Neo-colonial narratives in modern migration: Housing practices and class dynamics of Indian migrants in Frankfurt a.M

This article examines the housing practices and spatial inequalities within the Indian diaspora in Frankfurt, shaped by Germany’s evolving migration trends and neoliberal housing policies. The recent 495% increase in Indian highly skilled migrants contrasts sharply with earlier labour-driven Indian migration waves, creating distinct class-based residential patterns. While highly skilled migrants leverage financial capital to enter homeownership, labour migrants – once beneficiaries of Germany’s welfare-oriented housing system – now face heightened precarity due to the financialisation of housing markets. Using urban mapping, spatial analysis and in-depth interviews, this study reveals persistent residential segregation, exacerbated by class-based exclusions and shifting welfare policies. Highly skilled migrants’ property ownership in gentrified districts like Ostend and Kalbach-Riedberg contrasts with labour migrants’ reliance on subsidised rental housing in areas like Höchst and Gallus, reinforcing class hierarchies within the diaspora. By examining how the entanglement of neoliberal urbanism, nested identities and postcolonial legacies shapes housing access in Frankfurt, this article reveals how class stratification within the Indian diaspora is both historically rooted and actively reproduced. While financialised housing markets and state withdrawal from welfare provisions deepen exclusion, these structural inequities remain inseparable from postcolonial hierarchies that continue to dictate mobility, opportunity and spatial belonging.