This book examines how migration and migrant work are governed, lived and understood beyond major cities. Using Australia as a settler-colonial immigration country with extensive regional migration policies, the book offers a critical migration sociology of regional migration as both a policy project and a social space. It approaches regional migration at three levels: as everyday practice shaped by migrants, refugees, employers, service providers and long-term residents; as a governance arena structured by differentiated visa regimes, rights and responsibilities; and as an object of knowledge produced across disciplines and institutions. Across eight chapters, the book maps key policy settings shaping regional migration and migrant work, reviews social-scientific research on regional migration, refugee settlement and precarious labour, and traces critiques of economistic rationales in migration governance. Drawing on qualitative research conducted between 2010 and 2023 in regional Victorian towns, it analyses how stakeholders narrate the “value” of migrants, how attraction and retention are framed, and how onward mobility—often labelled “secondary migration”—is negotiated across life course, gender, racialisation and place-based opportunity structures. The book also examines how multiculturalism is debated and practised in regional communities, including the strategic mobilisation of economic arguments “from below”.

By placing migrant work, belonging, rural and regional change, and the governance of mobility in dialogue, this book is designed for scholars and students in migration studies, sociology, labour studies, human geography, refugee studies, rural studies and public policy, as well as practitioners concerned with regional settlement and workforce regulation.

Martina Boese is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University, Australia. Her research examines migration, employment and social inequality in relation to policy and governance, with particular attention to regional migration and settlement, migrant and refugee mobilities, precarious work and racialisation. She co-authored Becoming Australian: Migration, Settlement and Citizenship (2014) and co-edited Critical Reflections on Migration, ‘Race’ and Multiculturalism (2017).