Keywords

7.1 Introduction

Transnational career and family strategies involve ongoing negotiations of intra-family gender relations and broader socio-political contexts, barriers and opportunities. This chapter is told through the lens of the female member of two heterosexual couples. The first couple (Nahid and Amit) were born in Bangladesh and have, thus far, lived in five countries with multiple long-term return settlements to Australia, where they are currently living with their children (who were born in three different countries). The second couple (Sophie and Daniel) have lived in four countries as a couple and are both currently living in the UK with their two children, where they are going through the process of applying for British citizenship. Sophie was born in Australia, Daniel in Ghana; their first child was born in Australia and their second in the UK. Through an analysis of the experiences of these couples, this chapter traces the shifts in their pathways and decision-making. They have experienced a degree of career decline at significant life-course moments, such as having and raising children, which has resulted in gender-differentiated career progression. Yet while these couples experience structural and familial constraints in realising their professional aspirations through migration, they also seek to re-negotiate these tensions over time and through multiple migrations.

The analysis draws upon data from a longitudinal research project which examined the experiences of a group of migrants who were, at the time of the first research interview, tertiary educated, had professional experience in their fields and had links to Australia (as an origin and/or destination) at some point in their lives. The research aimed to understand specific forms of migration that are ongoing and unfinished rather than more traditional and permanent forms of migration that are characterised by linear, settler narratives. The research also examined the relational, emotional and intimate dimensions of migrant lives and belonging. As skilled and educated migrants, the participants involved in this research can be described as relatively privileged. Yet their stories show that privilege intersects in complex ways with the shifting ‘value’ of educational and professional experience and with gendered, classed and racialised identities, transforming over time and in relationship to different settlement contexts. Participants’ experiences highlight the often contradictory and sometimes simultaneous experiences of flexibility and risk, social mobility and ongoing precarity, belonging and exclusion, over the course of their lives. This chapter contributes to an emerging scholarship on onward migration trajectories and the broad spectrum of experiences within the migrant ‘middle’ and the varied constraints and affordances this positionality can involve (Marcu, 2019; Scott, 2019; Robertson & Roberts, 2022).

Migrants’ sense of belonging to the places in which they live is often fragile, where their social positioning can frame them such that they are constructed as inadequate or non-citizens, both practically and emotionally. Through an intersectional lens, I offer a reframing of how decision-making can shift between partners relationally, temporally and spatially. The development of an intersectional research lens – that includes a range of interweaving social hierarchies (such as race, class, gender and religion) – emerged, in response to critiques, by ‘feminists of colour’ and transnational feminists seeking to understand the complex layering of ‘privilege and subordination of diverse men and women’ (Purkayastha, 2010, 30). This perspective has been generative for scholars examining contemporary experiences of migration where people’s lives are constructed through relations that span transnational contexts (Purkayastha, 2010). Multiple levels of people’s experiences are structured through such an environment of privilege and subjugation – their personal biographies; the way their ‘community’ experience and cultural context are shaped by race, class, religion, sexuality and gender amongst other social positionings; and the systemic hierarchies embedded within the fabric of social institutions (Collins, 1990, 227).

In this chapter I am seeking to make visible the ways in which intersecting positionalities shape and transform experiences over time, with some positionalities having greater or lesser salience at different times and in different places (e.g. religion and spirituality were important factors in Nahid’s migration story but not central to every relocation). I acknowledge that the chapter draws on the concepts of both racialisation and ethnicity and that participants’ interview excerpts often use both terms interchangeably. My usage does not seek to equate the two but, instead, takes the perspective that racialisation is more socially imposed and hierarchical whereas ethnicity can be more fluid and fragmented and encompass multiple attachments. To a greater extent, ‘ethnicity’ can be negotiated through individual preferences and identity practices, while also acknowledging that both terms (race and ethnicity) have been used to subjugate people. I similarly take the perspective that religion is commonly used to describe institutionalised behaviour and spirituality as the practices of an individual.

The first section traces some of the current literature that conceptualises middling and ongoing migration as well as research that brings together space, time and migration to examine the relational and familial dimensions of migrant lives and decision-making. I then explain the methodological approach adopted in my wider research project from which the empirical data in this chapter are derived. Through detailed case studies, the third section takes an intersectional and spatio-temporal approach to analysing the stories of these two couples in order to examine experiences of ongoing mobility, showing how structural constraints, emotions and varied social locations and identities intersect in shaping family roles and decision-making processes.

