Migration Governance Research Articles

Singaporean Women Living in China: The Uneven Burdens of Middle-class Transnational Caregiving

ABSTRACT Studies on care circulation have highlighted that the landscape of caregiving within transnational families is uneven and shaped by institutional contexts. The importance of marital status, however, remains underexplored. Drawing on interviews with middle-class, older single female migrants from Singapore who are living in China or commuting between Singapore and China, this article considers how older single female migrants’ care and ageing orientations are shaped by the gendered norms and heteronormativity underpinning migration and care regimes. We argue first that gendered norms and heteronormativity underlying migration regimes result in fewer strategies for older single female migrants to prolong migration; second, that such gendered norms and heteronormativity shape their long-distance caregiving practices, even as they live abroad; and third, that by aligning later-life aspirations with their eldercare obligations, they reinforce gendered and heteronormative expectations of caregiving. Through focusing on migration and care regimes, this article contributes to transnational scholarship on familyhood, care circulations, and ageing futures.

‘Scholars at Risk’ in Germany: Forced Migration and Agency in Forced Migration Decision-Making

AbstractThe recent migration waves from countries ruled by leaders with autocratic tendencies or under war regimes included also the forced migration of academics who have become targets of widening severe attacks against academic-scientific values, institutions, and students/scholars (GCP EA). Based on empirical research, this paper studies the forced migration of scholars from such countries to Germany after 2015. While putting theoretical concepts deriving from distinct study fields (such as forced migration and exile studies) into a dialog, the paper perceives the migration of these scholars as forced due to risks they encountered in their home countries. It also addresses the complexity of their forced migration as a multidimensional and relational process involving various structural and subjective push-pull drives. In line with the empirical data and post-structuralist theories on migration and forced migration, the paper pursues the following theses: Risks and responses against risks are varied and involve the agency of migrants. Although forced migration is a regulated process concerning migration regimes and laws, it calls for the performance/agency of exiled scholars and other actors’ governing activities. As a complex and transformative process, forced migration results in different exilic positions. It is not a predetermined linear process in time and space, but a process with unexpected outcomes, since it entails the ongoing struggle of exiled scholars over/through their academic and social networks and capitals, which function as mediating-pulling drivers.

Informing for the sake of it: legal intricacies, acceleration and suspicion in the German and Swiss migration regimes

ABSTRACT In migration law, being informed about legal and administrative procedures constitutes an essential procedural safeguard. Yet, in practice, the transparency of legal practices is often structurally undermined, resulting in the curtailment of procedural safeguards and potentially affecting perceptions of procedural justice. Building on our multi-sited ethnographic research in Germany and Switzerland, we first argue that migrants find it often difficult to anticipate how laws work, contradicting the key procedural law principle of legal certainty. Second, a general trend towards acceleration in migration administration allows limited time for information to reach migrants on the ground, leaving them uninformed about legal procedures. Third, migration law is implemented in an atmosphere of suspicion, which has a negative impact on trust between migrants and state officials – and on transparency. We thus demonstrate how procedural safeguards become empty and routinised, aggravating the structural violence at the heart of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens in interactions with the state.

The Role of Colonial Knowledge in Building the Arab Gulf’s Migration Regime

In this paper, I examine how the British Empire in the Arab Gulf created colonial classifications between Gulf Arabs and South Asians. The British racialised the Gulf Arabs in a way which presented them as an eternal, homogeneous, and ‘pure’ group. This racialisation contributed to the exclusion of others within the Gulf, most notably South Asian migrants. Firstly, I discuss some of the gaps within the literature which include the erasure of race and colonialism. Then, I identify how these gaps can be remedied using a Decolonial framework. Based on these theoretical foundations, I interrogate the racialisations of Gulf Arabs and how these racialisations influenced the migration regime in the Gulf. Lastly, I examine how South Asians were racialised in the Gulf. I conclude that the exclusionary migration regime in the Arab Gulf is built on the foundations of the racialised colonial classifications of the British Empire.

