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Abstract

Research on spatial and social mobility intersections often foregrounds the role of migration in struggles for improved socioeconomic positions. Inspired by im/mobility scholarship and growing interest in voluntary immobility, this article considers the role of staying in the interactions between migration and upward social mobility. Drawing on 106 family history interviews with middle-class urban residents in Hanoi, Manila, Karachi, and Mumbai, we develop “comfortable immobility” as an analytical window to ask: How do spatial and social immobility matter for understanding this relationship? We analyze comfortable immobility as an active phase in migration and social mobility processes across three interrelated dimensions. First, as a subjective, embodied experience, participants’ descriptions of being and becoming comfortably middle-class reflect a voluntary immobility characterized by geographical and socioeconomic stasis, emerging as a social mobility outcome. Second, comfortable immobility is relationally produced as family members’ intertwined histories of moving and staying, and their interdependent relations, shape upward social mobility trajectories. Third, we examine how comfortable immobility builds on family histories while becoming a social mobility strategy shaping family futures, enabling aspirations and possibilities for moving and staying. Our analysis illuminates how staying may matter both as an outcome and as a strategy in urban middle-class families’ social mobility trajectories, thus contributing to rebalancing attention toward moving and staying in studies of the social-spatial mobility nexus. The article suggests that “comfortable immobility” speaks to debates on social change from varying Global South vantage points, while engaging with immobility conceptualization in migration studies more generally.

Keywords

social mobility migration immobility Asia families middle classes

Introduction

“My life is definitely more comfortable now. In the past… I didn’t want to buy anything because we were renting a house… However, having our own home has made us buy more things and improve our level of comfort compared to when we didn’t have our own place.”

Nam,¹ 37, lives in Hanoi with his wife and children, and works in the public sector. He repeats the word “comfortable” when describing his living conditions and socioeconomic position as being in the middle, neither rich nor poor. When Nam returned to Hanoi to work after studying abroad, his family could only afford to rent a house on a tight budget. After several years of working, he now owns his home, which has improved his family's comfort and contentment. He prefers to stay in Hanoi to provide his children opportunities. Nam's story reflects a process of achieving better living conditions, supported by previous migration, which enabled him to secure a job, buy a small house, and sustain his family's middle-class stability — from meeting daily needs, owning a motorbike, sending the children to school, to occasionally eating out and shopping. Moreover, his statement offers a window into the intersection of spatial and social immobility, in which both staying and socioeconomic stasis emerge salient to social mobility. This intersection points to such phases — whether short- or long-term — that may occur after periods of upward social mobility, or a turbulence of intermittent upward or downward social mobility, and importantly, against the backdrop of internal and international migration.

“Comfortable”² was a striking descriptor that emerged in our interviews with Nam and other middle-class residents across four Asian cities — Hanoi, Manila, Mumbai, and Karachi.³ Many of our participants used the word to describe experiences — in a particular time and place — of how staying in place and socioeconomic stasis can come together. Our participants have resided in their respective cities for years, yet they also have intergenerational family histories of internal and international movement. Their backgrounds opened a window into thinking about where, when, and at what point spatial immobility and social immobility may occur simultaneously as a desirable state of being for individuals and families, and as an outcome of migration and social mobility processes.

Earlier critiques on the lack of attention to class and socioeconomic mobility in migration studies (Savage 1988; Van Hear 2014) have inspired research addressing how geographical mobility shapes social mobility (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022; Kelly 2012), though studies have largely focused on international migration. The scholarship remains reticent on the role of staying in social mobility, despite growing interest in spatial immobility within migration studies (Mata-Codesal 2015; Gruber 2021; Hjälm 2014; Robins 2022; Salazar 2021; Schewel 2020), and the co-constitutive relationship of mobility and immobility (Sheller and Urry 2006; Merriman 2023). Researchers addressing the mobility bias in migration studies (Schewel 2020) have investigated voluntary immobility as an aspiration or preference to stay (Debray, Ruyssen, and Schewel 2023; Schewel and Fransen 2022), as understood through aspirations and abilities (Carling and Schewel 2018), and as involving complex migration decision-making beyond the dichotomy of in/voluntariness (Erdal and Oeppen 2018; Robins 2022). Yet, the intersection of spatial immobility and social immobility — and how staying and socioeconomic stability matter in family trajectories of social mobility — remains underexplored.

In this article, we develop “comfortable immobility” as an analytical window to engage with the question: What is the role of spatial and social immobility in family trajectories of migration and upward social mobility? Our participants’ reflections suggest comfortable immobility as an emergent “embodied experience” that is “culturally constructed and socially enacted” (Mata-Codesal 2015: 2286) — but also importantly tied to one's family trajectory of social mobility towards improved and stable living standards over time.

Our analysis draws on 106 family history interviews with middle-class urban residents in four Asian cities — Hanoi, Manila, Karachi, and Mumbai. By “middle-class,” we refer to a plural category of middle classes, leaning on both objective and subjective measures of middle-classness (Clément et al. 2022; Oesch and Vigna 2023), and the empirical reality of this rapidly growing population segment in Asia in the past few decades (Banerjee and Duflo 2008; Zotova and Cohen 2019). Our research attends to intergenerational histories of spatial im/mobility within the family's trajectory of becoming middle-class, in cities marked by varying trends of development, inequality, urban growth, and internal and international migration. In the analysis, we consider emerging similarities as well as contrasts which emerge from the family histories in the four cities, that speak in different ways to shared experiences of the simultaneity of social and spatial immobility.

While voluntary immobility scholarship has focused on staying preferences at the national scale (Debray, Ruyssen, and Schewel 2023), our work shows how spatial and social immobility manifests at the city-scale. We argue that comfortable immobility as an analytical window deepens our subjective, relational, and temporal understanding of why and under what conditions people stay (Mata-Codesal 2015) in relation to the spatial and social mobility nexus, thus rebalancing attention to both moving and staying, rather than privileging one or the other (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022; Savage 1988; Van Hear 2014).

