Migrating Imaginaries of a Better Life … Until Paradise Finds You

Abstract

Lifestyle migration has become a popular term to denote ‘voluntary relocation to places that are perceived as providing an enhanced or, at least, different lifestyle’ (McIntyre 2009: 4). Of course, virtually all forms of migration are related to aspirations of a ‘better life’. The focus of lifestyle migration is on ‘the lifestyle choices inherent within the decision to migrate’ (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b: 609). David Conradson and Alan Latham (2005) describe the motivations behind such migratory moves as self-realisation involving self-exploration and self-development, with career advancement only a distant secondary concern. Enabled by wider economic and political conditions, lifestyle migrants are ‘often, but not always, well educated. They may come from wealthy families, but more often than not they appear to be simply middle class’ (Conradson and Latham 2005: 229).1 They typically possess ‘high levels of cultural capital derived from education, professional skills and cultural knowledge’ (Benson 2012: 6). The classificatory box of these more ‘privileged travellers’ (Amit 2007) encompasses types as different as ‘residential tourists’, ‘rural idyll seekers’ and ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b: 611). Technically speaking, they are expatriates living outside their ‘fatherlanD’. However, not all lifestyle migrants retain their original citizenship and not all maintain regular transnational family, social, financial or professional ties. Many officially change their domicile, clearly intending to live their professional and personal life ‘elsewhere’ indefinitely.