Grounded in the theory of active aging and considering the dual attributes of mobility and aging, this study systematically assessed the levels of active aging among older urban migrants and uncovered patterns of subgroup heterogeneity within this population. A cross-sectional comparative research design with quantitative methods was employed. Data were collected through a field survey conducted across four cities and 14 urban districts in within Zhejiang Province. A multidimensional evaluation framework was developed, encompassing six dimensions, including individual factors, health-related behaviors, economic conditions, social environments, physical environments, and health and social services. The findings revealed that the overall level of active aging among older urban migrants remained relatively low, with significant deficiencies across core dimensions such as volunteering participation, property ownership, healthcare utilization, and medical insurance accessibility. Moreover, substantial internal heterogeneity was observed, shaped by variations in migration motivation, geographical scale, and length of residence. Quality-of-life-oriented migrants demonstrated higher levels of active aging compared with family-support and economically-driven migrants, while inter-provincial migrants and short-term residents faced greater barriers to accessing health services, social participation, and urban integration. These findings underscore the need to shift public service delivery from a household registration-based model to a residency-oriented approach. Targeted interventions are needed to enhance social inclusion, institutional adaptation, and individual empowerment among older urban migrants. Furthermore, stronger policy coordination and localized support mechanisms are essential for optimizing active aging within urban contexts shaped by migration.

This article examines forced migrants’ decision-making over time on movement from first country of asylum. Building on 150 in-depth interviews with Syrian refugees (A note on terminology: the term refugee is used colloquially by our participants, other scholars, the legal profession, and international actors to denote most Syrian migrants, yet it often means different things to its users. While many of our participants may be refugees, it is beyond our competence to judge and is not a term that describes their legal standing in Turkey or Lebanon. As such, we often use the term forced migrants as all our participants (and all refugees) can be described as forced migrants, whether they are refugees or not.) in Turkey and Lebanon (85 in Turkey and 65 in Lebanon) conducted in 2022–2023, we develop a tri-partite conceptual framework that integrates spatio-temporalities, migration infrastructure, and forms of capital. Methodologically, the study uses purposive, stratified sampling and semi-structured interviews, with coding for social, cultural, economic, and symbolic capital and mapping against local legislative, social, and temporal conditions. Our findings show that decision-making is iterative and situational, rather than a simple cost–benefit calculation or a linear trajectory. Spatio-temporal positions determine which infrastructures are visible and how urgent onward movement feels; migration infrastructures—formal and informal, digital and clandestine—translate possibilities into concrete routes and risks; and migrants’ varying capitals shape who can access regularized, document-based pathways versus hazardous, informal channels. Higher starting or converted capital often correlates with a preference for legal, document-dependent strategies and greater willingness to wait and convert capital; lower capital correlates with urgency, recourse to smugglers, and shorter latency between failed attempts and retrying. Digital platforms mediate both safe and exploitative practices, while administrative opacity and high transaction costs distort access to formal routes. The paper offers a dynamic, meso-informed account of secondary movement that foregrounds infrastructure as a relational system that shapes incentives and risk. Policy implications, therefore, call for interventions that reconfigure migration infrastructure, expand affordable, regular pathways, increase institutional transparency, and reduce markets for exploitative intermediaries to lessen harm and broaden durable onward-movement options.

The article examines how organisational and structural configurations shape the quality of administrative decision-making in European asylum offices. Drawing on fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of 27 cases across nine countries between 2010 and 2022, it analyses variation in administrative decision-making quality using judicial overturn rates as a proxy. The findings show that variation and fluctuation in decision-making quality is best explained by specific combinations of organisational and structural conditions rather than by single factors such as application pressure or professional capacity alone. Higher quality emerges through a limited number of conjunctural pathways in which greater administrative insulation from political influence or lower application pressure function as enabling conditions. Organisational experience and caseworker competence contribute to quality only when embedded in supportive institutional settings. Overall, the findings indicate that differences in decision-making quality stem from asylum offices’ varying capacity to manage political and workload pressures.

This article introduces the MoPEI (Mechanisms of Precarious Economic Incorporation) framework, a conceptual-analytical tool for explaining how refugees are steered into precarious labor through the relational and layered intersections of multiple mechanisms. Considering the labor market realities of Central and Eastern Europe, MoPEI identifies six such mechanisms – structural constraints, temporal and legal ambiguity, migration infrastructures, semi-compliance, normative pressures, and bounded agency – and models their interplays using network analysis. We apply this framework to a case study of forcibly displaced Ukrainians in Czechia, where our evidence points to their substantial engagement in informal, semi-formal, and precarious economic activities alongside rapid labor market entry. Drawing on two waves of survey data (2022, 2023) and focus group discussions, our findings demonstrate how the MoPEI mechanisms interact to facilitate and institutionalize precarious incorporation, shaped by entrenched brokerage practices, weak protection, limited agency, and structural disadvantages. In doing so, MoPEI addresses the limits of fragmented and thematically specific explanations by offering a relational account of how precarious incorporation is co-produced.