ABSTRACT
Has the Turkish labour migration to Europe transformed from guestworkers to global talent? This book suggests that in the increasingly globalizing world, migrant stories be apprehended as part of the ‘mobility turn’ and contextualized in the particular settings of domicile that shape and are shaped by the experiences of and discourses about their predecessors. To that end, the book develops three nexuses (mobility/migration, mobility/citizenship and mobility/dwelling) to show the embedded sense of mobility alongside its boundedness within the socio-political contexts. Only by examining highly skilled migration free of the typical assumptions about ‘elites’ and ‘global mobilities’ are we able to display how social relations ordered through mobility are different from or similar to those structured around stasis, how people embedded in mobility remain connected to places through transnational movements and home continuum, and, finally, how their mobility is nevertheless constrained by the nation state and ‘ethnic hierarchies’. With increasing global competition of knowledge economies, European states are likely to receive more highly skilled migrant workers in the future, which calls for a better understanding of the aspirations and deprivations of this new type of mobility. This book represents a first step in this direction.
