Comfortable Immobility and the Role of Staying in the Upward Social Mobility of Families in Asian Cities

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.