Unpacking 'status migration': The racialized status politics of 'skill' in French-Maghrebi expatriation to Dubai. Issue 1 (1st March 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Alloul, Jaafar
• Is Part Of: Transitions. Volume 5:Issue 1(2021)
• Page Start: 31
• Page End: 54
• Publication Date: 2021-03-01
• Subjects: Migrant labor -- Periodicals; Migrant labor -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Foreign workers -- Social conditions -- Periodicals; Immigrant students -- Periodicals; 331.544
• DOI: 10.1386/tjtm_00030_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2397-7140

Abstract

This ethnographic article details the resettlement process of Mounir, a French citizen of Maghrebi background migrating from Paris to Dubai. In so doing, it examines how social status formation plays out in the context of skilled labour migration between France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing on semi-structured interviews and multi-sited participant observation, it questions human capital theory's premise that 'skills' largely consist of a transposable set of objective technical qualifications. Instead, it finds that any effective validation of skill sets encompasses 'claims-making' processes that are co-dependent on social hierarchies of place, such as citizenship, class and race. The 'expatriate' portrait presented here demonstrates how tertiary-educated members of the Euro-Maghrebi minority engage in transcontinental migration not only as a way of dealing with hampered economic conversion yields of Bourdieusian capital forms in their home societies, but equally to renegotiate a more comprehensive transformation of social status. By describing Mounir's hybrid repositioning at the interstices of more dominant status markers in Dubai, this article theorizes 'status migration', a transnational process of human mobility, characterized by the skilful propensity of acting-by-moving from the part of (racially) degraded citizens in dealing with the status deficiencies specific to them in their home societies.