Un Settled Sojourners In Cities

Temporary migration is a human response to uncertain economic, ecological, political and socio-cultural environments. This book provides an important contribution to the literature on the rights, lived experiences and trajectories of temporary migrants. It focuses on the precarity of temporary migrants at different scales in urban settings, varying from the household, institution, and neighbourhood, to the city. Temporary migrants experience oscillations in precarity that vary with their categorization as skilled (professionals with valued skill sets, international students) or unskilled (domestic workers, labourers), their ambiguous legal status and the locales in which they reside and work. Individual chapters use case studies from around the world (USA, Canada, Ireland, Turkey, Singapore, China) to show how temporal and scalar precarity intersect and are mediated by national and local policies, civil society, as well as the personal and social attributes of migrants themselves such as gender, race, and country of origin. Although often overlooked due to their transitory status, the chapters demonstrate how temporary migrants are embedded in urban life and resist their categorization as disposable through individual and collective efforts. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Human Geography, Urban Studies, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Selecting migrants based on skill has become a widely practised migration policy in many countries around the world. Since the late 20th century, research on 'skilled' and 'highly skilled' migration has raised important questions about the value and ethics of skill-based labour mobility. More recent research has begun to question the concept of skill and skill categorisation in both government policy and academic research. Taking the view that 'skills' are socially constructed categories and highly malleable concepts in practice, this edited volume centres the discussion on the following questions: Who are the arbitrators of skill? What constitutes skill? And how is skill constructed in the migration process and in turn, how does skill affect the mobility? The empirical studies in this volume show that diverse actors are involved in the process of identifying, evaluating and shaping migrant skill. The interpretation of migrants' skill is frequently distorted by their ascriptive characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender and nationality, reflecting the influence of colonial legacy, global inequality as well as social stratification. Finally, this edited volume emphasises the complex, and frequently reciprocal, relationship between skill and mobility. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Human Geography, Politics, Social Anthropology, Economics, and Social Work. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

How does immigration transform societies and relations between ethnic and racial groups? This volume brings together scholars working at the cutting-edge of theory and empirical research on integration and assimilation in the US and Europe. It is dedicated to the life and works of Richard Alba, who has done so much to re-invigorate and establish ideas about integration and assimilation. The book aims to open a dialogue on the continuing value of assimilation and integration for studying social change in an era of increasing ethno-racial diversity in Western liberal democracies. Assimilation and integration, and the understandings of societal change that they theorise, depict, and empirically study, remain a contested terrain that is open for critical re-evaluation. This insightful volume offers a set of expert scholarly contributions, including contributions from Richard Alba himself, that tease out critical junctures and disagreements, in the belief that this collective effort can provide insights about where the future research agenda needs to go. Re-thinking Assimilation and Integration will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of sociology, ethnic and racial studies, international politics, and migration studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

This book investigates how migration has been transformed into a security threat in Europe. It argues that this process has taken place through a self-fulfilling spiralling process, which involves different actors and their specific narratives, practices and policies. The book examines how situations stemming from the so-called ‘migration crisis’ in the European Union (EU) have been dealt with by governments and non-governmental organisations. It also considers how actors treating migration as an ordinary phenomenon rather than a threat and sharing inclusive narratives can create the conditions for decelerating and eventually stopping securitisation processes. Some chapters examine the spiralling of the securitisation of migration in depth, by analysing increases in securitisation, as well as cases characterised by resistance. Others focus on examining the consequences of socially constructing migration as a crisis for the EU’s relations with third countries. In sum, this book shows that there is a wide range of motives for which states and societies would benefit from a change in migration politics and move from the current management of a ‘crisis’ to a more positive governance of human mobility. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of sociology, politics, international relations, social and cultural anthropology, human geography, and social work. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Reimagining Chinese Diasporas in a Transnational World examines the changing nature of the Chinese diasporas in a transnational world and its concomitant implications for Chinese diaspora studies internationally. With a shifting paradigm of transnationalism and transnational migration, new patterns of Chinese mobilities have emerged that can be characterised as multiple and circular rather than unidirectional or final. This book illustrates how the analytical constructs of hypermobility, hyperdiversity and hyperconnectivity aid in the understanding of contemporary Chinese transnational diasporas. The book offers new research findings and theorisation and contributes to the existing Chinese diasporas literature and the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic, migration and mobility studies. It stimulates further research and scholarly work on the Chinese diasporas in the age of transnational migration. This book will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of sociology, ethnic studies, international politics, and migration studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Marriages that involve the migration of at least one of the spouses challenge two intersecting facets of the politics of belonging: the making of the 'good and legitimate citizens' and the 'acceptable family'. In Europe, cross-border marriages have been the target of increasing state controls, an issue of public concern and the object of scholarly research. The study of cross-border marriages and the ways these marriages are framed is inevitably affected by states' concerns and priorities. There is a need for a reflexive assessment of how the categories employed by state institutions and agents have impacted the study of cross-border marriages. This collection of essays analyses what is at stake in the regulation of cross-border marriages and how European states use particular categories (e.g., 'sham', 'forced' and 'mixed' marriages) to differentiate between acceptable and non-acceptable marriages. When researchers use these categories unreflexively, they risk reproducing nation-centred epistemologies and reinforcing state-informed hierarchies and forms of exclusion. The chapters in this book offer new insights into a timely topic and suggest ways to avoid these pitfalls: differentiating between categories of analysis and categories of practice, adopting methodologies that do not mirror nation-states' logic and engaging with general social theory outside migration studies. This book will be of interest to researchers and academics of Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Human Geography, Social Work, and Public Policy. Barring one, all the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.