Intercultural Communication A Critical Introductio... - (Chapter 9 Intercultural Communication and Exclusion)

c h ap ter 9
Intercultural Communication
and Exclusion
9.1 cha p t er o bj e ct i ves

This chapter approaches the key question of this book of how culture is
made relevant by whom in which context for which purposes from yet
another perspective: how do cultural discourses serve as tools of social
exclusion, particularly of transnational migrants?
This chapter will enable you to:
• Explore the ways in which discourses of cultural difference and

language proficiency sometimes serve as a cloak for racism and dis-
crimination.
• Gain an understanding of the challenges faced by transnational
migrants in the labour market.
• Learn about inclusive language and industrial policies in linguistically
and culturally diverse societies.
Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
9.2 ra c i sm i n d i sg ui s e
Consider the following example, which comes from an Australian talkback
radio show and was broadcast in the context of the so-called ‘Cronulla
riots’ in December 2005, which pitted ‘Middle Eastern gangs’ against
‘Australian mobs’ in a Sydney beachside suburb.1 The show in question
discussed the most violent incident in this context, where ‘Australians’
had attacked ‘Muslims’. I am using quotation marks because in actual
fact both groups were native-born Australian citizens. Those portrayed
as ‘Australians’ in the media were mostly of Anglo–Celtic backgrounds
while those portrayed as ‘Muslims’ were mostly of Lebanese backgrounds.
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ra cis m in d is guis e 129
Pictures and media reports of the riots shocked the nation and the world,
and called Australia’s multicultural ideals into question. In the wake of
the riots, there were calls for ‘Anglo–Celtic Australians’ to apologise to
‘Muslim Australians’, and it is in this context that the following excerpt
from a phone-in radio show needs to be read:
Host: We Australians do not have to apologise for anything. My

anger is reserved for the politicians and bureaucrats who conspired
to bring in people who were guaranteed to be incompatible and
have demonstrated that in every country into which they have
moved.
Caller: Absolutely. Look, I couldn’t agree with you more.
Host: Many of them have parents who were first cousins, whose
parents were first cousins, because of the culture – it’s not a religious
thing, it doesn’t say this in the Koran – but it’s a cultural thing for
some part of the world to have parents who are very closely related.
The result of this is inbreeding, the result of which is
uneducationable people, and very low IQ.2
It does not really take a discourse analyst to point out that this is racism
masquerading as talk about culture: first, a common culture is ascribed
to Muslim Australians, which is asserted to be ‘incompatible’ with a dis-
cursively constructed unmarked general Australian culture of which the
former are said not to be part. In the process, Muslim Australians come to
be marked as non-Australian. ‘Culture’ is naturalised in the way ‘unedu-
cationability’ and lack of intelligence are ascribed to that discursively con-
structed cultural group. Shortly after the broadcast, the radio station, 2GB,
issued an apology for this segment but the host himself, Brian Wilshire,
refused to retract it, and issued the following statement:
I haven’t vilified anybody. I was just talking about culture, as

everybody does.3
Indeed, Brian Wilshire is correct in pointing out that ‘culture’ – rather

than, say, economic and social inequality, or drunk angry young men on
a testosterone high – was the dominant framework in which the Cronulla
riots were explained, and, in a wider context, ‘culture’ is the preferred
Australian narrative to explain the inclusions and exclusions of contempo-
rary Australian society.
Discourses of cultural difference that serve to obscure inequality and
injustice have been termed ‘culturism’. The term culturism is ‘similarly
constructed to racism or sexism in that the imagined characteristics of
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130 i nter cul tur a l com mu nica tio n a n d e x cl us io n
the “culture” (or “women” or “Asians”) are used to define the person’
(Holliday et al. 2004: 24). Culturism is a form of Orientalism (Said 1978),
an ideology that serves to justify colonial and neo-colonial relationships.
As explicit and overt racism has largely become unspeakable in ‘Western’
mainstream discourses, invoking culture and/or language proficiency
often serves to cloak discrimination. As an editorial in the Observer put it:
Racism is the hatred that dares not speaks its name. Instead, it finds
its voice in propositions of sweet reasonableness in which the
message of exclusion hangs only by implication. (Quoted in
McAuliffe 2005: 33)
Talk of culture is one frequent way of cloaking racism. Discrimination