The next section reviews relevant literature focusing on spatial and social immobility. After presenting our methodology, we analyze family histories in relation to three interrelated dimensions of “comfortable immobility” as an active phase in migration and social mobility processes. First, we examine comfortable immobility as participants’ embodied experience of being and becoming middle-class urban residents, and as an outcome of social mobility that involves gains, struggles, and negotiation. Second, we analyze it relationally, exploring how family members across generations, with their intertwined histories of migration and staying and interdependent relations, have collectively shaped family trajectories towards middle-class status. Third, we analyze comfortable immobility temporally, building on family histories, where it becomes a social mobility strategy shaping family futures, enabling aspirations and possibilities for moving and staying. We conclude with a summation of “comfortable immobility” as a productive analytical window that draws from Asian contexts and contributes fresh perspectives on spatial and social im/mobility interactions in families’ search for a good life.

The Role of Immobility in Upward Social Mobility

Interest in the social mobility outcomes which migration can lead to is longstanding (Savage 1988; Van Hear 2014). Research on class, inequality, and stratification has examined migration and transnational class formation (Amelina and Schäfer 2024; Kelly 2012; Bonfert 2024), the interactions between international migration and capital (Bonfert 2024), and increasingly, the role of internal migration (Breines 2021; Rigg 2007; Zotova and Cohen 2019). Recent contributions on class and social mobility have underscored migrants’ subjective perceptions and strategies of social positioning across geographical contexts (Bonfert 2024; Stock 2024), illuminating migration and social mobility linkages (Amelina and Schäfer 2024). This section discusses spatial immobility in social mobility processes, before developing our focus on “comfortable immobility.”

Spatial Immobility in Processes of Social Mobility

Upward social mobility refers to the relative improvement of living conditions and socioeconomic position, examined at individual, household or intergenerational family levels (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022; Savage and Egerton 1997; Torche 2014; van Leeuwen and Maas 2010). Scholars of migration and class have argued the importance of geographical mobility for (upward) social mobility, often focusing on international migration, transnational relationships, or migration's role in changing livelihoods and rural transformations (De Haan 1999; Gibson, Cahill, and McKay 2010; Stark and Bloom 1985; Thieme 2008). Boese, Moran, and Mallman (2022) call attention to the social-spatial mobility nexus to highlight the subjectively experienced interactive processes and social practices that extend understandings of social mobility beyond economistic measures. In contrast, the role of spatial immobility, or staying put, in theorizing upward social mobility has received relatively less attention.

We ground our work in the mobilities turn (Sheller and Urry 2006), recognizing that mobility and immobility are mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive categories or “binary opposites” (Mata-Codesal 2015). Materialities, fixities, and moorings — alongside various iterations of spatial mobilities and across different distances and durations — deserve attention (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006) in more systematic analyses of mobility–immobility connections (Mata-Codesal 2015; Rogaly 2015). Rogaly (2015) shows how a life history approach to migration can unveil mobility and fixity as simultaneously shaping subjective experiences of class and social mobility. Merriman (2019: 65) argues that attention toward the interplay of mobility and stasis in terms of the molar and molecular, or the perceptible and imperceptible, matters for critical “processual thinking.” These arguments underscore the importance of intertwining mobility and immobility, as well as movement and stasis, in thinking about migration histories and social mobility trajectories as intertwined processes.

In the past two decades, conceptualizations of spatial im/mobilities as more or less voluntary or involuntary have grown (Carling 2002; Carling and Schewel 2018; Erdal and Oeppen 2018). We are particularly interested in recent efforts to theorize voluntary immobility, defined as the aspiration or preference to stay in one's country of residence (Debray, Ruyssen, and Schewel 2023). Analyzing poll data, Debray, Ruyssen, and Schewel (2023) found that globally, a vast majority of the population across most countries prefers to stay in the country of residence. They identified a range of retain factors — individuals with higher contentment and life satisfaction, community institutions, local amenities, safety, and personal health, are more likely to have staying aspirations and preferences. Youth survey data from Ethiopia, India, and Vietnam indicate that family-related reasons and living a “good life” — with happiness and good work — were motivations to stay (Schewel and Fransen 2022). These findings add to other studies on staying behavior and motivations, including living in proximity to family and friends; the physical and cultural environment; the length of stay and increased place attachment; and the accumulation of local capital (Thomassen 2021).

Researchers have also developed immobility categories derived from analytical frameworks. The aspiration-ability model organizes immobility categories across aspiration and ability factors — “voluntary nonmigrants” are defined as stayers who view nonmigration as preferable to migration (Carling and Schewel 2018). Schewel (2015) proposes “acquiescent immobility” as a fourth category, referring to the preference to stay in one's country even without the capability to move. Desired immobility (Mata-Codesal 2015, 2018) refers to both the aspiration and ability to stay put, and recently, the notion of “active immobility” (Robins 2022) highlights the choice to stay, even with the capability to move. In researching middle to upper middle-class stayers in São Paulo, Robins (2022) found that despite having the capability to move, their choice to stay is motivated by a sense of duty to the family and social imaginaries of country and nation. The findings foreground the social, cultural, and political meanings that motivate people to stay, complicating the simple dichotomy between voluntary and involuntary immobility (Robins 2022). We thus recognize that voluntary immobility or staying can be differentially experienced (Mata-Codesal 2018; Schewel and Fransen 2022) — whether as an active decision or preference, an acceptance of not being able to migrate, an aversion to risk, or not having considered leaving at all (Schewel 2020; Schewel and Fransen 2022).

