UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies An Introduction

The introduction to this special issue traces class at the interface between migration policy and migrant strategies. Scholarship on the politics of migration and citizenship has thus far largely neglected class. In contrast, we contend that discourses on migration, integration and citizenship are inevitably classed. Assessed through seemingly heterogeneous criteria of “ merit ” and “ performance ” , class serves as an analytical connector between economic and identity rationales which intersect in all migration policies, including those regulating family and humanitarian admission. Class-selective policy frames can function as constraints maintaining some aspiring migrants into immobility or channeling different groups of migrants into separate and unequal incorporation routes. Yet, policy frames can also serve as resources to strategize with as migrants navigate and perform gendered and classed expectations embedded into receiving-country migration regimes. We conclude that connecting policy with migrant strategies is key to reintroducing class without naturalizing classed strategies of mobility.


INTRODUCTION
While the role of class inequality in shaping possibilities and impossibilities of migration, types of transnationalism, modalities of return, and dynamics of incorporation has been substantially addressed and refined in the last two decades (Zhou, 1997;Carling, 2002;Feliciano, 2005;Van Hear, 2004;Rutten and Verstappen, 2014;Cederberg, 2017), its relevance in migration policies and policy framings has only been marginally acknowledged in the scholarly literature since the demise of post-World War II labour migration policies. A key reason for this neglect is that social class as ascribed social group membership has become a relatively illegitimate criterion of discrimination in contemporary democratic societies, and thus may only appear in official policy in the form of proxies such as economic resources, cultural values, education, individual "merit" or skill (Shachar, 2006), which in turn can serve as substitutes for even less legitimate criteria such as race or ethnicity (Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018;see Elrick & Winter [2018] in this issue).
The contributors to this special issue first came together to discuss the work presented here in October 2015, at a mini-symposium on "Class, Gender and Migration" convened by Saskia Bonjour and S ebastien Chauvin in the framework of the Conference Class in the 21 st Century organized by the Amsterdam Research Centre on Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS). A central objective of the symposium was to connect policy frameworks with migrant strategies, resources and cultures. Holding the two together is key to approaching policy without taking policy categories for grantedor as a simple description of reality. Conversely, observing that classed migration strategies and classed performances are sensitive to policy frameworks and opportunity structures makes it possible to avoid naturalizing them as mere expressions of objective class backgrounds.
The following section discusses the role of class in migration policy discourse and practice. It argues that discourses on migration, integration and citizenship are inevitably classed, because representations of Self and Other are inevitably classed. The third section of this introduction explores class in migrants' strategies, experiences and performances and proposes a critical reflection on class, merit, and selectivity as they shape the interface between migration policy and migrant strategies. The final section presents the contributions to this special issue.

CLASS AND THE POLICY CONSTRUCTION OF THE (UN)DESERVING MIGRANT
Immigration policies create bureaucratic categories of people that distinguish between those allowed to enter and reside in destination countries, and those for whom borders stay closed or legal status remains out of reach. They also define the unequal rights assigned to residents based on these categorizations. A substantial body of scholarly work explores the ways in which these politics of selection and stratification, even when they only seem based on skill, labour shortages and apparently economic concerns, are shaped by conceptions of national identity, race and postcolonial relations (Laurens, 2008;Paul, 2012Paul, , 2015. Increasingly, attention has also been paid to the role of constructions of gender and sexuality in shaping immigration politics (Luibheid, 2002;Bonjour & De Hart, 2013;Boucher, 2016;Giametta, 2017). While intersectional approaches to the analysis of immigration policies are thus on the rise, the role of social class, and its intertwinement with other axes of inequality in policy considerations, has remained underexplored.