Resilience and governance of dispersed sub-Saharan migration in Morocco: The case of the refuge-cities of Tiznit and Taza

This article aims to contribute to the construction of theoretical and empirical milestones of the concept of urban resilience by applying it to the field of sub-Saharan migration geography in Morocco. Our analysis is based on participatory action research conducted between 2017 and 2020 with a cohort of 215 migrants dispersed by the Moroccan state from the northern border areas of the country and forcibly relocated to the peripheral cities of Tiznit (south) and Taza (northeast). These two territories, to which the state delegates de facto responsibility for receiving and assisting dispersed migrants, have been transformed into refuge-cities. By mobilizing a set of indicators, we present an operational definition of resilient urban governance of sub-Saharan migration. While exploring the link between resilience and local hospitable mobilizations, we highlight the processes underlying the construction of urban initiatives to host dispersed migrants. We show that the framework of urban resilience is revelatory of inclusive reception dynamics, of the autonomous agency, and the innovative capacity of refuge-cities in the core of a debordering process.

Colonial continuities and colonial unknowing in international migration management: the International Organization for Migration reconsidered

ABSTRACT The International Organization for Migration (IOM) exerts increasing power in global migration governance, yet research on IOM’s early history is scarce. Explanations of IOM’s founding and early migration management efforts are often reduced to bipolar, Cold War politics, with the US creating the organisation outside the UN to sidestep Soviet interference. Such simplistic accounts fail to grapple with the ways in which its creation and early activities also reflected and entrenched legacies of colonialism and related racialized inequalities. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article analyses how colonial interests and biases also shaped IOM’s establishment, founding documents, and vacillating positions in decolonisation movements. It examines the organisation’s role in moving colonists out of newly independent states; facilitating settler colonial states’ preference for white migrants; and advancing western interests in having an international migration forum in which opposition to exclusionary policies was virtually non-existent. In particular, it questions the agency’s involvement in supporting white migration to Southern Africa in the apartheid era, and the sanitisation of such work from IOM’s institutional history. Theoretically, the article analyses these dynamics through the lens of ‘colonial unknowing’, thereby laying the foundation for deeper, historicised understandings of IOM’s continued, contested roles in migration management.

Prespawning and Spawning Migrations of the Southern Greenling Pleurogrammus azonus (Mathematical Model)

Prespawning and spawning migrations of the southern one-finned greenling Pleurogrammus azonus in the bay are considered on the basis of the author's and literary numerical material. Peter the Great, in the summer-autumn period. As part of the spatiotemporal model building, the pre-spawning and spawning migrations were formalized. The dynamics of diurnal displacements is made in terms of transport equations. The recording of their representations follows the modified Patlack-Keller-Segel equations, according to which the flow of objects/substance is directed along the gradients of the stimulus zone functions introduced here. It is believed that in the pre-spawning period, morphophysiological and behavioral adaptations to a rather long and energyconsuming spawning occur. It is shown that the intensity of daily movements is proportional to their linear size (the larger the fish, the faster it moves). The equations for the spawning stage take into account the spatial competition of males, which under natural conditions is observed only in the vicinity of spawning areas. For females, clusters of males act as an incentive for movement. The simulation results turn out to be close to the observed migration regime.

Resilience and Sustainability in the Gulf Migration Regimes: Kafāla in the Era of Covid-19

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has strongly reaffirmed the critical importance of labor migration to the global economy, even as it has raised questions about the temporary migration programs responsible for much of this migration. In the Arab Gulf states – home to some of the world’s highest proportions of migrants – the pandemic has highlighted critical structural weaknesses in the region’s kafāla migration regimes. Drawing on two nationally representative surveys of Qatar’s citizens and migrants conducted between October 2020 and June 2021, we argue that the Gulf’s temporary migration regimes have shown resilience during the pandemic regarding flexibility, networks, and policies. However, Gulf states have gained this resilience at the expense of migrant workers, which threatens the sustainability of the kafāla in its current form. Nevertheless, we also identify key reforms undertaken in Qatar, which continued during the pandemic, and we find general acceptance of these reforms by citizens and business owners. Additionally, we find that Covid-19 has promoted recognition of the importance of migrant workers in the national labor supply, even if significant steps are still required to reduce migrant vulnerability.

