This article focuses on British migration to the Lot, a rural, inland department in the southwest of France. It first emphasizes the diversity among these lifestyle migrants by proposing a typology based on the position migrants occupy in the life course at the time of migration, identifying three different types of Britons living permanently in rural France: the family migrants, retirement migrants, and mid-life migrants. Each group of migrants hold in common their reasons for leaving Britain, the circumstances of their migration, and their position in the life course. The article then examines how the context of their lives before migration influences life in the Lot. In particular, it analyses the role of practical considerations in residential choice and degrees to which the migrants integrate into the local French population. By understanding the context of the migrants’ lives before migration, certain aspects of their lives in the Lot are illuminated, helping to fragment stereotypes of expatriate populations and challenge the dominance of retirement migration within related literature.
Author: Michaela Caroline Benson
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Lifestyle migration – or the search for the good life – seems to be growing. Although, as Benson eloquently notes in this paper, in almost every case actual numbers are very difficult to obtain (or, indeed, to trust), it is enough of a phenomenon to have attracted academic attention in diverse corners of the globe, including Panama, Mexico, Morocco, Varanasi, Turkey, Egypt, Spain and the mid-western United States. See http://www.lifestylemigration.net. In this paper, Michaela Benson silently acknowledges the advanced state of the field by fragmenting the population of Brits in France into some its constituent groups, each with its own dreams, aspirations and life trajectories. But what unites lifestyle migration? Some have suggested that the search for individualised utopias is a peculiarly western phenomenon; but I am not sure we can continue to talk of western versus non-western ideologies, discourses or cultural schemas. Anyway, academics in China and Japan are now beginning to try to understand the lifestyle migrations of their own populations.
Nevertheless, the search is somewhat anti-modern, anti-western, and anti-urban. Lifestyle migrants do not want to go home; they tend to reject their own societies and cultures. This kind of migration is rife with contradictions: individualistic but driven by a search for community; enabled by material wealth yet the migrants often eschew material goods; it involves leaving behind traditional ties, while celebrating the host community for its traditional values; it is egalitarian while benefitting from historical hierarchies.
Perhaps we should not waste our time on these shallow, wealthy, privileged migrants. But the French go to Morocco, the Americans to Mexico, the British to France, the Chinese to rural areas, for something contemporary societies cannot give them; they are all in search of ‘meaning’. Is it possible that this enduring, deep and widespread yearning for something that developed societies cannot provide could be harnessed for the good of society and the natural environment? I am not talking here about rich westerners living playboy/girl lifestyles in St Moritz, or expatriates working for transnational corporations in Dubai. The antecedent of lifestyle migration is not colonialism but the hippy movement, new age travellers, anti-urbanites, downsizers, and dropouts. Of course, they do not want to suffer, they don’t embrace poverty, they just seek a simpler life, pleasure in the mundane aspects of life. And they feel they have to move to obtain that.
Of course, they are only able to do this because of their relative wealth in relation to the places they go to (their structural advantage cannot be denied). But they are being used for economic gain. ‘Residential tourism’ is being marketed and sold as a dream package and a development tool for developing countries like Egypt and Panama. The long-term effects are unpredictable, but we should look to Spain for an idea of the havoc that can be wreaked.
Based on an ethnographic study of Britons’ settlement in the Lot, a rural area in south western France, Michaela Benson’s analysis of the so-called lifestyle migration or the pursuit of a better life by well-to-do Westerners is a well put together and sociologically insightful account—a good reading. And it certainly contributes to the growing scholarly knowledge about the whos, whys, and hows of this novel type of international travel.
My regret—I thought I would use this otherwise informative text to express some general concerns of an international migration specialist—is that it so perfectly reflects the limitations of this field of study. Let me note two of them. A good part of Benson’s analysis deals with the ways—or, in her terms, degrees to which—British lifestyle settlers in the Lot integrate into the local French population. Yet nowhere in her discussion does she refer to or, better, use—if only to contest and modify them in view of the data related to a new type of migration she examines—conceptualizations of (im)migrants’ integration into the receiver societies as context-dependent, multi-path and reversible trajectories that inform current investigations of this process by the sociologists of immigration. As it recognizes more types of cross-border population flows, the quickly growing field of international migration has been rapidly fragmenting: there are now specialists on refugees, trafficked migrants, international tourists, lifestyle migrants, temporary labour migrants, international nannies etc, each subfield with its own research topics and shared explanatory strategies, research networks and sessions at professional conferences. There is hardly a conversation among scholar-experts on these different kinds of transnational population movement. While understandable in the context of the expansion of the field of international migration studies and perhaps a testimony to its success, this differentiation—a growing mutual isolation, really—hinders an intellectual exchange among practitioners of particular research areas which could contribute to welcome theoretical innovations and modifications of research agendas in each of them. Regarding, for example, Benson’s discussion of British lifestyle settlers in the Lot, in addition to the empirical knowledge I gathered about the diversity of paths of integration described through individual cases she investigated, I would be curious to know what possible amendments to the existing typology of immigrants’ assimilation (upward and downward mainstream or ethnic-path trajectories, and mixed varieties with specific dimensions of integration falling under different categories) her analysis suggests.
My second regretful reflection prompted by Benson’s essay also concerns fragmentation, but in a broader scope. Precisely at a time when international migration and multiculturalism are articulating the major transformations of the twenty-first century world, this field of study—now treated as a whole—is actually “nichifying” within its own field-specific research agendas, professional organizations and meetings, and speciality journals. It is a bit like gender studies which everybody recognizes as central to the discipline, yet few nonspecialist scholars read the specialty journals or attend thematic meetings. Regardless of their focus on this or another type of international migration, very few studies in this field—and Benson’s essay conforms to this pattern—locate their analyses within the framework of mainstream social science debates such as, to note only a few issues related to the gobalization of the world, glocalization processes and their transformative impact on contemporary societies, pressures toward “cosmopolitanization” of social institutions and individual lifeworlds, or the recognition and study of multiple modernities. Instead, they analyze the examined problems within the field-specific interpretative frameworks of, say, immigrants’ integration in the context of receiver-country immigration policies, labour market dynamics, and native residents’ reception of the outsiders, or the forms and intensity of immigrants’ transnational engagements and their effects on sending-country localities’ economies. Using, again, Benson’s study as an example, linking, if only in the conclusion of the essay, her specific research agenda with mainstream social-science debates about glocalization and cosmopolitanism—the two issues of direct relevance, it seems, to the potential effects of the resettlement of residents of one country in another country search of nicer lifestyles—would have contributed to bringing international migration a step closer to the centre of disciplinary concerns.
Ewa Morawska