These perspectives inform our approach to voluntary immobility as an embodied, sociocultural experience (Mata-Codesal 2015) and shaped by broader structural forces and global regimes (Schiller and Salazar 2013). Staying put is not necessarily a “passive-by-default” situation, or a singular event — it is rather an “active and informed choice” (Hjälm 2014), motivated by various reasons that may include but extend beyond the aspiration and ability to migrate or not (Hjälm 2014; Mata-Codesal 2015). Being a stayer is also “a decision made over and over again” (Hjälm 2014: 560), and constantly re-evaluated and renegotiated across the life course, personal projects, and interpersonal ties (Hjälm 2014; Zhang 2018). Moreover, staying can be an active life strategy and ascribed a positive value (Mata-Codesal 2018), which we bring into thinking about how staying can become a social mobility strategy and outcome. We thus decenter immobility as a “decision” and consider how staying can be read subjectively, relationally and temporally in interaction with upward social mobility across contexts.

Toward “Comfortable Immobility”

We suggest that “comfortable immobility” articulates social positioning and spatial situatedness in the experiences of middle-class urban families in Asian cities. We develop it as an analytical window for understanding how the intersection of spatial and social immobility manifests, not as a generalizing concept or category. Social mobility trajectories are often neither linear nor consistent, and can unfold in dynamic, incremental, or staggered ways (Breines 2021). Our participants’ sense of being “comfortable” points to a phase of spatial and socioeconomic stasis that figures as a state of being and an outcome — whether long or short term — in social mobility processes.

We analyze three interrelated dimensions that explain “comfortable immobility” as a phase in family histories of upward social mobility. First, “comfortable immobility” points to an everyday experience of spatial and social immobility that may be intuitive and taken-for-granted but importantly sheds light on the subjective and sociomaterial aspects of being in a particular socioeconomic position while staying put. We consider our participants’ subjective perceptions of being and becoming middle-class in their respective cities as a social mobility outcome, and the similarities and differences that may emerge.

Second, we approach comfortable immobility relationally by focusing on intergenerational family relationships that shape histories of moving and staying among members, of achieving and maintaining middle-class living conditions, and of creating possibilities for “comfortable staying.” Our analysis centers the family as a social unit in which intergenerational roles, relationships, and resource sharing are interwoven in patterns of spatial mobility and immobility among members. These entanglements enable socioeconomic improvement and a degree of stability, but also potentially produce constraints and conflict over shared resources. Different members within a family unit may move and stay at different points in time and in the life course, with some becoming “active stayers” (Mata-Codesal 2015, 2018; Salazar 2021; Schewel 2021). We thus connect family histories of moving and staying to the ups and downs of social mobility.

Third, we consider “comfortable immobility” temporally, in social mobility as a development process and trajectory. We examine how this lived phase builds on family histories of moving and staying and shapes family futures, enabling family members to distribute and transfer resources or opportunities to younger members and to cultivate the capability or freedom to move or stay (De Haas 2021). While analyzing comfortable immobility as an outcome that links family histories to present conditions, we also explore how it cultivates transmissible aspirations, enhances abilities and opens future possibilities for migration and social mobility, thus complementing work on aspiration-ability approaches (Carling and Schewel 2018; Carling 2002, 2024).

“Comfortable immobility” recenters conceptual attention to spatial im/mobility as interconnected with social im/mobility, which points to four permutations — spatial mobility and social mobility; spatial mobility and social immobility; spatial immobility and social mobility; and spatial immobility and social immobility. While existing work has predominantly researched how spatial mobility shapes social mobility outcomes, we use “comfortable immobility” to illuminate the fourth permutation — how spatial immobility and social immobility intersect at certain points in space and time, and in the lives of intergenerational families. This focus dialogs with overall interest in “immobility” (Gruber 2021; Schewel 2020, 2021), particularly “voluntary immobility” (Mata-Codesal 2015, 2018) and “active immobility” (Robins 2022), foregrounding the relational and experiential aspects of immobility (Salazar 2021).

We apply this framing to examine how “comfortable immobility” manifests in the lives of middle-class families across four developing Asian cities, as part of broader processes of social mobility and development in the region. Researchers of migration, class, and development have increasingly attended to the middle spectrum of social stratification, such as internal or international “middling” migrants, in connection to education, occupation, and family ties (Robertson and Roberts 2022; Breines 2021). Existing literature on spatial and social mobility has often privileged international migration to Europe, North America, and other destination countries (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022; Savage 1988; Van Hear 2014). Our work joins efforts in investigating the links between migration and middle-class formation elsewhere. Researchers have investigated Africa's growing middle classes to understand the social and structural spaces of capital and power in shaping categories of difference (Noret 2024). Others have written about the nonlinear trajectories of middle-classness — rather than fixed positions on a vertical social ladder, social mobility is instead a product of shifting social positions tied to individual capital, access to opportunity, and social location (Breines 2021; Noret 2024). Asia, meanwhile, is a vast region of sociocultural diversity and urbanization featuring the growth of middle-class populations, yet has received far less attention despite its significance for conceptual and theoretical advances (Yeoh 2021) and decolonising migration studies (Collins 2022).

Methodology

Our analysis draws from the multisited project Migration Rhythms in Trajectories of Upward Social Mobility in Asia (MigrationRhythms), which investigates the role of migration in the upward social mobility of middle-class families in four Asian cities — Hanoi (Vietnam), Manila (the Philippines), Mumbai (India), and Karachi (Pakistan). These cities feature diverse migration patterns across internal and international scales, shaped by sociocultural, political, and postcolonial histories.⁴ The cities were purposefully selected as large Asian metropolitan areas, with clear presence of growing middle-class populations and lively debates among residents about what constitutes middle-classness “here,” testifying to emic and subjective understandings. While their unique histories offer rich contexts for analysis, they also enable cross-context analysis based on similarities and differences found in social mobility dynamics, in how migration featured, and in how social and spatial immobility occurred simultaneously in some families' trajectories into middle-classness.

