Unpacking ‘status migration
The racialized status politics of ‘skill’ in French-Maghrebi expatriation to Dubai
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6173765 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jaafar Alloul (0000-0003-3781-4182, KU Leuven, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 31-54 |
| Publication date | 2021-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Transitions Journal of Transient Migration (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2397-7159 • E-ISSN: 2397-7140 |
| Publisher | Intellect (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1386/tjtm_00030_1 |
| OpenAlex | W3177293036 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 39 |
This ethnographic article details the resettlement process of Mounir, a French citizen of Maghrebi background migrating from Paris to Dubai. In so doing, it examines how social status formation plays out in the context of skilled labour migration between France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing on semi-structured interviews and multi-sited participant observation, it questions human capital theory’s premise that ‘skills’ largely consist of a transposable set of objective technical qualifications. Instead, it finds that any effective validation of skill sets encompasses ‘claims-making’ processes that are co-dependent on social hierarchies of place, such as citizenship, class and race. The ‘expatriate’ portrait presented here demonstrates how tertiary-educated members of the Euro-Maghrebi minority engage in transcontinental migration not only as a way of dealing with hampered economic conversion yields of Bourdieusian capital forms in their home societies, but equally to renegotiate a more comprehensive transformation of social status. By describing Mounir’s hybrid repositioning at the interstices of more dominant status markers in Dubai, this article theorizes ‘status migration’, a transnational process of human mobility, characterized by the skilful propensity of acting-by-moving from the part of (racially) degraded citizens in dealing with the status deficiencies specific to them in their home societies
Context (archaeology · Economic growth · Economics · Ethnography · Expatriate · Geography · Human capital · Participant observation · Political science · Politics · Premise · Social capital · Social reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender
Contract Labour and Debt Bondage in the Arab Gulf States. Policies and Practices within the Kafala System
Introduction
Expatriate, migrant? The social life of migration categories and the polyvalent mobility of race
‘Moving to stay in the same place?’ Academics and theatrical artists as exemplars of the ‘mobile middle’
Game of labels
Race, space, place
Placing Transnational Migrants through Comparative Research
Japan as an ‘Emerging Migration State’
Crafting the Neoliberal State
France and the Unknown Second Generation
The “Tiering” of Citizenship and Residency and the “Hierarchization” of Migrant Communities
Bright vs. blurred boundaries
Identity, Community and Belonging in gcc States
Policing labour in empire
The Dubai Model
Leaving Europe, Aspiring Access
The failure of the importation of ethno-racial statistics in Europe
Unpacking ‘status migration
Tourism Imaginaries
Brokers, channels, infrastructure
Privileged Mobilities
Class and status
Studying embodied encounters
New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites
Theorising the power of citizenship as claims-making
Social construction of skill
The mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers
Expatriate labour markets in rapidly globalising cities
Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe
The Social Morphology of Skilled Migration
Condition de classe et position de classe
A not so multi-sited ethnography of a not so imagined community
Migrating Cultural Capital
Expatriate Communities
From spatial turn to mobilities turn
The upcoming new elite among children of immigrants
The minority culture of mobility of France's upwardly mobile descendants of North African immigrants
The 'other' looks back
The Stickiness of Race
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |