The other Eurostars: lifestyle migration, class and race among vocationally trained Italians

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the aspirations for adventure, cosmopolitanism and self-exploration among non-graduate EU migrants from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds. Drawing on interviews with Italians who moved to England after the 2008 economic crisis, and focusing on participants with vocational school diplomas, the article explores participants’ lifestyle imaginaries, how these contextualise participants’ economic concerns, and how they are negotiated in classed, racialised and gendered migrations. The findings reveal that these ‘other Eurostars’ come from class fractions endowed with relative, but unequally distributed, economic security and lower institutionalised cultural capital. This has a significant bearing on their motivations and experiences of migration, but without reducing them to mere economic instrumentalism. Indeed, participants approach employment as a means of self-realisation and status distinction, following aspirations that the extant literature ascribes to graduate migrants. The article contributes to lifestyle migration and intra-EU migration studies by revealing the centrality of non-economic motivations among less privileged EU migrants and showing that individualisation, as a late-modern project, is central to their migrations, but that it takes classed, racialised and gendered forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Lifestyle migration
• class
• race
• individualisation
• Italian migrants

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive comments and Berenice Scandone for the helpful feedback on an earlier version. Thanks also to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the research.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Enzo’s investment in the notion of meritocracy could be a defence mechanism towards the experience of social immobility: a way of maintaining a sense of ‘normalcy’ vis-à-vis the challenges of migration (López Rodríguez 2010). However, the idea of meritocracy was widespread among participants, including those who experienced smooth occupational mobility. It is thus difficult to connect it only with experiences of downward social mobility (see Varriale 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (UK) under a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2015–18)