Context Of Migration Research Articles

AI-driven migration management procedures: fundamental rights issues and regulatory answers

Artificial Intelligence can represent a valuable resource in managing migration flows. AI algorithms can perform several tasks including border controls, identity checks and predictive policing procedures. However, the utilization of such tools in the migration context raises several issues which must be analyzed and discussed in their implications. The presence of bias in datasets can lead to outcomes detrimental to the already vulnerable conditions of migrants. Furthermore, the inherent opaqueness of AI algorithms working routine does not allow the formulation of a clear accountability framework. This article aims to address these concerns to formulate valid answers from a legal and technological perspective, mainly focusing on the European Union approach to these issues. AI-driven migration management procedures: fundamental rights issues and regulatory answers

Forging a Linguistic Identity, Overseas-trained South Asian Doctors in the UK

Contemporary social policy debates on community cohesion in the UK appear to have very prescribed identities for migrants centred around on concepts of ‘Britishness’, having ‘common values’ and one national language, that is, English, for their successful integration. This paper draws on an empirical study of the integration and identity experiences of overseas-trained South Asian Doctors in the UK. The study involved in-depth interviews with 27 overseas-trained South Asian doctors practicing as general practitioners (GPs) in three geographical locales with varying ethnic density and urban/rural mix in the UK. The study set out to explore how this group of highly skilled migrants integrated into the UK society, perceived their identities and whether they had acquired a sense of belonging to Britain. The key concepts examined included identity, context of migration, structural and socio-cultural integration. Their narratives show that while they drew on certain sections of British society for recognition and realisation of opportunity by embedding themselves in local social contexts, they also drew strength from their own religious/cultural and linguistic resources. This included engaging with the revolutionary writings of their own poets and scholars as a way of creative thinking, innovating and dealing with adversity. In addition to the adaptation and dealing with adversity in the UK, the evidence shows that South Asian languages have played a significant role in maintaining transnational identities.

In Search of the Swedish Asians: Representations of Asians and Experiences of Being Asian in Contemporary Sweden as Reflected in the Non-White Swedish Literature

Asians in Sweden make up over 200,000 inhabitants. However, compared to the Afro-Swedes, the Latin Americans or the minority inhabitants who have a background in the Middle East, the Swedish Asians are largely absent from the political, cultural and academic spheres in contemporary Sweden. This absence applies in both minority and migrant contexts as well as in connection with migration and integration issues. This article consists of a study of literary texts written by minority authors who themselves are not Asians and in whose works Asians appear as characters as well as an analysis of texts written by Swedish Asians who write about how both majority Swedes and minority residents view them. The purpose is to try to understand this relative absence of Asians within both minority Sweden and majority Sweden and why they are so absent in relation to contemporary Swedish race relations.

Making Do: How a Somali Refugee Woman Experiences Social Mobility Amidst Precarity in Transit in Indonesia

AbstractThis article presents an account of Faduma, a Somali woman currently living in Jakarta, Indonesia, in order to illustrate the creativity, resilience and adaptability required to make do as a refugee with little to no formal support in a rather hostile environment. For Faduma, Indonesia presents such an environment. As it offers no formal protection for asylum seekers and refugees and only tolerates their temporary presence without guaranteeing them any fundamental rights, such as the right to work, it can be characterised as a ‘deviant destination’ for refugees in search of durable and effective solutions. This article analyses Faduma's strategies, embedded in the macro-political context of forced migration, the Global North's externalised border policies, the absence of safe pathways, and the lack of proper refugee protection in Southeast Asia, for finding informal employment, attaining new skills and education, and forming strategic friendships with Indonesians and expatriates as a means of dealing with racism, exploitation and multifaceted precarity. We selected Faduma's case from amongst a number of encounters that we had with Somali refugees in Indonesia because of her extraordinary involvement with the Somali community. While the current toleration of refugee activities by Indonesian authorities enables refugees to survive in transit, we argue that such unintentional and informal protection is not a durable approach for larger groups of refugees enduring prolonged periods of waiting.

From Labour Migrants to a Diaspora Community? The Case of Ukrainian Migrants in Greece

This paper discusses transnational labour migration from Ukraine to Greece since the end of the Cold War. It examines the migration context, motivations, and expectations. It then discusses the actual experiences of Ukrainian migrants, in Greek society and beyond, and their visions for the future. The paper touches upon the 2008 crisis in Greece and its impact on migrants and their choices. The paper also discusses the social organisation of Ukrainian migrants in Greece, as well as identity and belonging, in a globalised world. Whereas many Ukrainian migrants continue to perceive their stay in Greece as temporary, the emergence of a Ukrainian diaspora community in Greece is imminent. The paper is based on primary research conducted by the author in greater Athens, as well as secondary sources.

