Transnational Mobility and Social Positions in the European Union

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Movement across borders is considered to be crucial for an increase in life chances. During the last decade, the life chances of mobile populations within the European Union (EU), a space that offers freedom of mobility, have become a vital field of research. Scholars frequently point out that not all migrants benefit equally from these increased mobility opportunities; instead, differences in life chances proceed along heterogeneities, among which the most important are legal status, gender, ethnicity, and class. However, such studies predominantly investigate only certain categories of people (advantaged or disadvantaged), supranational social policies, or social positions of migrants in relation to either the immigration or the emigration country. Thus, we know little about how mobility patterns and other heterogeneities influence social positions within the transnational social space of the EU in terms of their objective and subjective socioeconomic status. Also unexplored are the social mechanisms that underlie how and under what terms migrants, who rely on more than one national frame of reference, would evaluate their social position according to their spatial mobility trajectory and other heterogeneities. In this project, we will address these crucial links by pursuing three main objectives: (1) an analysis of the spatial mobility trajectories of migrants characterized by different heterogeneities; (2) the linking of spatial mobility trajectories to social positions measured in terms of socioeconomic status, taking into account perceptions and evaluations by mobile persons themselves; and (3) an examination of how mechanism of social comparisons shape subjective evaluation of social positions. We will investigate the function of social comparisons in analyzing the reference groups that people use to make comparisons. All these issues will be explored by means of a sequential, mixed-methods research design. Data from the IAB-SOEP Migration Sample, which consists of migrants in Germany, will be analyzed to determine typical mobility trajectories and to study the socioeconomic status of mobile people and their level of satisfaction within different life domains. Complementary qualitative interviews will be conducted with selected SOEP respondents and with people who have not migrated. These interviews will allow us to reveal the interpretations and meanings individuals attach to spatial mobility and their social position over time. Our overall objective is to explore the role of social comparisons as the main social mechanism involved in the nexus of spatial mobility and social positions.