Class and migration: interrogating class across borders

Growing global inequalities in an era of hyper mobilities have seen class re-emerge at the forefront of migration scholarship. This special issue brings together class and migration studies scholars to progress understandings of complex, inconsistent and deeply unequal class consequences for migrants, families, relationships and societies, and to advance both fields through this engagement. In this introductory article we make three interventions at this nexus: first, we explain the importance of centring class in migration studies to augment the unstable and contradictory questions around social (im)mobility, status and exploitation that have long been within the purview of migration scholars. Second, we argue that a class lens enables us to interrogate how race and ethnicity are produced among the transnationally-mobile and to examine who benefits from these racialised logics and assemblages. Third, centring class in migration studies enables us to locate emerging and restructured global power relationships associated with family wealth regimes and the accumulation of asset-generated resources in ways that drive and stall migration trajectories. The papers in this collection explore these themes and others through their shared focus on settler-colonial Australia, offering empirical and novel insights into how class inequalities and privileges are transferred, reproduced and challenged across borders.