on the basis of language proficiency, particularly accent, is another. Most
people who make judgements about the language proficiency of others do
not necessarily have a good understanding of what constitutes language
proficiency (see also Chapter 10 below). Being a ‘native speaker’ of a lan-
guage does not automatically qualify someone to pass judgement on the
linguistic proficiency of speakers who use that language as an additional
language. I will now explain the ways in which people delude themselves
into thinking they are making a judgement about language proficiency
when they are really doing nothing but reproducing a racial stereotype. In
order to do so, I briefly need to take you into the world of experimental
acoustics. Researchers of auditory perception have for a long time known
that it is possible to hear with our eyes and see with our ears. McGurk and
MacDonald (1976) showed that if normal-hearing adults in experimental
conditions heard repeated utterances of the syllable ba while simultane-
ously watching someone make the lip movements for ga, the auditory and
visual input actually got fused in their brains and they reported hearing
da. [d] is produced half-way between [b] and [g] and hearing da is thus
something like a compromise between your ears and your eyes.4 I am
sure you will find this an eye-opening experiment but you might well
ask: What does multimodal perception in experimental acoustics have
to do with intercultural communication, and specifically the idea that
random language proficiency assessments are a form of racism in disguise?
Well, the connection is that our brains make similar compromises when
it comes to language proficiency and race, as research by Rubin (1992)
and Rubin and Smith (1990) has shown. In these studies, the researchers
audio-recorded a science lecture aimed at undergraduate students. The
speaker on the tape was a native speaker of American English speaking
in a standard American-English accent. The lecture was then played to
two different groups of undergraduate students at a US university. In one
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ra cis m in d is guis e 131
case, the lecture was accompanied by the picture of a Caucasian woman

and in the other, it was accompanied by the picture of an Asian woman.
Thus, the impression was created that a Caucasian woman was speaking in
one instance and an Asian woman in another. Both women were shown
in the same pose and had been rated as similarly attractive. So, we have
one audio-recorded lecture spoken in Standard American English and two
different visual signals: a Caucasian lecturer versus an Asian lecturer. Can
you guess where this is headed? Right! The students who saw the Asian
lecturer heard a ‘foreign’, ‘non-native’ or ‘Asian’ accent although none
was present in the auditory signal. What is more, the perceived accent of
the perceived Asian lecturer led to reduced comprehension. The students
rated the quality of the lecture and the quality of their learning experience
much lower when they thought it was delivered by a speaker with a foreign
accent. The students must have thought they were making an objective
assessment of accentedness, linguistic proficiency and their learning expe-
rience when, in reality, their brains were making a compromise between
the expectations created by the embodied identities of the lecturers they
saw in front of them and the lecture they heard. Experiments such as these
confirm what English speakers of colour have always known, namely that
the ways they are seen inflect the ways they are heard. Djité (2006: 1f.) pro-
vides a memorable anecdote when he writes about an experience that he
had at a time when he was the only black African lecturer at the University
of Sydney:
A few years ago, I acted as a language consultant for a large law firm
in Sydney. During the life of the project – some six months – I
communicated with the firm only by telephone, fax and e-mails, in
French and English. I had never met any lawyer or clerical staff
from the firm in person. At the completion of the project, I was
told that the secretary of one of the senior partners would come to
my office and pick up the document I had drafted for them. On the
day, I left the door of my office wide open, waiting for the secretary.
When she arrived, she knocked at the door and asked to see Dr . . .
I got up, greeted her, invited her into the office and asked whether
she was here to pick up a document for the law firm (holding the
document in my hand). She then said, ‘Yes, but I’d like to speak to
Dr . . .’ I answered ‘I am Dr . . .’ The secretary suddenly turned very
pale. I asked her if anything was wrong, and she answered, ‘No, not
at all. You look far too young to be a doctor.’
Of course, the principle of multimodal perception, of moulding what

