This volume explores the experiences of a wide variety of middle-class migrant groups across the globe, including ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ building new businesses in cosmopolitan neighbourhoods in Sydney; Chinese grandparents shuttling between Australia, China and Singapore to support their extended families; well-off young Indians in Mumbai strategising their future education pathways overseas; and Japanese mothers finding ways to belong in a London middle-class neighbourhood. This book asks how relatively privileged migrant groups negotiate their life trajectories, relationships and aspirations while ‘on the move’ and how they transform the communities and societies that they move between across time and space. The book’s chapters consider motives for migration, as well as experiences of risk, uncertainty and insecurity in diverse local contexts. A fresh look at the migration of those who possess skills and resources that can bring about significant economic, social and cultural change, this book engages critically with the notions of ‘middling’ migration, social mobility and mobile privilege in the global context of hardening borders and immigration complexity. It will appeal to scholars with interests in contemporary forms of migration and mobility and their local and transnational consequences.

This volume explores the experiences of a wide variety of middle-class migrant groups across the globe, including 'ethnic entrepreneurs' building new businesses in cosmopolitan neighbourhoods in Sydney; Chinese grandparents shuttling between Australia, China and Singapore to support their extended families; well-off young Indians in Mumbai strategising their future education pathways overseas; and Japanese mothers finding ways to belong in a London middle-class neighbourhood. This book asks how relatively privileged migrant groups negotiate their life trajectories, relationships and aspirations while 'on the move' and how they transform the communities and societies that they move between across time and space. The book's chapters consider motives for migration, as well as experiences of risk, uncertainty and insecurity in diverse local contexts. A fresh look at the migration of those who possess skills and resources that can bring about significant economic, social and cultural change, this book engages critically with the notions of 'middling' migration, social mobility and mobile privilege in the global context of hardening borders and immigration complexity. It will appeal to scholars with interests in contemporary forms of migration and mobility and their local and transnational consequences.

This book explores the complex category of the 'skilled migrant,' drawing on multi-sited narrative interviews with migrants who have all lived in Australia at some point in their lives (as an origin and/or destination). Developing the more nuanced concept of the 'mobile settler', it shows how becoming a skilled migrant is not just a political and economic determination of knowledge and human capital but a complex negotiation of contexts - immigration contexts, social locations, qualifications and skills, as well as personal ties. Belying the simple binaries of official visa categories, these diverse contexts of migrant experience are central to the ways migrants construct their personal histories and negotiate their shifting attachments to home and belonging over time and space. By highlighting how migrants imagine their own complex social, cultural, national, professional and linguistic identities and pathways, this book extends the agent-centred approaches to global mobility and transnationalism that have emerged in cultural studies and social and cultural geography in recent years, according greater recognition to the individualised, local and lived experiences of global migration and thus engaging more deeply with global concerns about increased mobility and the challenges it represents.