Migrant Agency Research Articles

Indonesian Migrant Women Workers in Türkiye and Media Representation at Home: Precarity Works and Mediating the State Protection

This qualitative study examines the portrayal of Indonesian migrant women workers in Türkiye by major Indonesian online media outlets from 2019 to 2023. Using content analysis, the research explores dominant media representations surrounding workers in Türkiye's care service and tourism sectors. Findings reveal patterns of precarious work, exploitation, and vulnerability to undocumented employment, particularly involving Syrian employers. The study highlights a significant shift in media coverage from sensationalist reporting to echoing government narratives on combating undocumented migration. This shift aligns with Indonesia's labour-export policy reforms under President Jokowi, which aim to promote labour migration to formal sectors and distance the country's image from domestic worker exports. The research demonstrates how media reflects and reinforces state migrant protection policies through "domesticated protection." However, this approach inadvertently perpetuates victimization and potentially exacerbates vulnerabilities by stigmatizing unofficial migration channels. While intended to safeguard workers, stringent regulations may if not already contribute to increased undocumented migration. By analyzing the nexus between media representation, state policies, and migrant precarities, this study contributes to understanding the complex dynamics of labour migration in an emerging corridor, calling for a more nuanced approach to media coverage, policy-making, and future studies that acknowledges both migrant agency and structural challenges.

Narratives of pride: Afghan migrant laborers in Iran

This article recounts the stories of Afghan migrants who have returned from Iran to Afghanistan. I frame these accounts of ordinary Afghans’ life experiences as “narratives of pride,” juxtaposing these stories with narratives of victimhood that dominate the immigration discourse on Afghanistan and more generally. In these narratives, migrants are predominantly characterized as victims in need of being saved. This article instead asks: why do returnees from Iran focus mostly on the positive parts of their mobility while downplaying the difficulties of dealing with the Iranian state, which does not have a good track record of dealing with migrants? In telling stories of years of living and working in Iran or other countries, I find that my interlocutors characterize themselves as sophisticated men of the world with a deep understanding of social and political phenomena that give them the ability to navigate life in foreign lands—an image far from victimhood as it is commonly portrayed in the literature and media. The article argues that in order to better understand the agency of migrants, it is crucial to form long-term connections with them to gain a more nuanced understanding of their experiences, rather than simply reproducing stories of victimhood.

Indentured Labour in South Africa

This essay traces the historiography of Indian indenture in South Africa, paying particular attention to shifts in approaches and interpretation and the evolution of the extant archive. Studies of Indian indenture in the 1970s focused on how the system originated and operated, the conditions under which migrants laboured, and their contribution to the colonial economy. Digitizing immigrants’ registers and quantitative studies followed in the 1980s and 1990s and laid the basis for (colonial) archival-based studies that focused on the agency of migrants, their resistance and resilience. The years since 2010, when Indian South Africans commemorated 150 years since the arrival of the first indentured migrants to the country, have witnessed an explosion of family histories and works of fiction. These publications have expanded the archive of indenture and enriched our knowledge and understanding of the system. Studies of indenture have been criticized for framing the system within a neo-slavery paradigm and suggest that works of fiction can best capture the stories of indenture. This essay demonstrates that historiographical developments since 2010 underscore the importance of personal contact, determination and imagination to take us beyond what is recorded in the official colonial archives, facilitating conversation across the oceans and bringing the individual and collective agency of indentured migrants centre-stage. It shows the richness of the work on indenture resulting from the expansion of the archives, the constantly changing view of the past, and different ways of communicating the story. This study contends that the Natal colonial archive remains relevant while acknowledging that writers of historical fiction and family histories are asking new questions about the past and broadening the lens through which we approach the story of indenture.

