It is fall 2021 and close to ten years after the majority of the migrants featured in this book moved for education or employment to Asia. Things would certainly look different if there was not the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, officially declared as a pandemic in March 2020, which is still ongoing. Yet, few have so far changed their place of residence because of the pandemic. It is difficult to foresee the next developments but the consequences of COVID-19 will certainly affect migrants’ future decisions in the years to come. Nevertheless, the core of this book has traced these migrants’ early career and young adulthood before the advent of COVID-19. Thus, their story is even more one of middle-class migration to Tokyo and Singapore of the 2010s, a time of – from a global perspective – increasing ease of travel generally and an upsurge of migration flows of those deemed skilled, while migrants’ EU home has seen a different trend of external border closures and internal crises in the same decade. Abruptly ended by the pandemic, this decade might come to be seen as a moment of heightened geographical mobility – at faster speed and lower prices – for a growing share of people around the world. For those highly educated with powerful passports who entered the labour market during this time, the world presented itself as incredibly open. And yet, as this book showed, such a perspective insufficiently depicts the reality of life on the ground and risks misrepresenting migration at a life stage when professional credentials are yet to be built.

The preceding chapters provided an in-depth examination of a migration phenomenon that challenges many of the taken-for-granted views in both so-called ‘skilled’ migration and lifestyle migration research. While the group in focus, the EU Generation, is numerically small, it draws attention to a number of aspects that affect and even spur the observed forms of mobility, at least during this distinct moment of mobility of the 2010s. The following sections take up the major themes developed in this book and consider their implications for middle-class migration in general and to Tokyo and Singapore as destinations in particular.