Perceiving the Migrant as “Other”: Analysis of Three Main Categories in the European Migration Context

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Gender Operations in Migraction: Daughters of Korean Migrants and Process of Ethnic (de) identification in Buenos Aires

This work seeks to contribute to the discussions on the relationships among migration, ethnicity and gender. It is part of a project on the cultural topography of migrations from East Asia in the southern cone of Latin America that combines a quantitative component based on the EAAM (Barry, 2001) with a qualitative component focused on interviews and focus groups. In the case of the Korean community in Buenos Aires, we observe, as an emerging issue, the salience of gender as a dynamic factor that intervenes in the processes of ethnic (de) identification of the daughters of migrants. Specifically, we argue that: 1) in a migration context marked by human rights discourses and policies and historical struggles for gender equality, parental notions and expectations around the traditional role of the “Korean woman” affect the scope and ways of appropriation of the “cultural heritage” and shape the adoption of adaptive strategies, especially those of “assimilation” and “integration” and 2) the struggles for gender equality that develop in the context of origin can inspire changes in the ethnic identification processes. Thus, we try to illustrate how a gender-focused approach can contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which migrants / people of migrant origin adapt culturally in the migratory context. While highlighting the productivity of the methods, qualitative studies intend to enrich quantitative approaches and provide inputs that make the measurement scales more complex.

Remittances to Albania: Before and after the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper aims to advance an understanding of the flows of remittances resulting from Albanian migration before and after coronavirus, their impact on the country’s development and ways to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and ensure resilience of remittance families in Albania. Over the years, migrants’ remittances have played an important role in the social and economic development of Albania and Albanian families. The health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is expected to reshape our economy and could be devastating for migrants too. This pandemic is expected to change the context for international migration and potentially cause a decrease in remittances from Albanian migrants. And yet, surprisingly, there is a lack of effective mechanisms, policies, and recovery paths for increasing the positive impact of remittances on the country's development. The paper suggests that the way remittances are managed is important. Based on the context of Albania, remittances can be encouraged and facilitated through developing private-public-people partnerships, lowering costs, and using them for entrepreneurial initiatives rather than consumption. The key contributions of the paper lie in extending discussions of the value of collecting data on remittances, providing a dynamic view of the multiplicity of factors behind remittances.

Migration, emotions and policies of sensibilities in Central America

In Central America, irregular migration to the United States has become an alternative with the aim of finding better living conditions, safety or to achieve the ‘American Dream’. Mobility is linked to conflict networks associated with poverty and violence. This article aims to analyze the problem of migration in Central America and the policies of sensibilities associated with it. First, an overview of social studies on emotions in the region is presented. Then, an analysis of migration policies and the main programs implemented to control irregular migration from Central America to North America, is introduced, specifically the Agreement that designates Guatemala as a ‘Safe Third Country’. As well, a characterization of the migratory context, its institutionality and the mechanisms for containing massive migratory flows is presented, as a demonstration of the relationship between state actions, sensibilities and social support mechanisms associated with migration and migrants’ feelings.

Transnational Communication between Children and Grandparents during the COVID-19 Lockdown: The Case of Migrant Children in Poland

ABSTRACT Transnational intergenerational communication between migrant children and their grandparents depends on family relationships and the specific migration context, but also shifts in response to emerging factors, such as the current COVID-19 crisis. The goal of this study is to offer an agile typology of communication between migrant children in Poland and their grandparents in other countries. It points to two types of family communication practices, namely direct (face-to-face) and technology-mediated communication (TMC). Drawing on data from a qualitative study of immigrant children (n = 19) and parents (n = 18) conducted during the lockdown and associated travel restrictions caused by the pandemic, the study offers a typology of emotional, symbolic, mediated, and discontinuous modes of intergenerational family communications. It also indicates that cessation of direct contact during an “immobility regime” reduces the scope of intergenerational communication in transnational families.

