Download Bearable Precariousness of being a Lifestyle Migrant Roger Norum

The (Un)Bearable Precariousness of being a Lifestyle Migrant
Roger Norum
When I returned to Oxford after a year and a half of
doctoral fieldwork in Kathmandu, the jokes began: I had
chosen to study a community of western expatriates so
that I could have a year or two of holiday; conducting
research in bars and restaurants among expats who
swanned around in SUVs and earned 40 grand a year was
hardly serious anthropology; my formative experience
with ethnographic fieldwork must have been really hard
on me.
It was all just jestful taunting, of course. But many a
truth is said in jest. The presumption my colleagues were
playing off was that if you are, as the saying goes in the
US, ‘free, white and 21’, then you should have nothing
to complain about. Lifestyle migrants, if they suffer at
all, suffer from ‘first world problems’, minor frustrations
and complaints that are only experienced by privileged
individuals in wealthy countries. But it may be that, to
paraphrase Billy Joel, the good ol’ days aren’t always as
good as they seem.
Lifestyle migration has come to encompass a range of
different people who move around the world for different
reasons: international students, domestic downsizers,
backpackers, gap yearers, retirees, corporate expatriates,
humanitarian workers, second-home owners, and people
who have married across cultures and borders. In fact,
many of the authors in this volume are lifestyle migrants,
having chosen a foreign land for work – perhaps because
we couldn’t find employment in our native countries, or
perhaps because we wanted to experience a life different
from home. Such people often see migration as a route
to a better and more fulfilling way of life than the one
they have decided to leave behind – the pursuit of the
‘good life’ (O’Reilly and Benson, 2009). Sometimes this
is escapist; sometimes it is due to necessity. Across the
UK and elsewhere in the global north, lifestyle migrants:
international students and highly-skilled workers –
foreign consultants, freelancers, expatriates and other
members of the so-called ‘mobile elite’ – currently make
up one of the fastest growing migration phenomenon in
the world.
But while these people have typically been
characterised by high levels of social, economic and
geographic mobility, in recent years the opportunities for
some have been slipping. Globalised, neoliberal forms
of employment have made limited-term jobs and zerohour contracts – to say nothing of that grand euphemism
for free and eager labour, ‘work experience’ – the norm
for many. As budgets are reduced and organisations do
away with long-term investment in the people that help
them function, people who once experienced stable
occupational identities and social protections are now
encountering novel experiences: insecurity, instability,
vulnerability, precarity and risk (Korpela and Nagy, 2013).
As responsibilities are shifted from public and private
institutions onto individuals, the welfare and wellbeing
of workers and their families, still often thought of
as privileged and immune to such problems, are often
ignored by states, policy makers and organisations.
Precarious labour is almost always organised beyond the
structures of social welfare and benefit systems. As a
result, those who labour often exist outside provisioning
for unemployment benefit, social security, health
insurance, and mechanisms for maternity and paternity
leave. Though they are frequently seen as the drivers and
beneficiaries of globalisation, their relatively privileged
positions may not shield them from its discontents
(Standing, 2011). The ‘precariat’ thus cuts across many
lines in society; precariousness no longer discriminates.
The zero-hours contract controversy that rocked
many of Britain’s educational institutions in late 2013
drew attention to some of these issues. ‘Highly skilled’,
it seemed, was no longer a guarantor of ‘highly paid’.
In the ivory tower, of course ,‘highly educated’ rarely
implied high pay, but the erstwhile prevalence of tenure
track academic posts at least guaranteed a lifetime of
employment, if not one of six figures. Today, however,
these insecurities may force many people to significantly
alter their lifestyle. It may lead foreign correspondents
to moonlight as babysitters, under employed academics
to work in High Street retail shops, and on-the-bench,
thirtysomething development consultants to live at
home with their parents as they await being flown off to
Addis Ababa for a two-week secondment. Such moves
show that the implications of limited work tenure and
the expectations of flexibility and mobility run deeper
than surface-level categorisations of people might make
visible. It also elucidates some of the limitations of how
human welfare is often conceived of and provisioned
in modern economies. As atypical and irregular work
relations such as project or product-based jobs become
typical and regularised, the institutional social structures
around such work require changing too.
The zero-hours debate also served as a reminder
that precariousness in labour, welfare and migration has
tended to be discussed in terms of lower skilled workers
and low-income earners – people who are clearly also
affected by neoliberal changes in society, often to a much
greater degree than those who can normally command
From Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, edited by B. Anderson and M. Keith, COMPAS, Oxford, 2014
higher incomes. Still, research into lifestyle migrants and
highly skilled workers comprises a unique and important
aspect of globalisation that is often disregarded. Such
scholarship can serve to contest common presumptions
that experiences of the privileged are vastly different
from those without access to education, funds or social
mobility.
Is this lack of research due to the fact that
precariousness among the upper classes in the global
north is a relatively new phenomena? Perhaps. But I
suspect it is also a result of a distaste among many social
scientists for studying so-called like-minded people.
Anthropologists, we know, have rarely ‘studied up’
(Nader, 1972) – or even studied ‘sideways’ (Hannerz,
1998), for that matter – and academic engagements with
human welfare have often focused on those traditionally
understood as underprivileged.
More research on the experiences of precarity and
welfare among lifestyle migrants and higher skilled
workers would raise a number of interesting comparative
questions. For example, in what ways are the determinants
of low and high-skill precarity similar or different? How
do imagined lifestyles of migrants conflict with lived
realities? How do the responses to instability vary among
different types of workers across different industries?
Do the vicissitudes of globalised ‘neoliberalism’ affect all
people low in the labour pecking order in similar ways?
And why should we care about the highly skilled anyway
if they are more privileged? Considering the roles and
positions of those with (perceived) privilege and power
would enable us to reconsider what is meant by centre
and periphery, and would allow us to better understand
how our models of human welfare work. Framed within
the rise in the (im)mobile precariat across countries in the
global north, these questions also lend credence to the
notion that there is value in research into the subjectivities
of those who already have, or who once had, a voice.
References
Benson, M. and O’Reilly, K. (2009) Lifestyle Migration:
Expectations, Aspirations and Experiences, Farnham: Ashgate.
Hannerz, U. (1998) ‘Other Transnationals: Perspectives Gained
from Studying Sideways.’ Paideuma, 44:109-123.
Korpela, M. and R. Nagy (2013) ‘Introduction: Limitations
to Temporary Mobility.’ International Review of Social Research,
3(1):1-6.
Nader, L. (1972) ‘Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained
from Studying Up,’ in D. Hymes. (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology,
New York: Random House.
Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class,
London: Bloomsbury Academic.
From Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, edited by B. Anderson and M. Keith, COMPAS, Oxford, 2014