Introduction

This book explores the complex category of the skilled migrant, drawing on multi-sited narrative interviews with migrants who have all lived in Australia at some point in their lives (as an origin and/or destination).

Developing the more nuanced concept of the mobile settler, it shows how becoming a skilled migrant is not just a political and economic determination of knowledge and human capital but a complex negotiation of contexts – immigration contexts, social locations, qualifications and skills, as well as personal ties.

Belying the simple binaries of official visa categories, these diverse contexts of migrant experience are central to the ways migrants construct their personal histories and negotiate their shifting attachments to home and belonging over time and space.

By highlighting how migrants imagine their own complex social, cultural, national, professional and linguistic identities and pathways, this book extends the agent-centred approaches to global mobility and transnationalism that have emerged in cultural studies and social and cultural geography in recent years, according greater recognition to the individualised, local and lived experiences of global migration and thus engaging more deeply with global concerns about increased mobility and the challenges it represents.