New scales of migration governance in the Mediterranean: Regional cities in the spotlight

Within the framework of Mediterranean migration studies and as a contribution to the emerging debate on the ‘local turn’, and on multiscalar approaches of region-making from different disciplines, the main objective of this article is to analyse an empirical trend that theoretically reinforces the view that cities can shape new regional domains. This city-region interface delimits the article’s two-sided argument. On one hand, the article argues that because of the increase of trans-Mediterranean relations, cities are contributing to regional-making; and, on the other hand, that this occurs through a critical process of State disengagement from the way in which the Mediterranean is configured today. After arguing for a Braudelian view of the Mediterranean as région de villes, the article conceptualizes the category of ‘regional cities’ within current geographical and international relations literature. Drawing on three examples of external city practices (city-to-city networks, city involvement in international non-governmental organization and city bilateral diplomacy with other cities), the article empirically illustrates, as a third step, the relevant different functionalities of the city that shape region-making. Finally, the article sets this empirical and theoretical focus within current European Union and State-based geo-migration politics as a top-down region-making failure. The purpose is to highlight the dissonance between the top-down region-making blockage and the historical bottom-up construct of the Mediterranean as a region of interconnected cities. This invites us to visualize regional cities as the basic component for a paradigm shift in Mediterranean migration governance.

Time, (im)mobility and social reproduction: self-development of Chinese migrant women workers in Singapore

ABSTRACT This article uses time as an analytical frame to examine low-wage migrants’ aspirations and strategies in negotiating social mobility and reproduction under temporary migration regimes. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Chinese migrant women factory workers who actively pursue self-development during their sojourns in Singapore, this article demonstrates that time is central to understanding migrant women’s mobility aspirations and social reproduction strategies as well as the structural conditions that propel them to embark on self-development. It underscores the diversity of migrants’ experiences of time and the rhythms of their personal and family lives and how they are inextricably linked to temporal processes of migration and production. Through the temporal lens, the article also sheds light on the workings of temporary migration regimes under neoliberalism. It points out the contradiction between state attempts to constitute low-wage migrants as immobile labouring subjects and the temporal nature of migrant subject-making and skills development. It also shows how migrants’ pursuit of self-development and enactment of agency paradoxically play into the dominant ideology and become a site for surplus value extraction. The article contributes to the temporal approach to the intersection of migration, mobility and social reproduction.

Talent Migration Governance and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparing Germany and Singapore

ABSTRACTWe compare Germany and Singapore to see how their approaches toward talent migration governance have evolved in the last decade and whether and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected these developments. Building on the Highly-Skilled Immigration Index (HSII), our discussions show Germany becoming very welcoming of high-skilled labor migrants, and Singapore becoming increasingly selective in which labor migrants it admits into the City State. Our findings reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has not changed the direction of policies in Germany and Singapore, but it has affected talent migration rates.

Legacies of British Imperialism in the Contemporary UK Asylum–Welfare Nexus

This article traces the imperial roots of the contemporary asylum–welfare nexus. It explores how English colonial governance exported Poor Law legislation firstly to colonial America (USA) and secondly to British North America (Canada). It argues that these three countries are an Anglophone shared moral space of law and governance, revealing the common unresolved contradictions underpinning contemporary debates about who ‘deserves’ entry, under what conditions, and why. Historical perspectives unsettle assumptions about the primacy of national geopolitical borders and the exceptionalism of contemporary migration. This article uses historical sociology to trace why and how national sovereignty took primacy over municipalities in controlling the mobility of people and the concomitant moral underpinnings. It then draws on new empirical research in three pioneering ‘sanctuary cities’ to explore how cities contest the entwining of welfare and migration governance. However, the article explores how these initiatives often reproduce justifications based on ‘deservingness’ and ‘contribution’. Through tracing the common threads that led to these forms of governance, we can understand they are not self-evident. A historical perspective allows us to ask different questions and open realms of alternative possibilities.

