Becoming Trans/Nationally Mobile: The Conflation of Internal and International Migration in the Trajectories of Indian Student-Migrants in Australia and Beyond

The growth of Indian students' enrolment numbers in Australian educational institutions has often been linked to the relatively easy pathway the country, until recently, offered towards Australian permanent residency (PR). However, building on ethnographic data collected over the past ten years this article shows that "permanently' residing in Australia is often not the objective. Instead, the mobility that these Indian student-migrants aim for encompasses a broader understanding of mobility that includes a variety of locations in both countries and beyond which emerge and/or are abandoned organically in an individual's trajectory. As such it is argue that their mobility strategies can be conceptualized as having "trans/national' dimensions.