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Regeneration, predatory inclusion, and migrant experiences in declining rural areas in Spain and Germany

ABSTRACT Declining rural areas have become central sites for migrant settlement. In the hope that migration will counteract rural shrinkage, migrants are increasingly portrayed as catalysts to revitalize communities. This article critically examines migration to declining rural areas vis-à-vis rural reception and regeneration policies. Drawing on qualitative research including interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observations, we compare migrants’ settlement experiences and their positions in rural revitalization processes in northeast Spain and eastern Germany. Our research illustrates that local reception and regeneration policies do not only sideline the role of newcomers as rural place-makers, who contribute to the sustainment (or expansion) of local services and infrastructures. They also result in conditions of ‘predatory inclusion’, in which migrants’ settlement is shaped regarding their potential ‘use’ for revitalizing local economies and housing markets in exploitative terms and along racialized lines. Facing precarious labor and housing conditions, migrants tend to reside only temporarily in our investigated areas. This article contributes to a growing body of migration research in rural areas and explains that attempts at regeneration through migration can run the risk of ignoring migrants' structural conditions, needs, mobility aspirations and life plans, thereby reinforcing racial and class-based inequalities present in rural areas.

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Debt-financed migration: Agency and the productivity of debt

ABSTRACT Debt-financed migration has been a subject of academic interest for the past two decades. This phenomenon can be divided into two main mechanisms: salary deductions and upfront payments. In salary deductions, facilitators provide migrants with upfront funds that are later deducted from their salaries by their employers. In upfront payments, migrants borrow and mortgage assets to obtain capital to cover migration-related expenses upfront or upon arrival. These expenses are then repaid through remittances. Most of the existing literature on debt-financed migration has taken an economic perspective that emphasizes the risks of debt bondage in salary deductions and vulnerability in upfront payments. Studies critically examine the role of states, brokers, and markets in impacting migrants’ well-being and labor and human rights. However, considering the increasing intensity of migration flows and the widespread use of debt as a funding mechanism, evaluating the relevance of the conventional economic framework is essential. I argue this framework can be supplemented with a richer and more empirical understanding of agency that shows how migrants can effectively use debt for empowerment and protection against debt bondage and vulnerability. To support this argument, I delineate an economic anthropology framework highlighting migrants’ agentic use of debt to their advantage.

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Where does the future lie? Initial aspirations for return among newly arrived Ukrainian refugees in Norway

ABSTRACT The lives of millions of people, who fled from Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, were turned upside down from one day to the next. When faced with such an abrupt escape, what initial thoughts do refugees have about whether to remain in their new host country or to return when the war ends? In this study, we focus on refugees' initial return aspirations soon after their escape. We conduct an in-depth analysis of how individual background factors and circumstances affect refugees' aspirations to remain or return. Based on unique data collected during the months immediately following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we use survey data on Ukrainian refugees in Norway to examine their return aspirations and what individual factors that affect these aspirations and qualitative interviews with Ukrainian refugees to explore the rationales for their initial aspirations. We find that only one-fourth plan to return to Ukraine as soon as the war ends. Our analysis of how individual factors affect initial return aspirations both support and contradict previous research. Thus, we discuss how our apparently contradictory findings provide theoretical nuances of how host country and refugee group characteristics interplay with individual predictors of initial return aspirations.

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Greener pastures: why Indian international students leave the US labor market

ABSTRACT This paper revisits conventional wisdom on US degree premiums for immigrant workers and shows that, despite the benefits of a US degree, migration policies and substandard labor conditions contribute to international student motivations to return home. Using two original datasets, I find that about a third of Indian-born US graduates leave the US, seeking employment opportunities abroad and a respite from US work visa restrictions. I draw on 105 in-depth interviews and 7,177 employment histories constructed from LinkedIn, and the analysis demonstrates the use of digital data to shed new light on under-studied patterns of return migration in institutional perspective. I find that US work visas are related to the underemployment of immigrant workers, and gaps in visa availability are associated with US labor market departure for Indian international students. At the same time, foreign employers reward skills and credentials developed in the US, and the results suggest that US degrees carry a higher premium in foreign labor markets. The paper emphasizes the role of institutions in the skilled migration system and identifies disjunctures in US migration policy. I identify opportunities for policy reform to improve immigrant labor conditions and increase the retention of US-educated migrants in the US labor market.