In the literature on the politics of immigration, it is common to think of economic considerations and identity concerns as two distinct rationales, shaping migration policies in distinct ways and often put forward by distinct actors (e.g. Brochmann & Hammar, 1999: 6;Hollifield, 2000: 162-163). In this perspective, economic rationales revolve around the costs and benefits of migration for the receiving country's economy and welfare state, centring on the interests of business and workers (unions), while cultural rationales comprise discourses and policies focused on (national) identity, belonging, and cultural differentiation between migrants and the native population. Scholars tend to think of class as belonging primarily to the first category of rationale, i.e. as pertaining to employment, income, education, and the like. Often, students of migration politics and policies consider only one of the two rationales. Rationalist political science perspectives tend to see migration policies as driven by economic considerations, often in combination with foreign policy or security concerns and institutional (judiciary) constraints (e.g. Cornelius et al., 1994;Messina, 2007). In contrast, constructivist or political sociology approaches, which analyse migration policies as instances of "politics of belonging" (Brubaker, 2010;Castles & Davidson, 2000;Geddes & Favell, 1999), i.e. of "boundary work" that nation-states perform to define insiders and outsiders of the national community (Wimmer, 2008), tend to conceptualize migration policies as shaped by concerns related to identity, ethnicity, and culture. In other cases, the two rationales are represented as competing with each other. For instance, Joppke (2007: 17) presents civic integration policies introduced by several Western European countries in the early 2000s as an instance of "economic instrumentalism" rather than "classic nation-building as cultural homogenisation". In a similar vein, Staver (2015: 298) argues that in Norwegian family migration policies which grant the most generous reunification rights to highly-skilled migrants, "classas evidenced by one's position at the 'top end' of the labor market in sectors such as engineering -'trumps' race or ethnicity".
The sparse literature that acknowledges that economic and identity concerns might be related can mostly be found in the political sociology of labour policies and irregular migration policies. Thus, Chauvin, Garc es-Mascareñas and Kraler (2013: 127) argue that "in a neoliberal context dominated by workfare policies, discourses, and imperatives (. . .), employment and self-sufficiency have been redefined as key elements of civic deservingness, thus blurring the distinction between the cultural and the economic". Likewise, Regine Paul (2015: 44) points to "the socio-political and ethno-cultural undertones that resonate even within the common discourse of selecting 'the best and the brightest' for 'the demands of the economy'". In Bridget Anderson's analysis, migration policies are about (re)producing the "community of value" which is "also about economic worth, independence, self-sufficiency, and hard work" (2013: 5).
We build on this literature to argue that economic rationales and identity rationales are inevitably fused, not only in policies about labour migration but in all migration policies and discourses, including family migration and refugee admission, as well as integration and citizenship policies. We place "class" centre stage because we contend that class serves as the analytical connector between economic and identity rationales. Indeed, in the current nationalist neoliberal context, the policy distinction between cultural and economic criteria is increasingly blurred. In Dutch civic integration discourse, Van Houdt et al. (2011: 422) argue, for example, that "the idealized image is that of the good citizen as a working ('participating') citizen". Conversely, "the failure of immigrants to properly participate (economically) is explained culturally". In this issue, Roggeband and van der Haar (2018) find that in Dutch parliamentary discourse, "Moroccan youngsters" are constituted as "a national-cultural category, which is also defined in terms of a disadvantaged socio-economic position". Building on Yuval-Davis' (2007) conception of intersectionality, Bonjour and Duyvendak (2018: 897) argue that "class and culture intersect in Dutch political discourse in the sense that they are 'mutually constitutive' [. . .]. Poor socio-economic prospects are assumed to coincide with national origin (non-Western) and religion (Muslim). A low level of education is assumed to coincide not only with welfare dependence but also with poor work ethics and oppressive gender and family norms".
Students of migrant integration policies in Europe have observed a restrictive turn since the early 2000s, which has been interpreted as a shift towards renewed assimilationism, neo-nationalism, or communitarianism (Kostakopoulou et al., 2009;Kofman, 2005;Van Houdt et al., 2011) in the context of a "culturalization of citizenship" (Duyvendak, Geschiere & Tonkens, 2016). While these perspectives offer valuable insights, they downplay the role of norms regarding economic participation and financial independence in discourses on the "failure" of multiculturalism or migrant integration more broadly.
Most notably, they fail to acknowledge that contemporary discourses on migrant integration reflect self-imaginaries of European societies as simultaneously classless and middle-class (see Elrick and Winter, 2018 in this issue). Segmented assimilation theory has long criticized dominant policy and research conceptions of "integration" for assuming that migrants will or should settle into a very specific segment of racially and socially stratified societies, namely the white middle class (Zhou, 1997). In scholarly and policy debates, nevertheless, "earning a living" is more than ever considered synonymous with being well integrated (Staver, 2015) and those who are highly educated or highly skilled, often referred to as "expats" rather than "migrants", are usually exempted from integration courses and programs, as they are assumed not only to find employment easily, but also to share core values and practices of the host society (Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018). In contrast, the unwanted "non-Western" migrant is assumed to be unfit for "integration" in terms of education and skills as well as norms and valuesranging from work ethos to marital practices. In the Netherlands, Bonjour and Duyvendak note that the unwanted migrant is implicitly construed in opposition to the idealized Dutch citizen characterised as "the hard-working Dutch (wo)man": "being 'Dutch' is defined as being middle class and participating in the (Protestant) culture and ethos of hard work. Native Dutch lower-class people are made invisible" (2018: 894). Thus, the exclusion of certain categories of migrants also implies the exclusion of lower class citizens from the imagined community (cf Anderson, 2013).
