Intimate Migrations

In her research with transnational Mexicans, Deborah A. Boehm has often asked individuals: if there were no barriers to your movement between Mexico and the United States, where would you choose to live? Almost always, they desire the freedom to "come and go." Yet the barriers preventing such movement are many. Because of rigid U.S. immigration policies, Mexican immigrants often find themselves living long distances from family members and unable to easily cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Transnational Mexicans experience what Boehm calls "intimate migrations," flows that both shape and are structured by gendered and familial actions and interactions, but are always defined by the presence of the U.S. state. By showing how intimate relations direct migration, and by looking at kin and gender relationships through the lens of "illegality," Boehm sheds new light on the study of gender and kinship, as well as understandings of the state and transnational migration.

Housing more than half of the global population, Asia is a region characterised by increasingly diverse forms of migration and mobility. Offering a wide-ranging overview of the field of Asian migrations, this new handbook therefore seeks to examine and evaluate the flows of movement within Asia, as well as into and out of the continent. Through in-depth analysis of both empirical and theoretical developments in the field, it includes key examples and trends such as British colonialism, Chinese diaspora, labour migration, the movement of women, and recent student migration. Organised into thematic parts, the topics cover: The historical context to migration in Asia Modern Asian migration pathways and characteristics The reconceptualising of migration through Asian experiences Contemporary challenges and controversies in Asian migration practice and policy Contributing to the retheorising of the subject area of international migration from non-western experience, the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations will be useful to students and scholars of migration, Asian development and Asian Studies in general.

As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.

Intersectionality can be used to analyse whether migration leads to changes in gender relations. This book finds out how migrants from a peri-urban neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, make sense of the migration journeys they have undertaken. Migration is intrinsically related to social transformation. Through life stories and community surveys, the author explores how gender, class, and ethnicity intersect in people’s attempts to make the most of the opportunities presented to them in distant labour markets. While aiming to improve their economic and material conditions, migrants have created a new transnational community that has undergone significant changes in the ways in which gender relations are organised. Women went from being mainly housewives to taking on the role of the family’s breadwinner in a matter of just one decade. This book asks and addresses important questions such as: what does this mean for gender equality and women’s empowerment? Can we talk of migration being emancipatory? Does intersectionality shed light in the analysis of everyday social transformations in contexts of transnational migrations? This book will be useful to researchers and students of human geography, development studies and Latin America area studies.

In recent decades, Africans have migrated to Europe in larger numbers than ever before; Africans are now a visible part of Europe s multiethnic landscape. The present volume brings together essays by an international group of social scientists which focus on economic and affective flows of goods, resources, and people, with careful attention to the regulatory forces of state and non-state (kin/friends/partners) actors. The aim is to integrate a scattered, but overlapping, set of literatures addressing care and intimacy in a variety of different ways among which are marriage migration, domestic labor, global care chains, romance travel, and moving for health resources. While any one paper may focus more on what the editors call affective circuits --the circulation of migrants, kin and goods--or on regulatory regimes, for example regulation of migration, labor, and material flows through state apparatuses, each addresses the complex intersections of the two dimensions of African migration to Europe. Each chapter focuses on the spaces between Africa and Europe and backs up arguments with ethnographic data and descriptions ranging across numerous different countries. This volume promises to become a benchmark in the burgeoning field of migration studies in anthropology. "

Growing numbers of partners, parents, children, grandchildren and siblings are living far away from each other, yet their opportunities to stay in touch have never been greater. Smartphones, tablets and personal computers are used by parents in London to care for their children in the Philippines. Refugees use phones and international transfers to send money and support to parents overseas. Funerals, weddings and anniversaries prompt return visits by plane and are streamed online to kin around the world. The mechanisms and processes of globalization are transforming the ways in which people 'do' and think about their families. Families, Intimacy and Globalization examines their experiences, charting the tensions between the freedoms and choices of late modern individuals, on the one hand, and the constraints of relational ties of love and obligation, on the other, which produce the 'floating ties' of global families and intimate relationships. Using detailed examples from all corners of the globe and across the life course, from internet dating to parenting to aged care, this thought-provoking book examines the transformation of relationships by the processes of migration and the cultural and economic flows that are central to globalization.

Mexicans in Alaska analyzes the mobility and experience of place of three generations of migrants who have been moving between Acuitzio del Canje, Michoacán, Mexico, and Anchorage, Alaska, since the 1950s. Based on Sara V. Komarnisky’s twelve months of ethnographic research at both sites and on more than ten years of engagement with the people in these locations, this book reveals that over time, Acuitzences have created a comprehensive sense of orientation within a transnational social field. Both locations and the common experience of mobility between them are essential for feeling “at home.” This migrant way of life requires the development of a transnational habitus as well as the skills, statuses, and knowledge required to live in both places. Komarnisky’s work presents a multigenerational and cross-continental understanding of the contemporary transnational experience. Mexicans in Alaska examines how Acuitzences are living, working, and imagining their futures across North America and suggests that anthropologists look across borders to see how broader structural conditions operate both within and across national boundaries. Understanding the experiences of transnational migrants remains a critical goal of contemporary scholarship, and Komarnisky’s analysis of the complicated lives of three generations of migrants provides depth to the field.

The lines between what constitutes migration and what constitutes human trafficking are messy at best. State policies rarely acknowledge the lived experiences of migrants, and too often the laws and policies meant to protect individuals ultimately increase the challenges faced by migrants and their kin. In some cases, the laws themselves lead to illegality or statelessness, particularly for migrant mothers and their children. Crossing the Gulf tells the stories of the intimate lives of migrants in the Gulf cities of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. Pardis Mahdavi reveals the interconnections between migration and emotion, between family and state policy, and shows how migrants can be both mobilized and immobilized by their family relationships and the bonds of love they share across borders. The result is an absorbing and literally moving ethnography that illuminates the mutually reinforcing and constitutive forces that impact the lives of migrants and their loved ones—and how profoundly migrants are underserved by policies that more often lead to their illegality, statelessness, deportation, detention, and abuse than to their aid.