ABSTRACT Youth in immigrant households play a pivotal role in facilitating access to institutions for their parents and family members by acting as informal translators, a function understood as language brokering. While researchers have studied how language brokers facilitate institutional access for limited English-speaking adults in their household, little research examines brokers’ long-term outcomes, including the extent to which they can navigate and access institutions for themselves as adults. This study shifts the unit of analysis of language brokering and institutional access from the household to the individual and quantitatively tests the relationship between language brokering and navigational capital (Yosso 2005). Using original data among young adults ages 18–34 in a predominantly Latinx city in California, I conduct a logistic regression analysis to predict the likelihood of an individual receiving public benefits in adulthood. Results indicate that, net of controls, young adults who identify as language brokering serves as a significant indicator for facilitating access to public benefits for themselves. This research complicates the nature of language brokering by examining how language brokers may extend their brokering skills beyond their household level as a form of capital to demystify bureaucratic processes and institutions to access public benefits as a resource for themselves.

ABSTRACT Transnational mobility is typically seen as an opportunity to break out of fixed class positions and facilitate social mobility. However, the availability of parental support remains a persistent if complex determinant of the social mobility opportunities available to young adults who move abroad. The influence of family support and class background on youth social mobility has been clearly recognised in class scholarship in Australia. Yet, this relationship has remained under-examined in transnational mobility contexts, where social mobility has tended to be examined more in relation to young people’s employment opportunities and visa pathways. Seeking to fill this gap, our paper draws together recent scholarship on mobile young adults’ experiences navigating social and class (im)mobility abroad in relation to employment (as this intersects with visas), and a growing body of literature that features the relational and social dimensions of social mobility for migrants. We argue that family support is a critical but overlooked factor in the social mobility of transnationally mobile youth. We explore how it functions not simply as a source of safety and stability, but shapes their economic opportunities and pathways in complex ways that illustrate the relational embeddedness of social mobility for middling mobile youth.

ABSTRACT This article examines how norms of 'legitimate' violence in EU deportation have transformed. Following serious injuries and deaths during removals from the 1990s to mid-2010s, there have been significant changes to the implementation of deportation, most notably the establishment of forced-return monitoring systems in nearly all EU states and Frontex. Despite this, academic attention to these developments remains limited. This article asks how the introduction of monitoring has shaped implementation and practitioners' understandings of 'legitimate' violence, and what effects emerge from regular interactions between monitors and escorts responsible for deportation. Using interviews, document-access requests, and documentary research, the article investigates these questions by focusing on relational dynamics from 2013 to 2023. To capture these dynamics within the international and multiorganisational context of Frontex and EU co-funded Forced-Return Monitoring projects, it proposes the analytical lens of norm translation in transnational grey areas. This approach reveals co-constitutive social spaces between written rules and their application on the ground, where escorts' and monitors' interactions can generate new normative views and shifts in behaviour over time. These actors shape, negotiate, and contest expectations of appropriateness, showing that bottom-up relational dynamics, beyond top-down EU standards, play a key role in driving change and informing practice.

ABSTRACT Prior research documents immigrant women’s disadvantaged position in domestic labour. However, many studies fail to distinguish among different immigration pathways, pay limited attention to employment status as a potential mechanism, or do not sufficiently account for cultural differences between sending and host societies. Using detailed immigration data from the Hong Kong Panel Survey of Social Dynamics, we examine how wives’ immigration status is associated with household labour patterns, paying particular attention to the role of employment. By focusing on family immigrants, our findings provide three insights. First, only wives who immigrate through spousal sponsorship, not through parental pathways, face significant disadvantages in household labour compared to native wives. Second, current employment conditions, including occupational status and weekly work hours, do not significantly mediate these disadvantages. Third, employment status upon arrival appears to be a critical early juncture in the formation of household labour arrangements: immigrant–native gaps in housework are observed only among spousal immigrant wives who were not employed upon arrival. From a life-course perspective, these findings suggest that early post-arrival experiences may be closely linked to longer-term patterns of household labour.

ABSTRACT How are citizens made? Who and what makes a citizen? Citizens are a defining element of a democracy, but does democracy define and create citizens? Does a higher degree of democratisation in constitution-making processes always lead to more inclusive citizenship outcomes? This article grapples with these questions demonstrating how persons have come to be included and excluded from citizenship through constitution-making processes of varying democratic credentials. In most African states, the concept of ‘citizen’ came into usage at the time of independence. Using Kenya and Tanzania as case studies, this article illustrates how the independence constitution-making processes and negotiations critically shaped each country's emergent citizenship regime. How citizenship was determined then, who was included or excluded, and the rules for determining these matters continue to be relevant and influential in current citizenship laws and practices. This article examines the processes of constitution-making in both countries from independence to present, analysing the degree of public participation, as one of the hallmarks of democracy, and the effect such participation or lack thereof has had on a country's citizenship laws and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately, it questions if democratic participation in constitution-making always results in more inclusionary citizenship regimes.

