ABSTRACT
Introduction “Even the basic stuff wasn’t there. There should be some basic things to at least come and survive for one or two days. This was the thing that irritated me at that time. Migrants, we don’t have to live here for long” (Naveed, 32). In this opening quote a high-skilled migrant mentions just one of the problems he encountered when trying to find adequate housing for himself and his family in Dortmund, a large post-industrial city in Germany. Similar sentiments were echoed by most of the interviewees in a research project examining the processes of local incorporation of mobile high-skilled middle-class migrants, most of whom did not intend to stay permanently. This was a rather surprising finding, considering that this group is usually regarded as privileged from a socioeconomical perspective and has been targeted by recent government policies to facilitate the entry of high-skilled migrants, and that the city in question has a relatively slack housing market.