7.2 Middling Mobility, Onward Migration and Transnational Families

Conradson and Latham’s (2005) early framing of middling migrants described them as usually, though not always, well-educated and as occupying a middle-class socio-economic status. While useful, this definition resulted in the demarcation of a wide segment of migrants, where more-recent studies have begun to show that, far from being a homogenous category, the ‘middle’ includes a diverse range of encounters, non-linear movements, varied migrant classifications, shifting class statuses and mixed experiences of temporariness and permanency (Scott, 2019; Robertson & Roberts, 2022). In addition to spatiality, the ‘temporal turn’ in migration studies increasingly contests binaries such as student/worker, tourist/worker, skilled/unskilled and temporary/permanent within contemporary migration policy, where experiences of the ‘middle’ can be conceptualised as dynamic and multiply constructed (Parutis, 2014; Rutten & Verstappen, 2014; Baas, 2017; Scott, 2019; Robertson, 2020). By understanding the pathways of middling transnationals over their life-course, a broader and more-mobile range of relationships with place and time than those attributed to isolated categories like managerial elites or lower-waged labour sectors becomes evident. Rather than a unified classification, this ‘middling’ space involves varied social locations and identities, socio-economic statuses, migration classifications and contexts. It also involves diverse mobility motivations including international education (Robertson, 2014), working holidays (Clarke, 2005), lifestyle (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016) and skilled employment (Ryan & Mulholland, 2014) as well as tactical mobility where people utilise a range of visa classifications, which may belie their skills and experience, in order to negotiate immigration governance structures in pursuing long-term settlement options (Roberts, 2021).

Through life-course approaches, an increasing recognition of much research on the experiences of middling migrants is the ways in which people navigate a range of spatial pathways that are ongoing and unfinished. As a consequence, a myriad of terms have been developed to capture the processual and open-ended nature of mobility pathways, as pointed out by Ahrens and King in the opening chapter of this book. For example, the term ‘step-wise migration’ has been used to describe how individuals and families undertake migration pathways that involve a hierarchical dimension of decision-making, strategically relocating to destination countries, working their way up to a final migration location, ‘accumulating sufficient migrant capital in the process so as to eventually gain legal entry into their preferred destinations, often in the West’ (Paul, 2018, 1842; see also Conway, 1980). The intentionality and pre-determination of stepping through a range of destination countries distinguishes this form of migration from onward and ongoing migration trajectories, which often hinge more on chance and a real-time responsiveness to changing personal and political contexts. However, distinctions between on-going and step-wise can become blurred if we take account of shifts in decision-making and circumstances over time. What began as step-wise migration may transform into on-going or onward migration and may not be hierarchical but involve a series of returns to countries of origin when initial plans do not eventuate, new professional opportunities emerge or the needs of family transform plans (Roberts, 2021). These intermediate steps, which can result in multiple moves between countries over the life course, have been theorised through a variety of terms including onward and step-wise as well as serial, multiple and transit migration (Ossman, 2013; Ahrens et al., 2016; Paul, 2017).

Paul and Yeoh (2021) recently proposed a new umbrella term, ‘multinational migrations’, to capture such complex movements across multiple destinations, which are subject to people’s personal imaginations and aspirations as much as shaped by migration regimes and infrastructures. This framing valuably captures multiple national shifts over the life course, though it does not necessarily capture the multiple sub-national shifts (both physical relocations and shifts in migrant classification and subjectivity) that may occur as migrants pursue their migration ‘projects’. By contrast, ‘staggered’ (Robertson, 2014), ‘multi-stage’ (Mares, 2018) or ‘complex’ (Erdal et al. this book, Chap. 2) migration trajectories also refer to internal navigations between visa categories in a destination country which disrupt linear settler-citizen pathways. Staggered migration shows how migrants navigate not only multiple migrations between destination countries but also multiple migration statuses and locations within those migration countries (e.g. from international students, to graduate temporary workers, to permanent residents) or from regional to urban contexts, as migrants utilise migration policies to increase their chances for long-term residency options.

While terms and their emphases might differ, what is common across this body of research is that single-origin-single-destination models for thinking about movement have become increasingly problematised (see Ahrens and King, Chap. 1, this collection). People frequently adopt onwards international migration tactics, seeking to leverage the social, cultural, economic and networked capital they have accrued in successive destination countries to advance their prospects of moving to the next location. Sometimes this can be a conscious and deliberate strategy and at other times responsive to changing circumstances, experiences of exclusion and discrimination and chance events and opportunities, often negotiated within family decision-making contexts. In particular, feminist accounts of migration have critiqued the literature that fails to acknowledge the role of gender in skilled labour mobility (Kofman, 2000; Nagel, 2005). Not only are the stories of skilled women not heavily featured within the dominant narratives of skilled and middling migration but also women have rarely been understood as active agents in migration decision-making over time and space. The literature on skilled migration was historically a story of male migration, with women occupying the status of the ‘tied’, ‘accompanying’ or ‘trailing’ migrant (Boyle et al., 1999; Cooke, 2001). As a consequence, many women experience migrations of ‘risk’ as they negotiate significant career disruption and, often, increases in domestic responsibilities. Kofman (2014) and Raghuram (2008) argue that attention must be paid to skilled women as movers in their own right as well as co-movers. People experience migration through positionalities shaped by complex intersections between classed, gendered and racialised identities. Differentially positioned migrants are able to enact varying degrees of temporal, spatial and relational agency to support entry, exit and stasis in destination countries and labour markets, by ‘choice and constraint’ (Buckley et al., 2017; McIlwaine & Bunge, 2019).