Migration industries around the nexus of mobility, immobility and settlement. An overview

This introduction aims to give a brief overview of research on the migration industries, based on our definition of the migration industry as all those eco-nomic and financial activities developing between people on the move and the border, we categorise the literature that focuses on this topic around the nexus of mobility, immobility and settlement. We suggest reading and interpreting the research along three main dimensions, depending on where migration in-dustry actors intervene in the relationship between people on the move and the border: a migration industry that facilitates mobility and border crossing and involves actors ranging from smuggling networks to global recruitment agen-cies; an immobility migration industry that involves state and private actors aiming to regulate and/or control the movement of people; and a migration in-dustry that is not concerned with the journey itself, but with the settlement of migrants. Various migration industry actors are present in all these stages, re-configuring their roles, shifting their activities, and responding to new and dis-tinct opportunities for/of the commodification and commercialisation of mi-gration. For these reasons, as will be argued in the introduction to this mono-graph issue, the notion of industries rather than a single industry better reflects the variety of actors and activities operating between migrant agency and border along the different stages of migration projects.

‘I know more Korean than the brides’: migrant categorisations and intra-group heterogeneity within the Vietnamese community in South Korea

ABSTRACT This paper examines the representative and performative aspects of the legal title ‘marriage migrant’, which surrounds the everyday lives of Vietnamese women who married South Korean men. While previous studies have predominantly addressed how categorisation by receiving states reproduces certain identities and treatments for those on the move, little is known about how it influences migrants’ behaviour. Drawn on observations and in-depth interviews with Vietnamese women married to South Korean men, this paper demonstrates that the category ‘marriage migrant’ not only carries gendered and socioeconomic hierarchised identities but further shapes Vietnamese women’s actions in response to those responsibilities and classifications. The research findings emphasise how categorisation and discourse reconfigure ethnic networks at the intersection of gender, class, and mobility. This study offers a nuanced understanding of intra-group dynamics within migrant communities, highlighting the implications of migrant agencies in categorising politics.

Qualitative-archival research on migration is not just preservation

Qualitative-archival research is needed to support effective policies and the work of practitioners working in the field of migration. This Open Letter helps readers to understand how this happens in different contexts, as more than 150 stakeholders among researchers, policymakers, practitioners, migrant associations, governments, civil society/non-governmental organisations and migrants in seven countries around the Mediterranean contributed to discuss this topic, during the H2020 project ITHACA - Interconnected Histories and Archives for Migrant Agency. Three main key findings emerge. Qualitative-archival research is not just “preservation”: it shows the potential of providing dynamic and interlinked information, including legal frameworks, policy documents, historical context, and original narratives, capable of supporting policies in the long term. Besides this, it is a potential tool to foster the agency of migrants. Qualitative-archival research can be a powerful tool for social innovation, as conducting qualitative research, based on individual and collective narratives, is a necessary basis to non-emergency policies and to social work planning and evaluation. Research helps to explain the reasons behind the migration phenomena and to contextualise them where it is most needed, whether in political, educational, labour, health or reception settings. Space, time and people are the three main enablers. for better qualitative and archival research-policy relations: qualitative archival research offers contextual and comparative tools to investigate in-depth local features and to possibly extend them to the national and international levels.

Coerced return: formal policies, informal practices and migrants’ navigation

ABSTRACT This article raises two questions: (1) how do formal policies and informal practices intersect in coercing returns of migrants without legal immigration status, refused asylum seekers and those unlikely to get asylum? (2) how do migrants at risk of return navigate the coercion they are exposed to? Focusing on the entanglement of formal and informal practices, we develop a typology of involuntary returns, distinguishing among pushing, imposing, and incentivising policies and practices. This typology invites us to see nuances in the forced and voluntary return dichotomy because coercive practices of implementation are embedded in all these types, but the level of coercion varies in different situations. The paper also investigates how migrants exercise agency by contesting/resisting or complying with the return procedures. The article contributes to the scholarship on returns by unpacking formal and informal policy and practice dynamics and migrant agency. Empirically, the paper is based on observations and documentation of practices derived from field research and 97 interviews conducted with returnees from EU countries and Turkey to Albania, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan between 2018 and 2023.

Beyond Formal Structures: Exploring Bottom-Up Governance Dynamics in the Assyrian Community’s COVID-19 Response in Germany

This article examines pandemic governance towards migrant communities in Germany in the context of mobilisation and demobilisation of state–society relations during the COVID-19 crisis. By studying how informality is reproduced in social practices and community networks as a response to top-down governance practices in the case of Assyrians – a quintessential diaspora community that settled in Germany through various migratory waves starting from the 1960s – this article aims to explore the bottom-up dynamics of governance practices among migrant communities. The study identifies three key themes for studying bottom-up dynamics of governance: informality embedded in everyday practices in response to formal governance, particularly vaccine policies; the existence of alternative epistemologies based on mistrust towards authorities, manifested in dual narratives; and the articulation of migrant agency in navigating top-down structures. Adopting a grounded theory approach, the study utilises theoretical sampling. Data were collected from various sources, including reports, newspaper articles, official statements and press releases from migrant organisations, alongside interviews with key migrant stakeholders.

