Highly Skilled and Marriage Migrants in Arizona

This chapter discusses the results of my interviews with post-USSR immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona, which place male-dominated highly skilled and female-dominated marriage migration in the context of scholarship on adaptation and return migration. The two migratory forms have been spurred by the interests of US men in creating monoracial families and by the immense growth in the number of contingent academic positions at US institutions of higher learning. Their differential legal status upon arrival provides post-Soviet marriage and highly skilled migrants with divergent access to economic, social, and cultural forms of US citizenship, community building, and opportunities for return. Highly skilled migrants create middle-class lives, appear less interested in participating in a coethnic community, and maintain limited physical transnational connections, while marriage migrants face downward mobility and dependency, experience greater difficulty connecting to other post-Soviet migrants, and more often consider returning. While they are immediately provided with membership in their husbands’ middle-class lives, the globalized form of US whiteness that marriage migrants are assigned even before they leave their countries of origin creates heightened expectations of their complete assimilation to a middle-class whiteness at the cost of their and often their children’s bicultural and transnational identities.