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Wednesday, 2 May 2012

In 1996 Petra Buergelt was an unsettled immigrant from Germany, living in New Zealand and wanting to go home.

She did not return home to Germany to live but now, 16 years later, Dr Buergelt has used her personal experiences to gain rare in-depth insights into the migration process, and turned them into an MA, a PhD, extensive publications and a research speciality that resulted in an invitation to address a meeting of 17 Western nations in Geneva recently, as they discussed migration issues.

She found that over the past 50 years, about 40 per cent of German people who migrated to New Zealand or Australia either went back to Germany or left to go somewhere else. Other immigrant groups experienced similarly high returning/ leaving rates.

"A lot of first world countries compete for migrants and invest considerable resources to attract and retain them, but still many migrants leave," she said.

The horticulturalist-turned psychologist who is a researcher in the School of Psychology, was keen to know why migrants from Western countries migrate across the world and what psychological and social processes influenced their migration, to find out what facilitated successful migration.

"To find out, I had to be - like migrants - bold and daring," Dr Buergelt said.

"I developed a unique research design for the study. It was a qualitative longitudinal study in which I accompanied, over two years, people who wanted to migrate.

"I went back to Germany and I lived with each of the participants in their homes for up to a week. I participated in their lives, observed them and interviewed them multiple times, and they started writing diaries for me when I left them.

"I visited those who migrated to New Zealand or Australia about six months after they arrived and again lived with them for up to a week. I did the same after about 12 months.

"Interestingly nearly half of the participants didn't migrate within the two year study period despite wanting to do so. To really get insights into why they didn't migrate, I flew back to Germany and lived with them again for up to a week and observed and interviewed them."

Dr Buergelt said this research design allowed her to enter private spaces usually reserved for insiders and access experiences, interpretations and actions that would normally be kept private and personal.

"Accordingly, the unusual depth of participant engagement allowed me to gather unusually personal, deep and rich data. Over two years accompanying 17 German migrants throughout their journey, I collected 130 interview hours, 112 days of participant observation field notes and nearly 1,000 diary pages."

She developed an innovative way of writing-up and representing data that provided an engaging and accessible yet rigorous and systematic account of the vast and unusually personal data collected. A composite migrant narrative in the first voice and a summary of variations in the third voice represented the development of the migration idea and what happened during emigrating and immigrating.

"I complemented the text with elaborate graphical representations as well as a poem that depicts the essence of the findings. Overall, the research produced findings that are meaningful and accessible for participants and the wider migrant communities, migration scholars from different disciplines and migration policy makers and service providers alike," she said.

"It is a commonly-held dream in Germany to migrate to Australia and New Zealand. The dream to migrate was planted during my participants' childhoods. All the participants in my research were avid readers. As children, they had all travelled in their imaginations and developed the desire to live an adventurous life and to get to know the cultures they had read about. Hence, they travelled a lot throughout their teenage and young adult years. Through travelling they advanced in the psychological processes that led to migration occurring to them as the next logical step to take and them having the confidence and capabilities to migrate.

Another of many reasons given for wanting to migrate was that both countries were seen as pioneering countries full of possibilities, while Germany was seen as very traditional. They generally felt that they couldn't be themselves in Germany and create the lives they wanted.

She said that while German migrants particularly loved the community spirit, the greater space, and the greater opportunities to be in nature in Australia and New Zealand, they found the migration process like a hurdle marathon.

"It was often a long, highly challenging and expensive process for immigrants to get their permanent residency, to get their qualifications recognised, and to secure a job in accordance with their qualifications."

Dr Buergelt found that New Zealand and Australia did not seem to live up to the expectations of German migrants. "For example, German people particularly like the clean green image of New Zealand but were disappointed with that country's environmental position." This was just one of many reasons for some German migrants not wanting to stay in New Zealand or Australia.

She came to the conclusion that to fulfil their desire to attract more migrants and to retain them, the country of origin and the country of destination needed to work together to empower and enable migrants during their emigration, to provide ‘success' migration stories that convey perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and strategies that worked, to provide insights into psychological-contextual migration processes, and to provide realistic knowledge of the country of settlement.

"The visa application process and the recognition of qualifications needs to be more simple, humane, personal and speedy. They need to reconsider whether it is really necessary for migrants from Western countries, (which have similarly high education standards to Australia and New Zealand) who have many years of practice, to go through extensive theoretical exams that are tailored to the Australian or New Zealand education system. These exams could, for instance, be replaced by courses and/or study guides that familiarise migrants with the professional terminology, knowledge and practices specific to Australia and New Zealand."

Dr Buergelt delivered a keynote statement to a workshop on motivation for migration to the IGC in Geneva in March. The IGC (Intergovernmental Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees) is an informal, non-decision-making forum for exchange and policy debate on issues of international migration.

Its members are Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and 12 western European states.

She has since been invited to address Australian and New Zealand government departments.

"I am happy that I am giving voice to contemporary Western migrants (a largely under-researched group) and empowering and enabling migrants," she said.

Dr Buergelt is currently working on a national project with the Bushfires CRC - which is not as far removed from immigration issues as it might sound.

"There are actually many parallels between migration and preparedness for bushfires," she said. "Both situations bring huge and dramatic changes: one is chosen, the other is not chosen. My interests have always been in how people adapt to these big changes."

Dr Buergelt said both migration and bushfires can lead to loss and sadness but both also had a huge potential for growth and transformation.

Published in UWA News , 30 April 2012

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