Uncertain future, unsettled present: suspending and embracing engagement with life among newcomers in Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT Contemporary immigration policies in Canada are marked by growing reliance on temporary and conditional migration, as well as increased processing times for immigration applications. More people spend longer periods of time living in Canada with deportability and therefore uncertainty about the future—uncertain if they will be able to remain in Canada and uncertain of how long this condition will persist. This article, based on qualitative research among newcomers in Toronto, Canada, examines the temporalities of living with uncertainty, attending to how experiences of and responses to uncertainty are dynamic across time. The article identifies two salient responses among research participants, either suspending or embracing engagement with life in Canada. Each of these responses entails risks, making both suspending and embracing difficult to sustain. The article expands scholarly understandings of uncertainty in the migration context by showing that uncertainty of duration mediates uncertainty of future presence. Furthermore, it shows that regimes of immigration control not only foreclose access to rights and supports on the basis of formal immigration status, but they also hollow out the value of permitted activities.

Human Trafficking: Results of a 5-Year Theory-Based Evaluation of Interventions to Prevent Trafficking of Women From South Asia.

Preventing modern slavery is of global interest, but evidence on interventions remains weak. This paper presents findings from a 5-year theory-based evaluation of an empowerment and knowledge-building intervention to prevent the exploitation of South Asian female migrant workers. The evaluation used realist evaluation techniques to examine the intervention mechanisms, outcomes, and context. Findings from qualitative and quantitative data from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh indicate that the intervention mechanisms (trainings) were not well-targeted, not delivered by appropriate trainers, and did not address participants' expectations or concerns. The outcomes of empowerment and migration knowledge were not achieved due to poor integration of context-related factors, flawed assumptions about the power inequalities, including barriers preventing women from asserting their rights. Ultimately, interventions to prevent exploitation of migrant workers should be developed based on strong evidence about the social, political, and economic realities of their migration context, especially in destination settings.

Tendencias globales de movilidad académica en el contexto de la migración calificada. El caso de la Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, Argentina

Tendencias globales de movilidad académica en el contexto de la migración calificada. El caso de la Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, Argentina

Educational contexts of migration. The case of East Prussia / Warmia and Mazury in 1945

Millions of people were forced to emigrate when World War II came to an end in 1945. Migration processes were particularly pronounced in East Prussia, the German territory that was partitioned between Poland and the USSR after the war. Germans fled from East Prussia, and their farms were settled by newcomers from central Poland and the Eastern Borderlands that had been ceded to the Soviet Union. This article discusses the narrative surrounding the wave of post-war migration in Polish and German academia, museums and informal education. An analysis of textbooks and academic scripts revealed that this topic has received broad coverage in the German educational system. Museum exhibitions focusing on emigration from East Prussia and the Eastern Borderlands were also examined, and the results of the analysis indicate that German museums displayed a greater interest in the topic.In the last step, websites dedicated to migration issues were compared as a form of informal education. The comparison revealed a similar number of websites as well as similar levels of activity in Polish and German websites.

Enwezor’s Model and Copenhagen’s Center for Art on Migration Politics

One of the most remarkable signs of the importance and adaptability of Okwui Enwezor’s work is the way in which the transformative models for exhibition making that he developed have found their way into small-scale institutional spaces and extra-institutional contexts. Resourceful curators across the world have successfully translated his models into critical formats and inventive ways of producing social and political knowledge, carefully adjusted to local contexts and needs. The aim of this article is to trace the influential postcolonial “platforms model” that Enwezor conceptualized for Documenta11 to a small but internationally acclaimed gallery in Copenhagen: the Center for Art on Migration Politics (CAMP). The article falls into three parts. The first part introduces CAMP and the Danish context for migration, before the authors discuss core elements of Enwezor’s exemplary transformation of curating into the creation of platforms for political interventions at his Documenta11 exhibition. The second part seeks to answer three questions: What was the curatorial strategy and multisited structure that Enwezor and his team developed? How did their decolonizing approach help create inclusive, discursive, and curatorial spaces that contested the binaristic perception of the West as the center and the non-West as periphery and offer a vision of the (art) world as profoundly entangled and plurivocal? How has the organization of Documenta11 as a globally distributed network of discursively and conceptually interconnected platforms contributed to restructuring the exhibition venue and to rethinking the interrelationship between the exhibition, as it is traditionally understood as the very core of an art event, and exhibition-related events perceived as collateral, sometimes even dispensable, activities? The third part of the article returns to CAMP to explore the specific translation of Enwezor’s legacy into a small-scale, local art space.

Europe ‒ Latin America: Migratory Space Development

The migration ties between Latin America and Europe at the beginning of the XXI century were manifested in a massive migration flow, resulting in the dramatic growth of the number of South American natives in Europe. The Migratory Space concept is applied to the current stage of transatlantic mobility, which makes it possible to determine the territorial limits of the involved states, to distinguish the transatlantic space from the general panorama of the Latin America migration movement as well as from the European migration context. At the present stage, the South American states are mainly the migration donors, while the European states are recipients. The historical ties between continents, their linguistic commonality and the social networks between migrants contributed to the transatlantic mobility. The majority of the Latin American migrants is localized in Spain and Italy. The high degree of integration into the host communities contributed to generally favorable public opinion about the migrants in the recipient countries. A large-scale migration presence also became an important factor in strengthening economic and political ties in the Iberoamerican Community of Nations.

