Understanding Where Immigrants Live Hugo, Graeme, Understanding Where authors who write on this topic in Australia. His Immigrants Live Bureau of Immigration, style in this publication fits well into the Bure a u ' s Multicultural and Population Research, objective for its Understanding series, which is Canberra, Australian Government Publishing designed to provide authoritative, balanced Service, 1995. coverage at a level suitable for schools and non- specialists readers. I have great pleasure in by Graeme Hugo welcoming the publication to the Bureau's list. Department of Geography, University of John Nieuwenhuysen, Director, Bureau of Adelaide Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research Foreword The Author The location decisions of immigrants arriving in Australia have recently been the subject of great Graeme Hugo is Professor of Geography at the public attention. In particular, the reasons why University of Adelaide. He obtained his PhD. so many of today's settlers choose Sydney, and from the Australian National University (ANU) the consequences for its urban infrastructure, in 1975 and is widely regarded as one of the have aroused interest and controversy. foremost demographers in Australia and the Southeast Asian region. He has held visiting In Understanding Where Immigrants Live, one of positions at the University of Iowa, University Australia's leading demographers, Professor of Hawaii, Hassanuddin University (Indonesia) Graeme Hugo, provides an excellent, clear and the ANU, and is the author of over a overview of many features of this subject. hundred books, chapters in books and articles in Professor Hugo divides the work into three scholarly journals. Much of his early work dealt main parts: the geographical distribution of with population issues in Southeast Asia, but in immigrants, the causes of their geographical recent years he has worked extensively on concentration in Australia, and its implications. Australian population issues and problems. Representative of this work is his book, Each of these three parts of Professor Hugo's Australia's Changing Population (1986), and the study makes fascinating reading, spelling out the recent series of demographic atlases geographical issues in the settlement of people commissioned by the Bureau of Immigration, who have come to Australia under its long- Multicultural and Population Research. established immigration program. Glossary of Terms The work is not merely intrinsically interesting, however. It also carries many messages for The census is a count of the total population, policy-makers, including some pertaining to but it also measures a range of characteristics possible incentives to immigrants to settle in such as age, sex, employment status, family defined cities or regions. characteristics, housing tenure, etc. In Australia, a national census is undertaken by the Professor Graeme Hugo is an outstanding guide Australian Bureau of Statistics every five years. through this field. His knowledge of the issues must be almost unparalleled in the group of Chain migration is a form of group migration Making Multicultural Australia Understanding Where Immigrants Live 1 which occurs through the linkages of family and support of a wide range of people from diverse kin networks. A typical case would be where an origins and with varied cultures within a single initial immigrant, once established in the new society. country, brings out other members of his or her family or facilitates their migration in some way. Net migration is the difference between in- migration and out-migration. For example, if Counterurbanisation describes a change in 5000 people moved into an area during a period population movement which occurred in many of time, and 1000 people moved out of that developed countries during the 1970s and area during the same period of time, then the 1980s. Whereas, prior to this time, the net net migration gain for that area during the population movement tended to be from rural period would have been 4000 people. areas to large urban centres, a change in this pattern was observed, indicating that the growth Non-English-speaking background (NESB) is a rates of smaller non-metropolitan centres had term used to describe someone whose first begun to exceed the growth rates of major language is not English, or whose cultural urban areas. background is derived from a non-English- speaking region or country. An entrepreneur is a person who undertakes a business or enterprise. Entrepreneurship refers The Points Assessment Test is used by the to the characteristics of business and Australian Government to assess applicants management skills, as well as the ability to within some immigration categories. The test initiate new projects and enterprises. assesses a number of factors, such as skill levels, occupational type and language ability. Ethnic group refers to a group of people who, because of shared culture, customs, place of An urban area is defined by the Australian birth and/or language, can be identified as a Bureau of Statistics as a centre with more than distinctive community.Within Australia, the 1000 inhabitants. The level of urbanisation in a term is usually applied to identifiable immigrant country is the proportion of the population who groups. live in urban areas. In Australia, the level of urbanisation in 1991 was 85.1 per cent, Gentrification refers to the renewal of older indicating that this proportion of Australians inner suburbs within cities, usually by lived in urban areas, while the remaining 14.9 professional middle-class people. per cent lived in rural areas. Geographical concentration, in relation to Section 1 – population, refers to the clustering of people in Introduction one particular location. Post-Second World War immigration has Marginalisation, as used in this report, refers to changed Australia from a relatively culturally a process whereby a group of people is partly or uniform country to one of the more diverse of totally excluded from sharing in the full range of nations. This period of immigration has benefits and opportunities which the wider represented a total break with the past because community enjoys. of its large scale, and the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from non-English-Irish The terms multicultural and multiculturalism backgrounds. Between 1947 and 1991, the are used in this report to refer to the diversity of national population increased from 7.6 million ethnic groups in Australia, particularly within to 16.9 million and the 5.2 million new settlers the major cities. Multiculturalism can also be arriving in Australia over that period accounted used in the context of government policy, in directly or indirectly (via their childbearing) for which case it refers to the accommodation and around half of that growth. Making Multicultural Australia Understanding Where Immigrants Live 2 However, the impact of post-Second World War national population living in urban areas in immigration has not been distributed uniformly 1991. The population is highly concentrated in throughout Australia's economy and society. the eastern, southeastern and southwestern This has been reflected by the fact that many coastal zones, which comprise only 3.3 per cent overseas-born groups have different locational of the national land area but account for 80 per patterns from that of the Australia-born cent of the total population. The nation's two population. Indeed, the pattern of post-war largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, have immigrants settling in particular areas has retained a fairly stable share of the national significantly influenced the distribution of population over the post-war years - around 39 Australia's population, the rate of population per cent between them. The settlement patterns change and changes in the structure and size of of post-war immigrants have tended to reinforce the labour force in various regions of the the dominance of the major cities in the country (Jarvie 1984, 1989). national settlement system. The geographical distribution of birthplace Distribution between States and Territories groups in Australia is of particular interest because patterns of settlement are related to a ...The largest numbers of immigrants live in the whole range of social and economic elements capital cities, with very few being located which affect the well-being of those groups, elsewhere in the nation. Immigrants are especially their means of earning a living and therefore more concentrated in their locational their social contacts within and outside the patterns than are the Australia-born population. group (Price 1963, p. 140). The tendency for particular birthplace groups to concentrate in ...Western Australia has the greatest particular locations inevitably raises the question concentration of immigrants in relation to its of whether such ethnic concentrations reflect total population, with 29.5 per cent of residents the existence of social, economic or political being born overseas compared with 22.8 per divisions or problems. Indeed, this issue is one cent in the nation as a whole. The other part of of some debate in Australia. the nation in which there is a higher than expected proportion of immigrants is the Section 2 – southeastern quadrant of the mainland Geographical distribution comprising NSW,Victoria and the ACT. of immigrants The population of NSW and Victoria has been The aim of this booklet is to review our present growing at below the national average, but these knowledge of the geographical distribution