With its main sources of immigration shifted to skilled-based migrants since mid-1990s, Australia has seen increasing numbers of educated Asian immigrants. In particular, international migration from China to Australia is historically a significant and rapidly growing flow, forming the largest non-European-origin population since the 2006 Australian Census. Their successful integration became a pressing and important challenge to Australia. Difficulties in accessing pre-2001 census data and the multidimensional nature of integration, however, has hindered in-depth and over-time research on Chinese integration in Australia. This thesis draws on 1981 to 2016 Australian Censuses and employs spatial integration as a useful summary indicator of immigrant integration to examine the changing characteristics of the China-born population in Australia. Research progress on analysing spatial distributions and subsequent internal migration patterns of mainland Chinese immigrants will be reported during the seminar. Emphasis will be on age profile and duration-of-stay profile in the China-born immigrants’ spatial dynamics. Findings suggest that immigrants generally became more integrated and less mobile with increasing duration of stay in Australia, particularly within the first ten years after their arrival. Analysis quantifying the duration-of-stay effect will also be presented.

Qing Guan is a PhD candidate in the School of Demography. Her research focuses on migration theory and modelling, particularly in international migration modelling and integration of immigrants. Her thesis employs a range of spatial analysis, multistate modelling, and decomposition techniques to investigate the spatial integration of Chinese immigrants in Australia and how that relates to immigrants’ duration of stay in the receiving country.