Mobility and Migration Online: An Anthropological View

This article analyzes the intensification of Haitians’ “transit migration” from South America to the United States during 2021 in the framework of disputes between the migration movements and control policies that reconfigured the South American border regime during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that racialized control policies are a constitutive dimension of the border negotiations that Haitian migrant engage with diverses actors in contexts of illegalization exacerbated by COVID-19 and reinforced by the expansion of North-South “transit migration” as a matrix of political intervention. Through a qualitative methodological approach based on document analysis and online interviews with Haitian migrants, this article synchronously and asynchronously reconstructs the collective travel strategies of four groups of Haitians that left the Southern Cone heading toward the United States and the political scenarios being restructured around the activation, facilitation, diversion, or obstruction of their mobility. The analysis reveals the racialized character of the control policies inscribed in institutional frameworks of “transit migration” based on the new velocity and magnitude of South-North migration and their institutional construction in terms of a “migration crisis” on the Colombia-Panama border between July and September 2021. Similarly, it proposes that the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to strengthening the Southern Cone-Andean Region interface as a by-product of the amplification and diversification of South-North routes and a constitutive dimension of the infrastructures of violence and resistance that spatially and temporally connect the migratory and border dynamics of South, Central, and North America.

Autonomous agents increasingly interact within social domains such as customer service, transportation, and healthcare, often acting collectively on behalf of humans. In many of these scenarios, individually greedy strategies can diminish overall performance, exemplified by phenomena such as stop-and-go traffic congestion or network service disruptions due to competing interests. Thus, there is a growing need to develop decision-making strategies for autonomous agents that balance individual efficiency with group equitability. We propose a straightforward approach for rewarding groups of autonomous agents within evolutionary and reinforcement learning frameworks based explicitly on the performance of the weakest member of the group. Rather than optimizing each agent's individual rewards independently, we align incentives by using a "weakest-link" metric, thereby encouraging collective strategies that support equitable outcomes. Our results demonstrate that this weakest-member reward system effectively promotes equitable behavior among autonomous agents. Agents evolve or learn to balance collective benefit with individual performance, resulting in fairer outcomes for the entire group. Notably, the introduced approach improves overall efficiency, as equitably-minded agents collectively achieve greater stability and higher individual outcomes than agents pursuing purely selfish strategies. This methodology aligns closely with biological mechanisms observed in nature, specifically group-level selection and inclusive fitness theory. By tying the evolutionary and learning objectives to the group's weakest member, we mimic natural processes that favor cooperative and equitable behaviors. Our findings highlight the importance of incentive structures that consider the collective well-being to optimize both group fairness and individual agent success. Future research should explore how this reward framework generalizes across broader domains and more complex agent interactions.

The articles in this volume are collated from field studies in East and Southeast Asia on several key aspects of women's experiences related to work and mobility. They highlight a range of issues based on women's labor as migrants, whose social or biological, paid or unpaid labor, are structural continuities that characterize the nature of women's role and status within households and families across cultural systems in East and Southeast Asia. The articles in this volume demonstrate how contemporary developments in work and mobility affect women migrants from developing countries. The 21st century has been said to be one that will see the rise and dominance of Asia. To fuel this systemic economic takeoff implies an increase in human flows within and to this region to respond to demographic and economic differentials across the region. Against this backdrop, this volume discusses the role that women in migration play as foreign wives, domestic workers and seasonal rural to urban migrants. It maps some of the issues that they confront in destination countries, as well as in their own homes as absent wives, mothers and daughters in expanded networks of global householding. On another level, this volume frames the overseas employment and settlement of women migrants in destination countries, in the contexts of contestations between States, organized labor exporters and emergent migrant women's movements, which for migrant women represent their individual and collective strategies for making a ‘bare life’1 (Agamben, 1998:177, 180) liveable. The studies here underscore the potential that migration offers to women in this region, while highlighting the complexities and contradictions in labor supply and its relationship to politics, culture and capital.