ABSTRACT

This article investigates the aspirations for adventure, cosmopolitanism and self-exploration among non-graduate EU migrants from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds. Drawing on interviews with Italians who moved to England after the 2008 economic crisis, and focusing on participants with vocational school diplomas, the article explores participants’ lifestyle imaginaries, how these contextualise participants’ economic concerns, and how they are negotiated in classed, racialised and gendered migrations. The findings reveal that these ‘other Eurostars’ come from class fractions endowed with relative, but unequally distributed, economic security and lower institutionalised cultural capital. This has a significant bearing on their motivations and experiences of migration, but without reducing them to mere economic instrumentalism. Indeed, participants approach employment as a means of self-realisation and status distinction, following aspirations that the extant literature ascribes to graduate migrants. The article contributes to lifestyle migration and intra-EU migration studies by revealing the centrality of non-economic motivations among less privileged EU migrants and showing that individualisation, as a late-modern project, is central to their migrations, but that it takes classed, racialised and gendered forms.

摘要

本文调查了来自工薪阶层和中下阶层背景的未毕业欧盟移民对冒险、世界主义和自我探索的渴望。这篇文章借鉴了对 2008 年经济危机后移居英国的意大利人的访谈，并以拥有职业学校文凭的参与者为重点，探讨了参与者的生活方式想象，这些想象如何将参与者的经济担忧背景化，以及他们如何在阶级、种族化和性别迁移。调查结果表明，这些“其他欧洲之星”来自具有相对但分布不均的经济安全和制度化程度较低的文化资本的阶层。这对他们的移民动机和经历有重大影响，但不会将他们沦为纯粹的经济工具主义。的确，参与者将就业视为自我实现和地位区分的一种手段，遵循现存文献赋予毕业生移民的愿望。这篇文章揭示了非经济动机在弱势欧盟移民中的中心地位，并表明个性化作为一个后现代项目是他们移民的核心，但它需要分类，从而有助于生活方式移民和欧盟内部移民研究，种族化和性别化的形式。