Linguistic hostility, social exclusion, and the agency of African migrants in Hong Kong

Abstract Long an immigrant society, whether Hong Kong welcomes ethnic minorities remains debatable. Combining Wesselmann and colleagues’ (2016) social exclusion framework, raciolinguistics, and interview data, this study investigates the social exclusion experience of Hong Kong's African economic and student migrants. The findings show that African immigrants who lack linguistic capacity are ostracised in different areas of life. Impolite language usage stigmatises them as poor and ghost-like and stereotypes them as refugees. Taking a raciolinguistic perspective, however, this study finds that race, rather than language, is the root cause of social exclusion. Lastly, the study shows that African migrants manifest agency in ameliorating marginalisation through various activities, revealing the bidirectional nature of social exclusion. Overall, this study empirically enriches the current understanding of Africans’ social exclusion experiences in Hong Kong through the lens of language. It theoretically contributes to the current discussion on raciolinguistics by extending it to the Asian context. (Social exclusion, Hong Kong, African immigrants, verbal rejection, non-verbal rejection, racism, raciolinguistics)*

Recognizing the agency of forced migrants with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics

Abstract In recent years, scholarship and policy reports have slowly attended to the lived realities of forced migrants with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). However, these emerging discourses are typically characterized by a violation-centric view that focuses on queer migrants’ vulnerabilities and experiences of victimization. Yet, what remains strikingly absent from existing research and advocacy engagement is how refugees with diverse SOGIESC across different settings also actively seek out services and build support networks; how they engage with their experiences on their own terms; how they resist violence; or in other words, how they exercise various forms of agency. In this field reflection, we emphasize the importance to recognize how and under what conditions forced migrants with diverse SOGIESC exercise agency. We put forward illustrative examples based on field reflections of working with refugees with diverse SOGIESC, opening up new perspectives for research, policy, and activism.

Transformative solidarity in contexts of mobility: Structural change and implication

Through an analysis of the work of select migrant shelters and community organizations in Mexico and the United States, this article examines mutual aid, solidarity and sanctuary projects that seek to transform structural conditions of injustice and inequality. It examines how different activist groups across the Mexico-US borders practise forms of solidarity that recognize the implication of both migrants and citizens in existing structures of violence and challenge hierarchies of power across difference. It also reflects on questions of positionality as a researcher and participant in these contexts of mobility. Structural transformation here is seen as an everyday practice, in the relationships that are built within the community organizations and with the local community, the changes that can be seen in the political agency of both migrants and locals through some of the projects, and in research practice itself. This work takes place both with and against the state, within a framework to advocate for the exercise of rights and for changes in legislation and policy that benefit migrants and the local community, but also building frameworks and horizons beyond the state.

Labour in Fisheries Through Migration Studies: Burmese Fish Worker Regularisation and Agency in the Thai Fishing Industry

ABSTRACT In recent years, labour in fisheries has emerged as a field of study, gaining traction both from academics and through policy implementations. Fish workers often migrate across jurisdictional borders to work on industrial fishing boats around the world. I argue that research on labour in fisheries would benefit from the inclusion of concepts found within migration studies that can unpack the implications of being a migrant in a host country. In this paper, I borrow the concepts of ‘regularisation’ and ‘migrant agency’ from migration studies to examine how migrant fish workers navigate migration regimes in order to work in the offshore fishing industry. I illustrate my argument through a case of Burmese fish workers in the border city of Ranong, Thailand. Methodologically, I focus on three disruptions to Thai fisheries – labour regulatory reforms, the pandemic, and the recent military coup in Myanmar, in 2021—as open moments to explore ways in which Burmese migrant fish workers navigate their livelihood strategies. Regularisation highlights the trade-off between the benefits and the costs for migrant fish workers of gaining legal status during the disruptions. The concept of migrant agency provides a lens through which to capture how migrants explored the space of possibilities through the cultivation of ethnicity and digital technology during the disruptions. I conclude that theoretically drawing on concepts found within migration studies has the potential to reveal the complexity of migrant fish workers, who exercise their agency, rather than being understood as mere victims in the unruly nature of ocean governance.

