Precarious outcomes to the Pursuit of Happiness: Lifestyle migration and liminality

Karen O'Reilly, University of Loughborough, gives a talk for the COMPAS seminar series This paper draws attention to the relatively affluent nature and precarious positioning of some lifestyle migration. Lifestyle migration has been defined as the movement of relatively affluent people to destinations that offer an improved quality of life. Lifestyle migrants (often, but not always, Westerners) are thought to move more in search of freedom and leisure than for security or as a result of economic necessity. However, lifestyle migrants are not always affluent in absolute terms; nor are they unerringly powerful or privileged. Increasingly, studies of lifestyle migration are drawing attention to the precarious nature of their migrant experience, whereby rules and regulations governing movement affect those groups who always seem most vulnerable: the elderly, the poor, women, and children.