The research team conducted 106 family history interviews in the four cities from January to August 2023. Our interviews involved two considerations. First, they captured participant perceptions of being middle-class, aligning with perspectives highlighting the socially constructed meanings of being and becoming middle class (Banerjee and Duflo 2008; Lentz 2020), and social positioning as “the process through which individuals evaluate their subjective social positions” (Bonfert 2024: 3). Second, they documented histories of moving and staying among family members, including extended kin, and across two to three generations. The focus on the family enables a relational, spatial, and temporal analysis of moving and staying (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022), which we set within intergenerational trajectories of (upward) social mobility, thereby stepping away from methodological individualism (Boswell 2008). It also encompasses moving and staying across internal and international scales — from the cities of residence, provinces, and rural–urban connections, to countries — avoiding “destination bias” and methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2003).

We recruited a total of 161 interviewees — across 106 interviews in the four cities — via informal and formal networks, combining snowballing and referrals from multiple “gatekeepers” in each context. Each city was either home or familiar to the team members, supporting wide-ranging access to and rapport with potential participants. We recruited interviewees based on first, city-based considerations informed by preliminary research of (lower to middle) middle-class characteristics, including the type of employment, education, housing, and neighborhood location; and second, whether and how families identified themselves as (lower to middle) middle class. Here, we lean on an understanding of middle classes as plural, including objective as well as subjective measures, recognizing the heterogeneity of middle-classness in urban Asia (Banerjee and Duflo 2008; Clément et al. 2022; Oesch and Vigna 2023). Third, we identified participants as those who have migration histories in their families and are familiar with them — we considered diverse backgrounds of past or present internal and international moves of participants and/or family members, across different motivations, locations, and durations.

The family history interviews are semistructured interviews, whereby participants shared their perceptions of being and becoming middle-class in the city and their family migration history. Each interview involved one to three participants — a main participant, with one to two additional family members, often spouses, parents, or children — hence the total of 161 participants for 106 interviews. Over half of the interviews were conducted with only one participant. Most of the interviews were conducted in participants’ homes, and only a few in cafés or other locations. Each interview lasted 1 to 2 h and included the use of migration history charts to map the moves and stays of family members over different locations and years, alongside life course events (Carling 2012; Mazzucato et al. 2022). We also used flash cards — a set of illustrations about themes like house, land, and education — which participants could look at as they reflected on factors significant to their improved living conditions.

The interviews were conducted in the main local languages in each city. Several participants spoke interchangeably in the local language and in English, reflecting the use of English among middle-class residents in Manila, Mumbai and to a lesser extent Karachi. We, the coauthors, conducted some or all interviews in each city, and the remainder conducted by researchers and trained graduate research assistants. All interviews were recorded with permission from the participants, except for one who declined audio-recording but gave permission for the researcher to take handwritten notes. The interviews were transcribed and translated with the assistance of local researchers, with efforts invested in ensuring adequate quality of translation into English. For data analysis, we developed a thematically oriented codebook for use in NVivo. The team subsequently systematically coded all interviews, after which thematic codes and connected segments of interviews were discussed and interpreted for the purposes of this article.

Living Comfortably in Place

Analyzing subjective perceptions of being and becoming middle-class and staying (Mata-Codesal 2015; Robins 2022) sheds light on “comfortable immobility” as an embodied, situated experience. Our participants self-identified as being (lower to middle) middle-class or having middle-income status. The majority are long-time residents in their respective cities, with some born and raised there and have never moved. On what makes a family “middle-class” in their city, they responded with characteristics related to socioeconomic standing (being neither rich nor poor, are employed and educated), the ability to support the family (renting or owning a home, sending children to school), having the means to meet basic needs (food, clothing, and utilities), to invest (assets and properties), and to pursue leisure activities (shopping in malls, domestic, and overseas travel). These responses reflect a range of locally grounded, sociocultural understandings of middle-classness in Asian cities, relating to but also extending beyond conventional and standardized measures such as income and occupation.

As earlier mentioned, being “comfortable” stood out in several participants’ responses that show how comfortable immobility is articulated in family experiences of being middle-class. Rhea (32, government employee, Metro Manila), for example, says:

“Definitely [we are in the] middle… because I’m comfortable. Maybe lower-middle or middle-middle, something like that. Definitely not upper… not lower either. I mean, comfortable-comfortable. We can’t also waste money, we’re also saving.”

Rhea uses the word to articulate her family's position of being in the “middle” — having some means to live well, but not enough to be wasteful. Comments on financial habits like budgeting and saving also came up in other interviews, reflecting middle-classness as having some economic capacity but within constraints. Second, “comfortable” referred to the family's shared living conditions. Quang (39, project manager, Hanoi), who lives at home with his parents, says:

“For my family…I feel that we live comfortably. My parents have pensions, and I am currently working. My parents also have savings from their previous jobs, so in terms of living, we are quite comfortable. We are not rich, but, for example, we have properties such as an apartment.”

Quang's response hints at the social and material dimensions that shape an embodied experience of comfortable immobility. His parents’ pensions and savings, and his own employment, have enabled them to live together, with enough to meet daily needs but also to own a motorbike and properties, signaling how combined resources co-produce socioeconomic stability that also enables staying put. Many interviews affirm the salience of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital in the shaping of class and social positioning, resonating with Zotova and Cohen's (2019) study on Tajik rural–urban migrants in Dushanbe who mobilize different forms of capital to negotiate their urban middle-class positions. Similar to their findings, our participants viewed home ownership as important to urban middle-classness, pointing to land and property as spatial capital.

The word “comfortable” emerged in narratives of becoming middle-class and achieving better living standards over time. Comfortable immobility can thus manifest as an outcome in middle-class urban residents’ experiences of upward social mobility. Across the cities, participants spoke of the roles of internal and international migration, which we discuss further in the next section.