Asylum, Racism, and the Structural Production of Sexual Violence against Racialised Women in Exile in Paris

The recent arrival of refugees from Ukraine has thrown into sharp focus the racialised colonial underpinnings of the French asylum and refugee system, as the open-door welcome afforded to Ukrainians, supposedly “closer” to the French population, highlights the rejection and marginalisation of “others” who seek refuge in the country. The current situation lays bare not only the “double standards” applied to refugees depending on their country of origin and race, but also the colonial foundations of the French asylum system as a whole. This might be seen as particularly significant in a country where even within academic research on asylum and refugees the racial and colonial foundations of the current system are rarely mentioned, and where the principle of Republican universalism has been consistently used to both hide and justify racialised and gendered forms of inequality and discrimination. In this contribution we wish to explore the ways in which the coloniality of the French asylum system works to deny exiled women access to welfare and social services, creating systems of racialised and gendered violence against them. We highlight the ways in which the State not only neglects these women, but actively contributes to violence through its racialised neo-liberal policies. The withdrawal of access to welfare and social services, including housing, welfare payments or health services, all form a part of this system of structural violence which leads to increasing levels of harm. Based on ethnographic research carried out in the Paris region, our article aims to emphasise that the structural production of gendered violence, particularly sexual violence against racialised exiled women, illustrates the coloniality of the asylum system and more broadly of the migration regime, which manifests itself in policies of exclusion, neglect and endangerment—including death.

Sustainability and Resilience in Migration Governance for a Post-pandemic World

This paper discusses the contradictions and tensions in the governance of international migration that the pandemic has exposed. It starts by defining the pandemic emergency as a wicked problem. Even though wicked problems usually do not have solutions, we argue that building resilience and sustainability as key features in migration governance can help address this wicked challenge. We look at three types of resilience: situated, structural and systemic and discuss the extent to which they may form the basis of sustainable migration governance.

Least Protected, Most Affected: Looking through Lens of Cross-border Migration in COVID Period

The major thrust of the present article is to explore the gruesome sufferings of migrants with respect to detention and deportation, social stigma, income and livelihoods, lack of health services and digital divide by establishing the fact that an inclusive global migration governance supported with a prudent and forward-looking migration policy and a human rights dimension is the way forward to address the consequences of COVID-19. An inclusive approach to migrant health leaving no one behind during the COVID-19 pandemic deserves cynosure of attention to direct our public health efforts since there can be no public health without migrant health.

Rethinking the migration-development nexus in the post-COVID-19 era.

This concluding article serves as an epilogue summing up key issues about migration, labor migrants and development amid a crisis of public health. We predict the forging of an age of sanitization in which different kinds of sanitizing policies will still be in place, especially in Asia, to deal with the sporadic changes of the pandemic. Sanitization politics will continue to intersect with different policy sectors and powers, which will extend beyond the medical understanding of a pandemic and blur the division between science and politics. It will have varied impacts on the migration regime and global governance as a whole.

Migration Policy of the EU Countries During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Convergence or Distancing?