we hear in the image of what we see, works for white speakers of English,
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132 i ntercu ltu ra l co mm unica tio n a nd e x cl us io n
too. However, white speakers usually have the privilege of ignoring the
principle as it works in their favour. White native speakers of English are
privileged to live with the illusion that their accents are neutral, stand-
ard and natural. Even white speakers who use English as an additional
language, such as myself, do well out of these perceptual compromises
between our voices and our embodied identities because if anything it
makes us sound less accented. Indeed, German speakers of English as an
additional language often engage in passing-for-a-native-speaker perform-
ances as I showed in Piller (2002b). Another example of white privilege
when it comes to the intersection of voice and embodied identity comes
from Colic-Peisker’s (2005) work. This researcher found that, in Australia,
migrants from the former Yugoslavia were not subjected to ‘prejudicial
gazes’ in public space. Australia is factually a multi-ethnic country but
continues to be imaged as an Anglo-Saxon one. Being white allowed
migrants from the former Yugoslavia to hide their migrant status if they so
wished or as long as they remained silent. While this might seem trivial, it
can be a considerable luxury, as a Sudanese-born Australian once told me:
‘Can you imagine how exhausting it is to be a migrant 24/7?’ Conversely,
Colic-Peisker’s Yugoslavia-born interviewees could pass as non-migrants if
they so wished and sometimes their whiteness resulted in little advantages
in interactions with strangers, as this story told by a Perth-based taxi driver
suggests:
One day a mature lady entered my cab in South Perth and said: ‘I
always only call “Black and White Taxis” [a smaller taxi company
in Perth] because “Swan Taxis” they’re all strangers, Arabs,
whoever. . . . You cannot talk to them, they speak poor English.’ I
said, ‘Well, my English is not the best either.’ She gave me a look
sideways and said: ‘At least you’re the right colour.’ (Colic-Peisker
2005: 620)
In sum, discourses of culture and linguistic proficiency can sometimes

work to disguise racism. While cultural and linguistic ways of assess-
ing others may seem objective, neutral, natural and value-free, they are
anything but. I will now explore how the interplay between discourses of
culture, linguistic proficiency and race is enacted in the labour market.
9.3 jo b s w i t h a ccen t s
Access to meaningful employment is a key aspect of successful migrant set-
tlement and social inclusion. However, data even from countries with such
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j o b s with a cce n ts 133
well-established migration programmes as Australia and Canada show

that the incidence of unemployment and underemployment of trans-
national migrants is much higher than that of the native-born population.
In Australia, even during the period of low unemployment and labour
and skills shortages that characterised much of the first decade of the
twenty-first century, the unemployment rate of recent migrants (5.5 per
cent) was considerably higher than that of the Australian-born population
(4.1 per cent) (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008). It is also important
to note that these statistics reflect only unemployment and not under-
employment. In Canada, recent research by Statistics Canada quoted by
Creese and Wiebe (2009: 2) ‘now confirms a persistent and growing gap
between immigrant and native-born incomes that is no longer projected
to converge at all’.
In both the Australian and Canadian contexts, these are disturbing
findings as both countries have long prided themselves in their migra-
tion programmes and multiculturalism. In contrast to most other coun-
tries that have received significant numbers of transnational migrants in
recent history, particularly in Europe, Australia and Canada have defined
themselves as immigrant nations for almost a century (Green and Green
2004; Jupp 2007). Furthermore, in comparison with the USA, another
country where immigration is part of the national imagery, Australia and
Canada have consciously adopted and experimented with state interven-
tion to facilitate social inclusion, including language programmes. In both
national contexts, discrimination on the basis of race and/or national
origin as the basis of exclusion from the labour market has become
unspeakable and unimaginable, and settlement and language-training
services are designed to help newcomers become employable. However,
evidence of racial discrimination under the guise of culture and language
proficiency continues to persist. I will now discuss two case studies of
discrimination in the Australian and Canadian labour markets before

addressing the question of the purposes of covert discrimination in these
contexts.
In Australia, discrimination against transnational migrants in the work-
place is well documented. A study of low-paid work, for instance, found:
Discrimination on cultural grounds is not an uncommon

experience for low-paid workers, especially from their managers.
Discrimination on cultural grounds manifested in many ways,
including being refused promotion, being limited in the types of
work they were allowed to perform, intimidation to work harder
and longer, abusive behaviour, manipulation of student and ‘guest
workers’ seeking citizenship points, and favouring Australian-born
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134 i ntercu ltu ra l co mm unica tio n a n d e x cl us io n
employees for higher positions and wages. (Masterman-Smith and

