Migratory class-making in global Asian cities: the European mobile middle negotiating ambivalent privilege in Tokyo, Singapore, and Dubai

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the fraught status paradoxes and settlement impediments of European migrants in Asian cities like Tokyo, Singapore, and Dubai. Global European emigration is predominantly imagined as professional ‘expatriation’, framed as temporary if not steeped in linear career pathways of manifest privilege. The implied bifurcation between voluntary European mobilities and economic migrations from the Global South is complicated here by foregrounding the existential aspirations of middling European emigrants who are anxious about their future class position in Europe and therefore resettle along a wider trans-Asian economic corridor. While this European mobile middle retains global advantages in terms of transnational circulation and entry by virtue of their European citizenship capital, they face under-documented legal hurdles and social precarities in their quest for overseas permanence. We conceptualise this transcontinental process, marked by a complex set of mobility ambivalences over time, as ‘migratory class-making’, the distinctive aspirations of which elucidate that structural socioeconomic incentives are equally bound up with contemporary forms of European migration. Enmeshed in this global process of migratory class-making lays a European predicament that speaks of blighted existential hopes about middle-class stability imagined to be the ideal result of multi-year investments in class-making across Europe and Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• EU mobile middle
• Asian global cities
• migratory class-making
• status ambivalences
• middle-class aspirations

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany under Grant Number [01UL2003B] and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under Grant Kiban C [Grant Number 15K03884].