However, becoming middle-class can also involve long family journeys of hardship, risk, and struggle, as family histories reveal. Sangeeta (59, NGO staff, Mumbai) was born and raised in Kashmir and internally migrated to Ahmedabad for studies and work, after which she married and moved with her husband to Mumbai in the 1990s. Initially, they struggled — they both had jobs and were co-parenting two children in rented accommodation, while taking loans for house construction elsewhere. Finally, in the 2000s, they moved to their newly built house:

“… So slightly, life became comfortable. Otherwise, I feel [the] initial 10 to 12 years, we were travelling — I was travelling like a cattle literally hanging.”

Her description — “traveling like a cattle literally hanging” — denotes a struggle for upward social mobility — and stability — that lasted for years. Sangeeta's story reflects how comfortable immobility figures in the broader processes of social mobility, which can go upward, downward, or sideways (Breines 2021). It is also about how families actively produce and maintain some degree of socioeconomic stasis over time, while remaining in place. We return to this point in the next section.

Lastly, the meanings and value of comfortable immobility are also negotiated over time, and among family members. Ly (42, office worker, Hanoi) moved from the province to Hanoi for university, after which she landed a job and chose to settle in the city with her husband and child:

“Initially, we didn't expect to migrate here, because we only thought that we came here to study… But when I finished my study, my job and everything were favorable, so I changed my place of residence and it had a better environment, it would also have more advantages…”

The quote shows how staying put is not a passive, one-off decision or event, but is constantly re-evaluated (Hjälm 2014; Mata-Codesal 2015) — in this case, Ly's weighing of advantages and opportunities reinforced her preference to stay in Hanoi as a positive value for upward social mobility (Mata-Codesal 2018). Inna (39, business owner, Metro Manila) initially wanted to work abroad to support her husband, their daughter, and their local business. An unsurprising consideration, given that international labor and/or parental migration has become livelihood strategy for many families in the Philippines (Asis, Battistella, and Liao 2019; Yeoh et al. 2023). However, her husband convinced her to stay — they were “able to make things work anyway.” She adds, “He would always say, if we aren’t starving, we are okay. Why would you leave?” The exchange hints at how social immobility in terms of being “okay” and “not starving” was negotiated between spouses in weighing the relative contentment of staying put, in comparison to a spouse living overseas.

The above discussion show how comfortable immobility emerges in participants’ family histories of being and becoming middle-class. Comfortable immobility relates to contextual, subjective perceptions of middle-classness in the four cities and is experienced as an outcome in the process of becoming middle-class. It is also a shared experience of status within the intergenerational family, actively shaped by concerted efforts to accumulate and mobilize capital (Mata-Codesal 2015), through housing and properties, access to transportation and healthcare, and options for consumption and leisure. Comfortable immobility thus integrates research insights on the importance of capital in enabling capacities for migration and staying (Van Hear 2014), and in producing, maintaining, and negotiating middle-class status in the city (Zotova and Cohen 2019).

Comfortable Immobility and Family Histories of Moving and Staying

Comfortable immobility captures the phase of social stability and geographical stasis that is relationally experienced and produced within the intergenerational family, including immediate members and extended kin. Our participants’ family histories show how patterns of moving and staying intertwine and co-produce family histories of social mobility toward comfortable immobility (Mata-Codesal 2015; Rogaly 2015). We found that in many cases, those who have moved and those who have stayed contribute to the “mobility-immobility arrangements” that become collective social mobility strategies for the intergenerational family across the life course, toward achieving “good lives” (Mata-Codesal 2015: 2277).

As earlier mentioned, all our participants have some family migration history, having at least an instance of internal or international movement among family members, in both the present but also more often in the past. Our interviews captured diverse internal migrations — in several cases, multiple movements (rural–urban and urban–urban) over different periods — whether the movers were the immediate (parents and siblings) or extended relatives (grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins), or the participants themselves, who have moved internally, internationally, or both. Internal migration emerged salient to intergenerational family histories, echoing existing research (e.g., Abad 1981; Abbas 2016; Aziz et al. 2024; Hoang 2011). Interviews detailed the journeys of participants and their relatives, especially the older generations (their grandparents or parents) in moving from the province or the village to the cities, often for education and/or work.

Against the backdrop of postcolonial history, development and urbanization, families also developed shared imaginaries of these cities, which in turn motivated multiple internal migrations within families. Participants described Hanoi as a cultural and educational center, and Metro Manila as ideal for college, and both were sites for job opportunities. Mumbai-based participants described their city as a “land of opportunity.” In Karachi, while some participants or their older relatives had moved there primarily for jobs and studies, many of them moved during and following the 1947 Partition, thus adding historical context to Karachi as a place to rebuild family lives. Many participants attributed their urban residence to their relatives’ initial moves, but they also importantly reveal the broader sociohistorical and structural contexts that shape family histories of migration.

Rashid (52, electrician) moved to Karachi as a young boy and has since resided in the city. His family previously lived in a rural village and worked in the fields under harsh conditions. “My father's nature from the start was that we have to go to Karachi,” he says. “It was a kind of slavery. ‘We must get out of here.’” His father initially moved from the village to Karachi to work as a policeman. After returning to the village, he moved again to the city, working as a security guard. This time, he brought along his two sons — one of them Rashid — to study and work, while helping their father build their Karachi home.

“When we shifted here first, it was me, my brother and my father — the sole earner was my father… We had to work really hard initially. We basically crushed stones. I’d go to school in the morning, but I couldn’t study much… After coming back from school, we’d do this work. From 3:00 p.m. to sunset… Now my father has passed away. Through our labour, we were able to build a home. We are five brothers, and all are living here now.”