Research has long focused on experiences of place, examining the ‘spatial reorganization of social relations’ (Massey, 1994, 4) and how people, ideas, objects and relationships transcend borders and can be multiply located (May & Thrift, 2001; Walsh, 2009). More recently, there has been a shift to bring migration, intimacy and time together, to take account of the temporalities associated with transnational families and sustaining intimacy over time and at a distance, where separation can be prolonged and migration futures uncertain (Vogel, 2016; Acedera & Yeoh, 2019; Robertson, 2020; Yeoh et al., 2020). A common theme in this literature is an examination of how relationships are maintained in the absence of face-to-face presence and the strategies for sustaining connections through emotional labour at a distance. This has included a focus on how domestic home life can be maintained through communication technologies, connecting geographically distant family members, as well as how this is impacted by social inequalities and the degree of network capital one possesses (Acedera & Yeoh, 2019). Unlike research that focuses on caring at a distance, this chapter examines geographically proximate romantic partnerships where couples usually migrate together, enmeshing people’s lives, choices and futures through the interplay of individual and dual desires and aspirations and within immigration governance structures which dictate where they can go, when they can stay and under what conditions.

7.3 Methods

While the focus on ‘couples’ was not part of the initial design of the wider research project and therefore only two interviews were undertaken with both members of a couple, it was an area that emerged across all interviews as an important factor shaping migrant experiences and decision-making. For the two migration stories told in this chapter, interviews were only conducted with the female member of the couple, who represented the experiences of both them and their partners. I acknowledge that not interviewing both members of the couple is a limitation. However, the longitudinal nature of this research, which included multiple interviews with the female member of each couple, did provide valuable insights into the perspectives of their male partners. In addition, centring female voices in narratives of migration is an important counter-response to the over-emphasis on the perspectives of male ‘lead’ migrants in many previous studies.

Participants in this research were tertiary-educated, had a minimum of 3 years’ professional experience in their fields and had lived at some stage of their lives in Australia, which allowed for multiple relocations, attachments and identifications. Interviews began in 2010 and informal conversations were had with some participants annually, up to 2017. Participants were asked to provide retrospective narratives of their migration experiences in order to capture the shifts in their migration pathways and the differing contexts of their mobility, not just during the data-collection period but over the duration of their lives. In the first round of formal in-depth narrative interviews conducted in 2010, 33 participants were interviewed. They were then invited to participate in an additional formal interview in 2012 (n = 25) and again in 2017 (n = 14).Footnote 1

As participants were not situated in one location, interviews were conducted face-to-face and via Skype and email. Initial interviewees were invited to participate in the research by way of the researchers’ personal and professional contacts and their networks, as well as through migrant community groups in Adelaide, Australia. At the time of the first interview, the participants ranged in age from their late 20s to their late 60s, with the majority aged between 35 and 45. The participants were born in a range of countries including Australia, Canada, India, China, Venezuela, England, Scotland, Poland, Bosnia, Germany, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Finland, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Brazil. They were also trained in a diverse range of occupations (e.g. as academics, teachers, scientists, managers, social workers, engineers, chefs and nurses and in finance and logistics, communications, public policy and international development). Participants spent between three and 10 years on temporary visas in a range of destination countries, often tactically transitioning across varied visa classifications (e.g. working holiday, student, spousal, bridging and permanent residency visas). The interviews were conducted in English, were audio-recorded and lasted between one and two hours; interview questions revolved around participants’ motivations for migration and their migration histories over time and space, strategies for moving (visas, etc.) and future migration intentions. Participants were also asked to narrate their memories of arrivals and departures, their material practices of homemaking and belonging and the ways in which their social and cultural identities shifted over time and interacted with different relocation contexts. The interviews were coded into emergent themes and all names used in the interview extracts are pseudonyms.Footnote 2

7.4 ‘Not This Time, I Won’t Go’: The Enmeshing and Re-negotiation of Migrant Futures Over Time and Space

Through a spatial and temporal lens, Nahid and Amit’s experiences both reinforce and problematise the label of the ‘trailing spouse’. Nahid’s ethnic background is Bengali. She was born and raised in a Muslim family in Bangladesh and attended English-speaking schools and colleges run by Christian-American missionaries, in Dhaka in East Pakistan (which later became Bangladesh in 1971) and Karachi, in West Pakistan (now Pakistan). Nahid married in 1981 while she was studying for a Master of Arts at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. After her marriage, she relocated to the United States on a spousal student (F-1) visa to join her husband, who was pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Texas. She lived with her husband in the US from 1981 to 1982 and studied history at the University of Texas. After her husband’s completion of a PhD in Petroleum Engineering, they moved to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia where they remained from 1982 to 1987. They moved so that he could take up a professional position in his field and improve their economic circumstances. In addition to employment opportunities, they were also motivated to leave the US because of the temporary nature of their student visas as well as the degree of culture shock they experienced between the American culture and their own. They relocated to Dhahran with their Bangladeshi passports, accompanied by a work visa. Nahid expressed how happy she was to be ‘living in the Muslim world again’ and that her stay in Saudi Arabia also gave her the opportunity to ‘perform the Umrah’, a pilgrimage to Mecca undertaken outside the prescribed Hajj period. For Nahid and her husband, the motivation to relocate to Saudi Arabia was based on cultural and religious factors as well as economic opportunities (Kabir, 2007). After 5 years, Nahid’s husband decided that there was not enough employment security for them to stay in Saudi Arabia, which would force them to leave if his contract expired. While Nahid was reluctant to migrate away from a Muslim country, in 1987 they decided to apply to migrate to Australia on a skilled-migrant visa to try and secure a stronger economic future for their family. During this time she was the fulltime carer of their children. Nahid said it was her husband who largely determined the decision to move and that she complied with some reluctance because, like their first move to the US, they were again moving to a non-Muslim country, which would be culturally different from their original homeland. Nahid’s husband won a position working in the oil and gas industry and, after 3 years living in Brisbane and Adelaide, they gained Australian citizenship.