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(Un)deserving victims: the race-gender-geopolitics nexus of migration discourses in Poland

ABSTRACT What makes some displaced populations deserving protection more than others? I discuss this complex problem in a critical analysis of discursive narratives, presented by Polish authorities about the situation on its two Eastern borders between 2021 and 2023. I propose the race-gender-geopolitics nexus of intersectional analysis to reveal how and why migrants on the Polish-Belarusian border were presented as threatening and ingenuine as asylum-seekers, and Ukrainians became real ‘war refugees’. While the identified narratives corresponded with the existing studies on the influence of race and gender on perceived deservingness and victimisation, considering geopolitics offers a novel, context-specific analytical layer of discourse production. I thus move beyond the ‘deserving/undeserving’ binary, complicating the picture with other groups of displaced people, often silenced in the analysed representations. I demonstrate how the widespread post-colonial, racializing and patriarchal attitudes have been intertwined with regional geopolitical goals and relations with neighbouring countries. For Poland, these are the aspirations to anchor its position within the West, as well as its complicated history with Russia and Belarus but also Ukraine. I argue that all of that, coupled with the long-standing antimigrant attitudes, resulted in particular discourses about the incoming people.

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Poverty among migrant, mixed, and non-migrant households: the role of non-teleworkability and single-earnership in Germany

ABSTRACT Migrant and mixed households have higher poverty than non-migrant households. This is partly because single-earner two-adult households are more prevalent in migrant and mixed households and because such households have different job characteristics. One crucial job characteristic is teleworkability. Whether or not individuals can work from home has become a dividing factor in the labour market. While much research has focused on how teleworkability affects poverty in the majority population, less attention has been devoted to migrant and mixed two-adult households. Using the German Microcensus (2019), we construct work arrangements based on the number of earners in the household and their job‘s teleworkability to predict poverty for non-migrant (N = 49,507), mixed (N = 6,818), and migrant households (N = 8,922). Descriptive statistics show that, in Germany, migrant and mixed households have more single-earner and non-teleworkable work arrangements. Results from logistic regressions report higher poverty for non-teleworkable and single-earner work arrangements, putting mixed and migrant households at an increased disadvantage. Furthermore, we find that migrant (and mixed) households not only have a higher prevalence of high-poverty work arrangements but also higher poverty than non-migrant and mixed households within the same work arrangements.

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Navigating employment and overeducation: comparative study of immigrant experiences in 17 Western European nations

ABSTRACT The labor market integration of migrants, focusing on employment and job quality, differs notably across Southern and Continental-Northern European nations, often involving trade-offs. Nonetheless, little is known about whether these diverse migrant inclusion models in European labor markets extend to the combination of employment and overeducation. Additionally, the role of gender in this context remains unclear. While overeducation is more prevalent among immigrants compared to native, its prevalence varies across countries. To fill this gap, we analyzed data from the 2015–2019 European Labor Force Survey in 17 European countries, considering gender and migrant origin – Western vs. non-Western. Results show that non-Western migrants and migrant women face more challenges than Western migrants and male counterparts, respectively. Among males, a trade-off model predominates, with low employment penalties but high overeducation penalties in Mediterranean countries, and vice versa in Continental and some Nordic nations. For females, those in Southern Europe align with the Mediterranean trade-off model, while those in most Continental and Nordic countries experience a double penalty. In Liberal countries, male migrants tend toward the Mediterranean trade-off model, while female migrants align with the integration model.

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