak to everyone else but never make eye contact with the women or speak to them. This practice made the women feel invisible, and it’s a fairly overt micro-aggression that excludes newcomers. Actually, this kind of experience was only reported by the Asian women in my study. But it seemed some of the European women were listening because towards the end of the project one of them told me in her final interview that she remembered what the Asian women had said about being made to feel invisible by locals and although she had never experienced this herself, she witnessed it with some Asian members of her tennis club that she played social games with. She had reflected on all this and she expressed a sense of her white privilege when she said to me “it’s nice to be beautiful white woman”.

Aside from these findings on race, there were really interesting findings on negotiating language use in key family relationships, and on how some women felt that they could express a different, more confident self in English than they could in their primary language.

Language learning and finding work

There are a number of conclusions related to language and race that come out of my study. For example, the way language proficiency is framed in the labour market impacts how successful new migrants are in achieving settlement goals through meaningful employment. As I’ve suggested, the Australian labour market is predominantly English monolingual, and this usually means that a migrant’s full language capital is not often considered when they are looking for work. However, in the few instances when their full language capital is being considered, this has the potential to greatly improve the settlement trajectory of new migrants and also to allow the economy to benefit from better utilising the qualifications and skills that migrants bring. It’s ironic really, because skilled migration is desired for Australia’s continued economic development and it makes up the largest proportion of the country’s annual migration intake, yet many people who come under that scheme struggle to find meaningful work in the fields they are qualified for, in part because of the way that ideologies about language and attitudes to race impact hiring practices.

One of the implications of these findings is that they can be used to develop the way that English language learning is framed within the settlement English program. In my experience, language learning was framed as the development of a kind of ideology-free, bounded lexico-grammatical system, and learners were encouraged to believe that developing proficiency in English was the key to social and economic inclusion.

Studies like mine have shown that this is not necessarily the case and their findings suggest that instead of framing learners as deficient speakers of English, we should be seeing them as emergent bi- or multilinguals, and we should be problematising interactions they have in the wider society and using an evidence-based approach to better inform language learners in the settlement English program about what to expect when they are looking for employment, and then we should be advising them on strategies for managing their entry into these important spaces of belonging and inclusion. Without this kind of approach, many new migrants end up blaming themselves for their lack of settlement success and the society as a whole denies itself the valuable contributions that could be made by its newest members.

Life in a New Language

Maria, a Chinese Brazilian, came to Australia via Japan. A savvy business woman and devout Christian, she told us she needed "many faces" to successfully navigate interactions, and foreground or background her multiple identities according to context
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 13, 2023

Many of the findings of my study are included in a forthcoming co-authored book from Oxford University Press called Life in a New Language. It’s a collaboration that sees data from six existing ethnographic studies of language learning and migration in Australia combined into a single large data set with over 100 participants. Sociolinguistic ethnography usually involves small data sets and rich data, but it is often considered to lack generalizability and rarely makes an impact outside specialist circles because it is widely dismissed as “anecdotal.” This book project marries depth with scale by combining and re-analysing data sets from these existing small-scale longitudinal ethnographic studies with the objective of making convincing conclusions about language learning and social inclusion, based on the premise that a larger qualitative data set increases the scope for generalisability. It represents something of an innovation in linguistic ethnography, as an after-the-fact multisite ethnographic study.

Life in a New Language will be published in June – watch this space for updates!

References

Butorac, D. (2011). Imagined Identity, Remembered Self: Settlement Language Learning and the Negotiation of Gendered Subjectivity (PhD). Macquarie University, Sydney. Retrieved from https://www.languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DButorac_PhD.pdf
Butorac, D. (2014). ‘Like the fish not in water’: How language and race mediate the social and economic inclusion of women migrants to Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 234-248.
Piller, I., Bodis, A., Butorac, D., Cho, J., Cramer, R., Farrell, E., . . . Quick, B. (2023). Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building’. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8c0d9316-2281-4594-9c7b-079652683f54&subId=735264
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Tetteh, V. W. (2023). Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://www.languageonthemove.com/scholarly-sisterhood-collaboration-is-our-academic-superpower/
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (in press, 2024). Life in a new language. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.