This project explores the settlement patterns of MC-born migrants in Australian cities against a background of broader trends in migration. The profile of MC-born migrants has changed to mirror global shifts towards highly-skilled labour, education-related, and investment-focused migration, all of which reflect a changing trend of migrants’ characteristics towards wealthy and/or educated cohorts. Applying the theory of spatial segmented assimilation, this project aims to develop an Australia-focussed conceptual framework to examine MC-born migrants across four dimensions (socioeconomic, spatial, ecological, and network) of assimilation at the community level allied with extending empirical studies to an individual level. Taking the MC-born migrants as the research population, this thesis sets up four goals by drawing on Australian census data from 2001 to 2011 in eight capital cities, along with primary data collected from an online survey in 2017 to: 1) unveil the latest characteristics of MC-born migrants and the spatial association of their economic characteristics; 2) examine the spatial patterns of MC-born migrants’ settlement in Australian capital cities and the association between socioeconomic characteristics and spatial patterns of concentrations; 3) understand the residential segregation of MC-born migrant and the association between socioeconomic/ecological characteristics and the level of segregation; 4) visualise the residential mobility of MC-born migrants to investigate the key drivers underpinning residential mobility.
It is part of Dr Siqin Wang's PhD project and it produced 6 papers: Wang, S., Sigler, T., Corcoran, J., & Liu, Y. (2019). Modelling the spatial dynamics of Mainland China-born migrants in Australia. Australian Geographer, 50(2), 201-219.
Wang, S., Liu, Y., Sigler, T., & Corcoran, J. (2019). 3D space–time visualization of individual settlement pathways of Mainland China-born migrants in Queensland, Australia. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51(2), 275-278.
Wang, S., Sigler, T., Liu, Y., & Corcoran, J. (2018). Shifting dynamics of Chinese settlement in Australia: an urban geographic perspective. Geographical Research, 56(4), 447-464.
Wang, S., Corcoran, J., Liu, Y., & Sigler, T. (2018). Understanding ‘segmented assimilation’in Australian cities: Modelling the residential choices of mainland China-, Hong Kong-and Taiwan-born migrants. Applied geography, 99, 140-153.
Wang, S., Corcoran, J., Liu, Y., & Sigler, T. (2018). Visualising the internal migration of the mainland China-born population between Australian capital cities over time. Australian Population Studies, 2(1), 56-58.
The Settlement Pathways and Residential Mobility of International Migrants in Destination Cities: A Segmented Assimilation Perspective, submitted to Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies