Introduction
As global mobility expands, the transnational movement of social work practitioners and students has become a defining feature of the profession, especially in countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom where persistent skills shortages continue to shape workforce needs. Since colonisation, Australia has relied heavily on migration to support both population expansion and economic progress. Skilled migrants, in particular, have contributed crucial expertise and experience that fill persistent shortages in the nation’s workforce capacity. In this context, many international social work students and graduates express a desire to build their futures in Australia, seeing the country as a place where they can develop their careers and pursue pathways to permanent residency.
Findings from a longitudinal doctoral study conducted by the first author, involving thirteen international students and graduates in Australian social work programs between February 2021 and July 2023, illustrate how these aspirations shape their educational journeys (See Yao & Flynn, 2025, 2026; Yao & Grieve, 2026). Participants described navigating a dual process of becoming: they were becoming social workers while simultaneously working toward permanent residency through skilled migration pathways. This dual process influenced every aspect of their learning and transition into practice. Their experiences show how efforts to “become” were deeply intertwined with questions of cultural and linguistic fit as newcomers to Australia, and with their evolving sense of what it meant to be a social worker in the Australian context.
A desire to obtain permanent residency provides a motivation to undertake social work education
Being qualified as a social worker in Australia acts as a critical enabler to obtain permanent residency in Australia
Read a description of the diagram
Two parallel pathways point to the right: becoming a social worker, and becoming a permanent resident in Australia. An upward arrow connects the residency pathway to the social work pathway: the desire for permanent residency motivates social work education. A downward arrow connects the social work pathway to the residency pathway: qualification as a social worker is described as a critical enabler of permanent residency.
For example, one participant described her experience of learning to become a social worker in Australia as an international student from a non‑English‑speaking Asian background, while another reflected on the need to adjust her thinking to align more closely with the norms and values she observed in Australia and within the social work profession:
“Not only do I have to adjust to the fact that my English might not be good enough, but I also have to adapt to different cultural values. So when I’m in a group with people from different cultures, I tend to become quieter because I’m afraid that the more I say, the more mistakes I might make. Some people might misunderstand certain questions as being racist, and I’m really scared of that kind of misunderstanding.”
“Sometimes when things challenge me, my thoughts become very conflicted. At the end of the day, I still have my roots in [home country]—no matter what, it’s that culture that shaped who I am today. But because I’ve also lived [in Australia] for so long, and especially because of certain ideas in the social work profession, there are things I need to change. I can’t let aspects of [ethnic] culture hold me back.”
Similar concerns about cultural fit and the pressure to demonstrate sufficient linguistic competence were echoed by other participants, reflecting patterns documented in recent Australian studies on international social work students. These pressures do not arise in isolation. They are shaped by Australia’s longer history of assimilation—from the White Australia policy to contemporary expectations of cultural “fit” in workplaces where Whiteness and White privilege continue to be observed. For many professionals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, racial discrimination and subtle forms of exclusion remain common experiences, reinforcing the sense that belonging often requires adaptation to dominant norms.
Professional Assimilation as the Hidden Curriculum in Professional Education
International students from Asian countries studying in Anglophone contexts often feel compelled to adapt to the host country’s dominant culture. Assimilation can become a common response to the Western norms that structure classroom interactions, placement expectations, and workplace cultures. While the concept of professional assimilation has not been widely discussed in social work, a recent publication by Tyminski et al. (2025) examining professional assimilation in occupational therapy, situated within the colonial history and institutional discrimination experienced by Indigenous and minority groups in the US, offers useful points for consideration. Tyminski et al. (2025) distinguish professionalism from professional behaviours, with the former referring to “a general adherence to the ethics and values of the profession” (p. 2) and the latter referring to “the specific, observable, and measurable actions of a student or therapist that reify or mark visible those ethics and values” (p. 3). Because professional behaviours are frequently left undefined or only loosely specified, they can function, intentionally or unintentionally, as mechanisms that preserve the status quo and reproduce dominant norms and values, which are frequently “white, Western, Christian, cisgender, [and] heterosexual” (Tyminski et al., 2025, p. 3).
