Reciprocal migration: the coloniality of recent two-way migration links between Angola and Portugal

Reciprocal migration—which we defne as the mutual exchange of origin and destination by two diferent migrating groups—is hardly acknowledged in the migration literature. In terms of the temporalities of migration, which are usually seen as sequences or transitions, reciprocal migrations are simultaneous. We analyse the reciprocal migrations between Angola and Portugal over the time-frame of the past 10–15 years. Indepth interviews were carried out with Portuguese migrants in Angola, most of whom moved there in the wake of the post-2008 fnancial crisis, and with Angolan third-level students and recent graduates in Portugal. A key operational concept in our analysis is the plastic notion of skill and its diferential racialisation. Portuguese migrants in Angola are automatically regarded as ‘skilled’ even when they are not, whereas Angolan students and graduates in Portugal, when they seek work, are often viewed as ‘unskilled African migrant workers’. We thus distinguish and deconstruct the geographical binary between transnational origin and destination spaces and the social binary between ‘skilled white bodies’ and ‘unskilled black bodies’. These racialised embodied tropes draw on histories of Portuguese colonisation and the contested notion of ‘Lusotropicalism’, as well as the so-called Lusophone migration system involving complex transnational relations and two-way migration fows. Theoretically we frame this asymmetrical system of reciprocal migration within a modifed version of core–periphery relations, as well as the coloniality of power and its enduring infuence over the racialisation of skill, education, culture and language across the Portuguese–Angolan transnational space.