The Middle-Class Migrant

"Whilst it is impossible to come up with a coherent answer as to why the middle class migrate internationally, it is plausible to see international migration as a particular mobility strategy, employed consciously or otherwise, that leads to their appropriation of social, cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu 1984). No longer do we just see managers and executives in Europe using international mobility to increase their transnational socio-economic networks and augment their class position. We also see large numbers of skilled migrants venturing overseas on less structured journeys of advancement. This advancement involves a different balance of social, cultural and economic capital to the corporate professional, but is nevertheless important in middle-class reproduction and internal distinction." Scott, S. (2006). The social morphology of skilled migration: The case of the British middle class in Paris. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(7), 1105-1129.

Definitions of "middle-class" abound and differ according to the metric used: income, occupation, lifestyle.  I think of it as group that has some level of financial and social capital (family background, education, credentials, skills, assets) but not enough of these things to put them in the "upper class."    The children of the well-to-do don't have to get a university education (though they usually do at elite institutions at home or abroad) nor do they have to worry too much about where they will work because money, connections, the family business means that they will never be unemployed unless they choose to be.  The middle class, on the other hand, must think strategically - how to best use the resources they have to get a good education and/or a profession that is financially and psychologically satisfying.  For the children of the middle-class some kind of paid employment is rarely optional; it is necessary in order to pay for housing, raise a family, and retire in relative comfort wherever they live.

Middle-class status in the home and the destinations countries, I contend, affects migration in many ways.

Temporary versus permanent: Temporary migration is a strategy that seeks to increase one's capital back in the home country.  The "Big OE"  overseas experience like study or work abroad can confer important social capital.   It can lead to better higher-status work at home. For example, a writer that spends a couple of years in Paris finances his stay doing childcare and writes until he is noticed back home and gets a job there based on his Parisian experience. Paying off credit cards or student loans is another possibility and many graduates go abroad to do this with the intention of coming home with less debt or savings. These are called "target earners" since they plan to leave once they have achieved their financial goal. However, the overall goal of the sojourners here is to maximize whatever benefit there is to being abroad  and leverage that capital to make a better life at home.

Those who come to settle in the new country are thinking more long-term (but not necessarily permanent).   Their intention is to leverage their capital into something that will provide them with a decent living in the host country.  Their middle-class status in the home country can mean that they are reluctant to take on work that would lower their status in either country. Furthermore, they have a model of "success" or upward mobility in the home country (one that is entirely relative) that they try to replicate in their new home.  What is most important here is that do this with limited resources and social capital which doesn't always translate very well.  They can not afford to stay in the host country without working or being with a spouse or partner who is working.  They may also not be in a position to move back if it doesn't work out:  the sheer cost of moving a household, the uncertainty of the job market in the home country, medical problems, family obligations are all things that may limit further mobility.

Different Skills,  Different Outcomes:  The "skilled" migrant is often defined by level of education with a BA or some tertiary education being the lower limit.  This ignores the enormous differences in universities, degrees, experience, and credentials. There are migrants with home country degrees in business, finance, medicine, engineering and science and there are those with classics, philosophy, political science and the like.  A basic liberal arts degree may be worth just as little in the destination job market as it was at home unless it's from an internationally recognized elite school.  I would argue that most middle-class migrants from developed and developing countries leave with higher levels of education than unskilled migrants, but where they went to school and what they studied still matters.  Anyone with Internet access can look up the Shanghai ratings and company HRs may have their own internal ranking with preferences for specific schools in the host country or abroad.  So those middle-class migrants from better schools in sought after fields have an edge.

This clearly translates into different outcomes in the destination country.  Those who come from other schools may have to fight even harder to get work that is commensurate with their education because they probably don't have native-level language skills or the right connections.  There are different strategies to overcome these things.  Some decide to open their own businesses or to go freelance.  Others find occupations where the employer doesn't care about what the migrant studied, only that he or she has a BA in order to get a work visa.   Another, interestingly enough, is to lie or to forge credentials.  This assumes that the employer in the host country won't or can't check.  All of these strategies have one thing in common;  they may or may not pay well but there is a higher level of risk:  a business can fail, freelancers may not find enough clients, a person with a generic BA can be replaced with another cheaper person with a generic BA and fraud might not only get him/her fired, it can put his immigration status in jeopardy.

Social Mobility:  Some middle-class migrants go abroad with the intention of moving down the class ladder.  They are looking for a lifestyle, not professional or social advancement. And yet, very few, in my experience, go to work in a factory or clean houses.  Instead they write, translate, teach, organize tours, open a bar/restaurant or just go back to the home country periodically to save enough money to return abroad.  Other middle-class migrants are content if they can just maintain their home country status in the host country:  a good "white-collar" or "pink-collar" job with benefits; a house or apartment that they own; enough pay to raise a family, save for retirement, and send the children to university.  In some cases the host country offers more possibilities for these things than the home country did.  Social-welfare programs vary widely among nation-states and depending on the migrant's situation, there may be more security and a greater likelihood that his or her children will also be middle-class or more.  And then there are those with ambitions; they want to do better than they would have done in the home country.  Moving is all about upward mobility:  starting a business in a place that favors entrepreneurship, marrying someone with a higher status and more resources, becoming an itinerant cosmopolitan "creative."

Redefining Successful Migration:  Somewhere in the middle-class migrant's mind is an ideal of the "successful" migrant and the fear of being seen as a "failure."  In some countries and cultures just moving abroad immediately confers status if the person is from a middle-class background. (Elites moving about is just, well, "normal.")  However, that status is precarious because as more and more other middle-class people migrate, it becomes less about the fact the migrants moved and more about what he or she did when she got there and settled.

There is a certain amount of defensiveness that creeps in when family or friends back home question how well they really are doing.  They feel that they must constantly justify their decision to move and stay.  I have to wonder if those who come from countries of immigration don't have a very difficult time with this.  Their middle-class status in the home country may be a result of centuries of immigration based on a perceived ideal that immigrants and their children are supposed to do better with each generation - from cleaning houses to small business owner, from SBO to law or medicine, from professional status to politician, high-level executive, CEO and so on.  There is a clear connection in this ideal between geographic mobility and social and professional upward mobility.

Middle-class migrants do not always do better and this is extremely embarrassing in both the host and home countries.  In the home country there is wonder that the migrant has somehow squandered a wonderful opportunity; in the host country it feels just as bad to struggle to achieve one's personal goals as it would at home.  "Going back" is seen as failure.

That kind of pressure leads migrants to redefine "success."  Instead of money or status, they point to other things they have done:  learned a language and a new culture, made friends, married, found a job they like even if it isn't something that they had ever aspired to do and doesn't "go anywhere."  They extol the virtues of the host country compared to home.  And they very rarely openly discuss the challenges, dissatisfactions, frustrations they experience abroad.  That would be handing ammunition to those who questioned the move in the first place and think that the migrant should return.

My take on this is that we greatly overestimate the ability of the middle-class migrant to be successful in all respects in the host country.  Yes, they have more education and some skills but there is no guarantee that they have the right ones for where they are going.  But they have at least a BA and speak English.  How hard could it possibly be to get a really good job abroad?   It can be very hard, actually. There a millions of people around the world who speak English and more learning every day.  There is a much smaller number of people who went to a school in the Shanghai List Top 10.   Not to mention that a BA does not automatically mean an aptitude for languages or the ability to absorb culture or have a successful relationship.   Furthermore, my definition of middle-class it implies limited means.  These are people who do not have years to master the language and life in the new country before they hit the job market.

I am often frustrated at the lack of research on middle-class migrants.  It is just as interesting as the mobility of the unskilled versus the skilled or the poor versus the well to do.  Maybe more so because they are operating under multiple constraints.  They have resources but they are not unlimited and so they must be very flexible and very smart about how they leverage what they have versus what is possible in the destination countries.  And when it's migration from one developed country to another it is not obvious what constitutes a "better" life in financial or social terms.

In the old immigrant steamships passengers were divided up into classes with luxurious first class cabins, the bare minimum in steerage (third class) and the intermediate second class accommodations for those with a little money but not enough to pay for better.  Something like that, I think, still operates and I think it would be worth our time to stop our obsession with the very rich and the very poor and see what the invisible middle has to offer migration studies.

