Colonial Legacy

Based on interviews with thirty-eight French retirees living in the seaside city of Nha Trang, Vietnam, this article queries their reasons for migrating and investigates how they make sense of their life abroad. I consider Vietnam’s historical connection with the French empire as a possible component of lifestyle migration and meaning. This small-scale study indicates that colonial memories and historical ties between France and Vietnam do influence many interviewees’ choice of place of retirement. However, for most, the personal and social amenities afforded by a tropical life in the present tend to eventually displace such memories.

Between Lifestyle Migration and Comfortable Exit Strategies: Turkish Golden Visa Investors in Greece

This article examines a new phenomenon of affluent Turks investing in Greek real estate following the 15 July 2016 coup attempt in order to obtain residence rights in Greece. Triggered by a sense of social, political, and economic insecurity, Turkish nationals invest to secure an exit strategy and safe haven for family and capital in case of potential economic and political upheaval in the country. Drawing on Hirschman’s (1970) typology of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, this paper argues that this new form of mobility and comfortable exit of the Turkish upper middle class helps defuse opposition to the AKP government and could have a stabilizing effect for the regime in the long run. Based on data from twenty-eight interviews with investors and Golden Visa brokers taking part in the investment process, two factors, in particular, are making the move from Turkey to Greece an attractive option for Turkish nationals, namely geographic proximity and perceived cultural familiarity.

New frontiers in international retirement migration

Introducing the special issue, this paper provides a state-of-the-art on established and new trends in the study of international retirement migration (IRM) and summarises the five papers that follow. Early studies on IRM were mainly within Europe and drew on the conceptual framework of lifestyle migration, with some reference to the transnational and mobilities paradigms. New frontiers in IRM are presented under three heads. Firstly, new geographical frontiers extend IRM to new destinations within and proximate to Europe, and to new locations in the global South such as Thailand and Ecuador. Secondly, new typological frontiers involve a broadening of the class and wealth backgrounds of the retirees, including the ‘return of retirement’ of labour migrants to their countries of origin, and attentiveness to IRM's gendered aspects. Thirdly, new conceptual and theoretical frontiers of IRM involve a more in-depth investigation of its transnational aspects, exploration of the various regimes of mobility and, most importantly, a political economy perspective which stresses global inequalities and histories of colonialism in shaping access to privileged lifestyles. In the final part of the paper, the original features of each paper in the special issue are highlighted, demonstrating how they are collectively integrated and contribute to the advancement of IRM research.

The interurban migration industry: ‘Migration products’ and the materialisation of urban speculation at Iskandar Malaysia

Iskandar Malaysia (IM) is a 4749 km2 urban conurbation and development region located at the Malaysia–Singapore border. State-led development of this regional economic corridor has attracted inflows of foreign investments and spurred the rise of mid- to high-end urban developments by foreign developers. This has resulted in the emergence of an interurban migration industry consisting of intermediary entities that are co-developing and co-marketing ‘migration products’ (real estate, education and lifestyle migration) as an integrated package to middle-class, aspiring transnational investor/lifestyle migrants from the region. This article argues that this middlemen industry is crucial to the materialisation of urban speculation, for state actors and investor/lifestyle migrants alike. Through interurban alliances that capitalise on the broader state-led speculative urbanism landscape, the industry co-creates an imagined urban future that is grounded in transnational lifestyle mobilities. This article highlights the need to analyse speculative urbanism and transnational investment/lifestyle migration as intertwined processes.