Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter restates the book’s main arguments and contextualises them within wider contemporary theoretical and empirical debates in migration, transnational and mobility studies. It also discusses the generalisation potential of the study’s results. The migrants in the study are representative neither of all migrants, nor of all Somali migrants. But the study points to practices (cross-border mobility) that migrants of different origins may undertake, systematically or otherwise, and that are either unacknowledged in sedentarist migration studies or taken for granted as an implicit and unquestioned element of transnational practices. Mobilities studies provides transnational scholars with useful theoretical tools to take seriously the meanings and effects of cross-border mobility practices in post-migration life. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the gap between these migrants’ creative transnational strategies and European countries’ logic of exclusive loyalty and integration within the borders of the nation-state. While cross-border mobility is greatly valued for highly qualified elites, it is regarded with suspicion when it comes to less privileged migrants. The study, however, demonstrates how, under certain conditions, less privileged migrants are also able to circulate in a globalised world, benefiting from being embedded in transnational social fields and from mobility practices over which they have gained some control.