Employment Poker in the Destination Country

Many migrants leave their country of origin to go off to play employment poker in the destination country.  You have a hand to play and in order to win (or just keep from losing big) you need to have a good understanding of  how your hand plays in the larger game that is the national job market.

Today let's look at a few things to think about before you go if you intend to seek employment on a distant shore.

Credentials:  What do you have?  High school diploma, associate degree, BA, MA or PhD?  In what fields?  Do you belong to a professional association that certifies certain professions?  Take a hard look at how those credentials "translate" on the other side.

Will your foreign credentials be recognized in the destination country?   A French going to Quebec or a Quebecois going to France will benefit from mutual recognition agreements (MRAs).  In the EU, see this site for information on how EU countries regulate access to certain professions.   If you are an engineer, look for countries that have signed the Washington Accord.

If there are no MRAs, what's next?  Look into what kind of retraining you would need to re-certify. How many years would you have to study?  How much will it cost?  Beware of  schemes that lure migrants in with the promise of certification in a few years.  Some foreign nurses are still waiting to become certified nurses in Japan.  Find out just how far industry certifications like Microsoft or Oracle (IT) or a TEFL or CELTA (English Language Training) certificate will take you. One high-tech French company I worked for only took IT people with engineering/computer science degrees, even for relatively simple tech work.  

What if none of your credentials are recognized and it's extremely difficult to recertify?  This is where you need to do some deep thinking.  How important is your profession to you?  Are you OK with the idea that you may not ever be able to work in that profession in the host country?  Would you be satisfied doing something else?  Something that may not be commensurate with your professional status, education, and experience in the home country (called "deskilling").  If your spouse is a citizen of that country how will this affect your relationship if you can't find work?  Perhaps you will find different work or full-time parenting to be a refreshing change, but perhaps not.  The time to negotiate these things is now, not after you've arrived and settled.

Language(s):  Start learning before you go.  Get as much experience with the language as you can.  Join the local Alliance Francaise, the Japan Foundation, or the Goethe Institut.   Contact consulates,  sister city associations, or local associations where you can find competent speakers of the target language willing to teach for a reasonable price.  Globalization means that there is probably a language community near you.  There is a  Japanese community in Versailles, for example.

In addition to basic communication skills, learn how to read and write.  How far do the illiterate go in your home country?  Not very.  Don't expect it to be any different in the host country.  I applied for one job in France, where to my surprise they gave me a handout describing a difficult situation with a client.  I was then given 30 minutes to write a response in French, using verb tenses not used in the spoken language and formal language and syntax that one would normally use with a client.  This was not a managerial job;  it was a very low-level IT consulting position. Literacy, literacy, literacy.

Connections:  If you have any connections to the destination country, use them.  It can be anything:  alumni associations, churches, a friend who was an au pair in that country, a family member who lives there, a co-worker who worked there.  Get into a network and see where it takes you.  There are places where a connection will land you a job much faster than fancy credentials and experience. It's not who you are, but who you know....

Money:  Down and Out in Paris and London (or Tokyo, Buenos Aires, or Shanghai) sounds so romantic.  It isn't.  Being poor isn't fun anywhere.  When I arrived in France I had almost no money and what little I had was sucked up with transportation fees, decent inexpensive clothes for job interviews, and language training.  I was not ready when I went looking but there was rent to pay.  And what I found was poorly paid secretarial work.  Money means options. Have something as a cushion just in case.  And don't assume you will be able to pay down your home country debts in the host country. It might happen, it might not.

Work Visas:  Given your situation, what visa categories are available to you?    Different countries have multiple work visa categories with different requirements and more or less beneficial conditions. If the visa is a short-term one (1 to 3 years) find out how hard it is to renew.  A spousal visa might be an option but it comes with its own issues; your ability to stay in the country and work may depend on your relationship with your spouse.  Never forget that you can be fired from that job, too.

Can you switch easily from one visa category to another?  Are you required to stay with an employer (H1-B in the US) or can you quit and find another employer without having to reapply to be able to stay?  Will the employer help with the visa process?  What about student visas?  Some countries allow students to work part-time.  Other countries allow international students to stay in the country after graduation and look for work.

Ghettoization:  The job market in the destination country is structured in particular ways.  Be aware of them.  Are certain nationalities mostly hired for certain kinds of jobs?  For example, it is reported that the Portuguese have a lock on the apartment manager jobs in Paris. Anglophones from certain countries are hired to teach English.  Silicon Valley seems to like French engineers.  A friend of mine who is an engineer from Mexico arrived in Europe where people suggested that she look for work teaching Spanish.  Eastern Europeans in some countries are associated with skilled trades.  In other places an Asian nationality may be associated with entrepreneurship.   Not to mention all the national stereotypes about migrant criminality, women and the sex trade, perceived failure of your nationality to integrate, and things like that.  Is that discrimination on the basis of national-origin?  You bet your ass it is.  And yet, it happens all the time and you can find yourself being herded into what the natives think is the "right" position for you based on the color of your passport.  And once you are there, they may never let you out.

Discrimination:  In addition to discrimination on the basis of national origin there can also be racial, sexual orientation, or gender-based discrimination in the host country.  If you are going to work in any country find out what your rights are (or if you even have any).  You are going into a world where you are most likely not a native-born citizen.  Perhaps there are local laws and protections but don't count on being able to use them because you are a migrant/immigrant/naturalized citizen.    Have a look at this EU publication, Migrants, Minorities and Employment-Exclusion and Discrimination in the 27 Member States.  Or this working paper on discrimination in Canada.

It's one hell of a game.  There are so many different possibilities that my head swims and I had trouble keeping this list short.  The thing to remember is that you have good cards and not so good ones that play differently in different countries.  Some of them you can throw away if you wish, others you are just plain stuck holding or giving them up is unthinkable.  I would argue that your chances of successful play are greatly improved with a little research and lot of thought.  I hope this helps.

Return to the Ancestral Homeland

There are books that make me want to ask for my dissertation back so I can cite them and add to my bibliography. Redefining Japaneseness:  Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland by Jane Yamashiro is one I really regret not having read before I submitted.

This work is based on a study and fieldwork on Americans of Japanese origin who came to Japan to live and work.  In this very clear, very well-written book, Yamashiro has some fascinating insights about their experiences.  There are a few areas where I would respectfully disagree with her, but overall her arguments and conclusions are cogent and worth reading by anyone interested in migration.

Yamashiro declines to use terms like return migration or diaspora in favor of her own term:  ancestral homeland migration.  She makes a very good case that her term is more accurate and more useful in the context of her research on Japanese-Americans in Japan.  Return migration is inaccurate, she says, because the Japanese have been migrating to the US for centuries and it's their children, grand-children or even great-grand-children who move to Japan.  How can they "return" to a place they have never been before, to a land that is often only a distant memory passed down through family members?   As for the term diaspora, she argues that this assumes an orientation toward that distant homeland that many second, third or fourth generation children of immigrants just don't have. Ancestral homeland migration, she argues, is a better fit because it doesn't use the language of "return" and it doesn't imply that there is any sort of active transnational connection between them and the land of their ancestors.

I found this argument to be very persuasive and I like the term. "Ancestor" implies distance while "homeland" acknowledges the connection to the destination country.  "Migration" (without the "return") completes it because they are indeed on the move.  Furthermore, I can see how is an elegant and appropriate way of describing, say, a Polish-Canadian's or Irish-American's move to Poland or Ireland.  The connection may be distant but it is there.

Yamashiro also investigates something that we do not think about enough when we look at migration: the role of regions and sub-regions within a larger nation-state.  Migrants do not just come from France, Canada, Brazil, they came at specific times from specific regions, towns, or cities.  In Choquette's work on the French who came to Canada, she found that many came from urban areas which is surprising since they moved toward a rural life in Canada.

Yamashiro looked at where Japanese-Americans grew up in the United States and found a clear division between those who were from the continental US and those who came from Hawai'i.  In the continental US (even areas in the West that were destinations for Japanese immigrants) Japanese-Americans are a minority.  Some of her informants grew up in places where they were the only Asian family in the neighborhood.  Not so in Hawai'i where Asians are not a minority and the Japanese-American community has influence and socioeconomic status.