Civil Society Organizations and Caravans: Strengthening the Migrant Agency

Resumen Las organizaciones de la sociedad civil (OSC) dedicadas a la población migrante que transita por el territorio mexicano realizan una amplia gama de acciones de asistencia humanitaria e incidencia sociopolítica. Con base en diversas fuentes (hemerográficas, revisión de la literatura académica y trabajo de campo) este artículo analiza la trascendencia de las actuaciones de las OSC en la agencia de los integrantes de caravanas de migrantes, tanto para el logro de metas migratorias como de objetivos políticos. Asimismo, se describen las principales características de las caravanas y se propone el análisis de estas como espacios de desarrollo de la agencia migrante.

Can The Pushed-Back Speak? Tracing Narrative Agency of Enemised and Victimised Migrants in Poland

The pushed-back migrants are the main subjects of the humanitarian crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border; however their presence as public discourse producers are rather scarce. The aim of this research is to trace the narrative agency of these people and explore its link to their emancipation. Drawing on the postcolonial theory, we address the question of how the subaltern(ised) subjects produce their discourse. With the analysis of media content, literature, and artistic materials, we argue that the discourse production of pushed-back migrants in Poland is heavily limited, restricted, and often interrupted, however they manifest agency by manoeuvring victimisation and contesting the enemisation of themselves. Using these results, we conclude that the researcher’s role during this crisis should be a mix of translation and representation of what the pushed-back said and were forbidden to say.

Information behaviour and factors influencing family planning knowledge of Myanmar ethnic migrants: a qualitative study

The accessibility to quality family planning (FP) information and counselling for Myanmar ethnic migrants in Thailand is questionable. Inadequate knowledge and lack of informed choice to practice FP methods increase the risk of unmet needs and method failures in FP, which could result in unplanned pregnancies and induced abortions. This research aimed to understand the FP information behaviour of a Pa-O migrant group, as well as structural and agency influencing factors on FP knowledge acquisition in Chiang Mai. A qualitative research based on the Information Behaviour model and Structuration theory was conducted using participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews. A non-probability sampling method was employed, and 31 respondents participated in the study. The study found that actively seeking FP information from formal sources to make an informed decision was not common among Pa-O migrants. Instead, there was more reliance on informal information sources for choosing FP methods. Cultural norms related to sex, marriage, and age hinder migrant health information-seeking behaviour from formal and informal information sources. Pa-O migrants were alienated from structural resources, limiting the opportunities to promote FP knowledge. The personal and situational factors that significantly influenced the agency of migrants were lack of awareness of the right to information, language barriers, and perceived communication barriers with health staff. Limited resources of migrant-friendly health education programmes adversely affect migrant FP information behaviour. Reproductive health education programmes, including quality FP counselling services, should be accessible for marginalised migrants to ensure that their choices of FP are well-informed.

Citizenship and mobility of the poor: Sweden during the 19th century

AbstractThe distinctive features of the modern form of citizenship include, among other things, that it is both internally inclusive and externally exclusive; that it establishes legal equality so that membership of the state supersedes all other memberships and allegiances; and that it defines membership as independent of residence. These characteristics largely evolved during the “long nineteenth century”, the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. Similar to that of today, the historical situation in which citizenship evolved was one of intensified mobility. With the example of Sweden, this article finds that citizenship, in both its internal and external dimensions, was elaborated partly as a way to manage the mobility of the migrant poor. The contours of citizenship emerged as authorities aimed to control and direct the movement of the poor, which preceded control efforts. This has implications for our understanding of citizenship as well as of the state, and highlights the agency of migrants.

