Migration Research Research Articles

Economic damage from natural hazards and internal migration in the United States

AbstractIn this paper, we analyze the impact of natural hazards on internal migration in the United States (US). The analysis uses Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax records and analyzes different versions of a gravity model to assess the impact of economic damage caused by natural hazards on migration flows between counties. We find that natural hazards in the origin county are associated to larger outflows, with hurricanes exhibiting the most substantial impact on migration, followed by floodings and severe storms. These results emphasize the need for migration research that distinguishes between various types of hazards. Furthermore, we extend the gravity model to investigate whether people tend to relocate to relatively nearby areas in response to natural hazards, an established phenomenon in existing literature. For floods and severe storms, the analysis demonstrates that migration flows to nearby counties are comparatively larger than to distant counties. These findings may be concerning, as it implies that individuals could still be at a high risk of experiencing future disasters. Additionally, we provide several robustness checks to investigate to what extent our results are driven by extreme events in the dataset.

Research and application of migration and plugging mechanism of temporary plugging balls in multicluster fracturing of horizontal wells

Plugging and diverting stimulation technology using temporary plugging balls (PDSTB) in horizontal wells is one of the effective measures to enhance production in heterogeneous carbonate reservoirs. However, the migration and plugging mechanism of temporary plugging balls in horizontal wells remain unclear, leading to suboptimal field application. Based on the Lagrangian method, the migration and plugging models of temporary plugging balls were established. The study investigated the migration and plugging mechanism of temporary plugging balls. It analyzed the effects of parameters such as displacement on the plugging efficiency. The results show that the flow field in the perforation section is significantly affected by the displacement. Temporary plugging balls show three states of plugging: one ball plugging one shot-hole, multiple balls plugging one shot-hole, and balls remaining in the wellbore. The plugging efficiency initially increases, and then, decreases with the increase in displacement and the ball diameter. The plugging efficiency initially increases, and then, stabilizes with the increase in the viscosity of the carrying fluid and the usage ratio of balls. Plugging efficiency decreases with increasing density of balls. The greater the pressure difference at the outlet of the perforation section, the higher the plugging efficiency in the advantageous inlet section. Based on these results, the field construction of Well M was guided. The gas production was 142.66 × 104 m3/d after stimulation, and the production increase was significant. This study provides a theoretical basis for optimizing and designing the parameters of PDSTB in carbonate long horizontal wells.

Emotional Earmarking: Insights into Remittances and Emotions from a Mixed Methods Study of Migrant Households in Rural Philippines

Overseas remittances improve the economic conditions and influence the financial behaviors of international migrants’ families that remain in the country of origin. Remittances affect family relationships in the hometown and across transnational borders, but migration research has not yet analyzed these family dynamics through the lens of household finance. Recent studies address the remittance–emotion nexus partially and statically rather than holistically and dynamically, delivering an insufficient understanding of complex and evolving links mediated by the sending, using, and investing of remittances. Built on an existing family financial socialization model, and using mixed methods for case studies in two rural municipalities of the Philippines, this study sets out to determine how emotions come into play as families strive to use remittances productively. A central finding is that migrant households employ what we call emotional earmarking to bring about economic benefits along with concurrent emotional benefits to family relationships. This emotional earmarking can help families (as well as migration and development stakeholders) in the productive use of remittances and the maintenance of family connections despite the physical absence of migrant members.

Regulated Temporariness Reconsidered: Chinese Migrants in Japan and the Confluence of Policy, Infrastructure, and Transnational Factors

This paper examines how Japan’s immigration policies, the role of migration infrastructure, and pressures and expectations from the home country shape the regulated temporariness of Chinese migrants in Japan. It analyzes the regulated temporariness inherent in Japan’s visa system and considers how the uncertainty faced by temporary migrants intensifies their connections with China. The findings indicate that the migration infrastructure between China and Japan not only enhances migrants’ mobility but also restricts their freedom of choice. Furthermore, globalized social media and migrants’ connections to China transmit “pressure from China,” stemming from the two countries’ war history and the resultant political discourse, to Chinese migrants in Japan. The study reveals that migrant temporariness is not solely driven by migration entry and residence policies, as emphasized in existing migration research theories. Instead, migration infrastructure, historical relations between the two countries, and expectations for future development also shape migrants’ regulated temporariness. Migrants voluntarily enter into regulated temporariness, paradoxically achieving greater flexibility within this regulated state. This phenomenon demonstrates a blurred area between flexible temporariness and regulated temporariness, where both coexist rather than transitioning from one to the other. Consequently, it is necessary to expand our understanding of regulated temporariness, taking into account broader transnational factors and informal influences.