These things have an impact on integration in Japan, Yamashiro argues.  The ability to "pass" as Japanese in Japan is a kind of privilege that European or African Americans in Japan do not have.  In my own research this was cited consistently by my Japanese-American participants as a reason they felt comfortable and integrated in Japan.  They were presumed to be Japanese as they walked down the street in Tokyo or rode the metro to work.   However, when they interact with Japanese, their Japanese phenotype clashes with their accent and their non-native level of language ability and cultural knowledge.

What is most fascinating are the strategies her Japan-American study participants used to get around their unveiling as "stealth migrants."  Those from the continental US would make it clear that they were Americans with native-level English.  Those from Hawai'i emphasized their regional identity over the national (US) one.  Hawai'i has a very favorable image in Japan and it is a common tourist destination for Japanese tourists and emigrants.  This is a very deft use of race, nationality, reginal identity, and language to create a favorable space within Japanese society.  And it is one that they are uniquely qualified to use.

My quibbles with Yamashiro's work are minor but I will mention two areas where I have a different view.

I felt that she made assumptions about "white privilege" and a preference for whiteness in Japan that have been challenged.  The idea that some migrants are automatically privileged because they are "white" is something that may have been true at one point in Japan, but is it still true?  I see a lot of evidence that this is not necessarily true now.   I would have liked to have seen a more nuanced presentation of this race-based "privilege" that points to research that contests these assumptions.  Also, the idea that a preference for white skin in Japan is linked to Europeans and white North Americans has been challenged by Hiroshi Wagatsuma (1967) who showed that this preference goes back to the Nara period (8th century) and predates the presence of Europeans in Japan by centuries.

The other assumption that deserves a closer look is the notion of English Language Teaching (ELT) as a white-collar "privileged" profession.  One has only to look at the research and the media reports in Japan to begin questioning that assumption.  I would argue that it was, indeed, a profession with status at a certain point in time in Japan.  The picture is very different today.

But those are relatively minor quibbles.  None of these assumptions are directly linked to her main arguments which are, in my view, thoughtful and persuasive.  The short review I have written here does not begin to do justice to the entire work.  I highly recommend you read it for yourself.

Why Do You Stay?

Yet another email that asks, "Why do they [migrants/expats] stay?"  That's a deceptively simple question that never has an answer.  Twenty years ago, I had a few answers that I dutifully and even happily pulled out whenever the question arose.  Today,  I have a completely different set of answers because I'm 50, not 20.  I changed, the US changed, France changed.   For that matter the world changed.  Go figure.

There are answers and there are rationalizations.  We are all frogs in a pot and someone else is controlling the heat.  But we can jump out and go elsewhere.  Maybe.  Never underestimate the power of inertia.  Nearly 97% of the people on this planet never pack up and leave their country of origin.  Is it because they are happy?  Or is it because they are risk averse?  One way to answer the question, "Why do you stay?" is to turn it around and ask the native-born-never lived anywhere else, "Well, why are you still here since you don't seem all that happy ?"  Is that a fair question?  You bet it is. If someone is going to ask me why I stay abroad, then why they stayed put is fair game.  

But recently I've started asking another question because I've met more and more people who move and move again (those Serial Migrants Ossman studies).  These are not the assigned expatriates (people who are sent by a company and rotated to subsidiaries around the world) but true nomads that move from one place to another, settle for a time, and then decide to try something else, somewhere else. Some even become citizens before they leave because, you never know, they might want to come back and who needs the immigration hassles?

The native-born citizens and other immigrants react very negatively to this.  Why come to a country, settle, and then leave?  Is there something wrong with our country or is there something wrong with you?  We still have this model in our head of immigration where the immigrant arrives, puts him or herself on the path to citizenship and then happily stays in his adopted country until the end of his days.  That's what immigrants are supposed to do, right?

It's never been that simple.  Entire papers and whole books have been devoted to the topic of return migration.  A substantial number of immigrants to the US in the early 20th century stayed long enough to become citizens before they packed up and went back to the home country or to a third country.  Immigrant does not equal "I plan to stay here forever."  Here are a few examples that I've encountered:

• A refugee family who escaped the Soviet Union and landed in the US.  They stayed just long enough to get US citizenship for the entire family and then they left a year later to live in Europe where they stayed.

• A young couple with different nationalities living in Northern Europe.  Prior to that they had lived in Asia for years. When I talked with them, they were exploring their options and were thinking Eastern Europe, Middle East...

• Retirement migrants who immigrated once in their lives and when their working days were over, found a third country (or went back to their country of origin) to retire in.  The adopted country was a great place but wasn't necessarily their ideal place to grow old in

• A young woman who goes from one global city to the next because after 5 or 10 years she gets bored. She wants the thrill of discovering a new place and she wants to be around people like her:  people who have lived and worked in many countries, not just one or two.  As for the immigrants and stay-at-home citizens in the countries she's lived in, she finds them equally uninteresting. (And, yes, that shocked the hell out of me. I sure never thought of it that way.)

So the question the global nomads ask the stay-in-the-adopted-country-forever immigrant is "Why do you stay?  The world is your oyster.  Especially if you are a citizen because you can always go back."

It's the same question asked by the stay-at-home citizens but it's coming from a very different place. They aren't arguing that we should go home and there is something wrong with us because left our home countries; they are saying that we should get out more.  The adopted country is not all there is.

So why are we still here?

Damn good question.

And for an interesting and eloquent look at how people make move or stay decisions over the course of a lifetime, have a look at this post by Iris Kapil over at her blog Iris Sans Frontieres:
Transitioning into old age from a life lived across cultures — Part IV

Lifestyle Migration

When I first heard the term Lifestyle Migration I really didn't know what to make of it.   "Lifestyle" in English implies something rather frivolous and even pretentious;  something that must be the province of the rich global elite and not within the reach of regular folks.  What I discovered when I looked into it is that this is actually a very broad category into which a few migration scholars have poured very disparate people:  international retirement migrants, sojourners in India, small entrepreneurs running bed and breakfasts in France, and foreign spouses of nationals.

In a 2009 article Michaela Benson and Karen O'Reilly wrote, "As we perceive it, lifestyle migrants are relatively affluent individuals of all ages, moving either part-time or full-time to places that, for various reasons, signify, for the migrant, a better quality of life." And there the trouble begins.  What does "relatively affluent" mean?  All middle and upper-class Europeans, North Americans and a few privileged Asians? Or can it be applied to any migrant from any country who is richer and better educated than her compatriots in the home country and nationals in the host country?  It appears that the phenomenon is very much about people from the Global North moving to other developed countries or the Global South which makes it suspect in my mind.  Why is a middle-class Canadian woman with a B.A. in Political Science who moves to Berlin a Lifestyle Migrant, while a woman from Morocco with a Masters degree in Engineering who moves to Paris is an Economic or Highly-Skilled Labor Migrant?

The difference, say the Lifestyle Migration scholars, is intentions.   The Canadian women is looking for the intangible - that better quality of life - and her move is informed primarily by a social imaginary of her target destination. This is essentially a romantic project, freed from the crassness of corporate ladders and the necessity of earning a living in ways that she feels are inauthentic.

Intentions alone are, I contend, a very poor basis upon which to differentiate migration flows.  The Moroccan woman may be just as motivated to emigrate by visions of Paris as a cosmopolitan global city as she is by the job opportunities there.  And the Canadian woman once she lands may be very preoccupied by the necessity of getting a visa and earning a living in her new home.

In Global Migration Governance, Caroline Olivier gives this definition:  "The term 'lifestyle migration' is applied to a growing number of migrations that are largely undertaken for lifestyle reasons and which do not fit into the existing policy categories of migration."  My counter-argument is that migration is always undertaken for a variety of motives and most Lifestyle Migrants can fit very comfortably within the existing migrant categories:  Family Reunification, Retirement, Labor (skilled and un-skilled) and others.

Some Lifestyle Migrants even share an important characteristic of less exalted migration flows:  they are "illegal migrants."  Foreigners (many of them from the West) in Thailand are forced to become "visa runners" because the Thai authorities won't give them residency.

