Immigration, naturalisation policy and multiculturalism are complex areas of Australian public policy. Grouped together under the concept of “migration”, they deal with both the macroeconomic effects and the granular impacts of such policies upon people: the rights of individuals and families to be together or not; the availability of safe harbour – or its denial; the capacity to work and study while on a visa for the appropriate length of time, the conditions of stay, or deportation; and the balance between new membership and the rights of existing citizens.

The newly established Office for Multicultural Affairs in Home Affairs is tasked with coordinating migrant-focused policies and services. Crucially, the Office has the potential to be a central institutional actor for listening to, collecting and integrating migrant narratives into policymaking, which helps to ensure that policies reflect the lived realities of those they affect.

When seeking to understand immigration and citizenship policies, individual migrant stories can illuminate the migration process in vivid and relatable ways that build upon conventional sources of evidence such as public statistics. In the 2024 Professor Laki Jayasuriya Oration in Multiculturalism (delivered by Associate Professor Anna Boucher), five migrant family stories from our research explored themes of asylum, belonging, mothering across borders, naturalisation and foreign skills with the aim of enlightening migration policy in Australia.

Internationally renowned public policy scholar Paul Cairney tells us that stories can be a powerful way to communicate around public policy:

“the aim [of policy storytelling] is more expressive than instrumental: the act itself of telling one’s story and being heard can be empowering, particularly within marginalised groups from which we hear few voices.”

Storytelling, as Cairney notes, can be an emotionally vulnerable process. A good story involves characters bound together in an effective plot, drawing the reader in through emotionality.

While the use of emotion in storytelling is a well-established principle in political speeches, it is less common to date in policymaking, potentially because it may be viewed as excessively subjective and, therefore, possibly biased. We argue that narratives are a powerful mechanism to situate public policy within the human experience. Their use in novel areas such as migration allows policymaking to directly connect more with people than might be possible through numbers or abstract concepts alone. The migrant family stories we have illuminated demonstrate this clearly.

Personal narratives, policymaking and human-centred design

Narrative matters in policy development and political communication. Policy change requires the management of debates around policy instruments and processes, as well as harnessing public statistics and narratives, particularly in complex, human-centred policy areas such as health and immigration. At the same time, statistical data can itself provide narrative stories – especially through visualisation, a method increasingly used by governments in both developing and communicating policy.

Policymakers can often rely on emotional and cognitive shortcuts to make decisions, responding more readily to what feels meaningful than to what is merely factual. Yet this can also explain why individual story-based narratives work: they engage with policymakers’ and citizens’ emotions and provide context-sensitive insights grounded in everyday realities. This can resonate with lived experience, making narrative information more familiar and acceptable.

Human-centred design (HCD) presents a potent opportunity to incorporate migrant stories into policy to ensure that the unique experiences of individuals are accounted for. HCD encourages policymakers to shift their focus from simply addressing a problem towards an approach that incorporates the perspectives of those involved in, and affected by, policy through a co-design process. Given that migrant storytelling takes on an empathetic lens, personal experiences and reflections can offer valuable insights into the real consequences of migration policies – and how they can be improved, alongside community-informed policy consultations.

Migrant stories drawn from lived experience prompt ideas outside the mainstream experience and what data alone might reveal, while also uncovering any structural weaknesses of a policy or process. Narratives can also reveal practical solutions that currently lack social and cultural legitimacy.

The experience of one New Zealand migrant seeking Australian citizenship sheds light on the structural limits of naturalisation policy implementation. Kaya (a pseudonym) and his family experienced a prolonged journey to Australian citizenship, despite his long-term residency. As visa categories and application processes changed, Kaya and his family endured repeated administrative challenges. When framing such immigrant processes through a human narrative, HCD can highlight the real impact of systems and processes on those who are directly involved with it, rather than the evident technicalities of policy design. As Kaya notes: “For us [my family] the biggest issues in the process have been the prolonged waiting times. Living in Australia for almost 16 years without the capacity to vote and limited government benefits has affected my family and community connection – it has complicated employment applications and made proving eligibility for skilled work more difficult.”

The story shows that even when migration rules are improved to support migrants, their implementation can generate negative outcomes independent of the policy’s substance. Accurately understanding individual narratives can reframe policy issues towards a more human rights-focused process. Where solutions favour transparent experiences and insights, the quality of policy delivery can improve.

