Mobile practices and the production of professionals on the move: Filipino highly skilled migrants in Singapore

Abstract

Recent geographical scholarship on skilled migration has developed a strand of research on the role of mobility in the constitution and production of the highly skilled migrant. In particular, scholars have forwarded the notion of geographical mobility as a form of capital to explain career development, employability and occupational mobility among skilled migrants and international students. While recognising capital-oriented approaches, this paper shifts the focus to how mobility is appropriated into practice in producing highly skilled and professional migrants across phases of movement and settlement. Through the lens of ‘mobile practices,’ the paper suggests that skilled migrants craft themselves into mobile professionals, through embodied practices that appropriate education, credentials and cosmopolitan attitudes and lifestyles, and the enactment of international geographical mobility across phases of re-location, settlement and re-migration. Drawing from interviews with 33 Filipino highly skilled migrants in Singapore, the paper shows how their aspirations drive their use of mobile practices to fulfil three aims. First, they engage in mobile practices to fashion themselves as skilled migrants qualified for the international labor market. Second, they disengage from mobile practices during their emplacement in the host country to produce themselves as skilled professionals that can adapt and settle in the local environment. Third, mobile practices are re-activated in mapping new routes for re-migration or return, shaped by aspirations of further mobility, family considerations and the life course. Overall, mobile practices as conceptual lens foregrounds how highly skilled migrants produce themselves as mobile professionals across shifts of mobility and immobility.