"While exact numbers aren't known, it is suspected that tens of thousands of Westerners reside in Thailand using this combination of back to back visa waiver stamps and / or tourist visas. They comprise a diverse bunch with several major sub-groups. There are English teachers whose employer has not or will not provide them with a work permit and 1-year visa. There are digital nomads for whom their work is location independent and for whom South-East Asia's combination of warm weather, friendly people and low cost of living make an ideal base. There are plenty of economic refugees, those who can't afford to have much of a life in the West, or those who choose to live here because they can have a higher standard of living than they could in their homeland." StickmanBangkok 

Many migrants from the Global North work under the table doing translation work or teaching their native languages. In some countries they are tolerated because they bring money in at a very low cost to the host countries:  a retired American in France on U.S. Social Security is not doing any harm and may even be doing some good since the money is coming from outside France and is being injected into the local economy.  Similar reasoning applies to French retirees in Morocco.  Some countries have designated retirees "quality foreigners" because they have a regular income (unlike many of the teachers, writers, and translators) and they offer special programs to draw these migrants in.  The Malaysia My Second Home program seems to be very popular and the Japanese government was actively promoting at one time "overseas ikigai towns".

Every time I take a tour of Lifestyle Migration and the attempts to define it as different from other migrant flows, the more I think this is a distinction without a difference.  Migrants from developed countries (all social classes and income levels by the way) who say they are seeking intangible things that cannot be expressed in monetary terms are still migrants.

That does not, in my view, make their motives selfish or suspect - something that I have always felt is implied in the term "lifestyle."  Is there something illegitimate (or exalted) about wanting to get a better job, seeking a higher quality of life, fulfilling a dream of owning a business, stretching one's pension, or raising children in a country that has a better education system and more opportunities for social mobility?  These are just a few of the aspirations of all migrants from all countries and from all socioeconomic classes.

The danger of lumping all these people together under a tent called Lifestyle Migration and glorifying their pure intentions is twofold.  The first problem is that it ignores the very concrete social problems faced by more and more people in developed countries: lack of opportunity, high unemployment rates for the young and the old, the precariousness of national pensions, debt, lives ruined by the Great Recession, and cuts in government programs.  Le Monde noted in this article from 2014 that the flow of young people leaving France was on the order of 60,000 to 80,000 a year.  Is it not easier to paint these young emigrants as having a fine adventure abroad gaining skills that they can bring back to France (because, of course, it is unthinkable that they might not return) as opposed to addressing the high unemployment rates experienced by the young in the Hexagon - an impetus for their leaving in the first place?

The second problem is that Lifestyle Migration as defined by scholars of the Global North is described as personal growth projects entirely based on individual choice and, some would say, a certain égoïsme.  This is almost guaranteed to raise the hackles of people in their home countries who might excuse a few of their compatriots having an temporary overseas adventure  but who begin to cast a suspicious eye on those who succeed brilliantly in their host countries.  That suspicion turns to outright anger when their temporary migration becomes permanent and they do not return.

In all fairness sometimes developed country migrants have a discourse that is not terribly kind or understanding of the people back home.  It does not help matters when a migrant describes his life outside the home country as an "escape" or when she treats people in the homeland as boring and unenlightened.  This is unnecessarily provocative and unfair - moving to India to live in an ashram or to France to start a gîte does not make anyone morally superior or special.

So I am hoping that the term Lifestyle Migration goes out of fashion very fast.  I don't think it's accurate or useful, I find its reliance on a global hierarchy of nations absurd, and I think it's potentially dangerous because it paints all developed country migrants as rich, privileged, egotistical, quasi-traitorous escapees - something that invites reactions like diaspora taxation or limitations on dual citizenship.

What would be far more helpful here, in my opinion, is to broaden every one's understanding of migrants and migration.   Instead of showing how these Lifestyle Migrants are different, how about looking at all the things they have in common with other migrants?

Developed country migrants who accept a migrant identity and identify with their fellow migrants (and who refuse to let academics stroke their egos) could go a long way in convincing the 97% of people who don't cross borders that migrants are not scary threatening aliens from destitute (but exotic) locales but people doing normal things like raising families, working jobs, going to school, making the most of their retirement.  And the only difference is that migrants just aren't doing those things in their countries of origin.

Would it not be a much better world if everyone everywhere  recognized that a migrant could be a daughter (or son), a parent, a childhood friend, a colleague, a parishioner from church?

I think so and I encourage all of us wherever we come from and whatever shore we've landed on to make it so.

Other Ways of Looking at Integration

In a previous post I talked about migrant integration and I asked readers to help me with a thought experiment that went like this:

Think about your home country and the immigration/integration debates going on there.  Determine what you think successful integration by immigrants would look like in or back "home".  For example, you might agree with the following statements "they should learn the local language"  or "they should not have a negative impact on the natives" or "they should be respectful of the people who already live there" or "they should avoid conspicuous expressions of religiosity." 

And then turn around and apply the exact same standards to a fellow citizen from your home country who lives as part of a migrant/expat community outside that home country.  Do you find that you can apply your integration standards equally to immigrants in your home country versus emigrants from your home country living abroad?  Or do you feel that you can't because the situations are simply not the same?

A few brave folks were kind enough to comment and it made for a very interesting discussion, though I note that no one really directly answered the question.  

Back in 2013 I wrote this piece which was my take on migrant integration from the perspective of a migrant (me) in France.  I reread it this morning and, frankly, I wouldn't change a thing.  I still have the same questions - I still feel that sense of confusion.  Here it is again for your reading pleasure this morning.

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In all the countries I've lived in there is an on-going discussion about the migrants and their integration into the host country.  It's a hard discussion to have because "integration" is a very broad term and a moving target.  When a native argues that the migrants must conform (or at least give lip service to) to his values that begs the question of which ones?  All of them or just the ones that particular native at that point in time thinks are important?  People change their minds (and their values) all the time.   Societies are not static.

Saying that migrants should act like natives, talk like natives, and share their values is a nice general principle but often breaks down in practice.  When a society is at war with itself over certain issues, migrants are left not knowing which foot to dance on.

Take something like the "Mariage pour tous" in France (know as Gay Marriage in the U.S.)  So what do the natives think about this?  Well, some are saying that this is going to literally change French civilization for the worse and that nothing less than the French Family, the composition of which is a strong part of traditional French culture, is at stake here.  Talk to others and they'll tell you that this about equality, fairness and the separation of Church and State and that it is against the values of the French Republic to not allow gays full marriage rights.

However a particular migrant comes down on this issue, when talking about it with the natives one must summon all one's powers of diplomacy so as not to offend.  Why?  Well, if the native in front of you disagrees with you he's very likely to tell you, "Well you're American/Algerian/Brit/German and we don't care what you think, you immigrant.  If you don't like our values, you should go home."  Of course, there is a completely different reaction if you agree.   Then they congratulate you on how well you've integrated because you clearly understand "true" French values.  It makes for an interesting conversational dance.

So when natives talk about values, all I can say is that the day you all agree on what French values you truly share, send me the memo.

As for behavior, may I gently suggest that people need to be very careful what they ask for because they just might get it.  There are circumstances where clearly the natives do not want immigrants to act like them.  In fact the whole reason that many got in the first place is because they offer something the host society wants and needs.

A good example of this would be a highly qualified migrant from a very entrepreneurial culture with a strong work ethic and a high level of educational achievement for him or herself and high expectations for his children.

Do they really want this person to act like a native?  Let's say he decides to not start a business and be a taxi driver or a public intellectual instead.  Or he decides to go on unemployment or disability because he sees that an awful lot of the natives are on it.  If he qualifies, why shouldn't he?  He may have a STEM diploma (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) but since the natives don't get those degrees in high numbers, he might as well go with the flow and encourage his kids to do something else.

Hard to see how anyone could complain about this since the migrant is simply conforming to the behavior he sees on the part of the natives.  He's not doing anything different.  In fact he's made a decision to be just like them.  Can we say then in that case that he is "well integrated?"  Or would everyone be much happier if he held onto the values and behavior that he brought from his native land?