Rashid's story illustrates how an older member's internal migration can shape the family's intertwined migration and social mobility trajectories. With a job that provided a foothold in Karachi, the father brought his sons to the city, where they collectively built a home that became their spatial capital, enabling comfortable immobility as they secured jobs and raised their own families. While Rashid admits their financial struggles amid inflation (in 2023), his family has been able to maintain middle-class living conditions in this house. His story illustrates the relational production of comfortable immobility — intergenerational family dynamics can simultaneously shape a family's trajectory of migration as it becomes a mechanism toward middle-classness. Their collective home construction also holds economic and symbolic value (Zotova and Cohen 2019), becoming a concrete, spatial means and representation of their long-term settlement in Karachi.

Across the four cities, interviews also show how comfortable immobility is relationally produced across age, gender, and life course stages within the family, alongside gendered roles of care and reproduction (Rigg 2007; Yeoh et al. 2023). In Mumbai and in Karachi, several women participants or participants’ female relatives migrated internally for marriage, often relocating to where the husband worked. Mira, 58, is a housewife and mother of two who has lived in Mumbai for years. Her combined history with her husband illustrates how internal marriage migration steers family formation and household strategies toward comfortable immobility in the city. In the 80s, she moved from a small village to Mumbai, where she married her husband. As an internal migrant and new wife expected to perform reproduction roles, Mira adjusted to life in Mumbai, changing her clothing style, caring for the children and managing the home, while the husband provided financial support for basic needs, healthcare, and tuition fees. Mira's case illustrates a gendered shift from mover to stayer — from internal marriage migrant to an urban-adapted, stay-at-home mother and spouse who oversees the care work crucial to sustaining comfortable immobility for the family and increasing the children's future life chances (Rigg 2020; Rigg, Nguyen, and Luong 2014). Their comfortable immobility is also strategic — Mira and her husband stayed in Mumbai not only for the husband's job, but also in proximity to a good school for their children. “We do everything for the children's education,” she says. Comfortable immobility thus resonates with active immobility (Robins 2022), in which staying in a favorable environment is a family strategy of social mobility motivated by family meanings and values of care and social reproduction. It also affirms the crucial role of women in mobilizing family activities and resources toward middle-classness (Zotova and Cohen 2019), but further illustrates the gendered experiences of immobility (Mata-Codesal 2015) as it matters for upward social mobility.

As relations of care and responsibility enable the possibilities of comfortable immobility, they also shape resource sharing and the transmission of livelihood strategies and other forms of inheritance and legacy through generations. A family's support system is crucial to negotiating and maintaining middle-classness in the city — such as how siblings, older family members and in-laws share expenses and financially support each other with, among others, house construction and property ownership or renovation (Zotova and Cohen 2019). Our interviews additionally uncover the role of other family members — whether movers or stayers — in shaping the possibilities of comfortable immobility for other relatives, especially younger ones. Mira, as mentioned, contributed to her children's comfortable immobility in Mumbai. Meanwhile, several Manila participants shared instances of fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, and siblings who migrated abroad for work and provided care from a distance, through remittances. This is hardly surprising given the Philippines’ history of labor migration, which has seen an outflow of women migrant workers since the 1970s, often to take up jobs in care-related sectors such as domestic work and nursing (Asis and Piper 2008).

Jayson (40, electrical engineer) has never moved out of Metro Manila, and while he had a short work-related stint in the province for about 2 years, he returned to the city on weekends. He considers his family as middle-class, living a decent life that he attributes to his mother's and sister's efforts. While his mother cared for him and his siblings, his older sister worked abroad. She worked service jobs in Canada, later landing a more stable job at a hospital, which allowed her to send remittances that supported her family's daily expenses and her siblings’ education.

“The moving abroad of my elder sister…she really became supportive and was also helping my mother so that all of us could finish our studies… If it weren’t for them, my mother wouldn’t be able to send us all to school simultaneously.”

The stories of our participants across the four cities may be diverse, but they illuminate the different ways past migration can enable possibilities for comfortable immobility as a shared outcome but also as a family strategy (Mata-Codesal 2018). Older family members’ education and labor-driven migrations become resources for achieving “comfortable immobility” over time, in which they are able to build or rent homes, acquire assets, properties and access to services, and establish stable everyday routines in urban spaces. Migration within the family can boost consumption and employment opportunities and enable the education of younger members. Comfortable immobility is thus a combined condition of social stability and geographical stasis that is deeply intertwined with family histories of moving and staying, and relationships of care and responsibility across generations. This relational and temporal analysis of comfortable immobility is salient to understanding the interaction of spatial and social immobility. In the final section, we turn to how comfortable immobility matters for future moves and stays among family members.

Comfortable Immobility, Future Im/Mobilities, and Return

In analyzing “comfortable immobility” temporally, we underline how this juncture of spatial immobility and social immobility builds on past experiences of moving and/or staying, enabling capabilities and possibilities for family members to stay in contented rootedness or to cultivate aspirations and decisions to move (De Haas 2021). When asked about future hopes, most of our participants did not explicitly express aspirations to migrate, except for some younger participants thinking of moving to study or work. Comfortable immobility manifests in their ongoing state of being in place, reinforced by maintained middle-class living conditions and regardless of whether they would be able to move or not. While few interviews touched upon the aspiration to move or the inability to do so (Schewel 2015), many others suggest a voluntary immobility that may be active or desired even when there is some ability to move or stay (Mata-Codesal 2018; Robins 2022). “Comfortable immobility” resonates with the notion of voluntary immobility as a preference to stay (Debray, Ruyssen, and Schewel 2023) and we find that this preference is also importantly grounded in the city where middle-class positions are situated — not just the country — thus emphasizing the relevance of geographical scales.

