Am currently read Laura Maria Agustin’s Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. More on its primary arguments later, but I have been musing on one point it makes: why do we have two terms: “expatriate” and “migrant worker”?
Aside from the fact that one generally comes from a First World country and the other from a Third World one, what is fundamentally different about their choices?
Agustin quotes the words of a hairdresser who had worked in Spain in a salon until a new local owner declared that he could only employee Spaniards, after which she entered the informal economy, working in clients’ homes and not declaring her business officially. It is only after the quote that Agustin reveals her source to be British – so is she an “expatriate” or a “migrant worker”?
Jawdroppingly – I hadn’t come across this before – there is a lively academic debate about whether working class migrants can be “cosmopolitan”. “Some fix migrant identity in a reluctant leavetaking and wariness towards the new, seeing their lives as a series of dry, instrumental decisions.” (p. 44)
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