Migrants can't fix what ails a society.  If a society cannot produce a sufficient number of people who know how to do X and are willing to do it, then that's not a problem with immigration, it's an internal problem.  Where natives use social welfare networks, can't balance their national budgets, and then refuse to have enough children to keep it going, that's solely within the power of the native population to change.  It's a bit cheeky to say to the recent arrivals, "Integrate or else" but "Do as we say, not as we do."  And it's a really unfair to ask immigrants to take sides in the "culture wars" and then get angry with them when they give an answer the natives don't like.

What migrants can do is to add their human talent to the pool and offer a different perspective that might further the debate.  I'd even argue that everyone has an interest in considering some of the values migrants bring from their homelands like, for example,  a strong sense of family or deep respect for elderly people.  The French might be really surprised to know that these two things are deeply held values that some North Africans and Japanese find a bit lacking here in France compared to where they came from.  Might be worth having a conversation with them to know why they feel that way and why they don't want to integrate a French interpretation of those values into their worldview.

Just a few things to think about from where I sit.

The Magna Carta and The Right to Leave One's Country

Every immigrant is also an emigrant.  Every migrant has a country or territory of origin and so the first step on any migrant's journey is to leave his or her country. I don't think nearly enough attention has been paid to that first step - emigration.

We, the enlightened cosmopolitan humans of the 21st century, look at this as a human right enshrined in international law.  After all Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

But the UDHR was only signed in 1948. So does that mean that the "right to leave" is some modern newfangled right that bureaucrats and politicians pulled out of their hats at the end of World War II?

Maybe.

In a 1981 article called "Citizenship and the Right to Leave" a fellow named Frederick  G. Whelan looked at where this right originated.  Strangely enough he found it (or something that closely resembled it) in the very first version of the Magna Carta - the one King John of England assented to in 1215.

"Liceat unicuique decetero exire de regno nostro, et redire, salvo et secure, per terram et per aquam, salva fide nostra, nisi tempore gwerre per aliquod breve tempus, propter communem utilitatem regni, exceptis imprisonatis et utlagatis secundum legem regni, et gente de terra contra nos gwerrina, et mercatoribus, de quibus fiat sicut predictum est." 

"It shall be lawful in future for any one, keeping loyalty to the Crown, to leave our kingdom and to return safely and securely, by land and by water. This is except in time of war, when men may go, only in the public interest, for some short period. (This excludes, always, those imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the realm, natives of any country at war with us, and merchants, who shall be treated as previously stated.)"

But, as Whelan explained, it disappeared from all further versions including the final one issued by Henry III.  He, in fact, "required any subject leaving the country to obtain a license, and other monarchs down to James I regularly issued prohibitions on the exit of important classes of subjects (e.g., clerics, noblemen, soldiers, skilled artisans). Otherwise the restrictions were relaxed in practice, and it came to be understood that anyone could leave unless specifically forbidden, so that travel and emigration were permitted to English subjects as a matter of policy. But the legal authority of the government to forbid this was not doubted, nor did the exercise of this privilege obliterate the allegiance which the emigrant continued to owe to the king."

Roughly 700 years later the "right to leave" gets put on the post-WW II agenda and included as a fundamental right in the UDHR.  How did that happen?

Whelan wasn't sure how it came about but he did see Articles 13(2) and 15(2) as something new and radical:

"A right of emigration as a human right is something new in world politics, a claim to which the laws and practice of many states, past and present, have been opposed. It is not only new; it is a radical claim in the fundamental challenge which it at least implicitly poses to the prevailing conception of the authority of the sovereign state and to the world order based on sovereign states, which is legitimized in traditional international law." 

"This right in particular, however, by its content, seems to pose a more specific challenge, in that it entirely releases individuals from binding ties of allegiance to their countries, conferring on them full liberty to abandon their nationality at will and assume a new civic identity on a voluntaristic basis. This claim, now put forward as a human right, raises important and basic questions about the nature of a political society and the individual's place within it." 

Yes, and for these reasons and many many others we need to take emigration as seriously as immigration.

The GOP Has a Problem with Immigration

There is a theory of international migration (one among many) called Dual Labor Market Theory.  This theory says that there are two very different labor sectors in the economies of developed nations.  One sector is characterized by stable employment, skilled labor and high wages.  The other sector is all about non-skilled or semi-skilled labor, people who work under much worse conditions with lower wages and a higher chance of being un- or under-employed.  Migrants, say the neo-classical economists historical-structural theorists, tend to be recruited for and work in that second, unstable sector.

The above is, I'm sure, a gross over-simplification of the theory but the key point for me is the idea that in that second sector employers in developed countries want migrant labor to fill those jobs.  And that means that business and native-born workers in the very same country will have very different views of immigration.  Business wants to bring them in (or keep them in even if they are undocumented), and workers and unions want to keep them out (or kick them out) so that wages don't fall and employment doesn't become even more precarious than it already is.

The result of this conflict of interest is a kind of schizophrenia about immigration in the heart of a developed nation-state.  The loud and strident calls of the native-born for restrictions on immigration are countered by powerful voices in favor of more immigration.  Talk about mixed messages.

In David Frum's article The Great Republican Revolt he makes the case that the business versus labor conflict over immigration in the United States is being played out in one of the two major political parties just before the next US national elections.  The Republican, the Grand old Party (GOP), is suffering, he says, because it cannot reconcile the very different interests of their party members when it comes to immigration.

On one side, says Frum, are the "Middle Americans" who are not happy with the state of the nation.  These are Americans of European origin who don't have a college degree, who suffered greatly during the Great Recession, and who don't seem to be recovering from it as fast as their college-educated compatriots.  Frum describes them as "middle-class" which I think is overly generous of him.  There are fewer and fewer stable high-wage jobs available to Americans who have only a high school diploma (or less), and many do end up working unstable, low-paying jobs where the chances for social mobility are small. It should surprise no one that there is nostalgia in the US for a time when someone could do very well without having to go to community college or university.

Frum is absolutely correct when he notes that this phenomenon is hardly unique to the US.  In France older members of my family loudly lament the passing of an era where a young person could aspire to a perfectly decent working life with nothing more than the bac (and in some cases just a brevet).

The argument is that this sense of precariousness ("losing ground") leads straight to support for right-wing parties with anti-immigrant platforms.  That seems intuitively true but there is also solid evidence to back it up.  A 2015 Pew poll found that Republicans strongly agree (53%) that immigrants have a negative impact on US society.  A whopping 71% believe that immigrants have a negative impact on the economy.

So a clear majority of the Republican base thinks that immigration is a bad thing for America.  They want fewer immigrants and they support better border control and the deportation of the undocumented.

But does the majority rule here?  Not really.  Frum points out that the Republican party also includes: "Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals..." who like immigration, or who aren't particularly bothered by it because they work in that stable high-paying sector of the American economy.  They generally support immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented migrants, though there are differences of opinion about whether immigration should increase or remain stable at current levels.

Whatever the polls say, Republican politicians have to listen to the pro-immigration contingent because it includes party members who make substantial political contributions AND because some of those politicians run for office in regions that have large numbers of naturalized citizens or second-generation migrants. And to muddy the waters further, some of those right-wing politicians are themselves the product of very recent immigration to the US.  In 2013, Frum notes, "A bipartisan 'Gang of Eight,' including Florida’s ambitious young Marco Rubio, agreed on a plan that would create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants and substantially increase legal-immigration limits for both high- and low-skilled workers."  In the end it didn't go anywhere, but they did try.

So the question is: How will the Republican party come to a consensus on immigration?  How can it reconcile the interests of its working class (former aspiring middle-class) native-born base with the interests of the business community and the professional classes?  One side has the votes, the other side has the money.

And, yes, it's starting to look very much like a class war.

And a hat tip to Curtis Poe for the link to Frum's article on Facebook

Hämäläinen v. Finland: Passports and LGBT Rights

There is a lot of buzz right now among Americans abroad concerning a new provision in US law that allows the Internal Revenue Service to ask the State Department to revoke, or refuse to issue, a US passport for non-payment of US taxes.

