The infrastructuring of young adults’ mobility trajectories: a case study of highly educated migrants in platform-mediated food delivery work in the Netherlands

This article contributes to the theorisation of the interplay between two major social phenomena: migration and the emerging platform economy. It does so by weaving together the concepts of youth mobility trajectories and migration infrastructure. This analytical frame is applied to ethnographic data generated through long-term research with a group of highly educated young adult non-EU migrants involved in platform-mediated food delivery work in the Netherlands. On this basis, I demonstrate how young adults’ mobility trajectories are both agentive projects of aspiration as well as complexly infrastructured in a co-constituting manner. Migration infrastructure, I show, works across and within space and needs to be understood as a dynamic entanglement. This entanglement, and how one’s migration is experienced, changes over time. The lens of temporality illuminates certain migrant practices (managing the meanwhile), the development of particular subjectivities (self-identifying as an entrepreneur) and the (re)shaping of the course of mobility trajectories (staying in migration, and return).