Współzamieszkiwanie. O wykorzystaniu wielostronnego studium przypadku w metodologii badań migracyjnych

The primary objective of this paper is to address the methodology employed in qualitative migration research. It involves a theoretical analysis of the methodological challenges associated with a case study design, necessitating the collection of accounts from multiple individuals participating in the studied process or event. The second aim is to empirically illustrate these considerations through a study focusing on the relationship between Polish hosts and Ukrainian guests (2022–23). The gathered empirical material indicates the effectiveness of applying the technique of cross stories (récits croisés) derived from biographical research, along with the ontological-epistemological difficulties encountered. The paper does not aim to offer a comprehensive analysis of the cohabitation phenomenon. Instead, it contributes to the field by explicitly citing significant portions of raw material and elucidating their context. Its impact on migration studies lies in demonstrating, from a methodological perspective, that the simultaneous examination of various viewpoints and definitions of situations allows researchers to leverage the full potential of qualitative research. Through cross stories, a more profound understanding of interviewees’ perspectives on the world emerges, enabling researchers, when necessary, to question common-sense meanings of certain categories and highlight gaps in biographical accounts.

The Glaring Gap: Undervalued and Unrecognized Knowledges and Expertise in International Migration Research

As we reach the 60th anniversary of the International Migration Review, a key question for those engaged in migration research remains: has migration studies become more inclusive of knowledges and expertise outside the Global North? In short, the answer is no, and both the passage of time and the persistent awareness of this inequality require urgent and immediate action. In this article, we draw on our experiences as first- and second-generation migrant women, and as practitioner-researchers working in the humanitarian sector, to reflect on the significance of undervalued and unrecognized knowledges and expertise on migration research. We share insights from our recent work with the Red Cross Red Crescent Global Migration Lab, an initiative established to conduct migration research that informs humanitarian operations and advocacy, and we reflect on key opportunities and challenges that have impacted our efforts to generate knowledge that is more inclusive of migrants, and of practitioners and researchers from the Global South. In doing so, we highlight the possibility—even if still limited—of doing research that engages more ethically and meaningfully with those whose knowledge and expertise has long been excluded from dominant debates. We do this with a sense of hope and urgency that, by the 70th anniversary of this journal, the landscape of migration research will have changed—as a result of a concerted investment of time, resources and new ways of working—to broaden the questions asked, the objects of study and the methodologies adopted.

Gender Differences in the Migration Process: A Narrative Literature Review

AbstractMigration scholars agree that migration is a highly gendered process. While the literature on this topic is increasing, the knowledge produced remains fragmentary and has not been synthesized systematically yet. This literature review aims at summarizing the current findings of quantitative migration research comparing migration patterns between genders and highlighting gaps and patterns in the literature over time. Following a reproducible and systematic approach, 6032 articles have been scanned and 170 were considered for in‐depth content analysis. The review of the literature revealed that women have a lower propensity than men to realize their migration aspirations conditional on migration intentions. Moreover, many articles analyzing migration flows by gender do not support the common narrative of a feminization of migration. Finally, evidence from the migration literature supports the assumption that migrant women experience a double burden of discrimination in the destination country labor market based on their gender and their migration status. It becomes apparent that gender‐based comparisons between migration outcomes have received the most attention in the literature followed by the comparison of determinants. The stage of the journey received only little attention. This literature review also focuses on the data sources used to produce our knowledge on gender differences in the migration process. Thereby, it stands out that the majority of papers rely on survey data for the analysis. Digital trace data are a promising source for gender‐disaggregated data and can potentially complement the scarce aggregate migration data landscape.

Amma La: Reflective Account of a Participatory Mixed Theatre Method in Migration Research in India

This article presents the methodological process of interpreting the ethnographic data of my research about the question of Indian citizenship for Tibetan refugees in India as a theater play titled “Amma la” (meaning “mother” in Tibetan). I present the enacting of the theater play “Amma la” with young Tibetans in India (2019) at three different institutions. I argue that performing the theater play “Amma la” with Tibetan participants in 2019 is a method of enacting the research findings in a participatory, collaborative, creative, and novel way that opens up possibilities for shared meanings and transformative re-interpretation of the data within an embodied, artistic, and performative dimension. I argue that the performance of the theater play “Amma la” sits theoretically at the intersection of verbatim theater, political theater, and participatory drama as well as forum theater and physical theater. It could also be argued that the theater play “Amma la” constitutes a form of experimental theater that is not complete and foreclosing, but processual and prospective. And finally, performing “Amma la” is a form of process drama, focusing on improvisation, and the process of creating and acting a scene for the benefit of the participants-actors, and not on the polished and rehearsed performances for a specific audience. For these reasons, I argue that “Amma la” is constructed on and theoretically supported by what I will simply call participatory mixed theater methods.

Displaced person(s): the production of a powerful political category

ABSTRACT Recent migration research suggests using “displaced persons” as a broader, more inclusive term than “refugees”, affording us an opportunity to recall the historical genesis and transformation of the concept of “displaced persons”. The concept emerged in the 1940s in the context of the control of forced migration. This article traces the evolution of the term “displaced person”, arguing it was created as a “category of action” for bureaucratic and political purposes, rather than to describe social realities. Understanding this historical context reveals more broadly how such categories have always been tools for political control, underscoring the need for reflexivity in migration studies.

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.