Pocock 2008: 44f.)
There is often an assumption that such discrimination is due to lack

of language proficiency, that is, migrants are not un- or underemployed
because they are being discriminated against, but rather because their
English is not good enough to meet job requirements. However, their
difficulties remain, even if they have relative proficiency in the language,
as a recent report to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights
Commission points out (Berman 2008). This report also notes a substan-
tial wage gap between similarly qualified native-born and migrant workers:
NESB employees with degrees and post-graduate qualifications also

receive 8% and 14% lower pay respectively than similarly qualified
Australian-born employees. (Berman 2008: 29)
Overall, the English proficiency of migrants to Australia is actually high

as evidence of English proficiency is a prerequisite in most visa classes, and
for many the path to permanent residency and citizenship includes tertiary
study at an Australian university. Furthermore, migrants who enter in a
visa stream that does not have an English requirement (that is, humanitar-
ian entrants, family reunion migrants, and the dependants of skilled and
business migrants) are entitled to free English-language tuition if they have
less than ‘functional English’.
Given such relatively high levels of English proficiency, it is obvious
that in most instances of the discrimination reported above it cannot
be factual language proficiency – an individual property of the second-
language speaker – that leads to exclusion, but rather linguistic and cul-
tural stereotyping on the part of employers. That this is indeed the case was
confirmed in a field experiment by Booth et al. (2009). These researchers

sent almost 5,000 fictional CVs in response to actual job ads for entry-level
jobs in wait-staffing, data entry, customer service and sales. The CVs dif-
fered only in the names of the applicants, which were names typical of five
distinct ethnic groups, namely Anglo-Saxon, Indigenous, Chinese, Italian
and Middle Eastern. The CVs made it clear that the fictional applicant’s
high-school education had been in Australia. So the assumption that their
English was not good enough was unlikely to arise and the response rates
can be seen as employers’ indicators of their attitudes towards these ethnic
groups. The researchers found
[. . .] clear evidence of discrimination, with Chinese and Middle

Easterners both having to submit at least 50 per cent more
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jo b s with a cce nts 135
applications in order to receive the same number of callbacks as

Anglo candidates. Indigenous applicants also suffer a statistically
significant level of discrimination, though the effects are smaller
[. . .]. We observe virtually no discrimination against Italian
applicants. (Booth et al. 2009: 20)
Further evidence for cultural stereotyping of a less sinister sort was pro-
vided by the fact that fictional Italian applicants for barista positions in
Melbourne, a city with a fine reputation for its coffee culture, enjoyed a
slight advantage even over their equally fictional Anglo-Saxon counter-
parts.
Evidence from Canada paints a similar picture. Creese and Wiebe
(2009) explore the labour-market experiences of African migrants in
Canada and conclude that these are overwhelmingly characterised by
deskilling and downward mobility, which channel them into low-skilled,
low-wage jobs well below their educational levels. The researchers inter-
viewed 61 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Vancouver to uncover
their experiences of re-entering the labour market post-migration. Most
of their interviewees were tertiary educated, most of them came from
Anglophone countries and had been educated in English, and most
of them had pre-migration professional experience. And they had one
more thing in common: post-migration, they were mostly long-term
underemployed:
Their educational credentials and experience in Africa went

unrecognised; their ‘African-English’ accents posed additional
barriers to many types of employment; and their additional
Canadian education often failed to translate into the expected
occupational rewards. (Creese and Wiebe 2009: 9)
Deskilling played out differently for men and women because the
labour market is not only racialised but also gendered. Men’s qualifica-
tions and experience were not recognised but there were still jobs for them
in the production sector and other blue-collar work. Women’s qualifica-
tions and experiences were not recognised, either, but, unlike their male
counterparts, they did not even have access to blue-collar work, as such
work is ‘reserved’ for men. At the same time, African women did not have
access to the lower rungs of the feminised Canadian labour market such as
retail and service work, either, because they did not ‘look and sound right’
for customer service. Consequently, their only options were in cleaning
and care work (see also Chapter 8). Thus, the Canadian labour market can
be characterised as operating a system of ‘economic apartheid’ (Creese and
Piller, Ingrid.
Wiebe 2009: 4). It worked to transform ‘skilled migrants’ into ‘unedu-

