Asian Migrants of the Middle in Local and Global Context
This chapter establishes the empirical context of migration from Asia to Australia in the 21st century and makes a set of arguments around the empirical value of studying these middling forms of migration. It explores the wider contexts of 21st-century, middle-class Asian migration, as well as establishes the use of the term 'middling mobility' to describe the experiences of the research participants. It argues that an analysis of more 'middling' forms of mobility can be useful in drawing out some of the paradoxes and tensions of mobile lives in which friction and fluidity, hypermobility and immobility, and precarity and security, often coexist and intertwine at different stages and in different ways. It seeks to show that researching migrant lives 'in the middle' can usefully highlight often hidden nuances around the interrelationships of temporality and mobility, and of spatial mobility and social mobility, by opening up analysis of the uneven experiences that exist between the liminality of the migrant precariat and the fluidity of the mobile elite.