Reintroducing class in the study of immigration and integration policies thus allows one to break with implicit imaginaries of destination societies as homogeneously middle-class, by showing how class-inflected "cultural" and "economic" criteria of entry, legalisation, and naturalisation based on these imaginaries contribute to (re)producing a stratified social structure, even as it reveals that policies do not always uniformly favour the higher-skilled (see Bonizzoni [2018] in this issue). This approach also brings to light that income and cultural requirements function both as selection devices and as disciplining tools.
The admission of family migrants and refugees is based on constitutionally and internationally enshrined fundamental rights. As a matter of principle, these admission practices are incompatible with selection on any other than humanitarian grounds. In particular, they are normatively inconsistent with selection of the so-called "best and brightest", i.e. with selecting on class. Critical scholarly analysis has shown that in practice, both refugee policies and family migration policies are shaped by conceptions of belonging and deservingness that are heavily gendered (e.g. Boyd, 1999;Gedalof, 2007) and racialized (Schuster, 2003;Myrdahl, 2010). More rarely, authors have investigated how these racial and gendered patterns intersect with class. For instance, Helena Wray (2009: 593) argues that British family migration policies are based on "middle class" conceptualizations of what constitutes a family. Bonjour & Block (2016: 790; see also Bonjour & De Hart, 2013) have shown that "the expat, imagined white, male and upper class, is the ultimate insider, and his marriage to a woman met abroad who follows him upon his return is the most positively valued of all international marriages". In asylum policies, scholars have investigated the role of class for instance in the evaluation of the credibility of asylum seekers (Wikstr€ om & Johansson, 2013;McKinnon, 2009). Even in these analyses however, class is not centre stage. In contrast, Kofman (2018, in this issue) argues that: "class has become the main determinant of access to family migration".

SOCIAL CLASS, MIGRANT SELECTIVITY AND "MERIT"
While class figures in various ways in migration policy, if indirectly, it also shapes the strategies and experiences of transnational migrants. Although the "global mobility divide" constitutes nationality as the master status enabling or curbing international moves (Mau et al., 2015), privileged class position measured by the amount of economic, cultural and social capital possessed by individual migrants and their familiescan significantly qualify this hierarchy (Carling, 2002;Van Hear, 2014;Br eant 2015). Van Hear (2004) remarkably observes that, contrary to appearances, asylumespecially to the richest countries of Europe and North Americaturns out to be one the most costly and selective option for international migrants, while marriage and, in some instances, labour migration remain relatively more accessible in terms of class background. Class structures the resource inequalities that separate those who are able to migrate from those who lack the means to travel (Carling, 2002). It determines the array of conditions that drive people to want to leave or not, whether in reference to local competition in origin communities or through classed imaginaries of success associated with destination countries (Alpes, 2012;Andrikopoulos, 2018). Indeed, many migrants anticipate destination countries as "middle-class countries", echoing these countries' self-representation. Following migration, migrants' sense of their own place in the class hierarchy is torn between at least two contradictory spaces of reference, so they may simultaneously experience upward and downward mobility (Anthias, 2013: 11-12;Rutten el al., 2014;Parreñas, 2015;Cederberg, 2017). Class cultures, modulated by social capital, gender and age, inform the nature of migration decisions, the types of collective expectations invested in individual migrants and the scope and morphology of cumulative causation in migration processes (de Haas, 2010). They also result in different types of transnationalism, modalities of return, and dynamics of incorporation (Zhou, 1997;Van Hear, 2004;Feliciano, 2005;Horst et al., 2016). This special issue asks which role class plays in shaping the agency of international migrants, with a particular emphasis on the intersection between class and gender as key to determining collective and individual ability, desire and duty to embrace mobility. Gender complicates the assessment of international migrants' class identities. For example, it structures the differential construction of skills for men and women by deskilling the recruitment channels of female labour migrants (Docquier et al., 2009;Kofman, 2013), which may also create avenues for certain streams of unskilled female migration (Bonizzoni [2018] in this issue). Classed conceptions of masculinity shape the motivations and modalities of men's migrations