Social Class and International Migration: Female Migrants’ Narratives of Social Mobility and Social Status

Abstract

It is well established that international migration involves not only geographical but also social mobility, as migrants achieve an improved socioeconomic position through increased economic opportunities, or experience downwards mobility as a result of not being able to transfer their economic, social or educational resources to the receiving country context. While the social mobility that accompanies migration is often considered in the migration literature, the implications for migrants' social class positioning has been less of a focus. This paper addresses this gap by looking at how female migrants in the UK evaluate social class trajectories as part of their biographical narratives. The paper brings wider sociological debates about class into a discussion about female migrants' socioeconomic trajectories and social status. By considering material as well as symbolic aspects of class divisions along with the transnational context in which migrants are embedded, the paper highlights the complexity of how migrants are positioned in class terms. It also looks at how class is subjectively interpreted, and outlines different ways in which migrants evaluate their class trajectories, for instance by conceiving of migration from a long-term perspective and in the context of the family unit, by emphasising different quality-of-life aspects, and by challenging dominant meanings associated with class hierarchies. The paper emphasises the intersection of class and gender in female migrants' experiences, and argues that exploring subjective accounts of class provide useful insights into the complexity of how class is experienced in the context of international migration.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 63 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.