cated Africans’.
Even if they were reluctant to speak of racism, the fact that attributions
of lack of linguistic proficiency were a disguise for something else was
obvious to the interviewees of Creese and Wiebe. One of the interviewees,
Vira from Zimbabwe, explained how she was repeatedly passed over for
promotion from a back-office to a front-office role:
I didn’t get the job because I can’t, the tone of English they want
with the customer service representative. They say their customers
want an accent that is clear and like them, which will understand
them. But when I talk to them, when I pack things, when I read
their things, and I pack and I send it to Calgary, I send it to
Minnesota, Missisauga, everything is OK. But when it comes to
accent, I am no good . . . . That’s discrimination. They don’t want a
Black thing in front, that’s it. (Creese and Wiebe 2009: 14)
Having your accent constantly problematised and focused on can be a

source of considerable stress and anxiety and serve to maintain boundaries
in the workplace, as Dávila (2008) found in a study of the employment
experiences of Latina women in the USA. Although the migrant women
in her study were highly educated and spoke English well, they experi-
enced downward occupational mobility and felt they were constantly har-
assed for their accent. Maria, a university graduate from the Dominican
Republic, recounts her experience:
My boss, she’s the wife of the owner. She’s always complaining

around me because she can’t understand me. She says ‘I don’t know
what you are talking about!’ Or, ‘Say it again’ (3 times). It’s so rude.
Because she doesn’t try to understand me either. (Dávila 2008: 365)
Discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin is

illegal in Australia, Canada and the USA. Furthermore, for all we know,
individual employers may consider themselves genuinely non-racist or
post-racist. Yet, as the examples above show, discrimination continues to
exist. It can continue to exist and even be largely invisible because linguis-
tic discrimination has come to substitute other forms of discrimination.
Linguistic discrimination is a common-sense proposition, it seems natural
and objective, as I showed in Section 9.2. It just so happens that these
seemingly natural and objective language assessments mean that ‘English
has a colour’, as Creese and Kambere (2003) put it in a clever turn of
phrase.
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e nha n cing a cce s s 137
9.4 en h a nci ng a cce ss

The search for employment and economic opportunities has always held
first place among the many reasons why humans choose to migrate, and
many migrants measure the success of their migration in economic terms.
Likewise, receiving societies tend to measure successful settlement largely
in economic terms. Where transnational migrants face the hurdles to
meaningful employment and the discrimination in the labour market I
discussed above, the success of their migration can be jeopardised at a
personal level and the success of a national migration programme can be
jeopardised on the societal level. I have also shown that the discrimina-
tion faced by transnational migrants in the Australian, Canadian and US
labour markets remains largely invisible because it is masked as objective
assessment of a lack of English proficiency. This raises the question of
appropriate policy responses: how can cultural and linguistic discrimina-
tion be made visible and prevented, and what can be done to achieve
more inclusive outcomes? I will address this question in two ways: first
through an exploration of language policy responses and then through an
exploration of industrial policy.5
Since the inception of its post-war migration programme, Australia
has taken a two-pronged language-policy approach to the inclusion of
migrants. Australia has focused on the one hand on the provision of lan-
guage-learning opportunities through the Adult Migrant English Program
(AMEP) and, on the other, on the multilingual provision of services, par-
ticularly in areas directly controlled by the state, such as citizenship, educa-
tion, health and the justice system. Australia’s national language learning
programme for migrants, the AMEP, has provided free English-language
tuition for migrants with less than ‘functional English’ since 1948.6 In doing
so, Australia recognised that a society must assist newcomers in learning a
new language if it wants to avoid the development of groups permanently

excluded from the mainstream. It also recognised that language learning
of newcomers is a collective social responsibility rather than an individual
one. The AMEP started out in the immediate aftermath of World War
II as a relatively small English tuition programme on board ships during
the long voyage from Europe to Australia and, on-shore, as a language
programme in a large migrant reception centre of the time, Bonegilla in
Victoria. From these humble beginnings, the AMEP has developed into a
nationwide programme that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
provides English tuition to over 30,000 new migrants per year.
In addition to the AMEP, a comprehensive language and commu-
nication strategy for linguistically and culturally diverse societies also
comprises substantial multilingual provision in home languages. To begin
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138 intercu ltu ra l co mm unica tio n a nd e x cl us io n
with, comprehensive language strategies are based on the recognition of