This is one that deserves some thought before getting out the pitchforks and prodding the behinds of the politicans who voted for it.  My visceral reaction is that this is a bad move on their part because it is perceived as yet another agressive move by the US government against the American disapora - the 7+ million Americans living abroad.  Where this population is already disgruntled and upset (and in some cases almost violently angry), this is not going to improve matters since many Americans abroad see this as a direct attack on them.  The US government should (in my view) be taking that very seriously.  Clearly they aren't. I invite you to read  Americans Abroad: A Disillusioned Diaspora? by Dr. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels which has a fine summary of the situation.

How people feel about this is one thing;  what recourse they have is another.  Before I post I would like to answer some questions I have about whether or not this is legal from either the standpoint of international human rights law or US domestic law.  That means reading cases.  And the core question I have as I read is this:  Can a state of citizenship deny an individual a passport thus preventing him/her from leaving or returning to that country of citizenship?  If so, on what basis can a state do this?  I will post when I feel that I have answered that question to my satisfaction.

However, sometimes the journey to answer a question reveals cases that would never ever have occurred to you because you didn't even know there was an issue that needed to be resolved by a court.

 Hämäläinen v. Finland was heard by the European Court of Human Rights in 2012 and the Court issued its decision in 2014.

The plaintiff in this case claimed that there was a violation of Article 8 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms by the Finnish government.  Here's the background:

Finnish citizen Heli Maarit Hannele Hämäläinen, who was born a man and married a woman but later underwent gender transformation surgery to become a woman, wanted her personal identification number changed to reflect that she was now in fact a woman and not a man. To do so, she needed her wife’s consent in order to legally become a woman, since that procedure would automatically have transformed their marriage into a legal civil partnership. 

The wife, citing her strong religious conviction that marriage lasts forever, refused to have the marriage turned into a civil union and therefore did not sign Hämäläinen’s application for change of legal gender. Hämäläinen was then left with two choices: to remain legally a man or to divorce her wife. Unwilling to do either, Hämäläinen turned to the courts, arguing that denying her a female personal identification number because she continued to be married to her wife constituted a violation of her human rights as guaranteed by article 8 of the Convention.

Under Finnish law a married person cannot legally change his or her gender without the approval of the spouse.  Finland does not have gay marriage, only civil partnerships for gay couples.  Because the spouse refused to give her permission for the gender change and Hämäläinen didn't want to get a divorce, Finland refused to legally recognize Hämäläinen as a woman - something the Finnish state would have done if Hämäläinen had been single (unmarried). 

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Finland and you can follow the link above or google the case to read why they ruled the way they did.

So how did I stumble on this case while looking up instances where the state revokes or refuses passports to citizens?

Because one of the not-obvious consequences of Finland's decision (which now has has been blessed by the ECHR) is a problem with her passport.   Hämäläinen says that she can no longer travel because her passport continues to say that she is male and she cannot get that changed legally.

Fascinating....

Integration: They Will Change Our Way of Life!

A Flophouse reader responded to yesterday's post where I talked about fear of migrants and migration with some arguments of his/her own:

"I don't think people are afraid of migrants. They're afraid migrants will change their way of life if too many of them come. It's all about integration and respect of the people who were there before you. It's also about the fear that they're taking the local's jobs or have a negative impact."

A great comment and a very good place to start talking about migrant integration which is a very sensitive topic everywhere that migrants go.  Migrants negotiate the terms of their acceptance into the host country and culture.  They have to because even if they come in large numbers there is no guarantee that the "people who were there before" (the majority) will accept them and to some degree migrants' happiness and economic success depends on that acceptance.

"They Will Change Our Way of Life!"

Absolutely they will and I think it's very human to fear this.  In a sense migration is one of the great Cosmic Crapshoots of Life because neither the host country citizens nor the migrants themselves can know what will come out of the encounter.

Chiang Mai, Thailand, for example, has a large "international community" (code word for "migrant population from the West") estimated at around 30,000 people in a city with a population between 300,000 and 400,000.  The foreign community is clearly a minority so one would think that some sort of negotiation had to occur.  It's worth asking the question  How has life in Chiang Mai changed because of the presence of these people?  And how do the people of Chiang Mai feel about that?  Is there a minimum level of integration into Thai society that the local community expects or can impose on these migrants?  Or is it the other way around where the migrants have the power to decide to integrate (or not) as they like?

These are fascinating questions for which I have no answers.  I used this case deliberately because 1. I knew an American who lived there long-term and died there not too long ago and in our email conversations he admitted that he was not as integrated as he would have liked to be and 2. it seems to me that an awful lot of the conversation about integration is about people from the Global South moving into the Global North which completely ignores the presence of large communities of Europeans and North Americans living in Latin America, Asia and Africa.  

Why is it normal for us to question the motives and the capacity to integrate of immigrants to OUR countries, while at the same time idealizing our very own migrant communities abroad (often referred to as "expats" even when they have lived in those host countries 20+ years):  French in Tokyo,  Americans in Kenya,  Canadians in Cambodia, British in rural France?

So, Flophouse readers, let's do a thought experiment just for fun.  Think about your home country and the immigration/integration debates going on there.  Determine what you think successful integration by immigrants would look like in or back "home".  For example, you might agree with the following statements "they should learn the local language"  or "they should not have a negative impact on the natives" or "they should be respectful of the people who already live there" or "they should avoid conspicuous expressions of religiosity."

And then turn around and apply the exact same standards to a fellow citizen from your home country who lives as part of a migrant/expat community outside that home country.  Do you find that you can apply your integration standards equally to immigrants in your home country versus emigrants from your home country living abroad?  Or do you feel that you can't because the situations are simply not the same?

Please let me know what you come up with and leave a comment.  There are no right or wrong answers here, folks, it's just a thought experiment. No grade and no pressure. :-)

On the Move Again

Susan Ossman, a professor at UC Riverside, has done some fascinating work on a migrant phenomenon that she calls serial migration.

A serial migrant is a category of migrant who immigrates once and not having suffered enough the first round, chooses to migrate again to a Third (or Fourth or Fifth) place. Think about that for a moment. The usual narrative is one where the migrant takes that great leap, casts him or herself on a distant shore, integrates insofar as she can in this new homeland, and then gratefully becomes a citizen of this new and wonderful place that she has learned to love as her own.

This idea and many others have been on my mind a lot lately.  When I last posted in this blog I was writing at a coffee table in front of my big blue chair on the 14th floor of a high-rise apartment building in Osaka, Japan where I had been living for about a year.

Today I am writing this post at a desk  in my room on the 4th floor of an apartment complex in the Schaerbeek neighborhood in Brussels, Belgium.

What happened?  Well, like most of my cross-border moves this was a happy accident.  I turned 50 this year and spent the entire year in Osaka thinking about what I wanted to do when I grew up.  And the one thing that kept popping up in my mind was the idea of taking what I have been doing with this blog for several years now (thinking and writing about migration) and taking a year or two to do formal studies in that subject.  

Once I decided that I wanted to be a scholar of migration I looked around for programs in Asia, Europe and North America and I finally applied to a Masters program at a British university here in Brussels.   I chose this program for many reasons but probably the most important for me personally was the opportunity to study under someone whose work I greatly admire, Dr. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, the author of Migrants or Expatriates?  Americans in Europe.

To my delight I was accepted.  I attended my first class as a graduate student yesterday morning and it was everything I was hoping to find.  I have a great deal of reading to do (no hardship there) and writing.  And here I have a lot to learn because writing for a blog is not at all the same as writing formal papers in academia.  I will spend a term here in Brussels and then I will return to Osaka for the summer to start on my dissertation.  Then it's back to Brussels in the fall for more classes.  If all goes well, I will graduate in 2017.

Now that I have a plan which essentially divides my life between three countries, Japan, Belgium and France,  I will return to posting regularly here at the Flophouse.  I hope to share with you some of the topics that come out of my studies, and I'm sure that my International Migration and Citizenship reading list will be greatly extended as I do my reading and add worthy titles to the list.

And speaking of serial migration, I noted the first day of school that many of my classmates fall into this category.  These are young people (about the same age as my Frenchlings) for whom Brussels is their second, third or even fourth country.  And my housemate too - a woman about my age who was born in Canada and whose parents returned to Ireland when she was a child.  Since that return migration she has lived in France and now Belgium.  Needless to say, we have a lot to talk about every night at the dinner table.