In 1990, Nahid and her husband and children moved again, this time to Muscat in Oman (carrying their Australian passports and a work visa for Oman). Their children were born in three different countries (Bangladesh, Australia and Oman) and all have Australian citizenship. As a couple, they have had different motivations for migration. For Nahid, the move to Oman was ‘a spiritual move back to a Muslim country’, allowing her to expose her children to their Islamic culture. For her husband, it was a ‘financial move’ prompted by an attractive job offer. However, there was long-term job insecurity in Muscat similar to that in Dhahran, where temporary skilled workers were only employed on a contract basis with no pathways towards citizenship and, after 5 years, they returned to Australia where Nahid pursued her Master’s and PhD degrees. She described how she had never desired or aspired to undertake a PhD or work in academia.

My husband had a PhD and a ‘good job’. Living in the Middle East I was a very happy young mum and I’m glad I did that at that time because that’s the time when the children need you but, when we moved to Brisbane, my husband bought a house very close to the University and he said, you know, ‘The university is very close, perhaps you can, if you want, pursue your studies’. At that time I had my Master’s. I was not very happy with his comment. I used to think, ‘Why is he telling me this, I don’t want to go back to the university’ but, when my youngest son started going to pre-school, then I started getting bored… I had so much time to myself… So I went to the university… and that’s how I started… My husband is also very progressive-minded, which again helped me to come to where I am. But it also depends, there could be women who are very smart and who want to have a career but they may not be privileged to have a home environment which gives them the facility or the opportunity. So I think I have been very privileged in that respect.

For many participants in the broader project, family and career timelines intersected, with women often experiencing a career decline and a slowing of their previous professional trajectory whilst they undertook the majority of the family’s childcare. In contrast, Nahid developed her aspirations for further education and professional development through her mobility. It was only once her children were in school that she began to seek these opportunities as she had more time on her hands. In 2004, Nahid and her family moved to Perth. In 2005, her husband moved to the UK for employment but this time Nahid did not relocate as she had developed ‘strong connections’ to Perth, both personally and professionally.

I had my work here and I said, ‘Not this time, I won’t go’ because it’s again another effort to establish the new place. It’s the children, it’s our self and it’s just, it’s our belonging.

While Nahid belonged to a patriarchally organised Muslim family, where her husband was the central decision-maker, her community and research activities also opened up paths for renegotiating circumstances over time. She secured a research position at a university in Perth (2005–2009) and her husband returned after 1 year working in the UK. While based in Perth, Nahid won a visiting fellowship at a university in the USA (August 2009–July 2011). Later, in 2011, she moved back to Australia to work as a senior research fellow (2011–2015). Nahid’s migration story highlights how decisions around migration are linked to life-course transitions, such as having children and deciding where to raise them. While the discourses around skilled and middling migration are often individualistic, suggesting that migrants design their own biographies and trajectories, in reality these decisions are often made in family contexts and in response to what countries offer in terms of visa conditions and economic opportunities as well as in relation to gendered, spiritual and emotional desires and expectations (i.e. the desire to raise their children in a Muslim environment). Through migration, many women experience significant career disruption and, often, increases in domestic responsibilities, despite their high level of educational and professional experience (Ho, 2006; Suto, 2009). This re-orientation of women away from paid work and towards the domestic sphere is one of the outcomes that may arise, at least temporarily, for skilled female migrants who relocate with their partners (Riaño & Baghdadi, 2007; Shen, 2013). While international mobility capital (e.g. international qualifications, networks and professional experience) is seen as a desirable attribute, it can also be highly gendered, reproducing the dichotomy of public masculinity (during early migrations, Nahid’s spouse relocated for work or study) and private femininity (during early migrations, Nahid followed and undertook the majority of the childcare), even when they were initially a dual-career household in Bangladesh. However, while Nahid may have experienced some structural and gendered constraints in realising her professional aspirations through migration, she also exerts agency, negotiating the circumstances of their professional and family lives, over time and in different contexts. If we were to take a snapshot approach to Nahid’s life, she may be constructed as a ‘trailing spouse’, particularly in her early migrations. As time passed, she gained educational capital (a Master’s and a PhD in Australia) and developed stronger professional and personal ties to her home in Australia, making the decision not to move to the UK when her husband did. Their second migration to the US (2009–2011) was also instigated by Nahid so she could take up a research position. Shinozaki (2014) has described this as ‘pendulum mobility’ and ‘taking career turns’. Nahid’s experience shows how transnational migration, which involves career as well as cultural, spiritual and emotional considerations, requires continual negotiation rather than being fixed. While we cannot downplay the structural constraints (in terms of visa conditions) or gender and religious norms shaping family roles (in terms of who does the majority of the childcare), it is also important to make visible the agency of skilled women within family contexts where partners continually re-negotiate the changing expectations and needs of one another over time.

