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ABSTRACT
Contemporary youth migrations are invested with hopeful connotations about potential, transformation and the future. For young people, migration is purportedly directed to enhancing life chances through exposure to diverse places, accumulation of social and cultural capital and opportunities for self-reflection. At the same time, however, youth migration occurs within uneven social and economic circumstances, and many young people today are on the move exactly because of present precarity and uncertain futures. Because of this youth migration also involves fraudulent intermediation, oppressive life and work situations and excessive indebtedness. This paper addresses the manner that hope emerges in relation to such disruption by exploring the narratives of young adults holding temporary study and work visas in Auckland, New Zealand. These accounts reveal both specific hopes expressed in migration – education, residency rights – as well as feelings of hopefulness. In many instances, however, hopes and hopefulness emerge specifically in relation to personal difficulties in ways that question the marking of hope as a positive emotion. Through this case, the paper argues that there is a need to re-evaluate hope in youth migration and pay greater attention to its role in generating and sustaining migration that can be both empowering and marginalising.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants in this research for sharing their stories of migration and their hopes for the future. Thanks are also due to Roger Baars, Madeleine Morey, Yu Shi and Bingyu Wang for their research assistance work. The final paper has benefited from the comments of two anonymous reviewers and the editorial advice provided by the guest editors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Francis L. Collins is Professor of Geography and Director of the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis at the University of Waikato.