in crucial ways (Sinatti, 2014;Prothmann, 2018 in this issue). Thus, gender informs classed strategies of mobility and classed performances of migrant deservingness by men as well as women (Chauvin and Garc es-Mascareñas, 2014). As migrants navigate and perform gendered and class expectations embedded into receiving-countries' migration and integration policies, bureaucratic categories not only function as constraints but also as resources to strategize with. That is why connecting policy framings with migrant strategies is key to reintroducing class without naturalizing classed strategies of mobility. This special issue thus brings attention to how resources interact with representations and politicaladministrative policy structures to determine class projects and strategies of class self-presentation with a view towards migration. As Regine Paul (2015: 29) reminds us: "While some properties of individualssuch as age, gender, race, educational attainment -[. . .] have structuring effects as to agents' positions in the social space, the way in which they structure these positions is not predetermined. Rather, a person's status and position in the social space depends to a great deal on the ascription of meaning to their individual properties in classificatory struggles and the recognition of these meanings as valid visions of difference [. . .]. Policies, in this reading, are preliminary codifications of meaning, temporary winner stories in the struggle over legitimate classification. Whether my language skills, my age, my biological gender, or my nationality are advantageous for (or indeed detrimental to) my entry and residence to country X is a matter of the value ascribed to these credentials in the countries' labor admission policies." Recent comprehensive studies of migration policy provide convincing arguments that migration regimes have become "selective" in new ways, rather than altogether more "restrictive" (de Haas et al., 2016). Bringing in class inequality to understand the dynamics of international migration makes it possible to uncover the plurality of resources that migrants may mobilize in response to these selective migration policies (Bourdieu, 1986). In addition to income or economic assets, cultural and social capital can also function as "migration-facilitating capital" (Kim, 2018). The multidimensionality of class has two major implications. First, individuals and groups do not just differentiate vertically along a line separating resourceful from resourceless migrants, but also along a horizontal line defining qualitative differences between migrants based on the structure of their resources. Second, plurality allows for the convertibility of one form of capital into another, and for mechanisms of compensation (Kofman [2018], this issue; Elrick & Winter [2018], this issue). Most emblematically, migrants with little economic capital may be able to migrate or gain legal status by compensating for their low material resources with cultural or social capital (van Hear, 2004(van Hear, , 2014Br eant, 2015;Wray et al., forthcoming).
Understanding the dynamics of class and class reproduction also casts a critical light on the rhetoric of meritocracy that frequently accompanies selectivity in migration policy. It can be argued that in selecting migrants based on diploma, skill, or ability to support oneself financially, so-called "merit-based" systems have very little to do with individual merit. To the very least, a genuine assessment of merit would require comparing the social position from which an individual came, with the social position they reached through their effort. If this standard were applied, someone with an educated upper-class background obtaining a graduate degree would not qualify as particularly deserving, while someone from a working-class background who is the first person in their family to reach college and obtain an undergraduate degree would be especially deserving and Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies should be granted entry over the first one. That this is not how "merit-based" systems function indicates that describing them as valuing individual qualities of "self-sufficiency" and "achievement" is misleading.
These selection mechanisms are almost invariably based not on applicants' merits but on how they would benefit the receiving society, following the logic that Alain Morice named "migratory utilitarianism" (Morice, 2004). In some instances, specific skills are required based on diagnosed sectoral shortages, which can advantage lesser skilled groups, such as working-class women in domestic work (Bonizzoni [2018], this issue), even though domestic workers represent a small minority of migrant women worldwide (Spiritu, 2016). In many other cases, selection is based on diploma level or on expected salary, with the paradox that migrants whose highly-paid labour will cost the receiving economy a great deal of money are framed as gains, while those whose lowwage work will cost the same economy very little are framed as costly.
