Growing up Abroad: Young and Highly-Skilled Migrants’ Transnational Transition to Adulthood
Youth here reflects those who either moved abroad for higher education purposes, therefore leaving their home in their teenage years, or for labour opportunities after graduating from a course in their home country and leaving home in their early twenties. As such, it was recognised that youth is a “life-course category which is socially and culturally constructed” (King et al., 2016:9) and characterised by leaving the family home, graduating and entering the labour market. It also needs to be acknowledged that “research on transitions to adulthood has largely been in non-migration context” (Moroşanu et al., 2019:1556), and recent scholarship became interested in how migration impacts the transition to adulthood (see Moroşanu et al., 2019; King et al., 2016; Lulle and King, 2019). In fact, migration is often used as a strategy to accomplish or accelerate adulthood, as was the case with the participants of my study. These lifestyle changes include greater autonomy upon moving, and the ability to be yourself more freely as “when you go and live on your own, you grow up” (Moroşanu et al., 2019:1565).
The findings are based on narratives gathered from 27 young and highly-skilled migrants in the UK and the fieldwork was conducted online between December 2020 and September 2021. The paper brings novelty in terms of examining the way migrants transition to adulthood while being away from their home-countries, but it also highlights the temporality of migrant experience by recognising the extension of socially constructed category of youth and delayed adulthood. The delay includes access to satisfactory work and income, the difficulty of getting on the property ladder, and starting a family.