The Decision to Become an Australian Citizen

While Australia is a nation of immigrants, not all of her immigrants become citizens and so become eligible to vote and hold political office. In a society where one in five of the population are overseas-born, where voting is compulsory, and where migrants vote differently from the native-born (Jupp, 1981; McAllister and Kelley, 1982), who does or does not take up citizenship might well have important electoral consequences. Yet beyond speculation, there is no evidence as to which migrants decide to become, or not to become, citizens. By applying multivariate techniques to a large, representative national survey, this paper seeks to determine which factors are likely to influence the decision to adopt Australian citizenship.