Leaving Europe, navigating access Status migration, traveling habitus, and racial capital in Euro-Maghrebi mobilities to the United Arab Emirates

Can racialization spur emigration? This dissertation investigates the departure motives and social itineraries of tertiary-educated, “second-generation” Euro-Maghrebis from France, Belgium and The Netherlands, who resettled in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Born and raised in the EU, these descendants of “guest workers” from North Africa report having experienced racism and social immobility at home and therefore decided to leave their native Europe. This ethnographic study advances three critical interventions: (1) it tackles the negligence of race as an analytical category in European migration studies; (2) it remedies the continued paucity of qualitative scholarship about (middle-class) migrant life in the Gulf Arab states—notably by documenting non-White negotiations of the “expatriate” experience in the context of the “Dubai model”; (3) and it valorizes and expands on Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work in migration and mobility studies by means of conceptualizing “racial capital” as a distinct form of analytical capital, as well as by developing the “traveling habitus,” a transitive tool to analyze class mobility in longer-term migration. In so doing, this dissertation reveals the contours of what it dubs “status migration,” a counter-technique on the part of status-degraded citizens trying to cope both with ascribed (racial) status inflictions and a lack of economic opportunities in an increasingly precarious European labor market. It shows how status migration is not solely grounded in an individualist economism, but follows from deeply-held relational calculations about (a multiplicity of) future social status gains in the (Emirati) space of arrival relative to the (European) home country.