Intra-European Migration and the Mobility—Enclosure Dialectic

In: Sociology: the journal of the British Sociological Association, Band 41, Heft 2, S. 277-293

Abstract

European migrants to Spain's coastal areas could be described as the archetypal elite transmigrant. Embodying Papastergiadis' spectre of placeless capital and the homeless subject, `residential tourists' make creative use of modern communication technologies and increasingly accessible air travel to construct fluid migration trajectories, employing transnational affective and instrumental networks. However, research on British migrants to Spain has revealed a high incidence of social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. Following a dream of star ting a new life in a new place, some migrants do not wish to transcend the assimilationist model, nor have the resources to depend on transnational ties. Their dream is integration, but the tensions inherent in the mobility—enclosure dialectic — the contradictions between freedom of movement and the reasser tion of the nation state, an ambiguous status in Spanish society, their own ambivalent attitudes — constrain both assimilation and their ability to transcend it and lead to marginalization.