Abstract
Millionaire Migrants explores the social, economic, and cultural meanings of the elite migrant circuits connecting East Asia and North America. Ley has three complementary and interdisciplinary goals. First, he aims to provide a social record of what is acknowledged as a region-changing demographic and cultural movement of business migrants (many from Hong Kong and Taiwan) to British Columbia and Canada. While the initial migration streams peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, the webs thus spun have great resonance for contemporary Pacific Rim geographies. Second, the book recounts a series of finely grained accounts of the encounters of wealthy people with places and institutions. Third, Ley promises to ‘burrow into the concrete places and imagined spaces of transnationalism’ (p. 6) to develop transnational concepts and better understand encounter with places and institutions. As such, the book refracts more abstract globalization theory readings of transnationalism from above, searching instead for insights like those in Michael Peter Smith’s (2001) Transnational Urbanism and Janet Salaff et al.’s (2010) evocative account of Hong Kong Movers and Stayers which problematize neoliberalism through a careful scrutiny of agency and diversity.
To achieve these goals Ley organizes a wealth of empirical material acquired from over 20 years' field experience into seven pacey chapters. Chapter 2 explores how a ‘trans-Pacific’ social field became established in the 1960s and 1970s, with state discourses working through different scales of governance and intertwining with circuits of capital, things, and people. Chapter 3 recenters the account on agents to discuss intersubjective meanings and intentions of business migrants through attention to memories, hopes, and always dynamic social relations. The importance of familyhood as a lifecourse thread – working alongside economic motivations for migration – becomes apparent. Chapter 4 critiques the ‘cosmopolitan capitalist’ thesis so loved by ‘from above’ theorists, with Ley bringing the full force of his empirical knowledge of the Business Immigration Programme in Canada to note that while such elite migrants were assumed to possess mastery of space – to have the freedom of the isotropic plain – they ‘rarely possessed such mastery’ (p. 124). The relevance of institutional and place context for transnationalism is further explored in Chapter 5, which tracks the circulation of meanings associated with property through the lens of the Canadian property investments of Hong Kong migrants and the subsequent development of local property markets. Social and political institutional ramifications of transformed housing markets are then discussed in Chapter 6 with attention to the stretching, again to the limit, of the idea of multiculturalism. Chapter 7 tacks back to the transnational Asian family, recounting how the place and institutional contingencies recorded above affect family life and, in turn, the development of civil society in Canada. Chapter 8 serves as a delightful anti-conclusion, with Ley bolting into the empirical and conceptual warren that is return migration.
As a whole the book is successful in addressing its aims. As with many enduring manuscripts, this book is a reflection on two journeys – an autobiographical journey, with the author summarizing and contextualizing diverse contributions to humanistic geography, social geography, urban geography, and the lifecourse, and a fine-grained empirical journey, as lived by elite migrants. Indeed, the social record is rich, and insights on the stickinesss of place and fungibility of institutions are clearly articulated and accessible. This material will sit nicely in introductory and upper-level undergraduate courses, and helps appreciate how immigrants have changed the business model, civil society, and family practises.
Yet, this book yields more. With customary sensitivity to agency, diversity, and contingency, the author elaborates the idea of ‘trans-Pacific life lines' to add conceptual traction to the empirics on the basis of three meso-narratives. These describe, first, how the social space connecting Canada and East Asia is not uniform, but woven from distinct political regimes, economic regulations, and cultural traditions, and furthercomplicated by the contingencies of the lifecourse. Second, geographic separation exerts new pressures on family forms and relations. The resulting transnational families are fragmented families, with distinctive constructions of wellbeing that stretch traditional notions of familyhood. Third, place is stretched as migrants and their transnational social institutions embody cultural traits of origins and destinations through language, food practises, property rights, and landscape values: ‘geography [is] an abiding – and not always welcome –constituent member of any transnational field’ (p. 6).
Of course, some readers will actively debate the merits of this formulation. There is a growing scholarship attending to how material cultures, important to the institutionalization of life lines,are situated in and through everyday practice. There may be potential to further derive the lifecourse geographies on the basis of intersecting temporalities, themselves tied to the reproduction of neoliberalism. There is an epistemological question about the type of transnationalism Ley sees: by rendering a dialectic reading of ‘trans-Pacific’ and ‘life lines'a rather more entrapped and less fluid account of place is rendered. Some may inquire as to the politics of the concept – that is, the possibility that one term may bring the other into crisis through recognition of what Ray Chow has noted as a ‘certain conceptual ambivalence, or precariousness even’ (Chow, 2009: xi). In truth, these are less ‘weaknesses' than goads to further scholarship, and suggest this book deserves a wide and careful reading.