Over multiple interviews, Nahid often described how she took pride in her multiple identities – Bangladeshi (her heritage), Muslim (her religion/Muslim umma) and Australian (her nationality) – and believes that her transnational mobility has ‘added to [her] self-esteem and feelings of stability’, rather than dislocation, wherever she may live. In a seemingly contradictory way, it has been experiences of ongoing mobility that have allowed her to establish belonging in various destinations.

I would consider myself as a trans-migrant, who has lived in so many places, learned and cherished so many cultures. When I was in Saudi Arabia or in Oman, when I saw other people’s cultures, I respected that, I still have that in my memory. That has added to my career, in living in a new country, so it is a cultural capital not a cultural deficit. I would consider myself as a trans-migrant, whose roots are in Bangladesh, where I was born and raised, but along with it, with different places, carrying cultural capital. I have been very privileged and have interacted and integrated wherever I went.

Nahid views her multiple relocations as facilitating important resources and cultural capital that accumulate over time and space, travelling with her and facilitating easier integration into a range of settlement countries. She also sees the contributions and connections which she makes to local communities through her research work as another important factor in developing a sense of ‘feeling at home’ in multiple places. However, as she acknowledges, not everyone is as able to easily carry cultural capital across borders. Classed, racialised and gendered identities intersect with levels of education and professional experience in differing ways and during different migrations, influencing the degree to which one can claim and feel a sense of belonging. Nahid reflects on her relative privilege in relation to being able to consider Australia home.

I can consider it home because I’m economically assured. My husband has a good job. We live in a prestigious northern suburb. So we are living in a very privileged condition. We don’t have to worry about financial matters or economic disadvantage. Our children went to private schools …I think that acceptance should come from within. But if I was living in a ghetto, in an enclaved environment, if my husband didn’t get a job, if my husband was an engineer but he was rejected for his colour or his name, my mentality, my temperament would have been very different. I would have been very non-accepting of other cultures. A lot of factors come into play. Or if I had, like, eight or 10 children or, say, a big family and my husband was very conservative, even if I had economic affluency, then I couldn’t have interacted with [other communities as much], so it is a lot of factors that can help someone to carry on with their cultural capital.

There exists a complex interplay of multiple markers of difference – like ‘race’, class and gender – that construct social positioning and the degree to which one can convert social and cultural resources into economic resources and a sense of belonging in various migration contexts (Anthias, 2001). Nahid and Amit’s experience has been one where their educational and professional resources have largely been valued in relocation contexts. Differential migrant incorporation depends on a range of intersecting factors or capitals – like language ability or accent and skill recognition – and the extent to which they can be carried across borders or that the economic position gained in one country can be utilised in another context (e.g. Nahid and her husband had enough economic capital from previous relocations to ensure their children had access to private education in Australia). Nahid also constructs new forms of migration-specific cultural capital over time and through multiple migrations (as a migrant who carries ‘cultural capital’ with her where her multiple interactions with diverse people and cultures allow for easier integration in new places). Nahid is able to mobilise these personal resources in improving their participation in labour markets and a sense of belonging in Australian society more generally. However, she acknowledges that had her family experienced racism, had fewer financial resources or lived in a more ethnically and economically ‘enclaved’ community, this may have influenced the degree of openness they felt towards other cultures and communities and their sense of belonging in various settlement countries. As Riaño and Baghdadi (2007, 181) suggest, ‘at any given time in an individual’s working lifetime, class, ethnicity, and gender may in fact take on positive or negative roles, depending on the socio-spatial context’. As the second migration story shows, Daniel (though economically privileged, skilled and educated), experienced racism in the UK, which has intensified following Brexit and in the context of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

7.5 ‘It Was Like They’d Never Met a Man Who Has Had Caring Responsibilities Before’: Entanglements of Gendered and Racialised Identities Within Family Contexts