Tyminski et al. (2025) further problematise the content of professional behaviour standards in occupational therapy education, highlighting their lack of accessibility, transparency, clarity, and specificity. These shortcomings increase the likelihood that the standards will be misinterpreted and make them particularly difficult to meet for students who do not use English as a first language or whose cultural norms differ from dominant expectations. As a result, “impression management” (Tyminski et al., 2025, p. 6), which often involves “masking,” “faking professional behaviours,” and “code-switching” (p. 6), becomes a common strategy adopted by students and therapists from minority groups to create a sense of fit within educational and professional settings. This dynamic suggests that professional behaviour standards may inadvertently promote assimilation rather than supporting the expression of individuals’ cultures and identities.
Assimilation as a Response to Oppression
Audre Lorde’s reflections on navigating oppression resonate strongly here. She observed that in a society organised through entrenched systems of oppression, “it is the members of the oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressors” (Lorde 1984, p. 114). She further argued that those who live with oppression as part of everyday life often learn to survive by “[b]ecoming familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection” (p. 114).
This dynamic is clearly reflected in the experiences of international social work students in Australia. For example, in Hicks’ (2020) study, international social work students in Australia also felt compelled to “read the culture” of placement agencies shaped by Whiteness and White privilege. Students adopted strategies to minimise their racial and cultural visibility across professional, social, and cultural dimensions. In particular, practices such as “learning to be Aussie” (Hicks, 2020, p. 154) and “speaking Aussie” (p. 155) were used to counter colleagues’ assumptions about their competence and to facilitate more effective engagement with service users, mirroring the dynamics Lorde (1984) described. Furthermore, Battaglia et al. (2023) reported that international graduates anticipated that their cultural and linguistic differences would “problematise working with co-workers and service users” and therefore prioritised “fitting in” (p. 427) when entering the Australian workforce.
The example provided by one field educator in Grieve et al.’s (2023, p. 361) study further illustrates the assimilation expectation imposed on international students and graduates in social work and Australian workplace:
“I’ve always said to students, ‘One of the first things you need to do is find a football team that you’re going to say that you support, or a team that you follow. You don’t have to like football.’ You don’t have to know anything more about it other than there is this one team and that’s my team. And that actually breaks ice. It makes people relax.”
Taken together, these studies suggest that professional socialisation for international students and graduates in Australia may function less as a process of integration and more as a mechanism of assimilation into dominant cultural norms. This tension is particularly striking when considered alongside the Australian Association of Social Workers’ (2020) Code of Ethics, which explicitly calls on social workers to recognise and celebrate cultural diversity as a core professional commitment. When international students and graduates feel they must assimilate into Whiteness to be perceived as competent or to avoid marginalisation, profound value conflicts may arise. With value congruence being central to professional identity formation, these assimilation pressures pose significant risks to the development of a stable, authentic professional identity.
Implications of Professional Assimilation in Social Work
This orientation toward professional assimilation among international students and graduates has significant implications for both individual and collective professional identity in Australian social work and social work as a profession in a globalised world. These implications are particularly salient given ongoing critiques of the pervasive influence of Whiteness within Australian social work education and workplaces. Belk et al. (2025) argue that institutional racism and discrimination become normalised through dominant notions of professionalism and professional standards, where settler colonialism and white supremacy are reinforced through the elevation of Western frameworks (p. 140). Although their critique focuses on the marginalisation of Māori concepts in Aotearoa New Zealand social work, their analysis offers an important caution for the Australian context. With the persistent Whiteness within Australian workplaces, professional assimilation of international students and graduates can risk reinforcing, rather than disrupting, existing structures of Whiteness and coloniality.
This concern is amplified by the fact that international students in Australia largely come from countries in the Global South. These students are likely to encounter a contradictory learning environment in which they are encouraged to engage with decolonising perspectives while simultaneously navigating pressures to conform to dominant White cultural norms. This indicates a clear value misalignment that can undermine international students’ and graduates’ capacity to engage meaningfully in critical thinking and reflection (Ranz, 2021), and may lead them to approach social work practice as a “value‑free technocratic service” (Ramon et al., 2006, p. 445) as a strategy for navigating these tensions.
Conclusion
The simultaneous pursuit of professional qualification and permanent residency, together with assimilatory pressures in education and Australian workplaces, exposes the layered complexity of international students’ professional identity formation. This points to a significant gap in existing literature on the roles of ethnicity, language, culture, and citizenship in shaping international social work identities, requiring further research.
References
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Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
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