Mobility and Lifestyles of Skilled Temporary Workers. Middling Migrants in Montreal
In this article we position “middling migrants” in relation to the globally mobile elite and unskilled temporary migrants in order to offer a critical reading of migration policies adopting econocentric strategies for “attracting and retaining” skilled workers, often described as ideal candidates for immigration, based on their potential for rapid and frictionless integration into host societies. By exposing the inherent contradictions between personal motivations and structural incentives of the globalized labour market, we argue that “temporality,” coupled with the ethos of the “global middle class,” keeps these workers in an interstitial space in-between mobility and local place attachment. The data presented is drawn from an ethnographic research on the streets, businesses and shops in the creative ecosystem of the Saint-Viateur East district of the Mile End in Montreal. This research is inspired by transnational urbanism which emphasizes the importance of the place, the local and urban context in the experience of mobility and migration.