Dev Nadkarni: Attacks fuelled by bad policy rather than racism

Recently, after two vicious attacks on Indian nationals living in Melbourne - one resulting in death - India issued a travel advisory for students intending to study in Australia.

Never before has such an advisory been issued by an Indian Government targeting a developed country, particularly for students.

These latest incidents follow a string of violent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney over the past year that have threatened diplomatic relations between Australia and India and sent Australian politicians scurrying to pacify the Indian Government, assuring better policing and new measures to protect students.

The higher education sector is Australia's third-largest foreign exchange earner and 90,000 Indian students make up a high proportion of its foreign student population.

Since the attacks began, there has been a 40 per cent drop in enrolments from India that has cost the sector some A$70 million ($87.84 million), and it is expected to worsen this year. The sector is right in fearing that the negative publicity could well affect enrolments from other countries, particularly in Asia.

Although the attacks on Indian students seems disproportionately high, there has been little analysis in the media in either country on why the problem has persisted. And why it refuses to go away despite measures taken by both the federal Government and the Governments of Victoria and New South Wales, besides educational institutions themselves.

The Indian media have overcompensated for the lack of in-depth reporting in the Australian media by concentrating primarily on individual incidents, highlighting them repeatedly in news bulletins and relying for any comment almost exclusively on the Indian student community in Australia and its leaders.

The frayed tempers and frustration that underlie such quick-cut comments on TV screens and in print and online media after a violent incident have veered public opinion heavily towards racism as being the central - often sole - motivation for the attacks.

The understandable reluctance of the Victoria police to ascribe racial motives to the attacks whipped up a frenzy in the Indian media. A prominent New Delhi newspaper published a cartoon featuring the police in a Ku Klux Klan outfit - a move that outraged the police and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

While race could be a factor in some attacks, it is unlikely that it is so in all cases. There are several pointers to other causes.

Migration has been on the increase internationally in the past two decades with more people and families leaving their countries to live, work and study in other nations. The sheer increase in the volume of global remittances over this period is testimony to this.

Increased migration has inevitably seen a rise in crime directed at immigrants across the world - from immigrant farm labourers in the European Union to students in Australia.

In recent years, pro-migration policies in Australia have resulted in a steady inflow of immigrants in the skilled migrants category. That, coupled with a preoccupation with boosting the education sector, has seen the Government open the floodgates to international students, offering them up to 20 hours of work a week while they study and a very real hope of permanent residency.

By some estimates, the Indian student population has grown 400 per cent in five years with the bulk of students enrolling in vocational courses, many of them run by institutions that could well be facades for getting people legally into the country.

The 20-hour work permit is a godsend for these students, especially those from poor backgrounds who are prepared to work long, odd hours for a lower wage - often in cash to avoid paying taxes.

There is clearly no dearth of employers willing to use their services at such low rates - it's a classic case of market gleefully meeting demand, as long as both parties break the law and are bound by a mutually beneficial pact of silence.

Low wages, odd working hours, poor choice of residential locations, a lack of knowledge of local social mores and an over-arching drive to earn more any which way all form a dangerous cocktail of circumstances that works against this type of student immigrant and catapults him into the dominant statistic that stares Australia in the face today.

This scenario seems likely from the far fewer attacks reported on Indian students at universities - or for that matter other Indian nationals who have lived in the country for decades - who do not need to work at odd hours to earn an additional wage.

The ubiquity of Indian students at casual jobs, such as at gas stations, and anecdotal evidence from witnesses to bashings of Indian students by drunken youths on public transport, as seen from footage in the Indian media, lend credence to the local resentment factor. Attackers have been known to accuse the victims of "stealing" their jobs and "working on the cheap".

Far from racism, flawed immigration and work permit policy may be responsible for what has unfolded in Australia.

There have been suggestions that New Zealand could use the negative publicity to its advantage by projecting itself as a safe destination for higher education. But given Australia's experience, the Government would do well to look beyond the immediate dollar gain.

* Dev Nadkarni is an Auckland-based journalist and editor of community newspaper Indian Weekender (www.indianweekender.co.nz)