Sophie was born in Adelaide, Australia. When she was 21, she travelled to Tanzania to work as a teacher for a year. She was motivated to live there because of a prior experience visiting Africa (Zimbabwe and Zambia) as an 18-year-old, during her first year of university. She loved the experience and knew that she wanted to return for a longer period of time once she completed her degree. When she returned to Australia and finished her undergraduate programme in Creative Arts, she enrolled in a Graduate Diploma in teaching so she could return to Africa as a qualified teacher. Once she finished her Diploma in Education, she was advised by friends and mentors to gain experience as a teacher in Australia first. While she took their advice and spent several years working in Australia, she didn’t enjoy it and so used her profession to fund her way through a Master’s in International Development with the intention of moving back to Africa. When Sophie finished her MA, she found it difficult to find work in Africa and her Master’s supervisor encouraged her to apply for a PhD instead, where she focused her research on Ghana. During her candidature she said she ‘got bored’ and decided to relocate to London for a few years and take a break from study. In London, she started working as an academic support officer in citizenship and human rights at a university. Whilst there, her manager encouraged her to complete her PhD. However, visa complications changed her plans. Sophie travelled to the UK on a Working Holiday Visa rather than through a skilled visa category. The week she was due to apply for a skilled migrant visa, the UK announced changes to the ‘points-based system’, which subsequently ‘created a backlog of six months for visa processing’. Sophie had run out of work rights on her WHV and had to leave. She did not want to return to Australia, saying ‘I didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore’ so, instead, travelled to Ghana to undertake her doctoral research. While there, Sophie met and fell in love with her husband, Daniel. They decided to both move back to Australia because obtaining visas for the UK was seen as too difficult for them – although getting a visa to Australia for her then-fiancé proved just as difficult. They ended up living in Kenya for 8 months waiting for their visas to clear. While Sophie loved living in Nairobi, Daniel did not, as she explains:

I realise now that my experience was different to his as I was always afforded a certain privilege as a white person in Africa. As a West African, he was more often discriminated against or insulted for not speaking the local language. So expectations on him were different to the expectations on me.

Their time in Nairobi underscores how couples can experience the same location in divergent ways – rather than a homogenous experience of belonging or not belonging, particularly as racialised identities interact with local contexts. Paradoxically, Sophie felt a sense of inclusion due to her ‘whiteness’ and not being a local, whereas Daniel was discriminated against for not being local enough. While living in Kenya, Sophie was also pregnant with their first child, which gave them the impetus to move back to Australia, as the medical appointments were too expensive and Daniel’s visa had finally been approved. The ability of Sophie to draw upon her Australian citizenship, allowing her and Daniel to return to Australia to make use of cheaper healthcare, intersects with academic discussions about transnational social protections (Faist & Bilecen, 2015). The cross-border social protection that Sophie and her family are afforded, as Australian citizens, to some degree reinforces existing inequalities previously framed within national welfare states around who is able to choose where to access the best and most affordable healthcare and education.

After 3 years in Australia, Sophie applied for and accepted an international development role in the UK. They both migrated there on a Tier Two Skilled-Migrant Visa. As well as deciding to relocate to access professional opportunities, she described how they were motivated to move to the UK because they felt it was more socially progressive and globally connected. Sophie said they were also motivated to leave because of Daniel’s experiences of racism in Australia.

My Ghanaian husband had some difficult encounters with racism in Australia – both outright and everyday racism – which was starting to wear thin. I also didn’t like my mixed-race daughter always being the only brown person in the room, which was probably mainly due to the work and social circles we seemed to fall into, as there are clearly a lot of brown people in Australia.

Feelings of racism from the host society resulted in the strengthening or redirecting of affective attachments to transnational social fields and destinations outside of Australia, in the hope that the same issues would not persist. While Sophie described motivations for relocation that included work opportunities, the decision to move was also closely intertwined with the personal and emotional experiences of her family. For her husband and her children, Sophie wanted to live in a place where she felt cultural and linguistic diversity was a more accepted and normalised experience. She felt that the UK presented this opportunity although she also acknowledges the recent return to forms of nationalist rhetoric, in a post-Brexit England, aimed at tightening borders and restricting immigration. Sophie’s experiences also show how ‘making homes’ varies at different life stages. When she was living overseas as a single person on a Working Holiday Visa, much of her sense of belonging was connected to the social group around her and having like-minded people to ‘have fun and experience that life with’. Now, as a mother and wife, she feels it is her small family unit that ‘makes a home together’ wherever they might be living. She makes migration decisions based on whether the location they live in is ‘open and accepting’ of her children.

I am a white Australian, with mixed-race children. I believe the fact that my children are mixed race is important to my migration decisions so, although it is their ethnic identity, it is also part of my decision-making around new homes and locations.

Sophie and Daniel have now been living in the UK for 6 years. Her work (focused on improving educational outcomes for people in Africa) previously required her to travel to either Africa or the US on a monthly basis. Because of the frequency of Sophie’s work-related travel, her husband has been the primary carer for both of their children for the majority of their early years, though he is also highly skilled and educated (a Master’s degree in Business). Sophie reflected on the intersections between employment and childcare for both Daniel and herself:

The issues around the gender pay gap cannot be resolved outside of the domestic labour issue. Men need to receive the same rights as women to parent their children. Women need to receive the same rights as men to pursue their careers. I think this intersects with gender more than migration. But there is some overlap. For example, because I was the skilled migrant (sponsored by my employer), Daniel had to move with no job and look after [our daughter] when we first moved to Oxford. At his first job interview they asked him thousands of questions on how he felt about taking a long break for caring responsibilities and they seemed to focus on it more than on his actual skills and work experience. It was like they'd never met a man who has had caring responsibilities before.