Policymakers take apparently heterogeneous variables as indicators of a class habitus: diplomas point to people with diplomas and high salaries point to people with a high salary: people who are implicitly assumed to possess a broad set of desirable characteristics, including shared values and compatible social and cultural practices. Thus income and education criteria reflect highly classed conceptions of deservingness and desirability. Individuals are deemed to have prospects because they are thought to belong to a class of people with prospects. In sum, "individual merit" has, on the one hand, little to do with merit and, on the other hand, less to do with individuals than with assessment of group membership. Contrary to neoliberal myths, "economic deservingness" thus functions as a collective indicator and selector of privileged group belonging, often a combination of class, culture and ethno-national stereotypes. As it turns out, merit schemes also often include individuals' spouses and their offspring, thus extending group deservingness to entire families. Logically, collective deservingness for some groups means collective undeservingness for others, who can be blamed as group members for their alleged bad behaviour or lack of integration prospects. Class is thus part of processes of racialization where such group characteristics are represented as "fixed and unmalleable" (Bonjour and Duyvendak, 2018: 888) or even "intergenerationally transmitted" (Roggeband and van der Haar [2018] in this issue).
Finally, including policy frames and routes in the study of class and migration can help avoid the risk of conceptualizing class merely as objective resources and habitus, thus forgetting that class is not just a given "background" but also a set of performances by which actors signify class belonging (see Bettie, 2014: 50-56). Deservingness frames embedded in migration policy construct a moral opportunity structure which leaves some leeway for migrants to perform deservingness in appropriately classed ways, emphasizing cultural capital, signs of middle-classness or economic reliability for example (Chauvin and Garc es-Mascareñas, 2012;Nicholls, 2013;Menjívar and Lakhani 2016). In her theoretical article on "migration-facilitating capital", Kim (2018) thus finds that "aspiring migrants, and migration brokers interact over the valorization, conversion, and legitimization of various types of capital for migration purposes". She observes that an "ensemble of migration brokers help migrants acquire the adequate profile of capitalor the semblance of the possession of such capitalcontesting the state's monopolistic claim over the governance of identity, qualifications, and mobility".
At times, individual merit will be also judged against a cultural background and "individual markers of class, status, gender, etc. will mediate the perceived admissibility of individuals vis-avis their ascribed racial/ethnic/national group membership" (Elrick and Winter [2018] this issue). However, migrants' policy-sensitive performance of class is only elastic to a certain extent and remains tied to pre-existing economic and cultural resources (Barron et al., 2016;€ Ust€ ubici 2018). For example, although class-inflected criteria for entry or long-term residence such as language provisions have well-known signalling, selection, and disciplining effects on applicants, they may also lock many less-than-perfect migrants unable to pass these tests into an endless "feedback loop of conditionality" (Goodman andWright, 2015: 1903), which has become a major mode of control within contemporary migration management.

UNCOVERING CLASS IN MIGRATION POLICY AND PRACTICE
The contributions to the first section of this special issue ask which role class plays in the construction of the '(un)desirable' migrant in political debate and policies.
Jennifer Elrick and Elke Winter [2018] show that the "dichotomy between economic utility and identity maintenance" which structures existing scholarship on immigration politics is void, since both in fact reflect the same purpose: "building the national middle-class status group". Drawing on Weber's concept of "status", Wallerstein's conception of nations as "status groups", and Bourdieu's concepts of "field, capital and habitus", they go far beyond the conceptualisation of class as market position, so common in the migration literature. Rather, Elrick and Winter show that German labour and family migration policies position migrants as more or less desirable according to different forms of capitaleconomic, social, cultural, and nationalwhich are potentially convertible. They challenge the claim that migrant selection is based on individual merit and deservingness, by emphasising the role of collective markers such as "national capital" in these selection processes. They conclude: "Western liberal-democratic states need to consider what it means [in terms of social inclusions and exclusion] to grow and shape their populations according to middle-class ideals, in a way that places the burden of achieving and demonstrating this status on individuals". Eleonore Kofman (2018) argues that "class has become the main determinant of access to family migration". She maps the "economic drift" of family migration policies in North-Western Europe, as social and humanitarian rationales for the admission of family migrants have increasingly made way for economic rationales focused on self-sufficiency and productivity. Zooming in on the impact of restrictive reforms of income requirements in the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK, Kofman finds that access to family reunification has become stratified according to classwhich intersects in crucial ways with gender, as women's structural position on the labour market makes them much less likely to be able to meet income requirements. However, lack of economic capital may be compensated by cultural capital, which enables transnational families to devise strategies to cope with strict income requirements. Kofman concludes by pointing to the normative implications of the "turn towards economic drivers in the regulation of family migration" as it "contradicts what should, in a moral sense, underpin policy: the facilitation of intimate relationships by citizens and residents where these involve cross-border movement, except in clear cases of harm to the wider society".
