Migration Status, Class, Race and Home

Abstract

Migration regimes are powerful forces that allow or deny individuals, in different ways, the possibilities of feeling at home, imagining home or doing home. This chapter draws on existing literature to show how migrant status, class and race intersect not only with each other but with gender, age, and other power relations in structuring these im/possibilities through bordering processes linked to global geopolitical and postcolonial processes. Firstly, the chapter explores how privileged migrant groups can draw on their available capital to reproduce comfortable notions of home in migration, and how different migration/citizenship regimes enable this. Secondly, the focus is brought to the phenomenon of enforcement, precarity and stuckness in migration, as a lens through which to explore how migrant status, class and race limit the possibilities of feeling at home for other migrant groups and how they navigate these limitations and borders in seeking to find and make home in the world.