Precarity on the move: the relative economic precarity of mobile youth moving to Australia

Analyses of precarity often focus on how insecure employment, careers, finances, and geographies influence people’s lives for the worse, with young people understood as especially precarious in their economic stability and transitions to adulthood. This article analyses accounts of precarity amongst middling transnationally mobile youth, drawing from 24 semi-structured interviews incoming to Australia, and longitudinal survey data. We show that experiences of economic precarity are impacted by their access to work, government support, ability to access or sustain visas, and access to support from family and partners. By drawing on migration scholars’ observations that transnational mobility can be privileged and precarious, and youth scholars’ discussions of how different backgrounds—and ‘welfare mixes’ of state, labour market, and family support—inform precarity, we contribute a fluid and contested notion of mobile youth’s economic precarity. Using Antonucci’s (2018) framework of welfare mixes, we propose that precarity is mutable: emerging differently across contexts, interacting with family and partners, and being governed by visa, financial, employment, and migration-related policies and circumstances.