Paola Bonizzoni (2018) shows that in Italy, too, economic desirability is classed, but does not benefit the highly skilled. She recognizes that the valorization of highly skilled migrants is the rule in most national cases. Yet, by depicting a policy context in which class functions differently, she invites us to question the seemingly self-evident assumption that "highly-skilled" equals "desirable" and "low-skilled" equals "unwanted". Bonizzoni characterizes Italian labour migration management as a "bifurcated regime of deservingness", which has recently shown a tentative shift towards selection of highly skilled in a "competitiveness-driven frame" but which "has been largely dominated by the recruitment of a low-skilled workforce". Mass regularizations, which benefited mostly seasonal and domestic workers, have provided the main selection channel. Bonizzoni points out that the structural demand for low-skilled migrant labour and the high tolerance for informality have combined with the "neo-corporatist and familistic character of the Italian welfare regime" to produce constructions of migrant deservingness that appear to be particular to the Italian case, as migrants are represented neither as competitors for "good" jobs nor as welfare scroungers, but Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies rather as "net contributors" to the welfare state. Domestic and care workers especially enjoy "privileged social and political legitimacy" in Italy. Bonizzoni concludes that the employment of cheap and flexible migrant labour may prove a "short-term 'survival' strategy" reducing governments' incentives to "implement systematic, long-term welfare reforms".
We tend to think of class restrictions on basic citizenship rights, such as the right to vote, as a thing of the past. However, Jeremias Stadlmair (2018) reminds us that the very access to citizenship is stratified according to class, as naturalization is subjected to income requirements and fees. His analysis of party political positions in Austria reveals that increasingly restrictive economic criteria for naturalization have been put on the agenda by the mainstream Right and far Right, based on combined narratives of "integration as individual performance"as evidenced by language skills, civic activities, and professional activitiesand "citizenship as reward", i.e. citizenship conceived not as a basic right enabling integration but as reserved for those who have proved to be "deserving". Both narratives reflect an imagination of Austrian society as a meritocratic and "classless society of self-sufficient individuals", as a result of which these economic criteria are almost consensually perceived as fair and "the consequences of not being able to acquire citizenship remain out of sight". Stadlmair calls our attention to the ways in which naturalization policies reproduce and deepen not only ethno-cultural differentiation but also socio-economic inequalities in Austrian society.
Conny Roggeband and Marleen van der Haar (2018) demonstrate that national-cultural and socio-economic categories intersect in the political representation of citizens of migrant background. This results not only in the categorical exclusion of these citizens from the imagined national community, but also in a shift in the ascription of responsibility for their marginalization, which is no longer understood as a social injustice which should be remedied by the state, but rather as a result of cultural incompatibility and private failure. Roggeband and Van der Haar analyse the intersectional "category politics" in Dutch parliamentary debates between 1999 and 2013, through which the category of "Moroccan youngsters" has become a shorthand to refer to Dutch-Moroccan boys and young men who allegedly pose a social and security threat. They show that "the link built between nationality, ethnicity and class, naturalizes the class position of Moroccan-Dutch", to the extent that it is perceived as inevitably transmitted from one generation to the next. The cause of the problem is perceived as lying not in societal structures but within the home and the family, which justifies a shift away from traditional welfare state approaches towards state interventions such as boarding schools, parenting classes, and family coaches. At the same time, parliamentary discourse is highly pessimistic about the outcome of such interventions, and thus "the hope that Moroccan youngsters can be re-educated to become an integral part of society is annulled". Roggeband and Van der Haar conclude that "the way parliamentarians represent 'Moroccan youth' as a policy problem does nothing to include and support Moroccan-Dutch citizens, but rather reinforces the negative public discourse about this part of the population, adding to their 'othering' in Dutch society".
Together with gender and age, class resources and cultures inform the nature of migration decisions and the types of collective expectations invested in individual migrants. The second section of the special issue asks which role class plays in constraining and shaping the agency of international migrants and examines how migrant men and women navigate and perform gendered and classed expectations embedded in host country migration policies.
