Stability Migration Research Articles

Social isolation: a key to explain a migrant worker cigarette smoking

Migrant workers in China are experiencing social isolation caused by institutional and non-institutional barriers. This paper explores the relationship between social isolation and migrants’ smoking behavior as well as gender differences in smoking. Migrants’ social isolation is systematically measured from the structural and qualitative perspective. Using the survey data of 2,188 rural-to-urban migrants in China in 2016, the prevalence of smoking among migrants is 38.21%, with 51.70% for males and 4.06% for females. Migrants with social isolation, such as migration instability, lack of ties with family and fellow migrants, and life dissatisfaction in migrant cities, are more likely to smoke and the impacts vary by gender. The income and price elasticities of cigarette demand show that male migrant smokers are more sensitive to income and price changes than female migrant smokers. Boosting rural migrants’ integration into the local community will reduce smoking prevalence, improving the overall health of the society.

Migrant subjectivities and temporal flexibility of East‐Central European labour migration to the United Kingdom

AbstractThis paper seeks to broaden existing understandings of migrant worker flexibility drawing on the data from the two ethnographic studies of low‐wage employers and Eastern European migrants in Scotland. It focuses on the temporal aspects of flexibility production in employment discourse and temporal expectations about flexible migrant workers. Our findings reveal double movement of interruption and remaking of temporal flexibility, which challenges directional expectations about time and unsettles the assumed connectivity between flexibility's temporal elements. Uncertainty and instability of migration and employment frameworks undermine the attempts of employers and migrants to manage time, to develop continuous portfolio careers and coherent temporal horizons. Furthermore, contested temporal expectations about flexible migrant workers create fragmented and fractured “flexiworkers” that do not fit within the existing temporal frameworks of signs, routines, and rhythms. The paper suggests re‐orientation of flexibility debates beyond temporal measurement, outside familiar temporal structures, and towards redefinition of flexible worker identities.

Mechanism of Support Optimization and Confined Blasting of Thick and Hard Rock with a Wedge-Structure Immediate Roof: A Case Study

Based on the occurrence conditions of a thick and hard main roof and wedge-structure immediate roof in the Zhuxianzhuang Coal Mine, the fracture characteristics and instability migration law of a thick and hard roof (THR) were examined via physical simulations. Mining zones were divided with respect to the strata behaviors and roof control difficulty levels, and the principles and methods of zonal control under THR were put forward. This study proposed a coordinated control strategy of using confined blasting in water-filled deep holes, and reasonable support optimization, which could effectively reduce the roof fracture size, increases the supporting intensity and eliminate roof-control disasters. The length of confined blasting blocks and supporting intensity were calculated using a mechanical model for roof control in the strong strata behavior zone and less-strong strata behavior zone. These key parameters were determined as 20–25 m and 1.15–1.28 MPa, respectively, and the mining strategy was successfully applied in working face 880, performing high security and reasonable economical efficiency.

Flipping the orbital planes of primordial trans-Neptunian binaries by close encounters with Neptune during the planetary instability migration phase of the outer Solar system

Flipping the orbital planes of primordial trans-Neptunian binaries by close encounters with Neptune during the planetary instability migration phase of the outer Solar system

Legal Features of Migration Processes in Unrecognized Territories: Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas Region

Migration processes revolving around the unsolved situation of Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas Region raise various legal questions and difficulties in the context regulation and recognition as well. This article sheds light on the political and legal status and the process of formation of unrecognized quasi-governmental entities, the issuance of passport and official documents, and migration instability. The article concludes that by seeking a forced secession of a separate territory from the mother country, separatism takes the entire population of the state as hostages, causing a critical migration situation within the sovereign state

Lessons from stochastic small-area population projections: the case of Waikato subregions in New Zealand

Subnational population projections in New Zealand by means of the conventional deterministic cohort-component method have had a tendency to be conservative: underprojecting fast-growing populations and overprojecting slow-growing ones. In this paper we use a stochastic population projection method as an alternative. We generate population projections for five demographically distinct administrative areas within the Waikato region of New Zealand: Hamilton City, Franklin District, Thames-Coromandel District, Otorohanga District and South Waikato District. The results are compared to official subnational deterministic projections. The accuracy of subnational population projections in New Zealand is strongly affected by the instability of migration as a component of population change. Differently from the standard cohort-component method, in which net migration levels are projected, the key parameters of our method are age-gender-area specific probabilistic net migration rates. Generally, the identified and modelled uncertainty makes the traditional ‘mid-range’ scenario of subnational deterministic projections of limited use for policy analysis or planning beyond a relatively short projection horizon. We find that the projected range of rates of population growth is wider for smaller regions and/or regions more strongly affected by net migration. Directions for further development of the methodology are suggested.