Abstract
This article examines the nexus of spatial and social mobility by focusing on how migrants in Germany use cultural, economic and moral boundaries to position themselves socially in transnational social spaces. It is based on a mixed-methods approach, drawing on qualitative interviews and panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey. By focusing on how people from different origins and classes use different sets of symbolic boundaries to give meaning to their social mobility trajectories, we link subjective positioning strategies with structural features of people’s mobility experience. We find that people use a class-specific boundary pattern, which has strong transnational features, because migrants tend to mix symbolic and material markers of status hierarchies relevant to both their origin and destination countries. We identify three different types of boundary patterns, which exemplify different ways in which objective structure and subjectively experienced inequalities influence migrants’ social positioning strategies in transnational spaces. These different types also exemplify how migrants’ habitus influences their social positioning strategies, depending on their mobility and social trajectory in transnational spaces.
Highlights
In an increasingly mobile world, it is worthwhile asking if spatial mobility holds the promise of social mobility and for whom
A Dutch respondent told us that people generally associated Dutch people with sympathetic individuals, which worked in her favour. These perceptions may explain why the chooser type rarely used symbolic boundaries in the interviews to differentiate between themselves and the German population, but rather to position themselves above or below other people in general—independently of their nationalities or their ethnic origin. Their citizenship and national origin did not seem to matter to the choosers in the same way in connection with social mobility as it did to those migrants whose opportunities to work, study or live in Germany were closely related to their passport
The types we identified in the interviews provide evidence for the claim that boundary drawing shows a class-related pattern influenced by the specificities of the mobility experience and the transnational spaces that migrants inhabit
Summary
In an increasingly mobile world, it is worthwhile asking if spatial mobility holds the promise of social mobility and for whom. Migration scholars have investigated the make-up of social hierarchies that function beyond the nation state and theorised about the mechanisms of their reproduction They have used Bourdieu-inspired approaches to study cultural features of class reproduction and inequality which combine economic concepts of class with the analysis of political, social and cultural aspects of social standing in order to investigate migrants’ social positions across national boundaries (Cederberg, 2017; Erel, 2010; Oliver & O’Reilly, 2010). The focus on subjective sense-making strategies helps to uncover which values and discursive tools form the basis for people’s conceptions of social status and belonging and how their structural positions in social orders influence these conceptions (Eichsteller, 2017) Such a conception of class allows us to describe the heterogeneity of positioning strategies for migrants in greater depth (Cederberg, 2017). The conclusion points to the importance of incorporating both pre-migration status and mobility trajectories into the investigation of migrants’ subjective status-positioning strategies
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