David Ley, Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines

Abstract

Millionaire Migrants synthesises two decades of David Ley’s research on transnational migration between East Asia and Canada. It touches on important contemporary topics including international migration, transnationalism, multiculturalism, political geography, urban struggles and identity politics. Ley demonstrates that geography (still) matters even for the well-off elitist mobile persons studied. He interrogates the migration trajectories at different geographical scales, ranging from the nation to the city, the neighbourhood, the family and the individual self. This multi-scale approach succeeds in bringing forth the complexity of transnational migration. Compared to the other scales, the nation is emphasised; this makes sense, as the nation (and nation-state) is crucial in this social field due to numerous determining processes and struggles operating at this level. In demonstrating that Asian migrants transcend national borders, Ley uses transnationalism as the conceptual anchor. This choice is logical*indeed, it can almost be considered conventional nowadays. But since Ley’s empirical analysis of Hong Kong Vancouver trajectories is fundamentally translocal, I ponder how a stronger conceptual engagement of a translocal perspective would shed new light theoretically. Considering the processes also as translocal*I do not suggest rejecting the transnational perspective*would push us to think more seriously about the mobility corridors that link distinct localities where an array of actors and communities are involved in the making and shaping of the transnational life lines under study. How and why is the Hong Kong Vancouver translocal space similar or different to the Hong Kong Toronto one? What about Montreal as a destination for business migrants? As we open up the ‘nation’ and hence ‘trans-nation’ categories in our thinking, we may recognise more clearly other important geographies that are subsumed in the transnationalism paradigm. A translocal perspective would, for instance, allow more space for thinking through relationships between groups*migrants or otherwise*embedded in different localities. What do we know about the relationships between Hong Kong or ethnic Chinese migrants from different migration generations settled in various parts of Vancouver, and spaces beyond Vancouver? And how have places outside of these mobility corridors been affected by the emergence