language communities and the provision of services in community lan-
guages such as programmes that aim at hiring community liaison officers
in education, health care or the judicial system. Additionally, efforts have
been made to mainstream bilingualism through considering proficiency in
community languages as a selection criterion for employment in all these
sectors. Second, the availability of materials and resources in community
languages is important to achieve inclusion, and there are many exciting
projects that have developed best-practice strategies on how to create and
disseminate such materials (see, for example, the description of Griffiths
et al. (2005) in Section 4.3). At present, most analyses of the provision of
services in community languages note a dire lack of such materials, even
in contexts where the importance of such provision has been recognised
or even mandated, as a UK report on social exclusion (Improving Services,
Improving Lives: Evidence and Key Themes. A Social Exclusion Unit Interim
Report 2005) notes:
One in seven people from ethnic minorities face language barriers

when accessing and using public services, yet translated materials
are often unavailable. A recent report on local authority compliance
with the Race Relations Act, for example, found that only one in
ten benefit departments had produced leaflets in ethnic minority
languages. Translating leaflets does not always solve the problem,
however, as they may be poor quality or inappropriate for people
who cannot read their mother tongue or have a culture of oral
communication.
As the report points out, the provision of materials in home languages is

not always feasible and the provision of materials in plain English – or a
plain version of whatever the national language is – also needs to be an

important part of the language strategy for linguistically and culturally
diverse societies.
Finally, language policy that aims at raising the status of languages
other than English can also serve to increase employment opportunities for
transnational migrants, as is evident from the ‘Productive Diversity’ policy
in Australia, which was launched in 1992 with the dual objective of increas-
ing Australian business access to diverse domestic and export markets as
well as taking advantage of Australia’s multilingual and multicultural
workforce (Pyke 2005). The policy has indeed resulted in the creation
of ‘cultural mediator’ roles, particularly in the service industry, and thus
created some, even if not many, additional employment opportunities for
migrants (Bertone 2004).
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e nha n cing a cce s s 139
However, the question remains: Why does an excellent language

policy such as the one described here for Australia, with its three-pronged
approach of state-sponsored language training, multilingual provision and
status planning for community languages, still result in the inequitable
outcomes reported in Section 9.3 above? The answer to this conundrum
is a complex one. To begin with, labour markets have changed drastically
since the inception of the AMEP, the implementation of multilingual
provision policies and even the ‘Productive Diversity’ policy of the 1990s.
Language needs of the production sector, which has shrunk significantly
in Australia, are minimal while communication skills often play a central
role in the service jobs of the new economy (see Section 6.4 above). As the
language needs and requirements of businesses rise, it obviously becomes
more and more difficult for second-language speakers to meet them,
and the intersection of language proficiency perceptions and embodied
identities I discussed above takes on ever greater importance.
Second, language in and of itself is not actually enough to make for suc-
cessful settlement. Despite the rhetoric around the importance of learning
the language of destination countries, languages are difficult to learn and
in and of themselves do not constitute a meaningful qualification or allow
for access to employment and inclusion more generally, as this example
from Finland demonstrates. In her book Human Cargo, the journalist
Caroline Moorehead (2006) explores the refugee experience. In a chapter
about community resettlement with the title ‘Dead dreams’ (Moorehead
2006: 266ff.) she describes a community of seventy-one Dinka from
Southern Sudan who have been resettled in Oulu, a city of 123,000 inhab-
itants in Finland. The Finnish resettlement programme is generous and
the Dinka felt blessed to be safe and to be assisted generously. At the same
time, their dependence on welfare and their inability to find employment
was a constant topic:
As they know well, as they tell each other every day, of the 250
refugees who were resettled in Oulu before them – Iraqis and
Iranians, Bosnians and Somalis, Afghans and Burmese – only two
have found work, and both as interpreters for social workers.
Among the seventy-one Sudanese are teachers, electricians, nurses,
farmers and university students. Talking about their lives, they say
that they had simply assumed that resettlement would bring
education, and with education would come work and a future.
Now, it seemed, they would learn Finnish but not much else. They
had never imagined, never conceived it possible, that there might
be a life without an occupation. ‘We watch television, we eat, we
sleep,’ said Malish. ‘We visit people. And we sit. This is really
Piller, Ingrid.
useless for me. I had a dream. It was about how I would work, and
learn things, and become someone. If I don’t succeed in my dream,
I don’t know how my life will be. My dream is dead. [. . .]’
(Moorehead 2006: 274)
Malish’s voice and the experience of the Dinka in Oulu – the death
of dreams and the waste of human potential – are a poignant reminder
that resettlement of refugees in and of itself is not enough if they are not
included in their new societies. Having to rely on welfare robs people of
their dignity and their dreams. We are thus still left with the question:
Why would societies such as Australia, Canada or Finland employ pretexts
of culture and language to exclude refugees whom they have generously
taken in or skilled migrants whom they have actually wooed for their
‘human capital’? Would it not be in these societies’ best self-interest to
allow transnational migrants to contribute to the best of their ability
rather than exclude them on the basis of their accents? Some transnational
migrants are obviously excluded because their proficiency in the national
language is factually insufficient to do a particular job. At the same time,
employers and the general public obviously extend the argument of
insufficient linguistic proficiency to a much larger group of transnational
migrants whose English levels factually meet the requirements of a particu-
lar position. Why would employers actually want to discriminate against
appropriately qualified workers? Is it not in their economic self-interest
to select the best person for a job whatever their background? Well, no,
actually not. In the Australian case, Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (2006)
argue that discrimination is a perfectly rational – and highly exclusionary
– response to the specific circumstances of the contemporary Australian
labour market where – in contrast to other advanced economies – only a
relatively small pool of cheap labour (for example, illegal aliens) exists to
fill vacancies in low-wage, rural, seasonal or otherwise undesirable work

