In 1848, the year of European revolutions, roughly one million people left Europe for the New World. By 1900, the annual flow had grown to well over a million per year from Europe alone. In the 1980s, as telecommunications shrank the world and air travel became affordable, human movement reached scales that the mid-nineteenth century could barely have imagined. Somewhere between 250 and 300 million people — roughly the population of the United States — now live outside the country of their birth.
Migration has built cities, emptied villages, transformed economies, created diasporas, triggered racist panics, and produced some of the most significant social experiments of the modern era. It has also been met with some of the modern world's most systematic attempts at restriction — including Australia's White Australia Policy, which for nearly seventy years tried to make a continent that sat on the doorstep of the world's most populous region as white and as British as possible.
This package asks: how did Australia move from that closed, racially restrictive policy to a multicultural society that, by 1990, had accepted hundreds of thousands of Asian migrants and had made multiculturalism an official national value? And what does that transformation tell us about the nature of race, policy, and national identity in the modern world?
This first article builds the conceptual foundation. It introduces the key vocabulary of migration studies, surveys the main waves of modern migration, and situates the Australian case within a global context. The three articles that follow examine, in turn, the White Australia Policy, the Vietnamese refugee experience, and the creation of official multiculturalism.
The vocabulary of migration
Before examining the Australian case, we need a precise vocabulary. The terms used in migration debates — "migrant," "refugee," "immigrant," "asylum seeker" — are not neutral. Each carries legal definitions, political connotations, and moral implications. Historians and policy analysts use them carefully; political actors often do not.
A migrant is, broadly, someone who moves from one place to another. Within this broad category, crucial distinctions apply. Voluntary migrants move by choice — for work, education, or to join family. Forced migrants move because they have no safe alternative. A refugee is a legally defined category under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention: a person fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. An asylum seeker is someone who has applied for this status and is awaiting determination. These legal distinctions matter enormously for the people concerned — they determine what rights, protections, and opportunities are available.
Push and pull factors
Migration scholars use the concepts of push factors and pull factors to understand why people move. Push factors are conditions in the country of origin that drive emigration; pull factors are conditions in the destination country that attract immigration. Both operate simultaneously, and neither alone is sufficient: millions of people experience terrible push factors (war, poverty, persecution) without being able to act on the pull of safer destinations, because they lack the resources, connections, or legal status to migrate.
Great waves of modern migration
Modern migration history can be organised around several great waves, each shaped by particular combinations of push and pull factors and by the particular barriers — or open doors — that receiving states maintained.
The first great wave (1840s–1914) was the mass emigration from Europe to the Americas, Australasia, and Southern Africa — roughly 60 million people in 70 years. Irish famine survivors, Italian sharecroppers, Russian Jews fleeing pogroms, Scandinavian farmers — all were pulled by land, opportunity, and political freedom in the New World. This wave also included the massive, coerced movement of people within imperial systems: Indian indentured labourers to Fiji, the Caribbean, and Natal; Chinese workers to California, the Australian goldfields, and the Transvaal.
The interwar contraction (1914–1945) saw migration sharply restricted as nation-states raised barriers. The United States introduced racial quotas in 1924 that effectively closed its doors to Southern and Eastern Europeans and Asians. Australia tightened the White Australia Policy. This period also produced the first mass movements of refugees — Armenians fleeing genocide, Russian émigrés fleeing revolution, European Jews fleeing Nazism — who faced closed borders almost everywhere.
The post-war era (1945–1975) was characterised by two major patterns: the massive labour migration from Southern Europe and the developing world to the industrial economies of Northern Europe, North America, and Australia; and the creation of the global refugee system through the 1951 Refugee Convention. Australia's post-war immigration programme brought two million migrants by 1960, initially overwhelmingly British and European, but progressively admitting Southern and Eastern Europeans as the labour shortage deepened.
The contemporary era (1975–present) is characterised by the globalisation of migration flows — from South to North, from East to West — and by the simultaneous hardening of immigration restrictions in wealthy receiving states. It is in this period that Asian migration to Australia — the subject of Articles D2–D4 — becomes the central story.
The Australian case in global context
Australia's experience of migration is, in several respects, extreme. No comparable country has experienced such a complete transformation of its immigration policy in such a short time. In 1966, Australia still maintained formal racial restrictions on immigration. By 1990, it had accepted hundreds of thousands of Asian migrants, including over 130,000 Vietnamese refugees, and had institutionalised multiculturalism as official national policy. This is one of the most dramatic reversals of immigration policy in modern history — and understanding it requires understanding the specific Australian context: the colonial legacy of the White Australia Policy, the humanitarian crisis of the Indochina refugees, and the political decisions of a handful of key figures.
How historians approach migration history
Migration history is a relatively recent sub-discipline, though its roots go back to nineteenth-century demographers and social scientists. It has been shaped by two major methodological debates: the debate between structural and agency-centred approaches, and the debate between national and transnational frameworks.
A conceptual source: the 1951 UN Refugee Convention
The 1951 Refugee Convention is the foundational legal document of the modern refugee system. It defined a refugee as someone who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside their country of nationality and is unable or unwilling to return to it. It established the principle of non-refoulement — the prohibition on returning a refugee to a country where they face persecution.
Australia signed the Convention in 1954, but its implementation — and the question of whether Australia was actually meeting its obligations — became central to the debates over Vietnamese refugees from 1975 onwards.
Why do states restrict migration?
The historical record suggests that immigration restriction is neither natural nor inevitable — it is a policy choice, shaped by specific interests, fears, and assumptions. Understanding why states restrict immigration, and why they sometimes reverse those restrictions, is essential to the Australian story.
Australia's transformation as a historical lesson
The transformation of Australian immigration policy between 1966 and 1990 is remarkable not only as a chapter in Australian history but as a case study in the conditions under which entrenched discriminatory policies can be reversed. Several factors made this transformation possible, and each has potential applications to contemporary policy questions:
Economic interest overrode ideology. Australia needed skilled migrants that its traditional British and European sources could not supply in sufficient numbers. Economic pragmatism — the need for labour — gradually eroded the ideological commitment to racial exclusion, even among politicians who had personally held those beliefs.
Diplomatic pressure mattered. Australia's relationships with Asian Commonwealth partners — India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore — were damaged by the White Australia Policy. The push for decolonisation after 1945 created a new international norm that made racial discrimination diplomatically costly. Australia's post-war desire for a larger role in Asia was incompatible with a policy that declared Asia's people unwelcome.
A humanitarian crisis forced a decision. The fall of Saigon in 1975 created a refugee crisis that could not be managed through gradual policy evolution — it demanded an immediate, public commitment. Malcolm Fraser's decision to accept Vietnamese refugees (which you will examine in detail in D3) was a catalytic event that transformed rhetoric into reality.
Political leadership was decisive. The transformation required specific individuals who were willing to use their political capital to change policy against significant public resistance: Harold Holt, Gough Whitlam, Al Grassby, Malcolm Fraser, and the architects of the Galbally Report. None of these figures acted alone, but each made choices that could have gone differently.