When skilled migrant women in the broader research project described their employment experiences, they said that their time out of the workforce caring for their children left ‘a huge gap in their CV’ which lowered their chances of employment and slowed their career progression. They were penalised by employers for not having recent experience or skills. Discussion of childcare, key to explaining this gap, was rarely acknowledged or discussed by their prospective employers. However, in reverse, Daniel wanted to discuss the relevancy of his skills and experience with prospective employers but they were instead fascinated by the time he had taken to care for their children – because it was seen as transgressing traditional gender norms related to the labour of childcare. This may not have increased his employment chances but it did make visible the important role of ‘caring’ in a way that women in the broader project did not experience in employment discussions. Yet Sophie has also suffered professionally because she is a mother. She describes how her employer has questioned her ability to undertake significant overseas travel, making a judgement that she should be at home with her children more – even though Sophie and Daniel negotiated within their family unit that he would take on the role of primary carer. For Sophie, employers saw an irreconcilable tension between being a ‘good employee’ and a ‘good mother’ because her role required significant overseas travel, an assumption that is unlikely to be applied in the same way to men, in studies of male-led migration.

Sophie also acknowledges the differential privileges afforded to her as opposed to her husband. She reflected on the terminology associated with particular migrant bodies and the level to which people can claim belonging or the right to long-term residency. Now living in the UK, they often joke about how Sophie is described by those around her as an ‘expat’ whereas Daniel is described as a ‘migrant’.

The terminology around expats and migrants in the UK does seem to have a rather racist ideology around it. People justify the language saying that expats intend to leave but I think my husband expresses a desire to leave more than I do and somehow I’m an expat and he’s a migrant.

In this excerpt, the concept of belonging can be analysed in two ways. Firstly, it can be used to understand how migrants negotiate their citizenship and belonging at an individual level, how they understand their positioning in society and exert agency in their relocation strategies (i.e. Sophie wants to stay in the UK and sees herself as a migrant whereas Daniel wants to leave and feels more like an expat). Secondly, it can be used to understand how the nation – through government policy and media representations – positions migrants through discourses of belonging and citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, which are attached to different migrant classifications and terms (i.e. the perception that Sophie, as a white woman, is a skilled and educated ‘expat’ who will eventually return home or move to another country while Daniel, as a black Ghanaian man, is positioned as an unskilled ‘migrant’ who is seeking long-term residency and who, it is assumed, will not leave). While ‘expatriate’ literally refers to ‘a person who lives outside their native country’, the term is controversial because in contemporary usage it is largely reserved for white Western migrants (Fechter & Walsh, 2010). Both terms – ‘expat’ and ‘migrant’ – make assumptions about class, ‘race’, occupation and skill. Scholars have suggested that the social positioning of individuals around racial and gendered identities can powerfully shape their ‘differential inclusions’ in relation to belonging (Ho, 2009). Not only does this have an impact on the physical mobility opportunities and levels of security, permanency and citizenship that individual migrants can expect but it also has an impact on the way in which some migrants are perceived by others, which does not correspond with how they view themselves, their intentions and their motivations for mobility.

This example also highlights the inequality of passports – how the white, western and educated member of this couple is positioned by broader society as a ‘knowledge migrant’, who passes relatively smoothly through immigration governance structures and across borders and who may desire to leave again, while the other member is viewed (incorrectly) as less-educated and as holding the ‘wrong’ visa; who must, according to that society, have a pre-determined desire to stay (Wagner, 2014). Sophie’s international mobility experience and capital can be more easily mobilised as resources for seeking employment, yet Daniel’s positioning as a migrant is racialised in a way that diminishes his mobility capital (as equally skilled and educated) so that, rather than a resource, it also becomes a source of discrimination. As Lundström (2017) similarly argues, the framing of the ‘migrant’ as a pre-constituted non-white, non-privileged, non-Western subject, who is seeking permanency in the West, is contrasted against other migrant types, such as ‘expats’ and ‘lifestyle migrants’, as white, privileged, Western and more likely to be engaged in ongoing mobility pathways, thereby concealing other migrant subjects who do not fit this image. Both Lundström (2017) and Knowles and Harper (2009) suggest that, while the literature has persistently examined the interconnections between race and migration, it has simultaneously disconnected whiteness and migration within migration studies. Accounting for whiteness and other forms of privilege (like gender and class) in accounts of migration is necessary if we are to understand the varied forms of social and cultural capital that migrants possess and the ways in which these resources are reconfigured, utilised and/or diminished over time and in different settlement contexts, facilitating or constraining people’s migration experiences.

7.6 Conclusion

This chapter has examined how multiple relocations over a person’s life influence the intimate lives and decision-making of middling migrant couples as they negotiate the coordination and alignment, divergence and disruption, of expectations and needs. Participants’ life courses cannot be fully understood as individual trajectories but as relational mobility projects that involve people in complex entanglements with family, intersecting privileges of gender, class and race, governmental policy, political contexts and embedded and emotional geographies of home and attachment that continually transform over time. Through the stories of two couples, two key arguments are made in relation to middling migration. Firstly, that the experience of middling migration is highly differentiated and often involves ongoing migrations, which necessitate longitudinal and life-course research processes in order to bring these dynamics into view. Through the stories of Nahid, Amit, Sophie and Daniel, we can see how the ‘middle’ encompasses a diversity of migration statuses (labour migration, spousal, international education) and varied social positionalities that become more or less salient in different migration contexts and under changing social and political circumstances (e.g. Daniel’s experiences in the UK following Brexit). Secondly, I argue that not only does the catch-all of ‘middling’ encompass diverse experiences but that this diversity is intensified within migrant couples, where an individual’s migration status, decision-making and social positioning are simultaneously entangled with the experiences and positioning of their partner. It is not just that these two couples provide two different renderings of middling migration when compared to one another but that their experiences also show that the couples themselves cannot be viewed as a unified entity/subject either.

