Placing the future: Onward migration, education and citizenship among Portuguese-Bangladeshi in London

Based on a longitudinal ethnography with Bangladeshis in Lisbon and in London, this article unravels the ways my interlocutors perceive their onward migration projects to the UK. Their decision to migrate once again was intimately connected with the education of their children. This would not only make them fluent in English language, a global language of power and prestige according to many but would give them access to better opportunities in the labour market. Simultaneously, these new mobilities had a tremendous emotional/affective price and were seen by the parents as a sacrifice and a new beginning. This article argues that these new beginnings are not about the accumulation of diverse forms of capital per se but rather the creation of larger horizon of expectations based on the redistribution logic of relatedness, kinship and domestic units; in sum, onward migration was a future-making strategy in contexts of economic uncertainty.