Migrant Entrepreneurs As a-Typical Expatriates: Practices of Future-Making Among Highly-Educated Migrants in Singapore and Tokyo

This presentation examines global cities outside of the West as destinations of hope and future-making for a-typical expatriates, that is, self-initiated highly-educated migrants who choose to work and eventually become migrant entrepreneurs in these metropoles. Based on data from ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews with roughly 35 migrants in Singapore and Tokyo I engage with notions of hope, aspirations, and future-making in order to disentangle the processes of embedding in a given host society and labor market for those supposed to be privileged. The presentation examines migrants’ expectations towards the future and according strategies to establish host country networks that allow to root, to maintain transnational networks that offer a fall-back option or an infrastructure through which to return, and practices of home-making and anchoring through employment and legal stability. The analysis holds that expectations and strategies are not merely rational but are made-up of, negotiated, and reworked through hopes and aspirations. It proposes that disentangling the anthropological concept of hope from the sociological study of aspirations in migration research is fruitful for analyzing how supposedly privileged or ‘skilled’ migrants engage in practices of future-making, that is, practices directed towards building a viable, secure, and stable future and livelihood post-migration. Highly-educated but mostly from under-represented groups, including men and women from developing countries, migrants of colour, and second-generation migrants, these foreign entrepreneurs rarely pursue the stylised pathways of corporate – and mostly male – expatriation. The presentation sheds light on specific characteristics of Singapore and Tokyo, which enable these migrants to project hopes of career development or family building to life in the two cities and lead them to invest in establishing themselves in-place, thereby challenging the image of both the cities as short-term destinations and the migrants as uprooted individuals.