In addition, I have suggested that we need to understand not only that women are movers in their own right but also that the dynamics of the decision-making do not exist at two ends of a spectrum (those who lead and those who follow in the migration process). While, with the first couple, mobility is shown to be highly gendered, I also argue that temporal perspectives illuminate how mobility can be more varied and complex than ‘men as the primary or lead migrant’ and ‘women as the tied migrant’. There are moments of contestation and renegotiation even when situated within traditional/patriarchal structures of social life (Toader & Dahinden, 2018). Decision-making is complex and continually shifts along this spectrum as a result of intra-family circumstances and priorities as well as the conditions of migration policy in various destination countries. Nahid’s and Daniel’s experiences show that women (and, less frequently, men) may migrate through family migration streams, which overshadow their education and experience. This is particularly the case for women who enter the country as an accompanying spouse and often intersects with caring responsibilities, as women gravitate away from the workforce post-migration to care for children. For Nahid, focusing on childcare responsibilities post-migration was a responsibility she actively claimed for herself, though it did have an impact on her career progression in the short term. When one member of a couple feels a sense of belonging or experiences upward social mobility as a consequence of migration, the other member of that couple may simultaneously experience social exclusion or slowed career progression. However, such experiences should not be read as static or fixed but, rather, as fluctuating over time and in different settlement contexts. Through a focus on ‘intimate chronomobilities’, recent research is now arguing for a closer examination of how romantic partnerships ‘entangle individuals’ mobility timings and futures with their partners in terms of choices and desires, but also in terms of the possibilities afforded through governance structures’ (Robertson, 2020, 692). Taking a longitudinal approach to understanding migrant practices of ‘the middle’, allows for a deeper understanding of how people re-negotiate career strategies and transnational family lives spatially and temporally in a ‘fine balancing act’ within shifting intra-family gender relations (Shinozaki, 2014).

As Sophie’s and Daniel’s story shows, different types of migrants fit (or do not fit) racialised constructions of national belonging, where one member of the couple can carry institutionalised and embodied capital across national borders more easily than the other. Anthias (2001, 634) utilises the term ‘translocational’ to describe the complex matrix of positionality experienced by those who are ‘at the interplay of a range of locations and dislocations in relation to gender, ethnicity, national belonging, class and racialisation’. Migrant couples can experience concurrent processes of belonging and non-belonging within their everyday lives, as family units reconfigure identities and attachments across time and space. The intimacies and emotions associated with migration become more complex when examining the lives of migrant couples, where the bringing together of two lives both necessitates and complicates a ‘synchronization of expectations and needs, of communication and understandings, of livelihoods and care’ (Wagner, 2014, 81). Racialised issues did not come to the fore in Nahid’s account to the extent that they did for Daniel. There may be multiple contextual factors at play that have shaped their experiences in differing ways. As Nahid reflected, she believes part of the reason why their family did not experience forms of racism in the way that she has seen happen to other Bangladeshi migrants in Australia was their class positioning. They were able to transport their class status in Bangladesh to Australia and accumulated additional economic and cultural capital through their multiple migrations outside of these two countries. What is interesting is that both couples could be described as middling migrants yet Daniel’s and Sophie’s middle-classness could not transcend the racialised social positioning of Daniel as someone who was presumed to be a low-waged migrant seeking long-term settlement security in the UK.

As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, it is clear that, within migration research, single-origin-single-destination models for thinking about movement have become increasingly problematised. People frequently adopt onward international-migration tactics, seeking to leverage the social, cultural, economic and networked capital they have accrued in successive destination countries to advance their prospects of moving to the next location. Perhaps it does not matter so much what terms we employ to define this multiplicity and complexity in conceptual terms (as staggered, on-going, step-wise or multi-stage) but more that our research, methodologically, is able to capture this complexity through multi-sited, narrative-driven, longitudinal designs which are attuned to relational, temporal and spatial dynamics. This openness is critical to examining any form of mobility yet is particularly so when researching experiences of middling migration. The theoretical breadth of ‘the middle’ can erase the complexity and diversity of experiences within it because of its inherent expansiveness. Much more empirical research is needed that captures the complexity of middling-migrant pathways that are often ongoing, as well as the shifting positionalities and subjectivities of migrants, further developing our understanding of the variable spaces between temporariness and permanency, choice and constraint, flexibility and precarity, inclusion and exclusion. The experience of onward migration and therefore the presence of multiple relocation countries, each with different structures of opportunity and marginalisation, challenges migration researchers to consider more closely the transnational, intimate and relational subjectivities of people.