"Lachak" and the Normalization of Nonbelonging: Skilled Migration, Symbolic Capital, and Settlement in Canada

This article examines how skilled Pakistani newcomers to Canada experience and make sense of the loss of recognition associated with their prior professional identities following migration. Drawing on 43 life-history interviews in the Greater Toronto Area, I use the Urdu word lachak (flexibility) to describe how my interlocutors lower expectations, accept downward mobility, and reorient their identities in order to move forward with settlement. I argue that lachak captures how symbolic capital loss becomes embedded in everyday self-understandings, producing an embodied and often obscured sense of nonbelonging. The analysis also demonstrates that these processes are structured through gendered differences across professional and domestic domains. By foregrounding lachak, the article shows how nonbelonging persists through the normalization of diminished recognition in settlement.