And all that is what I think will be the very best part of this experience - talking to other migrants, learning about their lives, how they ended up in country X or Y and why they stayed (or didn't).  For all the media attention focused on the cosmopolitan globe-trotting elite, the refugees fleeing conflict or the undocumented immigrant, there are many other categories of migrants who don't make headlines:  students, teachers, tech writers, IT workers, nurses, small business owners and so much more.

In the media frenzy over this or that migrant "problem" what is lost is how migration is fundamentally just about People Who Move Around.  And those people come from every country, every culture, and just about every socio-economic class.  Migration is an incredibly complex phenomenon which has in our time certainly been enhanced by globalization and technology, but has always been part of the human experience.

If there is a larger and loftier goal in my ambition to became a scholar and writer on this topic, it would be simply this:  to communicate and convince the homelanders that migrants are people, and that just about every human being on this planet today is potentially a migrant, too - their co-workers, their friends, their children, their grand-children, or even their precious selves.  If more people could see in themselves the potential for a life lived upon a distant shore, I would hope that there would be much more empathy, and a lot less fear, about migrants and migration. 

Riener versus Bulgaria

On August 28, 1997 Ms. Ianka Riener filed complaint  46343/99 against Bulgaria with the European Commission of Human Rights.  Almost 10 years later, the final judgement in the case was handed down by the European Court of Human Rights (Fifth Section).

That's a long time to wait for justice.

The story is a convoluted one that started with a tax dispute which led to a passport seizure and a travel ban that lasted for years.  The bare facts are that Bulgaria claimed that Ms. Riener owed taxes and then prevented her from leaving Bulgaria until those taxes were paid.  How you might feel about these facts depends greatly on how you feel about such things as "tax justice" versus "freedom of movement".

The irony here is that the story pretty much ended before the ECHR ruled:  Bulgaria dropped its claim against Ms. Riener for back taxes and lifted the travel ban in 2004, two years before the ECHR's judgement dated May 23, 2006.

So what was complaint  46343/99 all about?  Ms Riener, a dual Austrian/Bulgarian citizen, claimed that Bulgaria violated her rights under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms when it prevented her from leaving Bulgaria  Specifically, she alleged that she was denied her rights under Article 8, Article 13 and Article 2  (Protocol No. 4)  - Freedom of movement which says:

"Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence.
Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.
No restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are in accordance with law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, for the maintenance of ordre public, for the prevention of crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
The rights set forth in paragraph 1 may also be subject, in particular areas, to restrictions imposed in accordance with law and justified by the public interest in a democratic society."

Ms. Riener was born in Bulgaria in 1946 but moved to Austria and became an Austrian citizen in 1989.  Her daughter and grandchildren lived in Austria but in 1991 Ms. Riener was living in Bulgaria where she ran a coffee import business registered in both Austria and Bulgaria.   The trouble began with a tax dispute.

In 1992 the Bulgarian authorities "found that the applicant owed 26,494,582 “old” Bulgarian levs (“BGL”) of unpaid excise tax and BGL 4,104,925 of interest (the total amount due having been at the time the equivalent of about 1 million United States dollars (“USD”). The applicant’s ensuing appeals were dismissed on 20 August 1992 by the Sofia fiscal authority and on 7 April 1993, after a hearing on the matter, by the Sofia City Court. On 7 October 1994 the Supreme Court dismissed the applicant’s petition for review (cassation) of the above decisions."

In 1995, the year that Bulgaria formally applied for EU membership,  the Bulgarian fiscal authorities asked the Passport Department at the Directorate of the Police to impose a travel ban on Ms. Riener until her tax debt was paid.  In the same year, when Ms. Riener attempted to leave Bulgaria for Greece, her Austrian passport was seized at the border and she was not allowed to leave the country.  Since she did not have a Bulgarian passport the seizure of her sole passport meant that she had no travel documents at all and could not leave Bulgaria.  She appealed the travel ban and in 1996 the Sofia City Court ruled against her:

"It found that the applicant’s obligation to pay a significant amount in taxes, as established by the courts, was a sufficient ground, under section 7(e) of the Passport Law, to seize any passport which is used for international travel. Unpaid tax was also a ground to impose a prohibition against leaving Bulgaria under section 29(1)(v) of the Law on Sojourn of Aliens. Although this provision did not provide expressly for a confiscation of a foreign passport, if applied in conjunction with the relevant regulations, it clearly allowed such measure in respect of a person against whom there had been a
decision prohibiting his departure from Bulgaria."

Bulgaria argued that unpaid tax obligations were sufficient to override Ms. Riener's right to leave the country.  Note that Ms. Riener did not agree with the tax assessment in the first place.  She claimed that "the Bulgarian authorities had failed to distinguish between her activities as a physical person engaged in commerce and her position as manager of the Austrian company she owned. That had resulted in wrong assessment of her tax liability. In reality she did not owe taxes."

Not surprisingly the Bulgarian government saw things a bit differently. "The Government stated that the measures against the applicant had been lawful and necessary in a democratic society for the maintenance of ordre public and the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Emphasising that the applicant had owed significant amounts in taxes and had refused to pay, contesting her debt, the Government considered that the measure against the applicant had been imposed on an individual basis, taking into account her behaviour."

So how did the Court rule?  The right to leave a country is not unconditional and Article 2 makes that very clear. But a State does not have unlimited freedom to override the right to freedom of movement by citing public order or the interests of a democratic society.

"Any measure restricting that right must be lawful, pursue one of the legitimate aims referred to in the third paragraph of the above-mentioned Convention provision and strike a fair balance between the public interest and the  individual’s rights." 

In other words a State must have a very good reason to deny an individual freedom of movement and that reason must be in pursuit of a specific goal outlined in Article 2. And finally, fairness and proportionality must also be considered.

Tax obligations can be a reason to consider denying freedom of movement and the Court noted that there are States that do have such laws.  But it is the ultimate aim of such a denial that makes all the difference here.  A travel ban, said the Court, cannot be a de facto punishment for not meeting one's tax obligations.  The goal must be recovery of the debt. 

And here Bulgaria fell short.  The Court decided that Bulgarian tax authorities had not "actively sought to collect the debt, either before or after the entry into force for Bulgaria of Protocol No. 4 to the Convention."  The Bulgarian authorities simply renewed the travel ban year after year and ''the periodic 'confirmations' of the travel ban were not based on analysis of the applicant’s attitude, on information about her resources or any concrete indication that the chances for recovery would be jeopardised if she were allowed to leave the country."

The authorities, said the Court, have a duty "to take appropriate care that any interference with the right to leave one’s country should be justified and proportionate throughout its duration, in the

individual circumstances of the case. It notes in this context that in the domestic law of a number of member states prohibitions against leaving the country for unpaid taxes can only be imposed if there are concrete reasons to believe that the person concerned would evade payment if allowed to

travel abroad."

So it's not so simple as sending a dunning letter, revoking or seizing a passport, and then waiting until the individual suffers, complies and pays. The State must justify its decision and continue to do so with fairness and proportionality in mind:  Is the aim legitimate?  Are the means used to achieve it necessary and reasonable?

"In sum, having regard to the automatic nature of the travel ban, the
authorities failure to give due consideration to the principle of
proportionality, the lack of clarity in the relevant law and practice with
regard to some of the relevant issues and the fact that the prohibition against
the applicant leaving Bulgaria was maintained over a lengthy period, the
Court considers that it was disproportionate to the aim pursued. It follows
that has been a violation of the applicant’s right to leave any country, as
guaranteed by Article 2 § 2 of Protocol No. 4."

I like the Court's reasoning.  Travel bans and passport seizures exist or have been proposed as tools in the "war against tax evasion".  What the proponents of such measures forget is that States are powerful and they do abuse that power. That is not an anti-government stance - it is a fact.  Whatever the merits of the tax case against Ms. Riener she still had rights and the State had a responsibility to be respectful of those rights.  

Ms. Riener was awarded 10,000 Euros by the Court which is not much when one considers that she spent years as a captive citizen of a country she wanted to leave and whose citizenship she tried to renounce four times.  Bulgaria didn't come out of it too well either;  not only did the Court rule against them in 2006, in 2004  the Bulgarian fiscal authorities determined that their right to seek the collection of the debt under local law was no longer valid which meant that the only legitimate aim (recovery of the debt) was not served by keeping Ms. Riener in Bulgaria.  

