Humanitarian Migrant Settlement in Non-Metropolitan Australia: New Destinations and Factors Fostering Retention

Cho Yat Wong, The University of Queensland
Aude Bernard, University of Queensland
Tomasz Zajac, Institute for Social Science Research, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Queensland
Francisco Perales, University of Queensland

Despite growing efforts by the Australian government to settle humanitarian migrants in non-metropolitan areas, we know little about the impact of such policies on the emergence of new settlement destinations and regions’ ability to retain humanitarian migrants in the long term. To address these gaps, drawing on the chain migration theory and network migration theory this study investigates changes in the geographical distribution of humanitarian migrants who arrived in Australia between 2006 and 2020 and establishes the level and determinants of retention in non-metropolitan areas, paying particular attention to variations by origin country and co-ethnic networks size. We apply survival analysis to novel longitudinal administrative microdata from the Personal Linkage Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA) and track humanitarian migrants’ internal migration patterns. The findings suggest that policy efficacy to promote non-metropolitan settlement is limited. Despite the emergence of new non-metropolitan destinations, there has been no significant increase in non-metropolitan settlement, although humanitarian migrants are more likely to be retained in areas with larger co-ethnic networks with a lower share of far-right votes, a proxy for migrant welcomeness. As governments continue to promote the non-metropolitan settlement of humanitarian migrants, our findings have implications to boost humanitarian migrants’ retention.

Keywords: Migrant Populations and Refugees, Internal Migration and Urbanization, Longitudinal studies , Linked data sets

See extended abstract.