Informal strategies in transnational mobilities and their implications for European lifestyle migration

Informality encompasses a wide range of unregulated activities that has usually been associated with the activities of marginalised groups. However, it has been recognised that affluent lifestyle migrants use informal strategies to pursue a good life across borders. How lifestyle migrants resort to informality and how it affects their lives is less well understood. To fill this gap, we present findings from 22 qualitative interviews with Swedish lifestyle migrants in Portugal. Lifestyle migrants can navigate webs of (in)formalities thanks to their privileged position as citizens of the European Union. First, lifestyle migrants gradually appropriate informality, which illustrates their privileged use of informal strategies to establish themselves in a new country. Second, lifestyle migrants never have to settle down in one place because they can employ informal strategies across countries to support their desired life in one of them. Finally, lifestyle migrants end up facing a paradox of immobility because their use of informal strategies to retain connections between countries creates dependency and immobility. Not unlike marginalised groups, lifestyle migrants exploit gaps in formal frameworks of the global mobility regime. Informality is intertwined with the privileged pursuit of a momentarily better life abroad and is thus essential to lifestyle migration.