This paper examines certain aspects of the migration policy of the EU countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic has affected all areas of society, including a massive decline in population mobility in all countries of the world. The purpose of this work is to analyze the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for EU countries in the field of internal and international migration and the implementation of migration policy. The study is based on official data from Eurostat, the International Organization for Migration, the International Labor Organization, analytical reports and legal documents of the European Union as a whole, as well as individual states. The work uses analytical and comparative methods. As part of the analytical method, an analysis was made of some legal documents in the field of migration policy aimed at reducing the risks of the spread of coronavirus infection, social and legal support for certain categories of foreign citizens living in the EU countries. The comparative method made it possible to compare the tools and mechanisms for implementing individual migration policy measures during the pandemic in a number of EU countries and identify the most successful practices. Our research has shown that, on the one hand, a number of measures taken at the EU level have proved to be effective in restoring mobility and ensuring movement within the EU without restrictions. On the other hand, EU member states had fairly broad powers in matters of independent regulation of migration within their own country, focusing primarily on national interests. The results obtained in the work can be further used, firstly, for effective tools for managing migration in the event of global shocks, and secondly, for the purpose of a deeper study of the possibilities and limitations of the implementation of migration policy by states that are members of integration associations. Key words: Migration policy of the EU countries, COVID-19 pandemic, migration regime, social support for the population and migrants, migration crisis, impact of the pandemic on demographic development.

Stories Too Big for a Case File: Unaccompanied Young People Confront the Hostile Environment in Pandemic Times

What imagery best evokes the violence unaccompanied child migrants feel when asked, or made, to tell their story over and over, as well as the violence of not being asked nor being heard? How can we show both strength and struggle in difficult times and often uncaring places such as the UK’s hostile migration regime? Taking these questions as a jumping off point, this article offers three key responses, drawing on experiences of co-producing the research-based film, Stories too big for a case file, which accompanies this text. These reflections highlight the importance of participatory, change-oriented research that ‘cares’ for participants; the value of creative forms of knowledge production and aesthetic modes of expression for communicating the affective complexities of research material; and, the importance of turning the representational gaze outwards towards systems and institutions to avoid situating social inequities as individual failings and to, instead, invite viewers to ‘walk together’ in solidarity with research interlocutors.

Double two-level games and international negotiations: making sense of migration governance in EU-Africa relations

ABSTRACT This article conceptualises international negotiations between two groups of states as the result of double two-level games, whereby the two negotiating teams negotiate with their counterpart at the international level while simultaneously engaging with their constituents at their respective domestic level, trying to reconcile pressures from both arenas. Furthermore, it points to the importance of contextual and normative explanations and problem-solving approaches to explain negotiation outcomes. Empirically, it sheds light on one of the most contentious aspects of the Post-Cotonou Agreement between the European Union (EU) and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS), thanks to exceptional access to the negotiation process and subsequent interviews with most members of the negotiating teams. While the EU-OACPS Agreement may be dismissed by its critics as a relic of the past, the significance of its provisions on migration and mobility may mark a turning point in EU-Africa relations. A detailed mechanism, in fact, was agreed upon to ensure that African (as well as Caribbean and Pacific) states readmit unwanted migrants in the EU without conditionality and formalities other than a swift identity verification, with serious consequences if they fail to comply.

‘Ways to stick around’: im/mobility strategies of ageing, temporary migrants in Dubai

ABSTRACT In spite of the strict migration regimes that prevent permanent settlement and naturalisation, migrants have, for decades, made the UAE their unofficial home, something that has led to the existence of subsequent generations of non-citizens who are born there. However, reaching the age of 65 marks retirement for migrants, who can no longer receive work visas in the UAE. Prolonging residency is possible, yet without social security and pensions, maintaining a decent life requires significant financial investment and reliance on family and social networks. Based on interviews with the adult children of first-generation migrants from the ‘Global South’, this paper provides insights into a number of strategies their parents develop in order to navigate restrictive immigration regimes upon retirement in the UAE. Most migrants prefer to stay put in the UAE upon retirement, where their children continue to live. Drawing on ‘immobility’ debates, this paper argues that immobility is an active – and relatively privileged – response to restrictive immigration policies in the UAE that enforce mobility upon retirement. Whilst a preference for ‘ageing in the UAE’ is often costly and precarious, older migrants’ social and emotional attachments often outweigh economic reasons to leave, as this paper shows.