Introduction

During the 1980s and 1990s, Australia’s migration intake turned rapidly towards recruiting business professionals, managers and entrepreneurs to support that country’s entry into the global economy. A policy framework labelled Productive Diversity was invented within Government as a way of conceptualising the belief that migrants would bring business acumen and a global outlook to help Australia compete as a trading nation. This introductory chapter suggests that there is an opportunity to reconsider Productive Diversity as a value proposition when migration is understood for the increasing numbers of occupations that might be categorised as something other than ‘labour’. Productive Diversity is poorly studied in the history of Australian migration. As this chapter explains, so too are the theories and understandings of class, productivity and value, where migrants are viewed either as commodities or as bearers of cultural capital regardless of their role in economic production and accumulation.