The article interrogates the 'mobility imperative' and its impact on precarious academics. Drawing on 40 biographic interviews with academics with experience of long-term precarity in Irish higher education, and using a Bourdieusian framework, we identify the specific conditions, uses and impacts of international mobility for these workers. This method offers a unique retrospective advantage for an analysis of the utility of international capital for a cohort of workers typically excluded from studies of international mobility. Among the specific obstacles we identify which are faced by precarious academics in the accumulation and conversion of international capital are the lack of or compromised initial social capital; the dubious value of international capital in Irish academia, especially when associated with precarity; and the difficulty for workers to construct acceptable career scripts when both precarity and mobility have led them off-script. We suggest that the ability to accumulate and convert usable forms of international capital while working abroad is in part predetermined by prior struggles in the national field.