For most participants, being long-time middle-class urban residents is far from a perfect situation, given the constraints and struggles of maintaining living standards over time, and the periods of family conflict, hardship, and crises that can trigger moments of downward social mobility. Yet, their acceptance of a decent, comfortable life suggests a degree of contentment that reinforces a preference to stay. Most have no plans of (further) moving internally or internationally. Kristine (34, corporate manager, Metro Manila) has never lived outside the city and presently has no intention of doing so. This, despite growing up with a father who worked as a seafarer for over 40 years, a job that allowed him to support his siblings’ education, to raise his own family and buy his own home, and to send his children to private schools and universities. Kristine's husband, who internally migrated to Metro Manila, studied in a top university and landed a well-paid corporate job, also has no interest in moving abroad or elsewhere.

“To me, we’re lucky because [my husband] and I benefited from the efforts of previous generations, that we’ve found good jobs here that can somehow, you know — we don’t need to necessarily work abroad. I mean we can… But, in the words [my husband], ‘Why leave if you have a good life here? A privileged life here?’”

The quote notably illustrates how the mobility of some family members can enable the comfortable immobility of others. As Schewel (2021) has pointed out, mobility and immobility interact in different ways across individuals, households, families, and communities. The remittances of migrant family members, for example, can “enable the immobility of others” (Schewel 2021: par. 21). This applies to Kristine's case, who attributes her capacity to remain in Metro Manila to her father's labor migration at sea. Whereas stay-behind family members are often portrayed as recipients of remittances, several family histories also show how active staying also enables others to migrate (Schewel 2021). A breadwinning overseas migrant entrusts household management to the stay-behind spouse and children; an internal migrant sends remittances to the village, where a sibling stays behind to care for their parents. Parents in the cities or in hometowns support children who have migrated abroad or internally for studies or work (Marcu 2018). These im/mobility arrangements matter especially during family crises, such as in pooling finances to cover a relative's medical expenses. Intergenerational family histories thus reveal how “different ways of migrating entail different ways of staying put” (Mata-Codesal 2015: 2275), and how comfortable immobility builds on past histories, but also present dynamics of moving and staying among members.

Family members’ past and present migration experiences can also influence relatives’ migration perceptions that may reinforce comfortable immobility. Rashid, mentioned earlier, refuses to leave Karachi — apart from living comfortably in place, his brother's migration history also underscores the importance of ethnic belonging and citizenship (Robins 2022).

“No, I wouldn’t want to migrate anywhere. I did have opportunities. I have also extensively travelled but I wouldn’t want to go anywhere. It's because I’m a Pakistani and I’ve my close friends here only. My brother shifted to America and then returned. He said you could earn dollars surely, but your life has no meaning there, you spent an isolated life there. Therefore, he returned.”

Yet, comfortable immobility can also reinforce the intergenerational transmission of migration aspirations (Brunarska and Ivlevs 2023), creating conditions and possibilities for younger generations to pursue different options for moving (or staying). In our interviews, parents who had no plans of moving expressed hope that their children will have the opportunities to do so, whether for further studies or jobs. While they do not necessarily have the means to send them abroad, participants such as Sana and Khánh, both mothers, hope their support for their children's education will provide the qualifications and skills through which they can access a wider range of options for future movements — whether short- or long-term, and for upward social mobility as well as cultural learning and spiritual journeys:

We can’t move as a family, but we’d wish for our children to move anywhere they want to. And we wish that God gives us enough that we are able to perform Umrah [Pilgrimage].

—Sana, 25, housewife, Karachi

I also want them to migrate internationally to learn and gain experiences, but I'm not sure if it will be a long-term stay, as in reality, I still prefer our homeland. They can learn many things from international migration.

—Ly, 42, office worker, Hanoi

We also found stories of younger family members — either immediate or extended — who moved internally or internationally, often for work or education, and in several cases in Karachi and Mumbai, for marriage. For some, older relatives and extended kin encouraged and provided financial support, contributing to the shaping of their aspirations and their actualization of them. Notably, younger participants living in comfortable immobility have also expressed some desire to move, especially internationally, and for career and education. While current economic conditions are a motivating factor, in some cases, they were strongly inspired by other relatives’ migration histories. Anna (23, helping with family business, Metro Manila), a daughter of a seafarer, is also considering the same career:

“We’re getting convinced one by one to work on a ship… Because of our titos, who we saw become comfortable when they started working on a ship… Actually, if [our parents] could decide for our lives, just migrate. That's what they say but it's still our decision. Because there are better opportunities outside the Philippines and that's the reason why we’re living better.”

The quote above illustrates how past migration supporting comfortable immobility can become a means of enabling or inspiring future migration among family members. Thanks to her father's hard-earned remittances, Anna's family has achieved decent, comfortable middle-class living. Her father's efforts and her uncles’ improved living standards from their overseas work to some extent convinced her that working abroad is a viable option for upward social mobility.

Lastly, we find that for some participants, especially those in Hanoi and Metro Manila, current comfortable immobility can shape prospects of return migration, toward the aspiration of future comfortable immobility elsewhere. Some participants with older relatives who migrated abroad have returned to their home provinces or hometowns for retirement. Among some of our Hanoi participants who went abroad for work or studies, they considered Vietnam as the “homeland,” and their hometown as a place they wish to return to when they are older. Hoàng (39, businessman, Hanoi), for example, studied and worked in Ukraine before returning to Hanoi for good:

“I felt like I should come back… I wanted to return to my homeland. The reason is that I had already accumulated enough. Secondly, I thought it was time to return to my homeland, at that age, there's no need to earn more money. It's not about satisfying life, but my life is self-contained. I don't need to strive for anything; I don't need to stay and try to accumulate… I came back here because I still have parents, siblings, friends, and family. Family is the most important thing… For me, I just want to work for a period of time, and when my children grow up, I will go back to my hometown… My ethnicity originates from there, so I want to go back. A person should have roots.”

