Australian immigration regimes have shifted from a paradigm of permanent settlement and full citizenship to one in which migrants experience a range of temporary statuses and ‘gradations’ of rights. This paper situates the large numbers of noncitizens now living and working in Australia within the workings of ‘millennial capitalism’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001) - a process that renders labour invisible and foregrounds citizenships of consumption and of contract. I argue that temporary immigration regimes produce noncitizenship with two main effects: the significance and the vulnerability of noncitizen labour in Australia is obscured; and the noncitizen identity is depoliticized, to minimise resistance to the ‘intimacies’ of state power on noncitizen lives. I then look at some of the incipient solidarities and acts of resistance of noncitizens in Australia to these intimacies of power, and their potential to meaningfully transcend or transform the norms of consumption and contract that shape citizenship.
