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 or 'middling' migrant groups across the globe, asking how relatively privileged migrant groups negotiate their life trajectories and aspirations while 'on the move' and how they potentially transform the communities and societies that they move both from and to.

Transforming the Politics of Mobility and Migration in Aotearoa New Zealand is a future-focused edited collection that formulates alternative paradigms that can lead to a more just and ethical politics of mobility and migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Examining a variety of topics, the book addresses the challenges of structural discrimination, integration and migrant rights framed within larger regional and global concerns. Collectively, the contributors advance perspectives on social justice and migrant rights, specifically addressing issues of ethics, collective well-being and solidarities. The collection brings together leading and early career scholars paired with practitioners in the migrations sector. Developing conceptual knowledge in migration studies, it fills a gap in the sparse literature on the politics of migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. While theoretically engaged and of value to the research community, the book also follows recent calls to better communicate the complexities of migration to policy makers, with accessible chapters that address a range of issues faced by migrants and speak to a wide audience.

The book presents insights from a mixed methodology study that examines recent mobility patterns exhibited by the middle classes. Its major contributions are two-fold: theoretically, it advances the conceptualisation of middle class migration; empirically, it analyses the migratory motivations of a relatively new Latin-American group in Australia. The accelerated insertion of the Mexican society into globalisation processes is strongly linked not only to the growing participation in migration phenomena but also to people’s outflow to new destinations. Although studies of Mexican emigration are vast, research on Mexican skilled migration is scarce, and research that focuses on mobility to non-USA destinations is even scarcer. Mexicans are a relatively new addition to Australia’s multicultural society, and little is known about this group’s profile and why they choose to migrate to Australia. Employing a mixed methodology approach, the book provides a comprehensive portrait of migration in a new group.

This book is an ethnography of urban-to-urban migration and its role in middle-class formation in Ethiopia. Through an examination of the intersections and tensions between physical movement and social mobility, it considers how young Tigrayan people’s migration between urban centres made them distinct from both international migrants and non-migrants. Based on fieldwork in Adigrat and Addis Ababa, it focuses on these young people’s notions of progress, experiences of higher education and ethnic tensions to demonstrate how their movements enabled them to enhance their economic, social and symbolic capital while their cultural capital remained largely unchanged. The book provides new insights into the opportunities and constraints for upward social mobility and argues that the emergence of shared characteristics among urban-to-urban migrants led to the formation of a group that can be described as a middle class in Ethiopia.

Explore the transformative potential of international students in shaping the politics of higher education. Moving beyond a focus on the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of the international student experience, this book breaks new ground by examining diverse forms of international student activism, advocacy, and political engagement.

This open access book brings novel perspectives to the scholarship on transnational migration. The book stresses the complexity of migration trajectories and proposes multi-sited field studies to capture this complexity. Its constituent chapters offer examples of onward migration spanning all major world regions. The contents exemplify a range of interdisciplinary approaches, including both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The result is an impressive remapping and reconceptualisation of global migration and mobility, of interest to students and policy-makers alike.

This book examines an emergent pattern of international student mobility: that of international students from across the African continent who are enrolled on degree programmes at Chinese universities. China is among the most popular destination countries for African students, yet there has been little research to-date into this emergent mobility pattern. Drawing on data from a series of interviews, the book focuses on the specific modalities of integration into the global economy of both the sending region and the host country, and examines how these shape the decision-making, experiences, and future aspirations of mobile students. It also highlights how incipient flows of international student migrants, such as those between various African countries and China, are calling into question a number of the axioms around the study of international study mobility that were developed with reference to more established migration patterns, which tend to flow from other regions to the West. These include, for example, the idea that international students are generally privileged members of the global middle class who seek an education abroad as part of a strategy to accumulate cultural capital and reproduce social privilege. This novel work is of interest to researchers in human geography, sociology, development studies, migration studies, and particularly those studying China-Africa relations.

As corporations ramp up «workforce globalization», social entrepreneurs use online digital platforms to create offline social events where foreigners can meet face-to-face. Through ethnographic study, Erika Polson illustrates how, as a new generation of expatriates uses location technologies to create mobile «places, » a new global middle class is emerging.

Studying the entangled histories of the areas conceptualized as Middle Eastern and North Atlantic World in the interwar years is crucial to understanding the two areas' respective and common histories until today. However, many of the manifold connections, exchanges, and entanglements between the areas have not received thorough scholarly attention yet. The contributors to this volume address this by bringing together various innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. They thereby further the understanding of the two areas' entangled histories and diversify prevailing concepts and narratives. Through this, the volume also offers enriching insights into the global history of the early 20th century.