ABSTRACT This study explores the native–immigrant employment gap around the transition to parenthood by comparing the employment trajectories of immigrants and their descendants with those of native-born Spanish mothers. Using sequence and cluster analysis with individual-level data from Spain, we reconstructed three years’ employment histories around the transition to motherhood and identified eight typical career trajectory types. Multinomial logistic regressions were then used to examine differences in maternal employment patterns by immigrant group and generation. Results reveal a substantial immigrant–native gap in maternal employment pathways. Immigrant mothers are more likely to experience long-term non-employment but are less likely than native-born mothers to undergo turbulent non-employment transitions or interrupted employment. Our findings also indicate upward assimilation among descendants of immigrants, who face fewer penalties in occupational attainment and greater access to stable permanent or self-employment trajectories, although they remain more prone to inactivity traps than their native counterparts. Compositional differences in human capital and citizenship status help reduce these gaps in maternal employment. By highlighting persistent inequalities in maternal employment patterns and their determinants, this study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the social and economic integration of immigrants and their descendants.

ABSTRACT This article examines how Italian asylum institutions produce gendered and racialised hierarchies of credibility and vulnerability. Drawing on an original mixed-methods dataset of 80 case files of female applicants and 76 expert interviews conducted in Sicily, the analysis compares first-instance decisions by Territorial Commissions (TCs) with judicial rulings on appeal. While TCs function as suspicion-driven border sites privileging narrative coherence, courts adopt trauma-informed reasoning that more consistently recognises gender-based persecution. The study conceptualises credibility and vulnerability as institutional constructs that shape epistemic authority through everyday bordering. Beyond institutional asymmetries, the analysis reveals how bordering practices intersect with differentiated racialised scripts: while West-Central African women are predominantly positioned within humanitarian and victimhood narratives (e.g. trafficking), North African applicants are frequently reframed through culturalised familial idioms. These divergent representations lead to unequal credibility outcomes and stratified access to protection. By highlighting the discrepancy between administrative and judicial phases, the paper demonstrates how the legal recognition of gender-based violence remains contingent upon the intersection of institutional discretion and the applicant’s national background.

ABSTRACT This paper draws upon data from research with Afghans who have been recently resettled across varied sites in England. Focusing on the accounts of resettled Afghan women, we seek to advance understanding of how, in the context of resettlement, they navigate embedding in particular places – including large, multi-ethnic cities and smaller, less diverse towns and villages in England. To inform this understanding, we adopt mobile methods, in particular walking interviews, across these different geographical locations. As we walk around their neighbourhoods, the women narrate their everyday experiences and forms of agency within these places. The paper examines the extent to which they feel welcome and supported in their new locations or if they face hostility. Focusing on places as socially constructed through interactions over time, we explore relationality, socio-cultural structures and power dynamics within these localities. The racist riots across various English regions during the summer of 2024 emerge as a specific theme in women’s accounts, undermining their feelings of safety and threatening to unsettle nascent embedding. Thus, our paper aims to shed new light on the fragile and processual nature of embedding, but also how it is actively negotiated, through mobilising resources (capital), within specific temporal and spatial contexts.

ABSTRACT Growing global inequalities in an era of hyper mobilities have seen class re-emerge at the forefront of migration scholarship. This special issue brings together class and migration studies scholars to progress understandings of complex, inconsistent and deeply unequal class consequences for migrants, families, relationships and societies, and to advance both fields through this engagement. In this introductory article we make three interventions at this nexus: first, we explain the importance of centring class in migration studies to augment the unstable and contradictory questions around social (im)mobility, status and exploitation that have long been within the purview of migration scholars. Second, we argue that a class lens enables us to interrogate how race and ethnicity are produced among the transnationally-mobile and to examine who benefits from these racialised logics and assemblages. Third, centring class in migration studies enables us to locate emerging and restructured global power relationships associated with family wealth regimes and the accumulation of asset-generated resources in ways that drive and stall migration trajectories. The papers in this collection explore these themes and others through their shared focus on settler-colonial Australia, offering empirical and novel insights into how class inequalities and privileges are transferred, reproduced and challenged across borders.

ABSTRACT This study examines the long-term employment of immigrants to Australia who, upon arrival, were categorised as either refugees or asylum seekers. We focus on the role of immigrant status categories using the case of refugees and asylum seekers who encounter different premigration experiences, rights, and entitlements upon arrival. We assess whether refugees and asylum seekers differ in their employment outcomes immediately after securing permanent residency and ten years later. Utilising regression and propensity score weighting techniques, we find that the distinction in initial immigrant status between the two groups shapes their employment trajectories. We also find a surprising pattern: although refugees enjoy more welcoming policies and favoured status when arriving in Australia compared to asylum seekers, they experience a relative disadvantage in the labour market initially after securing permanent residency. However, after considering intervening factors such as postmigration experiences and resource accumulation, refugees and asylum seekers follow similar long-term employment trajectories. Specifically, basic rights and temporary protection that asylum seekers acquire through a bridging visa help explain the initial employment gap. Our findings have implications for immigrant integration globally given the rise of neoliberal immigration policies and temporary immigrant statuses with precarious rights.