Using narratives to bridge the gap between large datasets and individual experiences

In policy areas such as migration, an empirical gulf can exist between large dataset analysis and people’s experiences. Narratives can help bridge this gap, relating large-scale trends to how individuals move through the migration process. Story narratives can influence policymaking from the bottom up, rather than being solely shaped by the official narratives constructed by policymakers. Drawing on the “Narrative Policy Framework” (NPF), we offer three guidelines for practitioners and policy experts to use individuals’ experiences to shape decision-making.

1. Craft a narrative story

Crafting individual stories using key narrative elements – setting, characters, plot and a moral aspect – can help communicate policy issues clearly and ethically. This structure not only personalises complex problems but also highlights broader systemic challenges and their policy implications.

The experience of one PhD student, Omar Bernardo, during COVID-19 is a powerful story of precarity and discrimination. Omar came to Australia from Mexico, initially finding belonging with Sydney’s Latin community. However, with the lockdowns, border closures and lack of social security payments for international students, Omar began to experience loneliness. Many of Omar’s friends were subject to labour market exploitation, as the JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs incentivised the hiring of Australian workers over migrants and international students.

Looking at this time through Omar’s eyes shows why the eventual decisions in 2021 by the Commonwealth Government to extend visas affected by COVID-19 and by the NSW Government to offer a small relief package to international students were so important to individual migrants.

2. An effective messenger

The messenger or storyteller is also important in effectively delivering narratives in the policymaking process. Policy actors, including public officials, advocates, experts and citizens, engage with the policy process in different ways. The credibility and positioning of those using stories to influence the policy process shape how narratives are informed and influenced.

In Australia, non-profit organisations such as the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre (IARC) serve as effective storytellers by translating migrants’ complex legal experiences into compelling narratives that reveal policy gaps and emerging challenges. Its trusted position as a legal advocacy organisation, combined with its active engagement in policy submissions and the media, gives it narrative credibility and reach within the policymaking process.

For people, organisations and governments seeking to shape and explain migration policy, choosing a compelling and credible narrator is essential. In some cases, an organisation such as IARC is well placed to do this – but individuals can also be effective and authentic advocates, especially drawing on their own lived experiences.

3. Narrative intervention points

In the policy cycle, narrative stories work differently at certain intervention points. Stories help to frame issues in agenda-setting and draw on human empathy when policies are being formulated and constructed. Bringing in narratives of lived experience can reveal real-world outcomes, valuable at both the point of evaluating existing policy settings and in designing new approaches.

Another PhD student, Tingting (a pseudonym), faced the challenge of raising her young son between Australia and China while completing her doctorate. After residency requirements were reimposed in 2023, Tingting had to move to Australia to continue her studies. However, migration rules prevented her bringing a family carer for her son with her to Australia, so her family and supervisors developed an elaborate, costly and emotionally-taxing strategy of moving between the two countries to allow her to complete her PhD. In the end, she achieved her goal.

Making stories like Tingting’s available to policymakers at a key moment, such as a review of temporary migration policy, could help develop a more flexible approach that accommodates the realities of gendered care responsibilities.

Making narrative a mainstream policy tool

There is a key opportunity with the Office of Multicultural Affairs to embed storytelling in government policy. To do so meaningfully, we propose that migrant stories be crafted and delivered effectively at the right policy intervention points, especially with regard to human-centred policies such as immigration.

In a country as diverse as Australia, embracing narratives in the policy process enables practitioners, scholars and public servants to better meet the needs of a multicultural population, ultimately helping build fairer and more inclusive institutions. While traditional approaches to migration policymaking often rely on abstract, quantitative data, the integration of lived migrant experiences reveals the different impacts of immigration on individuals. Migrant stories serve as cognitive shortcuts that make policy issues more relatable and memorable, bridging the gap between policymakers and citizens to shape more contextually sensitive agendas, support more compassionate delivery and enable more inclusive evaluation outcomes.

This article draws on the 2024 Professor Laki Jayasuriya Oration, “From Chengdu to Wellington to Moscow: Australian Immigration Policy through the Stories of Migrant Families”.

 Dr Anna Boucher is an Associate Professor in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, where she lectures in public policy and migration. She is a frequent advisor to the Australian and overseas governments on a range of immigration issues.

 Mengmeng Zhang is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on immigration policy and the social integration of skilled migrants.

 Gourvika Kumar is a third year Politics and International Relations student at the University of Sydney. Her academic interests focus on industrial relations and migrant policy.

Further contributor: Dr Jaime Arturo Padilla Ugarte is a PhD graduate from the University of Sydney. His research focus is on immigration policy and agenda setting.

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