Psychosocial adaptation of Turkish return migrants and factors affecting their intention to remigrate to Europe: Personality, perceived discrimination, ethnic identity

The current study explores individual differences in the readaptation processes of Turkish return migrants from Western Europe, and investigates the roles that personality, satisfaction with life in the migration context, perceived discrimination, ethnic identity, and demographic variables play in the psychological and sociocultural adjustment of returnees. The factors predicting better psychological and sociocultural adaptation of returnees, and the factors causing them to have intention to remigrate to Europe, were scrutinized. The study involved 184 individuals, aged 15–72 years (M = 42), from three generations. Forty percent of returnees reported that they have intention to remigrate to Europe, this intention being predicted by host country ethnic identity and sense of belonging. Neuroticism, perceived discrimination and senses of belonging were found to be the main predictors of the psychosocial readaptation of Turkish migrants. The mediation analysis showed that psychological adaptation mediated the effect of sociocultural adaptation on the general wellbeing of return migrants. The results are discussed within the theories of acculturation.

Enacting Statehood in Places of Exception: The Structural Effect of Statehood on Greek Migration Management

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to outline an analytic perspective on the notion of statehood, state authorities’ performance in situations of exceptionality, and to present some insights from ethnographic research in the context of migration in contemporary Greece. Following Timothy Mitchell's thesis on the ‘effect of state’, taking into account Giorgio Agamben's and Michel Foucault's theories regarding the ‘state of exception’ and ‘exceptionalised institutions’, as well as Erving Goffman's ‘dramaturgical perspective’ on the studies of social interactions, it is argued that 1. the ongoing cases of illegal and unsanctioned practices carried out by police and army officers in the Greek migration context should be interpreted, first and foremost, as mere practices of statehood enactment; 2. the ‘state of exception’ is not merely a useful spatialised device used by state authorities for mobility-control purposes, but rather an essential trait of statehood enactment itself. In order to reconcile the internal ambiguities inherent in the convoluted ensemble of perceived notions about what ‘a state’ is and how ‘a state’ does what it is supposed to do, it will be argued that, statehood enactment, by its very definition and constitution, frequently requires recurring to an ‘institutionalised state of exception’. From a broader viewpoint, these arguments question some supposedly non-problematic assumptions about the (concrete or abstract) nature of the state, while at the same time proposing an examination of the epistemological status of migranthood.

Does Emancipation Matter? Fertility of Chinese International Migrants to the United States and Nonmigrants during China’s One-child Policy Period

This article investigates the impact of international migration to the United States on the level and timing of Chinese migrants’ fertility. We compare Chinese women who did not leave the country (non-migrants) and were subject to restrictive family policies from 1974 to 2015 to those who moved to the United States (migrants) and were, thus, “emancipated” from these policies. We theoretically develop and empirically test the emancipation hypothesis that migrants should have a higher fertility than non-migrants, as well as an earlier timing of childbearing. This emancipation effect is hypothesized to decline across birth cohorts. We use data from the 2000 US census, the 2005 American Community Survey, the 2000 Chinese census, and the 2005 Chinese 1 percent Population Survey and discrete-time event history models to analyze first, second, and third births, and migration as joint processes, to account for selection effects. The results show that Chinese migrants to the United States had substantially higher childbearing probabilities after migration, compared with non-migrants in China, especially for second and third births. Moreover, our analyses indicate that the migration process is selective of migrants with lower fertility. Overall, the results show how international migration from China to the United States can lead to an increase in migrant women’s fertility, accounting for disruption, adaptation, and selection effects. The rapidly increased fertility after migration from China to the United States might have implications on other migration contexts where fertility in the origin country is dropping rapidly while that in the destination country is relatively stable.

Reflections on the Interplay between Race, Ethnicity, and Migration

Recent events such as the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter movement have sparked a global conversation on racial inequality and systemic violence. There is an urgent need to critically reflect on issues of race, racialization, and ethnicity as embedded in, shaping, and transforming diverse contexts of migration and mobility across the world. This debate dossier builds upon this momentum and draws on some of the contributions from the seminar series on ‘Race, Ethnicity and Migration...