This article examines the mobility patterns of migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates. It identifies and explains the emergence of serial labor migration, which we define as the multi-country, itinerant labor migration patterns of temporary low-skilled migrant workers. It argues that policy contexts shaping temporary labor migration, as they impose precarious and prohibitive conditions of settlement in both countries of origin and destination, produce the itinerancy of low-skilled migrant workers. We offer a holistic analysis of the migration process of temporary labor migrants, shifting away from a singular focus on the process of emigration, integration, or return and toward an examination of each stage as a co-constitutive step in the migration cycle. Our analytic approach enables us to illustrate the state of precarity and itinerancy that follows low-wage migrant workers across the various stages of the migration cycle and produces serial migration patterns among migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia.

This paper questions the currently lopsided relationship between the cosmopolitan and the parochial, in which the former is favored both conceptually and empirically. In response, we propose a relational framework for bringing them into conversation, simultaneously recasting and re-animating longstanding debates via three framing devicesthe process of relationality/territoriality, disposition, and spaces of encounterembedded in and through the subject of the immigrant-gentrifier in Koreatown, Los Angeles, itself a novel category that has hitherto eluded systematic research. We present the results of 25 interviews of Korean immigrant-gentrifiers and 10 key informant interviews. The results constitute a parochial critique that emerges as a series of conflicted paradoxes but also productive tensions: between an ostensibly transnational process compromised by a profoundly homegrown, parochial set of investors and outlooks; between a set of dispositions that seek inner-city diversity and density, yet simultaneously sheltered from its spillover costs; and spaces of encounter marked by a gap between the promise of truly open spaces and the reality of guarded and self-segregated ones. Ultimately, this paper does double dutyconceptually rebalancing the cosmopolitan-parochial relationship, but in doing so empirically elevating the emergence of the understudied immigrant-gentrifier category.

The pursuit of overseas English language education by South Korean youth has resulted in a hierarchy of educational destinations, with migrants studying English in the Global North attaining higher cultural capital compared to those learning English in the Global South. This article examines the experiences of South Korean youth who pursue education in English language schools in the provincial Philippines. Using in-depth interviews and participant observation with South Korean educational migrants in the Philippines and South Korea, it outlines class and regional dynamics in a pattern of youth mobility the author calls “transperipheral educational mobility.” This type of mobility refers to the transnational movement of less-privileged, that is low-resourced, South Korean youth from peripheral regions in South Korea to peripheral cities in the Philippines for the purpose of pursuing English language education in a budget program. Despite being considered “less legitimate” than the credentials earned by their counterparts in destinations in the Global North, the pursuit of English language education in the Global South, as this article shows, provides forms of precultural capital, compensatory middle-class consumption, and entrepreneurial inspiration that strategically and creatively seeks to challenge working-class migrants’ marginal positions within South Korea's highly stratified and increasingly neoliberal society.

Using participant‐observation and 58 in‐depth participant interviews, this study examines South Korean youth who undertake overseas English language acquisition across the Philippines, United States, New Zealand, and Australia. This research introduces a concept I call ‘segmented pathways of educational mobility’, which describes the multi‐dimensional and complex levels of stratification within regional educational mobility flows that reinforce existing class inequalities for many migrants. However, segmented pathways also reveal that while resource‐constrained youth understand that their migration choices are more limited, they seek to accrue alternative cultural resources across varied destinations to gain the experiences and credentials necessary to advance in the South Korean labour market. Despite increased opportunities for English study abroad via market liberalization, this research contends that it also produces more levels of stratification within and among youth migrants.