ABSTRACT
This chapter brings the discussion of Productive Diversity together with a detailed analysis of Australia’s Business Migration Programs (BMP). It explores a convergence of Productive Diversity and business migration, manifest in a desire by various national actors to mobilise ethnic know-how as a form of global entrepreneurialism. The chapter focuses its analysis on the politics of Australia’s BMP under successive Labor governments from 1983 to 1996 to show how ideas of ethnoculture were either implicit or explicit in the policy and programme. The aim is to provide a detailed account of how migration of this special category of non-productive and market expanding occupations was recruited to build links with the regional and global production system described in the earlier chapters on globalisation. For a period in the mid-1980s, business and professional skilled migration to Australia (and in competition with Canada and New Zealand) underwent almost a doubling in growth year-on-year.