(for example, abattoirs, cleaning, aged care).
In this context, racism is not simply an irrational prejudice, but a

basis for rational, economically advantageous behaviour of
employers: it keeps certain ‘marked’ groups out of the mainstream
labour market and good jobs and thus ensures that undesirable job
vacancies are filled. (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury 2006: 221)
The un- and underemployment of transnational migrants of non-white

and non-English-speaking backgrounds is thus not only a function of
their English proficiency but of existing labour-market segmentation.
Multilingualism and employment thus articulate in at least two different
Piller, Ingrid.
k e y p o in ts 141
ways in the Australian context: on an individual level, the English com-

petence of a person may not match their skill level and thus exclude them
from employment at their skill level. On a systemic level, the exclusion
of migrants on the basis of their real or perceived lack of proficiency in
English creates a pool of people with a lack of employment options at their
level and thus forces them into low-paid work. It is obvious that even the
best-thought-out language policy for social inclusion has little purchase in
this context.
So, what can be done to ensure fair and equitable employment and
combat racism masquerading as culture or language proficiency? It would
seem to me that the role of the state lies as much in the regulation of labour
(key concerns include the segmented labour market for migrants and the
‘living wage’ debate) as in the provision of language training. Language
policies such as the ones I have described above can only be effective in
the context of industrial policies that address the conditions under which
‘undesirable’, that is, undervalued work is performed, specifically minimum
wages at community standards, working conditions and job security, a
social wage and the dignity of work (Masterman-Smith and Pocock 2008).
Language policies for social inclusion can only be effective if they are under-
girded by industrial policies that indeed allow for work to be the foundation
of social inclusion and justice. A recent report by the International Labour
Office (2009: 16f.) shows just how little some work is valued:
It is estimated that in 2007, 624 million workers – 21 per cent of all

workers in the world – lived with their families in extreme poverty
on less than USD 1.25 per person per day. [. . .] An estimated 1.2
billion workers lived with their families on less than USD 2 per
person per day in 2007, representing more than 40 per cent of all
workers in the world.
In sum, if a society – be it on the national or global level – does not face

the true costs of work and reward it justly, culture and language proficiency
can emerge as a ‘natural’ criterion to force migrants, or entire populations
in the Global South, into low-paid work and marginal existences.
9.5 key p oint s

