The Social Economy of Escaping to the Beach: The Impact of Privileged Lifestyle Migrants on a Local Community in Caribbean Costa Rica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the social and economic impacts of Euro-American migration to the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. This lifestyle migration from highly developed countries is a growing trend as U.S., Canadian, and European citizens seek to maximize their incomes in lower-cost locales, enjoy a rural-idyll near natural amenities, and live out the thrill of travel on an extended timeline. I examine how the wealth and privilege of Euro-American lifestyle migrants relative to local Costa Ricans reshapes communities, impacts migrant integration, and potentially incentivizes locals to adapt to migrants. In this research I use interviews, ethnographic observations, and media analysis during two periods of fieldwork in the south Caribbean. I find that social class and ethno-national differences prevent most Euro-American migrants from deep integration into local communities. While owning a business is considered a structural measure of immigrant integration, entrepreneurial lifestyle migrants in Costa Rica form a new owning class that serves to maintain separation from locals. I find that locals resist integration into the cultural expectations of migrants, but do adopt some aspects of migrant culture that help them find work in the tourist-oriented businesses run by migrants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".