Indian Students who are also Migrants

This book deals with Indian students in Australia. With ‘Indian students’ I mean Indian overseas students: students who have left India for Australia in order to continue their higher education there. As I will show in this book, many of these students are also migrants. They have chosen Australia as a study-abroad destination because Australia has very clear-cut rules when it comes to applying for a permanent residency (PR) after graduation. At the time I was doing fieldwork for this book (2005–6), there was little awareness about this connection. Within the education industry (as Australia refers to the business of making money by selling education to international students), it was clear that those involved were well aware of the connection between education and migration; your average Australian on the street, however, was hardly aware of this. Some people seemed to have their ‘suspicions’ as they had observed the Indian population grow quite rapidly in recent years, but generally Indian students were considered welcome additions to the local economy. Australia was proud of its education industry which they often referred to as one of their largest (services) export industries. Indian students, for that matter, were considered an outcome of the growth of the ‘industry’ and thus more than welcome. Indian students also experienced this themselves, though they were already highly critical of the education they received in Australia and the often difficult situation under which they had to make ends meet: having a part-time job, paying for rent and groceries, making sure they did not fail their exams and so on.