This chapter made the following key points:
• Discourses of culture and language proficiency are sometimes made rel-

evant in transnational migration contexts to serve as a cloak for racism.
Piller, Ingrid.
142 i ntercu ltu ra l co mm unica tio n a nd e x cl us io n
Such discourses can naturalise discrimination in the guise of objective

assessments.
• In some contexts, racism disguised as objective assessments of cultural
competence or linguistic proficiency serves to justify social exclusion,
particularly unfair access to desirable employment.
• Language policies are of central importance to achieving social inclu-
sion in diverse societies. However, they can be undermined by neolib-
eral free market policies and unfair industrial awards. In the context of
the latter, culture and linguistic proficiency is often made relevant to
obscure unjust social arrangements.
9.6 fur t h er r ea d i ng
The key reading in the field is English with an Accent: Language, Ideology,
and Discrimination in the United States by Rosina Lippi-Green (1997).
Piller (in press-b) provides an overview of research into the intersection
between social exclusion and multilingualism.
9.7 a cti vi t i e s
The Applicant
If you can gain access to the film The Applicant (Makeny 2008), watch it
in class. What would you have done if you were the main character? What
can we do to prevent the discrimination exposed in the film?
A migrant’s story
Interview a migrant to your country about their working life pre- and
post-migration. Ask only a few open-ended questions such as ‘Can you tell
me about your qualifications and work experience before you came here?’,
‘Can you tell me about your work experience since you’ve come here? Did
you do any further training?’, ‘I am also curious to hear how you learned
English [the local language]?’, ‘What role does English [the local language]
play in your current job?’ Audio-record the interview with the inter-
viewee’s permission and write an essay where you explore their experience
with the knowledge you have gained in this chapter. Which aspects fit the
pattern? Which do not? Does the interview confirm the overall thrust of
my analysis or throw it into question?
Piller, Ingrid.
no te s 143
n o tes
1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Cronulla_riots for one account of the events.
Last accessed 13 October 2010.
2. http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1574242.htm. Last accessed 13 October
2010. My emphasis.
3. http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1574242.htm. Last accessed 13 October
2010. My emphasis.
4. If you want to try this out for yourself, you can find a neat video of the experiment at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw. Last accessed 13 October 2010.
5. See Piller (in press-b) for a full exploration of the role of language and industrial
policies in achieving social inclusion in diverse societies.
6. See Piller and Takahashi (2011) for a detailed overview of the AMEP.
Piller, Ingrid.

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c h ap ter 9

9.1 cha p t er o bj e ct i ves

• Explore the ways in which discourses of cultural difference and

Host: We Australians do not have to apologise for anything. My

I haven’t vilified anybody. I was just talking about culture, as

Indeed, Brian Wilshire is correct in pointing out that ‘culture’ – rather

Talk of culture is one frequent way of cloaking racism. Discrimination

case, the lecture was accompanied by the picture of a Caucasian woman

Of course, the principle of multimodal perception, of moulding what

In sum, discourses of culture and linguistic proficiency can sometimes

well-established migration programmes as Australia and Canada show

discrimination in the Australian and Canadian labour markets before

Discrimination on cultural grounds is not an uncommon

employees for higher positions and wages. (Masterman-Smith and

There is often an assumption that such discrimination is due to lack

NESB employees with degrees and post-graduate qualifications also

Overall, the English proficiency of migrants to Australia is actually high

confirmed in a field experiment by Booth et al. (2009). These researchers

[. . .] clear evidence of discrimination, with Chinese and Middle

applications in order to receive the same number of callbacks as

Their educational credentials and experience in Africa went

Wiebe 2009: 4). It worked to transform ‘skilled migrants’ into ‘unedu-

Having your accent constantly problematised and focused on can be a

My boss, she’s the wife of the owner. She’s always complaining

Because she doesn’t try to understand me either. (Dávila 2008: 365)

Discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin is

9.4 en h a nci ng a cce ss

new language if it wants to avoid the development of groups permanently

with, comprehensive language strategies are based on the recognition of

One in seven people from ethnic minorities face language barriers

As the report points out, the provision of materials in home languages is

plain version of whatever the national language is – also needs to be an

However, the question remains: Why does an excellent language

fill vacancies in low-wage, rural, seasonal or otherwise undesirable work

In this context, racism is not simply an irrational prejudice, but a

The un- and underemployment of transnational migrants of non-white

ways in the Australian context: on an individual level, the English com-

It is estimated that in 2007, 624 million workers – 21 per cent of all

In sum, if a society – be it on the national or global level – does not face

9.5 key p oint s

• Discourses of culture and language proficiency are sometimes made rel-

Such discourses can naturalise discrimination in the guise of objective

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