Transnational youth and social mobility: the role of family financial support in unsettled lives

Transnational mobility is typically seen as an opportunity to break out of fixed class positions and facilitate social mobility. However, the availability of parental support remains a persistent if complex determinant of the social mobility opportunities available to young adults who move abroad. The influence of family support and class background on youth social mobility has been clearly recognised in class scholarship in Australia. Yet, this relationship has remained under-examined in transnational mobility contexts, where social mobility has tended to be examined more in relation to young people’s employment opportunities and visa pathways. Seeking to fill this gap, our paper draws together recent scholarship on mobile young adults’ experiences navigating social and class (im)mobility abroad in relation to employment (as this intersects with visas), and a growing body of literature that features the relational and social dimensions of social mobility for migrants. We argue that family support is a critical but overlooked factor in the social mobility of transnationally mobile youth. We explore how it functions not simply as a source of safety and stability, but shapes their economic opportunities and pathways in complex ways that illustrate the relational embeddedness of social mobility for middling mobile youth.