Infrastructures of Highly Skilled Family Migration: Political Economy of the Family in Migration

ABSTRACT Research on highly skilled migration has challenged methodological individualism by emphasising the need to centre familial relationships in the understanding of migration. However, the resulting focus on the micro‐scale of the family unit negates an understanding of broader political‐economic discourses shaping everyday migrant lives. This paper demonstrates why research on highly skilled family migration needs to be placed in conversation with neoliberalism. Using a case study of Australian and British highly skilled migrant families moving through Singapore, the paper makes two contributions to research on migration. First, the paper develops the scope beyond that of the micro or macro‐scale into the missing meso‐scale analysis of highly skilled family migration. Second, the paper advances migration infrastructures as a conceptual approach to understand the meso‐level, contesting the previous methodological individualism by extending analyses of infrastructures to the family. Using examples of infrastructures of visas and international schools, the paper demonstrates that meso‐level infrastructures broker temporariness, transience and time insecurity as a condition of neoliberalism within the lives and mobilities of highly skilled family migrants.