Introduction

The chapter introduces how middling migrants now comprise the majority of regular migration flows to post-industrial countries where migrants with skills and educational capital are increasingly prioritized over unskilled migrant workers. While this middle space is one of relative privilege compared to low-skilled and undocumented labour migrants globally, it is also a space, particularly for those who are young and navigating early career and life transitions, of decidedly uneven experiences. Exploring these lived experiences of mobile temporality is highly significant to migration studies, largely because these experiences reflect the broader spatio-temporal changes migration has undergone in our current era of globalized modernity. The chapter explains that the book seeks to highlight the multifarious ways that temporality operates within the lives of young and middle-class migrants from Asia to Australia whose open-ended mobilities criss-cross multiple spaces, statuses and identities. It draws on the concept of chronomobilities, which it uses to describe the temporalities that structure mobile lives as well as emerge from them. It positions chronomobilities — which encompass the disjunctures, velocities, synchronizations and rhythms of everyday mobile lives and the meanings they entail — as fundamentally shaped by specific global and national 'time-regimes' of the early 21st century. It also argues that three 'time-logics' emerge as the primary ways in which time is 'lived' and understood within migrants' own meaning making and narrations of their lives under these broader temporal conditions. The focus on the three logics — sequence, tempo and synchronicity — allows time to be understood as multiply and simultaneously sequential, rhythmic and relational.