A Leap into the Future: The Australia-Japan Working Holiday Agreement and Immigration Policy
The Australia-Japan Working Holiday Agreement of 1980 represented a leap of faith on the part of both governments in their own people. Unprecedented for Japan, and breaking with Anglophone cultural stereotypes for Australia, neither government could have objectively predicted the enormous success of the agreement, or that it would become a model for many more such agreements. Both governments counted on recognition developing of the cultural benefits of the agreement. Neither could have foreseen that the agreement would eventually have significant labour market effects, mainly positive, though different, in Australia and Japan.
A National Construction of Transnational Mobility in the ‘Overseas Working Holiday Phenomenon’ in Korea
This study examines the ‘overseas working holiday phenomenon’ in Korea, drawing on a content analysis of policy and media discourses and qualitative interviews with Korean working holidaymakers in Canada. The study reveals a significant disjuncture between popular representations of transnational mobility and the participants' actual experiences of it. The process of repackaging youth as a potentially ‘global generation’ in the recent discourse of the working holiday phenomenon in Korea implies that transnational mobility can be a discursive construct that may conceal the immobility of a particular group of people, such as youth. The study argues that transnational mobility should be reconsidered as a symbolic and lived process in which national issues are negotiated and contested.
Post‐national citizenship, social exclusion and migrants rights: Mexican seasonal workers in Canada
In the past few decades, migrants residing in many European and North American countries have benefited from nation‐states' extension of legal rights to non‐citizens. This development has prompted many scholars to reflect on the shift from a state‐based to a more individual‐based universal conception of rights and to suggest that national citizenship has been replaced by post‐national citizenship. However, in practice migrants are often deprived of some rights. The article suggests that the ability to claim rights denied to some groups of people depends on their knowledge of the legal framework, communications skills, and support from others. Some groups of migrants are deprived of the knowledge, skills, and support required to negotiate their rights effectively because of their social exclusion from local communities of citizens. The article draws attention to the contradiction in two citizenship principles—one linked to legal rights prescribed by international conventions and inscribed through international agreements and national laws and policies, and the other to membership in a community. Commitment to the second set of principles may negate any achievements made with respect to the first. The article uses Mexican migrants working in Canada as an illustration, arguing that even though certain legal rights have been granted to them, until recently they had been unable to claim them because they were denied social membership in local and national communities. Recent initiatives among local residents and union and human rights activists to include Mexican workers in their communities of citizens in Leamington, Ontario, Canada, are likely to enhance the Mexican workers' ability to claim their rights.