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[AAC] ““Investment Migration” ? What golden visas and privileged mobilities do to destination countries” (IMISCOE, 22nd Annual Conference, Paris, 2025)

Thomas Pfirsch & Madeleine Sumption

Résumé

Since the financial crisis of the early 2000s, many countries have launched « investment migration » programs seeking to attract privileged migrants by offering them citizenship or stable residency in exchange for financial investments. A line of research has emerged on these “golden passports and visas”, focusing on their policy designs, as well as on their impact on the reshaping of membership to the Nation State. But their consequences on receiving societies are still unexplored. Is “investment migration” really an investment for the countries that set them up ? The panel will revisit the “investment migration” narrative by analyzing its economic outcomes on the national accounts, housing markets, and “migration industry” of the destination countries. It will also study the effects of “investment migration” on human mobilities by focusing on the understudied “investor migrants”. While in some countries golden visas are primarily a means of attracting capital rather than people, in others they combine lifestyle migration, tourism and financial optimisation. Lastly, many of these programs are based on real estate, and therefore have deep impacts on the urban patterns and built environment of receiving countries. 

We welcome contributions on the following topics (but not limited to them):

– Investment migration industry, capital mobility, and their economic outcomes 

– The lifestyles of investor migrants and their impact on social inequality and segregration in receiving countries. 

– The spatial effects and environmental consequences of investment migration 

– Case studies from the Global North and the Global South, as well as comparative studies.

[AAC] “Privileged mobility and transnational conjugality: reconsidering global power relations from an intersectional and intimate perspective” (IMISCOE, 22nd Annual Conference, Paris, 2025)

Laure Sizaire & Asuncion Fresnoza- Flot

Résumé

Global Western migrations are often framed through concepts and terms, such as “lifestyle migrations”, “privileged mobility”, and “white migrations”, highlighting how privilege (typically tied to whiteness, middle-class status, and heterosexuality) plays a crucial role in these phenomena. Despite their multifaceted nature (encompassing expatriates, retirees, tourists, and others), these migrations are often depicted as reproducing unequal power dynamics and creating social distances from citizens of host countries. However, research on transnational families reveals that Westerners also form conjugal relationships and families in these new settings. A paradox emerges here: how can social distance and unequal power coexist within such relationships? Shaped by social, historical, political-economic, and gendered forces, these intimate mobilities, such as Western women partnering with African men, or Western men with post-Soviet or Asian women, offer a compelling context to interrogate the notion of privilege from an intersectional and intimate perspective.

From this angle, the panel raises questions such as: How gendered transnational conjugality challenge, reinforce or transform privileged Western positions? What drives Westerners to establish permanent residences and families in settings where matrimonial and gender norms significantly differ from their countries of origin? Are global power relations renegotiated within these intimate partnerships, and how do couples manage divergent values, norms, and behaviors? How do individuals deal and navigate between different normative regimes (gender, race, class), especially in the context of Islamic countries?

Contributions may explore, but are not restricted to, the renegotiation of race, gender, and class relations in both intimate and global contexts; the reinforcement or destabilization of Western positionalities in transnational conjugalities; the integration of partners into the host society and their interactions with the local community; power dynamics within couples; relationships with stepfamilies and living arrangement; organisation and decision-making when couples have children (such as travel between the host society and the West); and the process of couple formation. Priority will be given to qualitative and empirical research.

[AAC] “Undesirable migrants versus privileged expats’? Exploring the coproduction of im/mobilities in the professional field of international aid in the global Souths” (IMISCOE, 22nd Annual Conference, Paris, 2025)

Anissa Maâ

Résumé

Broadly speaking, migration studies can be divided according to whether they focus on so-called “migrations” or “mobilities”. This distinction sheds light on a two-tier governance that restricts the movement of some, while encouraging that of others. However, it tends to reify the opposition between two archetypal figures – that of the “undesirable migrant” and the “privileged expat’” – both of which have proven insufficient to grasp the variety of mobilities on a global scale, as well as their entanglements at a local level.

This panel aims at going beyond this binary divide, by exploring the complex dynamics underlying the hierarchisation and coproduction of different forms of spatial im/mobilities. To do so, it empirically focuses on the professional field of international aid in the global Souths, in sectors such as development, humanitarianism, migration management etc… So-called “Aidland” is a relevant site of inquiry insofar as it employs people with unequal access to mobility, namely: Western expatriates, foreign employees from the Souths, national staff, and contractual workers. While it rests upon a division of labour that reproduces global inequalities of citizenship, class, race, gender, and sexuality, this professional field is also a space where power asymmetries are negotiated.

In this perspective, this panel raises questions such as: to what extent is this professional field productive of differentiated forms of mobility? How are power relationships related to im/mobility addressed in the field? How are aid workers negotiating their access to global and local mobility?

To answer these interrogations, the panel adopts an intersectional perspective attentive to the multiple articulations between im/mobility and citizenship, class, race, gender, and sexuality. It welcomes contributions addressing the global and local im/mobilities of international aid workers, through the possible (but not limited) lens of: professional categories and work statuses (expatriation, brokerage…), narratives of identification and distinction, daily practices and experiences. Special attention will be paid to contributions dealing with: “in-between” positions of racialised Western expatriates and expatriates from the Souths, security and differential exposure to risk, relationships of power, mutual dependency and intimacy among workers. Priority will be given to qualitative research and authors demonstrating reflexivity regarding their position in the field.