Privileged Mobilities: Locating the Expatriate in Migration Scholarship

Migrants who are privileged by citizenship, class or ‘race’ are largely still absent from mainstream migration research and theory; until recently, they were generally assumed to be adaptable and acceptable cosmopolites, positive drivers of cross‐border transfers of knowledge and skills. This has been addressed by an emerging scholarship on ‘expatriates’. This article offers a review and critical reading of that literature; it considers the instabilities and ambiguities of the term ‘expatriate’ and situates expatriate migrants within the global economy, before examining the gendered nature of expatriation and attending to migrants' incorporation in host contexts and expatriate negotiations of identity. The literature suggests that at the heart of these processes lie complex configurations of racialisation, gender, class and nationality, often involving problematic reproductions of the colonial past. This article argues that these issues are inherently related to the category's inconsistencies, rendering it difficult as a ‘category of analysis’. Instead, rather than using the term as a pre‐given conceptual frame, it needs to be treated as a ‘category of practice’ to be investigated in its own right. Especially as the subject becomes more established in migration studies, scholars need to reckon with the ongoing challenge that lies in studying the identity category ‘expatriate’ while resisting reproducing a reified understanding of it.