Migrant, interrupted: The temporalities of ‘staggered’ migration from Asia to Australia

Abstract

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.