How class shapes rural migration for young people

Class remains curiously absent in rural migration scholarship of the Global North. Earlier studies highlighted the role played by class origin in capital accumulation and social mobility among migrants building futures in new country contexts. Yet class has been largely obscured or avoided in empirically-driven analyses of rural migration and rural multiculture over the past twenty-five years. This paper examines this omission through the lens of contemporary Australia, a burgeoning site of research on rural migrant settlement and mobilities. Australia’s rural towns and cities were historically engineered on classed colonial and racialised hierarchies. These conditions continue to structure rural social and economic life in the present – from schooling and employment relations, to social networks and resourcing. Drawing on extensive empirical research, this paper draws out the significance of class for the migration experiences of young people and their families from migrant backgrounds in the inland, rural city of Mildura in south-eastern Australia. Class is shown here to structure and shape rural migration in complex ways, both enabling and hindering anticipated and desired social mobilities and playing a key role in young people’s rural migration trajectories.