Gender-based violence (GBV) is widespread globally and is based on social roles. These social roles represent society’s expectations of men and women carrying out stereotyped functions and behaviours. These gendered social expectations vary across culture, space and time. Drawing from an empirical study in Israel and building on the previous literature on these issues, this qualitative and interdisciplinary article identifies various forms of GBV along Eritrean women’s journey from their home country into Israel. The empirical work helps to examine the findings of previous theoretical studies. This article establishes that there is a continuum of violence for women, especially refugees and asylum seekers, rooted in the standard system of oppression – patriarchy. This has triggered the flight and trafficking of refugees from Eritrea through the Sinai Desert and into Israel. The article argues that structural and cultural violence emanating from both the hosted community and the host community play significant roles in allowing the circumstances for GBV to thrive throughout the entire refugee cycle. What can be seen is the creation of multiple layers of vulnerabilities, particularly the specific social–legal–economic marginalization of segments of the population, including Eritrean asylum-seeking women. Reacting to this continuum of violence, many participants in the study argued that it was necessary to adopt strategies to create a continuum of resilience and resistance grounded on women’s sorority, support and agency.

Investigating the multi-layered mobility of Southeast Asian irregular farm workers in rural Taiwan, this article examines the formation of their mobility in a physical, geographical, occupational and socio-economic sense. Focusing on frequent movement in these four aspects, this article coins the term ‘fettered mobility’ for workers’ constant relocation in the villages’ informal farm labour market. In tandem with the focus of this Special Issue on the ongoing transformations of migration at the crossroad between the legal, social and economic obstacles dictated by nation states and the market, and new patterns of movement, this article shows how ‘fettered mobility’ is an unintentional result of the Taiwanese state’s mobility regime, which regulates foreign nationals’ mobility by categorizing a hierarchical legal status. Fettered mobility is facilitated by the translocal migrant community constituted by the co-ethnic link between migrant workers and migrant spouse farmers, and also by the inter-ethnic link between the migrant community on the one hand and Taiwanese farmers and unlicensed brokers on the other. When migration is reconfiguring at a global, regional and local scale, fettered mobility is an assemblage in which the state, market and individual amalgamate into a networked, mobile, irregular and precarious labour force in which unprotected migrant workers are vulnerable to the state’s power to repatriate. Repatriation is an omnipresent threat, and anyone who knows of a migrant worker’s fettered mobility can put an end to their migration. Presenting fettered mobility as an assemblage, this article enriches the ongoing debate on the relationship between mobility and immobility and underlines its conditionality and instability.

In this article, I combine my observation of Indonesia’s desire to end labour outmigration with scholarly reflections on the end of migration studies. Challenging the orthodoxy that takes for granted sending countries’ support of migration as presumed in current optimism of the migration-development paradigm, I trace Indonesia’s successive development plans to demonstrate the treatment of migration as a less-preferred option for job creation, exploring how postcolonial trajectories entail the desire to keep development in situ and lead to persisting view of migration as deeply undesirable. The recent shift to governance works as a way to both discipline workers through required documentation and to allow the government to eschew accountability by advancing a discourse on protection. As the state sets out a future anticipation where those defined as unskilled no longer migrate, a question arises as to how we build a meaningful scholarship around migration as a non-priority and the process towards making a certain migrant category disappear? My critique of development planning turns the analytical lens back to the state, which I see as a way to go on with the study of migration in a more ethical, pro-migrant manner. Rejecting the trap of methodological nationalism, I offer an approach that seizes of the ‘postcolonial moment’ of migration.

Review of: Superdiversity Migration and Social Complexity, Steven Vertovec (2023) Abingdon: Routledge, 250 pp., ISBN 978-0-41583-463-6, p/bk, £27.99 ISBN 978-0-41583-462-9, h/bk, £96.00

Review of: Transnational Student Return Migration and Megacities in China: Practices of Cityzenship, Zhe Wang (2023) Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 155 pp., ISBN 978-9-81992-082-2, h/bk, EUR 39.99 ISBN 978-9-81992-083-9, e-book, EUR 32.09

Over the last decade, scholars have declared the collapse of the Mexico–US system of undocumented migration. The H2 visa programme, a regime of managed sojourning is replacing the system of unauthorized cross-border mobility. In fiscal year 2023, the US government issued nearly 370,000 H2 temporary work visas to Mexicans. This temporary migrant labour programme is also bringing back circulation, temporary legal stays, and mostly male cross-border mobility – features that are akin to the old Bracero Program (1942–64). We contend that the restoration of these legal and sociodemographic dynamics undermines critical pillars of the system of undocumented labour mobility, limiting and reorienting the role of social networks, and potentially ending the way Mexico–United States has functioned for the past half century. We use ethnographic, interview and survey data to analyse the expansion of this new regime of highly mediated cross-border mobility, the ascent of the brokerage apparatus, and its effect transforming the social infrastructure of migration. We ask, specifically, how does the H2 temporary migrant labour programme constrain and diminish kin and hometown-based social networks, previously seen as ‘the engine of migration’? How does the shift from migrant networks to a brokerage apparatus impact trust, reciprocity and the development of migratory social capital? How is the new regime changing the experience of migration – substituting risk and adventure for certainty and routinized movement? How does the H2 temporary migrant labour programme revert the locus of social reproduction of the labour force back to sending communities, preempting integration at the destination? We frame the answers to these questions in the emerging migration industry and infrastructures paradigm, which examines to the role of migrant and non-migrant actors in the facilitation, control and overall mediation and structuring of cross-border mobility.

This article addresses how transient international refugees create new digital reconstructions of home-making when physically and mentally shuttling between two or more places of residence. Worldwide crises force millions of international refugees to adapt to new ways of constant remigration between their temporary places of residence and their home country. Instead of settling in a new place of residence, many international refugees often have difficulties feeling at home where they do not want to be. This article focuses on current refugees from Ukraine in Europe who shuttle between their homeland and their host country. The actual process of the refugees’ constant balancing between physically and mentally leaving and arriving at their home and host countries is coined ‘shuttle refuge’ in this article. It emphasizes the loss of a permanent home during refuge and portrays the necessity of digital reconstructions of home-making with friends and family via communication media due to the unavailability of a constant physical home. After addressing the legal circumstances that currently contribute to the ongoing state of temporariness, this article illustrates practices and effects of the shuttle refugee through a group interview with six recent Ukrainian refugees in Germany at the beginning of the year 2023 to shed light on the interviewees’ adaption to a new cultural environment and their efforts in digital home-making practices with their families and friends.

For the French in London, as for other citizens of the European Union, the Brexit process resulted in the end of free movement for EU citizens relocating to the United Kingdom and affected the rights of those already living there. This article traces how Brexit shaped the spatial choices of middle-class French citizens whose status in London changed as they became international migrants with diminished rights in the United Kingdom. This case study, based on longitudinal ethnographic research between 2014 and 2022, sheds light on how relative privilege operates in migration processes and draws attention to the diversity of experience among middle-class migrants when new bordering arrangements are enacted.

This article reports on findings regarding the experience of prolonged temporariness of migrant women on partner visas that separated after experiencing domestic or family violence (sponsored women). Four participants’ narratives were selected from a longitudinal study to understand how women rebuild their lives after violence while in an uncertain visa status. The analysis reported in this article reveals two strong experiences: Investigation and waiting times and productive waiting. The conclusion is that like with protection visa applicants and students, waiting and prolonged temporariness is experienced as harmful and delaying progression and healing even when the sponsored women engaged in productive waiting. Further, time and waiting also shape women’s experiences of migration and in the case of this cohort, their relationship with the host country and their experience of safety and well-being.