Asia Expats Before and After the Great Recession

The first time our little Franco-American family headed off for Asia back in 2006 the French multinational my spouse worked for built us a golden bridge.  We were seduced with a package that included a job for me in Tokyo, Japanese language lessons, a great international school for the Frenchlings, and business class plane tickets "home" so when we returned to France on vacation we did so in style.

As we settled in that first year in Tokyo we learned that our package was not unique at all.  The office were we both worked was filled with other French expatriates and those higher on the food chain had even better packages.  The Grand Poobah himself, a product of France's finest schools, travelled in a car with a driver, lived in a huge apartment, and was given a French tri-lingual secretary whom he treated with great respect.  She was a necessity because even after 10 years in Japan, he spoke very little Japanese and preferred to conduct business in French or English.

Sounds positively colonial, doesn't it?

In 2015 all that is gone, gone, gone.  Most of the French expatriates who worked with us years ago went home.  It was simply too costly, we heard, to support so many in the style to which they had happily become accustomed.  And so the French company  gave them two choices:  repatriation or local contracts.  Most left.

As for the company (a different one) that sent us to Osaka earlier this year, this package is nothing compared to what we had the last time.  During the negotiations prior to leaving France, the company did everything they could to keep the costs down.  They succeeded;  it is only costing the company slightly more to have us in Osaka, Japan as opposed to France, my spouse's home country.

Personal experience is not proof of a trend.  And yet a recent Wall Street Journal article analyzing the state of the traditional business expat in Asia argues that, yes, post-financial crisis. the business expat experience in this part of the world is very different.

In Singapore, China and Hong Kong, says writes Rashmi Dalai, the packages are slimmer, the salaries are lower, and the profiles are different:  more expats from other parts of Asia and fewer from Europe and North America.  Younger, too, and willing to stay long-term even if it means less money and living in less desirable locations.

Very interesting article and well worth the read.  If you are a Flophouse reader in any of these Asian countries, I would to have your take on what she says.  Dalai was based in Shanghai, a city I worked in temporarily a few times, but don't know it well.  All I can offer here is my perspective from Japan, and I have a few questions about her argument.

Writing about three countries on this vast continent and implying that this is representative of Asia is a bit hard to swallow.  Yes, over the years the action (so to speak) is centered on Asian countries with growing power and influence, and strong economies.   I am old enough to remember when Japan was booming and was the place to be.  Some of the expatriates I've met here who stayed through the busts and the natural disasters have a certain nostalgia for that period when even a foreign language teacher could make decent money.  

Last time I looked Japan was still part of Asia as is Korea or Thailand or Vietnam or Cambodia.  There are business expats in those places, too.  So I would argue that she would have to look at a more diverse selection of places before she can dub this an Asian trend. For that matter it would be interesting to know if the trend was not regional at all, but international in scope with business expatriates in South America, Africa or Europe having similar experiences. 

I was also a bit dubious of this assertion:  "Five years ago, the majority of expats in Asia were Westerners on short-term assignments with multinational corporations that offered generous housing, schooling and travel packages."

I really doubt that is true.  Yes, there are cities in Asia with a high number of business expats like Tokyo and probably Hong Kong or Shanghai.  But however large that population, there is almost always a greater population of  Western foreign language teachers, academics, translators, small business owners, spouses, students and missionaries.

They are far less sexy (and probably of little interest to WSJ readers) than the entrepreneurs or company transfers and reflect a much wider socio-economic spectrum than the businessmen and women.  These Westerners are not drawn to Asia by the expat packages because they don't have them and never did.  For that matter, some arrived without any job at all and did what was necessary to get one.

Whatever is going on with the traditional business expats in Asia or elsewhere, a far more interesting question (to me at least) is the relationship between the foreign company transfers, the floating group of short to medium-term expats with more mundane jobs, and the more or less permanent Western communities in Asian countries.  If what Dalai says is true about their being fewer Western expats with money to burn and the power to hire, and there are more local people who have the qualifications and the profiles to take over those positions, what is the impact on all the other Western expatriates or permanent residents?

Will there be fewer opportunities for Westerners overall?  Will it be harder for the permanent foreign residents to survive even with their language and culture skills?  What happens to the infrastructure (schools, churches, societies) if there are no longer enough well-heeled foreign nationals to support them?  Or the small businesses built around "translating" the local culture and language for short to medium-term expats?

Last word.  It is a real pity that we have such a loose definition of expat and that so much energy is expended avoiding the word migrant for people from Western countries.  Why?  Because the surface interpretation of this article would be that one type of expat is simply being replaced by another type of expat.  Another, and I think a truer interpretation, would be that the expats are being replaced by economic or opportunity migrants who just happen to be from Western countries like Europe or North America.  And once we've opened our minds to that, we can look to migration experts for theories and answers.

Defining Terms: Migrants, Expatriates and Travelers

Contempt before investigation is a most perilous mindset and I was skirting the edges of it as I reluctantly picked up  Self-Initiated Expatriation: Individual, Organizational, and National Perspectives  by Maike Andresen, Akram Al Ariss , Matthias Walther (Editors).

Self-initiated expatriation?   The meaning was (I thought) clear but why invent a term when others already exist?  I feared that it was just another bit of academic nitpicking designed to glorify the "adventurers" of the First World to the detriment of other migrants.

To my surprise, the book is quite good and I'm glad I gave it a chance to surpass my low expectations.  I will discuss the difference between Self-Initiated and Assigned Expatriates in another post (in the book there is a good, if limited, study of both in Japan).

Today I'd like to talk about the very first chapter where the three editors  take a stab at defining terms.  What is the difference between migrants and expatriates?   And what distinguishes both from long or short-term travelers?

These are not easy questions to answer.  Sometimes migrant and expatriate are used in the same way citizenship and nationality are used:  as interchangeable and having more or less the same meaning.  Often they are used (especially when people label themselves) to make a distinction between someone from the developed world versus a "real" migrant or immigrant from the developing world.  This distancing reveals not just global hierarchies, but also says a great deal about the self-perceptions of  Europeans or North Americans.  (See this Flophouse post on Immigrants vs. Expatriates.)

 Even academics and researchers use these terms in different ways.  The editors looked at English-language journal articles and found 74 definitions for expatriate and 84 for migrant.  They concluded, "there is no consistency in the literature regarding how each of the three individual terms [migrant, expatriate, and self-initiated expatriate] is defined."  They then took it upon themselves to clear up the chaos.

Their model is a good one, I think, and worth using.  It is perfect but it is, I contend, more objective and deftly avoids the trap of trying to define migrants/expatriates by their countries of origin, socioeconomic class, and intentions.  They are defined instead by what they do when they hit that distant shore.

The first step in cleaning up these categories divides the "people who move around" into two groups based on the answer to this question:  Is there a geographic relocation across national borders and a change in the dominant place of residence?  If the answer is No then the person is not a migrant, but a traveler.  If the answer is Yes then the person is put in a big bucket called Migrant.

Under the category Migrant are subcategories and of them is Expatriate (others might be Entrepreneurs, Retirees, Education, Marriage or Family Reunification Migrants.)  But what is the one thing, say Andresen et al, that always puts someone in the Expat group?  An employment contract.

"Individuals," they argue, "who move to a foreign country without taking up employment cannot be categorized as expatriates."  This can be a contract with a home country organization or company, or one with a host country organization or company.

And that is the difference between the Assigned Expatriates (AEs) and the Self-Initiated Expatriates (SIEs):  the former is sent by a company in the home country (or country of residence) and the latter deals directly with an organization or company in the target country, signs a contract with them and relocates on his own dime.

I like it.  Under this model an engineer, professor, aid worker, programmer, teacher, hairdresser or agricultural worker with a work contract who hails from North or South America, Europe, Africa or Asia are all Expatriates.

"But, but, but..." (I can hear some of you sputtering.)

OK, I agree that this model is not perfect, so let's discuss.   Tell me what your objections are and, if you like, propose your own model.