Hoàng's response suggests how comfortable immobility in the homeland, or in the hometown, is valued in relation to contentment and accumulating enough, of being self-contained, and living with family — the most “important” thing and returning to one's roots. It resonates with research on the significance of the family with staying preferences, as in the case of young people in Vietnam (Schewel and Fransen 2022). At a broader level, “comfortable immobility” foregrounds an experience of social contentment and stability that is rooted in notions of home, homeland and the family, and tied to meanings of “what is considered as an acceptable threshold of local good life” (Mata-Codesal 2018: 5).

Conclusion

What is the role of spatial and social immobility in family trajectories of migration and upward social mobility? This article engaged with immobility scholarship in migration studies to explore how staying in place matters in connections between spatial and social mobility interactions (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022). Drawing on family history interviews with urban middle-class residents in four Asian cities, we developed “comfortable immobility” as an analytical window to explore the interaction of spatial immobility with social immobility as it manifests in urban contexts that are sites of both internal and international migration. Through the findings, our article offers the following contributions.

First, “comfortable immobility” works as a productive and integrative framing of three dimensions — the subjective, relational, and temporal — that illuminate how spatial and social immobility co-constitutively engender a condition of geographical stasis and socioeconomic stability in terms of living conditions, allowing for a comfortable, good (enough) life. The focus on the intersection of spatial and social mobility contributes to migration scholarship as part of the refinement of theorizing im/mobility interfaces, and how these are co-constitutive in individuals’ and families’ experiences. It complements existing conceptualizations of immobility (Erdal and Oeppen 2018; Robins 2022; Schewel 2020) by bringing in a social mobility dimension and focusing on people who stay and what they consider “comfortable,” middle-class living in cities. As Mata-Codesal (2018: 2282) notes, desired immobility “is more likely to be present in contexts where staying put is associated with processes of upward social mobility.” Our work elaborates on this by showing how subjectively experienced socioeconomic conditions and living standards can reinforce staying preferences.

Second, “comfortable immobility” offers an opportunity to consider different types of social mobility, with or without consideration of their interaction with migration processes. Existing research has often focused on particular directions of social mobility — upward or downward — and barriers, constraints and struggles, including those of the precarious lower middle classes (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022; Robertson and Roberts 2022). While we recognize the importance of such analyses, this article offers complementary perspectives on conditions where individuals and families may arrive in positions of contentment, stability or staying afloat, often despite moments of crisis, loss, or phases of downward social mobility. Social mobility trajectories are rarely linear (Breines 2021) and may feature upward and downward moves but are also marked by periods of stasis — or social immobility, not least among the growing numbers of Asian urban middle classes. “Comfortable immobility” thus contributes a fresh view of social-spatial im/mobility interactions that may otherwise be less perceptible or taken for granted (Merriman 2019), such as intergenerational and multisited developments, which can be overshadowed by attention to crises. Our analysis also affirms the relevance of scale, and how a focus on the city, not just the country or nation-state, reveals histories of internal and international migration and how such moving and staying trajectories intertwine with social mobility processes in urban contexts.

Third, our analysis of comfortable immobility as relationally produced echoes insights on the social-spatial mobility nexus as subjectively experienced, relational, and processual (Boese, Moran, and Mallman 2022). On the one hand, spatial immobility plays enabling roles in family histories of care arrangements and responsibilities. Some members stay to care for other stayers, while others move for work; others again stay to work, pursue education, or acquire skills and experience. Staying can thus also be imagined as pauses or launchpads for social mobility steps to be made. On the other hand, social immobility, which points to a phase of contentment or comfortable living conditions, might enable considerations related to both spatial mobility and immobility. Moving and/or staying may play key roles in relation to maintaining a “good life,” or securing socioeconomic improvement for the next generation, or addressing changing aspirations of the quality of life. Our research shows how “comfortable immobility” can draw attention to the potential of stasis — for enabling or maintaining some degree of middle-classness, countering downward social mobility, or realizing aspirations for upward social mobility — but also for cultivating new moving and staying considerations and possibilities. We thus show avenues for the in-depth investigation of relational and temporal dynamics within intergenerational families — including immediate and extended kin — enabling more concrete operationalization of calls for intersectional awareness (see also Salazar 2021). Our analysis of intergenerational relations also foregrounds aspects of age, gender, and life stages as linked to marriage, family formation, and women's roles. It extends beyond the reproductive roles of mothers, for instance, to the supportive roles of sisters toward siblings, encouraging critical questions about who in the family stays, who leaves or returns, and how these matter for differing geographic and/or socioeconomic positionings within families.

As mentioned, “comfortable immobility” is not meant to be a generalizing category, nor is it claimed to be generally representative of (Asian) middle-class experiences. It is instead grounded in a bottom-up reflection of the meanings of staying for middle-class urban residents and their families, and how these matter for migration and social mobility processes. Our analysis brings together insights from four different research contexts, which show the cross-cutting relevance of “comfortable immobility” — notwithstanding the unique traits and histories of middle classes in each of these contexts.

Finally, we suggest that “comfortable immobility” can speak to the realities of development processes, social change and inequality from varying Global South vantage points (De Haas 2021; Gruber 2021), thus allowing for fresh theorization of relationships between migration and development, and processes of social change, at the scale of the individual, the family and the community (Rigg, Nguyen, and Luong 2014). In the spirit of honest efforts to contribute to the decolonization of knowledge production, we suggest that conceptualizations, such as ours, that are built on both data and existing frameworks from Asian contexts, should also be assumed to hold analytical purchase beyond the Global South (Collins 2022; Yeoh 2021). We therefore welcome future research which engages with the possibility of “comfortable immobility” as an analytical window, in contrasting geographic and socioeconomic contexts, where it might be more useful in some and less in others.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Karen Anne S. Liao

Marta Bivand Erdal

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Research Council (grant number 94840,2021-2026).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

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