Status Illegibility Enables Immigrant Arbitrage

In societies with rigid local caste or class markers, newcomers whose social cues are 'illegible' to locals can create new status categories and leverage tight family/ethnic capital to bypass existing mobility barriers. That status arbitrage helps explain outsized success among certain immigrant merchant communities and shapes cross‑cultural marriage markets. — This reframes immigration success as often driven by social‑capital portability and legibility, not just human‑capital or institutional openness, with implications for integration and inequality policy.