Settling matters: classed capacities and the logics of settling practice

Migrant settlement is often seen as a linear path – getting an education, a job, a house, a family – ignoring the complexities and unevenness of modes of incorporation. This article draws on research exploring the ways Chinese migration is reshaping everyday life in Australia to examine how class shapes and is shaped by, settling experiences. The article develops several claims: ‘settling’ involves diverse practices whereby migrants make use of the infrastructural affordances of the host country, embodying three logics of practice – incorporation, diasporic and convivial; the capacities to settle are shaped by class, but these capacities entail a collective accumulation of resources and that these capacities are mediated by symbolic notions of character which ‘hold’ these competing logics together.