Unlikely settlers in exceptional times: The impact of social class and selective migration policies on the recent migrations of trade skilled workers and their families from China to Perth, Western Australia

This ethnography of contemporary trade-skilled labour migrants from China to Australia proposes migration literacy and national class frames in motion as new lenses to theorise social class and international mobility under selective migration policy. National dimensions of class are critical to transnational analyses as they move and are reformed and reinterpreted in new contexts. Case studies of Chinese migrants offer particular insights as new Chinese social class and suzhi discourses are imbricated with spatial mobilities. Dimensions of class are evident in citizenship choices, migrant temporalities and return migration imaginaries.