Between Economic Exile and Lifestyle Migration. US and Spanish Expats in Chile.

In this paper, I present the results of my research with “immigrants” from the United States and from Spain that are residing in Chile since 2000. I base my analysis on Castles´ theory of social transformation applied to international migration within neoliberal globalization, in connection to Favell ideas on mobilities and the notion of life-style migration. Using virtual ethnographies on blogs and other virtual spaces, secondary statistical data, and more than 50 interviews, I explore the contexts that frame the US and Spanish migration process to Chile in the early 21st century to understand how these contexts narrated by these migrants and the construction of their migration decision. Based on the data analysis I argue that there is a dual construction of the migration process. On the one hand, these migrants frame their migration within the Great Recession of 2008 and this period inhabits their migration decision. On the other, they narrate their decision and stay in Chile from an agency based perspective that centers on how this migration is an opportunity created by a search for the "good life" and not externally influenced.

This research expands on the study of migration decisions by analyzing how global social transformation create context in which individual decisions takes place. Advances, as well, in migration studies by studying migration from the global north to a country in the global south (or at least in the periphery of the global north). Third, it advances life-style migration approaches by studying possible restrictions to this type of migration in context of social change and global crisis.