In his original ethnographic study in Pikine, an urban area within the Dakar region in Senegal, Sebastian Prothmann (2018) shows that class is the key factor in both the logic of departure animating the young men he met and of their economic strategies in receiving countries. Prothmann depicts unmarried young men experiencing precarity and "prolonged youthfulness" that prevents them from assuming the traditional role of the male provider. However, contrary to the common image of economic refugees fleeing absolute misery, those urban men shun existing local lowerskilled jobs "opportunities", such as small-scale informal street activities, which they consider shameful and associate with their rural counterparts. Meanwhile, staying in Pikine would involve "eternal dependency" on their families, which would be at odds with their classed self-image and ideals of reaching "social adulthood". Their migration is thus at once a gendered and classed agebound project of self-realization, one seen as the designated pathway to hegemonic masculinity, often modelled upon their migrant fathers. Once in their destination countriesespecially Italy, the US and Spain, in the case of the neighbourhoods studied by Prothmannremoteness and "being out of sight" enables young men to choose from a wider range of income-generating activities, as they are partially protected from the moral assessment scheme of their kin regarding dignity and occupational distinction.
Mar ıa Villares-Varela's (2018) article examines gendered dynamics in a different class context, that of Latin American migrant women entrepreneurs in Spain. Female business owners are often portrayed in feminist and migration studies as empowered by an activity that allows them to break away from "traditional family relations". Bringing class into the picture, however, uncovers marked differences between the situation of working-class and middle-class women. None of the women Villares-Varela interviewed relies on their husband's help, contrary to male-dominated family businesses, which frequently exploit invisible female labour. However, middle-class women still view their entrepreneurial strategy as a sacrifice that guarantees their spouse's career advancement, providing him with more leeway to find something "in his field", even if this involves a period of unpaid internships. Such strategy validates "the preponderance of their husband's career in sustaining the weight of the collective family middle-class social status" and preserves the husband's class-based masculinity. But this takes its toll on the women's class positions by preventing them from enjoying the level of social activity that defined their previous life back home. In contrast, women from working-class backgrounds experience opening a business as a way out of lower-level jobs in the domestic and care sector and frame their move in terms of upward mobility. Yet they also report that being their own boss makes them "flexible" for family duties, thus making it fulfil expectations associated with femininity. Hence, for the author, becoming an entrepreneur does not contradict class-based femininities but amplifies them.
In her article on ethnic identification among the university-educated Moroccan and Turkish Dutch in the Netherlands, Marieke Slootman (2018) challenges a dominant policy assumption about the relationship between class mobility and ethnic identification. Contrary to the notion that success in education and the labour market will inevitably lead to weaker identification with one's ethnic-minority background, and that the latter is a prerequisite for identification with the host society, she shows that ethnic identification is actually empowered and even encouraged by upward mobility. In their youth, her informants concealed or downplayed their ethnic-minority status in response to stigmatization and the pressure to identify in singular terms, but also because they primarily associated their ethnicity with lower-class status. Their access to higher education subsequently occasions "the life-changing event of meeting co-educated co-ethnics", which they experience as "modern, liberal and emancipated", in contrast to the large working class co-ethnic network of their parents, which they see as conservative. They share with these new "soulmates" the double experience of being an outsider in both ethnic-majority and co-ethnic contexts. They become more at ease embracing their identity, for example through participation in ethnic-minority student associations. Furthermore, their own sense of success and increased self-esteem pressure them to showcase their identity. Claiming Moroccanness or Turkishness becomes part of a strategy to "prove negative stereotypes wrong" and show that you can be Moroccan or Turkish and "successful". Thus, although segmented assimilation theory poses that ethnic identity preservation is compatible with upward mobility and even generates it though higher self-esteem, Marieke Slootman provides a significant update by showing that higher self-esteem through upward class mobility may also generate reinvigorated ethnic identification. In other words, self-esteem does not stem from ethnic identification, but the reverse. Overall, Marieke Slootman's study challenges assimilationist assumptions that ethnic-minority identification is incompatible with a feeling of belonging to the national society of residence.
The contributions to this special issue thus explore how class is conceptualized, operationalized and strategized, within political discourse and policies and in migrant and post-migrant day-to-day practices. They ask how different aspects, not only income, education and housing but also national origin, culture, identity or "integration", relate to class. They reflect on the ways in which class intersects with ethnicity and race on the one hand and gender on the other in construing degrees of desirability. Finally, they begin to investigate how dominant frames associated with migrant deservingness relate to the actually existing resources possessed by citizens, migrants and aspiring migrants.