Bargaining Power: A Framework for Understanding Varieties of Migration Experience

This article introduces the concept of bargaining power as a framework for understanding varieties of migration experience and behavior. We argue that migration and settlement experiences vary according to a migrant’s leverage — or bargaining power — afforded by their individual cultural and socioeconomic capital (internal bargaining power) and their home country’s political and physical security characteristics (external bargaining power). These two dimensions of bargaining power interact with a host country’s social and political structures to produce specific experiences of (dis)advantage. We apply our framework to the Arab Gulf states, where large and diverse foreign populations experience complex and interconnected forms of inclusion and exclusion. Utilizing data from a nationally representative survey of a highly diverse sample of foreign residents in Qatar, we use our framework, first, to generate a typology of Gulf migration experience and, then, to statistically predict migrants’ reported life satisfaction in the host country and intentions for long-term settlement. We also use widely available secondary data to examine objective correlates of bargaining power, offering an alternative pathway for future research that does not require individual-level survey data. We conclude by describing the relevance of our bargaining power framework to the study of varieties of migration experience in other migration regimes.