Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the lived experiences of two qualified migrant women in Switzerland who face the predicaments of mobility. I look at qualified migrants’ embodied, professional and existential immobilities, and their aspirations in the face of uncertain work life on the move.

Paper long abstract:

In a world perceived as being constantly on the move, ‘mobile’ individuals become either subject of “praise or condemnation, desire, suppression or fear” (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Regimes of mobility, while demanding to reconsider spatial and temporal boundaries and to challenge work and life possibilities, dictate who can move, when, how, and where. Those unable to conform to the disruptions, rhythms and velocities of mobility may feel excluded, immobile and trapped into altered categories. This paper explores the lived experiences of two migrant women in Switzerland - a refugee and the partner of a diplomat - who face the multiple predicaments of mobility. I look at the rupturing event of migration for qualified workers, the embodied, professional, existential immobilities, and aspirations in the face of uncertain and unstable work life on the move. Qualified migrants’ aspirations and views about the future may be in tension with the work opportunities and pace offered by institutions, which may immobilize people by putting them in a limbo situation where continuing or planning a career becomes difficult. However, immobility also becomes a space for imaginative and aspirational moves, which assist in orienting toward the world and in engaging the future in spite of uncertainty. Shedding light on the disruptions, immobilities and lived experiences of qualified migration can challenge categorical boundaries between ‘vulnerable/precarious’ and ‘privileged’ migrants, and support in exploring the complexities, inequalities, and (im)possibilities of mobility.