Introduction: Mobile Aspirations? Youth Im/Mobilities in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract

Young people in the Asia-Pacific increasingly move around for work, education and leisure, and combinations thereof. Asians make up 41 per cent of international migrants worldwide (United Nations 2017) and the region represents diverse flows of both inbound and outbound, short-and long-term migrations. Settler nations with aging populations, like Australia and New Zealand, strategically seek to draw on the mobility aspirations of burgeoning youth populations elsewhere in the region as a migrant labour force but also as consumers of education and tourism experiences. Emerging economic powers like China and India seek to send vast cohorts of young people abroad to obtain skills, and simultaneously attract diaspora returnees and highly skilled foreigners back to work and invest. The increasing reach of multinational corporations across the region creates new opportunities for the circular mobilities of professionals, tracing new patterns of movement alongside traditional migration routes for manual labourers and domestic workers. Intra-regional mobility is increasingly important for youth. For example, while more than half of all tertiary international students globally are from Asia (UNESCO 2013), East Asia and the Pacific are an increasingly significant destination region, hosting 19 per cent of all international enrolments (UNESCO 2016). Further, new virtual mobilities, such as cross-border education programmes and digital outsourcing, position immobile young students and workersas well as those who prefer to 'stay' rather than 'move'into transnational and transregional networks and processes even as they remain in place. Despite the embedding of cultures of mobility into the lives of many mobile and immobile youth in the Asia-Pacific, contemporary youth mobilities research has been strongly focused on the European Union (EU) (see for example,

Settling down in time and place? Changing intimacies in mobile young people's migration and life courses

“…As Coe (2016) and Baas and Yeoh (2019) argue, migrants' life courses and relationships across space are transtemporal as well as transnational. Furthermore, attention to intimate relationships under conditions of mobile transitions (Robertson et al, 2017) can also help us to attend to and critique the universalising tendencies of Western models of both transition and migration (Robertson et al, 2018).…”

“…Little research captures transnationally mobile young people's life plans, aspirations and imaginings regarding their intimate relationships with people and places specifically in the context of their navigation of new and uncertain pathways to adulthood.Our focus on the temporalities and spatialities of intimacy builds on this scholarship in transnational migration and critical youth studies but specifically aims to draw out how intimate timelines and timings intertwine with the 'flexibilised' passaging towards adulthood in contexts where young people are on the move and their social relationships may be spread across transnational space and across diverse cultural understandings of the construction of adult life. We position this as part of an integrated, relationally oriented transnational youth mobilities agenda(Robertson, Harris, & Baldassar, 2017;Robertson et al, 2018; see alsoReynolds & Zontini, 2016) that draws productively on both transnational migration studies and critical youth studies to explore more deeply how, for mobile youth, family and friend relationships and networks of people and places are becoming increasingly entangled and multifaceted under conditions of complex trajectories and matrixes of mobility and the changing nature of transitions to adulthood.…”

Unequal Youth Migrations: Exploring the Synchrony between Social Ageing and Social Mobility among Post-Crisis European Migrants

“…Race and racism are especially relevant for black and ethnic minority Europeans, whose trajectories remain underresearched (Barwick, 2018). Future research will also need to explore how synchrony and asynchrony shape youth migrations outside Europe (Robertson et al, 2018a).…”

Suspending, settling, sponsoring: the intimate chronomobilities of young Asian migrants in Australia

“…Such attention to the intersections of intimate timelines and timings with transnational mobility -in other words, to 'intimate chronomobilities' -adds critical insights to both the emergent 'temporal turn' in migration research and the increasing scholarly interest in intimacy and migrant (im)mobility. With forms of transient, middling migration on the rise globally, and more young people than ever before undertaking forms of transnational mobility in young adulthood (Robertson et al 2018), the experience of 'intimate chronomobilities' is relevant to many transnational contexts beyond Asian migration to Australia. Geddie's (2013) work, for example, suggests that young international graduates in the UK and Canada, where policies have similarly allowed for increasingly transient and transitionary forms of migration, similarly centre intimate relationships within their mobility decisions.…”