“The Radio Said They Were Just Deportees”: From Border Necropolitics to Transformative Grief in Tim Z. Hernandez’s All They Will Call You (2017)

Just as necropower discriminates between those who can and those who cannot live, post-mortem circumstances are explicitly affected by an irrefutable gentrification of memory and grievability. Drawing on the political dimension of mourning and on the concept of slow death, this paper proposes a necropolitical reading of All They Will Call You (2017), where Tim Z. Hernandez revisits the 1948 plane crash that killed 28 Mexican deportees at Los Gatos (California) and the subsequent oblivion that prevented their memorialisation except for a mass grave containing their remains and a protest song (“Deportees”) composed by Woody Guthrie. My analysis focuses on Hernandez’s attempts at dismantling the tropes of criminality and expendability that Latino immigrants are associated with as a result of their racialised vulnerability, which are distinctively aggravated in border contexts. Excavating in the background stories of these deportees seems to me an ironic contestation to the failed forensic work that left them unnamed and unritualised for seven decades. And, at the same time, I contend that, in line with the work of many activists and artists in the US–Mexico border, Hernandez mobilises solidarity while transforming our perception of migrant bare lives into one of migrant agency.

‘Why did you return?’: North-South return migration and family ties in the case of Iran

This article offers insight into the motivations behind voluntary North-South return migration by examining returnees’ own understanding and perception of return. Adopting a bottom-up approach and drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with eleven Iranian returnees, this study asks: How do return migrants perceive and articulate what motivated and facilitated their decision to return from a prosperous country in the Global North to the challenging living conditions of their home country in the Global South? How do they explain the role of their stay-behind families in shaping their return migration trajectory? Informed by social network theory, this article showcases the agency of North-South return migrants as active social actors in the process, wherein their return is shaped by transnational relationships, particularly family ties, regardless of the context of return. Family ties act as a driving force of return migration not only when stay-behind families provide emotional and practical support to return migrants but also when migrants feel a sense of duty towards family members who have remained in the homeland and may need their care. This study contributes to scholarship on return migration by undertaking a critical examination of return migration theories grounded in economic models. In the study of voluntary return migration, scholars have focused significant attention on the economic push and pull factors informed by the rational choice theory. The economic models, however, do not fully explain the seemingly puzzling North-South return cases where migrants participate in return migration from a prosperous country to an economically adverse context of their homeland. This study highlights the role of family ties in return migration process and challenges the dichotomous success-failure narrative about return.

‘I am still waiting for my papers but ʾinna Allāha maʿa al-ṣābirīn’: on religious temporality and agency in female marriage migrants’ precarious migration experiences

ABSTRACT Building on postcolonial, feminist and gendered migration theories and the ‘turn to mobility’ this article aims to explore the agency of so-called low-skilled Moroccan female marriage migrants in Flanders (Belgium). More precisely, it aims to study how religious temporality plays a role and how it shapes their experiences in a specific context of migration and precariousness. It questions how these women invoke a religious temporality in confronting the uncertainties and difficulties of which motherhood and a precarious residency status are the most challenging and stigmatising. Firstly, focussing on two ethnographic vignettes this article empirically analyses their nonlinear, risky and often undocumented trajectories laying bare a politico-discursive temporality in marriage migration, motherhood and belonging. Secondly, it analyses how exactly these women tend to challenge this bureaucratic temporality. The analyses show that through their active engagement with sabr (patience) and tawakkul (reliance on God) these women become agents.

Intellectual capital and student mobility

ABSTRACT This paper advances the conceptualisation and application of intellectual capital, a key concept in the intellectual migration framework, to understand international student mobility. The intellectual migration framework contends that higher-education and highly-skilled migrants acquire, upgrade and utilise intellectual capital for upward career and social mobility. This paper argues that intellectual capital is not the sum of different forms of capitals, but a complete package with human, cultural and social capitals working in synergy through the agency of migrants. Focusing on higher-education students at the beginning of the intellectual migration continuum, it analyzes how intellectual capital is differentially accumulated at various stages of the educational process. Drawing on 51 semi-structured interviews with Chinese international students in North America, we learn that pre-migration intellectual capital, due largely to parents and family, reflects social inequality in contemporary societies whereas that obtained while studying abroad reveals more on individual agency. As such, intellectual capital accumulation abroad serves as a mediating process, especially for those with less privileged backgrounds. Supportive international higher education sectors in both sending and receiving countries can also assist students in their intellectual capital cultivation process and contribute to alleviating educational inequality.