The pitfalls and benefits of using administrative data for internal migration research: An evaluation of Australia’s Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA)

The pitfalls and benefits of using administrative data for internal migration research: An evaluation of Australia’s Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA)

Lifestyle migrants as Eliasian ‘outsiders’: The case of Swedish emigrants to Portugal

AbstractThis paper discusses the emigration process by the Swedes permanently residing in Portugal and their emotional ties to the Swedish society. The focus is on those who have no ambition nor desire to keep up any ties with Sweden after they have emigrated to Portugal. Hitherto, the non‐intention to return is, both empirically and theoretically, underexplored in migration research. To enrich the conceptual framework, we incorporate Hirschmann's theory on loyalty, voice, and exit with Elias's established/outsider‐theory. The findings suggest that many of the Swedes in Portugal with no intentions to return were Eliasian ‘outsiders’ before leaving Sweden. We conclude that all lifestyle migrants do not migrate to'practice privilege’ or'self‐fulfilment’, partly contesting what is known about lifestyle migrations associated with European north‐south migrations; some have done a Hirschmann ‘exit’, left their native country and try to prosper somewhere else. The added value of this paper is its potential to explain why emigrants choose not to maintain ties with their country of origin.

Why Has Migration Research So Little Impact? Examining Knowledge Practices in Migration Policy Making and Migration Studies

Scientific and expert knowledge on migration is often disregarded in policy making and plays only a minor role in public debates - despite the massive growth and institutionalization of migration research in recent years. This article interrogates the limited impact of migration research(ers) by examining knowledge practices in both policy making and academia. We first look “outwards” at migration policy making. Revisiting and integrating the hitherto separate scholarship on knowledge use and knowledge production, we identify the main mechanisms that characterize knowledge practices of policy actors, such as individual and institutional self-preservation, issue politicization, or unequal power dynamics. We then mobilize these insights to look “inwards” at our own knowledge practices in migration studies, showing that similar mechanisms shape how migration scholars produce and use knowledge. In particular, we identify a fragmentation of migration studies into ever-more fine-grained sub-fields, each with their own knowledge practices and impact strategies - and with little dialogue across them. In fact, rather than acknowledging their complementarity, these sub-fields tend to delegitimize each other's knowledge and efforts to achieve socio-political change. We argue that such “academic tribalism” creates a self-sabotaging dynamic that undermines the field's wider credibility and impact. Ultimately, we hope that this paper empowers migration researchers to act upon this diagnosis and inspires a collective discussion on how to foster more mutually-reinforcing knowledge practices that strengthen the field's role in political debates and public life.

Reimagining, Repositioning, Rebordering: Intersections of the Biopolitical and Geopolitical in the UK's Post-Brexit Migration Regime (and Why It Matters for Migration Research)

This article examines the emergence of a new immigration regime in the United Kingdom, following its exit from the European Union, to uncover the entanglements and intersections of biopolitics, geopolitics and ideology in migration and migration governance. It draws a clear line between Brexit as a political and geopolitical rupture, the ideological project of “Global Britain” that emerged from it, and the forms of migrant and citizen subjectivity that these paired projects produced as the body politic was re-modelled in this image. It demonstrates this through a critical analysis of recent immigration data and trends that consider who is coming to the UK, through what routes and under what conditions, and of recently introduced changes to the immigration system, including the curtailment of asylum and the emergence of new humanitarian routes. Building on scholarship that has shown the impact of migration on the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum, our analysis of migration and migration governance after Brexit offers unique insights into how migration continues to play a central role in the ideological reimagining and geopolitical repositioning of the UK on the global stage and develops the concept of rebordering to capture the nexus between ideological and geopolitical transformations and the making — through migration and migration governance — of a new body politic and its “others” that embody and can serve their purposes.

SCRATCH: A programmable, open-hardware, benchtop robot that automatically scratches cultured tissues to investigate cell migration, healing, and tissue sculpting.

Despite the widespread popularity of the ' scratch assay', where a pipette is dragged through cultured tissue to create an injury gap to study cell migration and healing, the manual nature of the assay carries significant drawbacks. So much of the process depends on individual manual technique, which can complicate quantification, reduce throughput, and limit the versatility and reproducibility of the approach. Here, we present a truly open-source, low-cost, accessible, and robotic scratching platform that addresses all of the core issues. Compatible with nearly all standard cell culture dishes and usable directly in a sterile culture hood, our robot makes highly reproducible scratches in a variety of complex cultured tissues with high throughput. Moreover, we demonstrate how scratching can be programmed to precisely remove areas of tissue to sculpt arbitrary tissue and wound shapes, as well as enable truly complex co-culture experiments. This system significantly improves the usefulness of the conventional scratch assay, and opens up new possibilities in complex tissue engineering and cell biological assays for realistic wound healing and migration research.

Conflict potential of Central Asian immigration (using the example of the Yaroslavl region)

The article is devoted to the problem of conflict potential arising as a result of immigration to Russia of the indigenous population of the Central Asian states. Most researchers of labor migration from Central Asian countries to Russia have so far studied the problems of adaptation of migrants and their integration into Russian society. In addition, xenophobia towards migrants by the indigenous population of the Russian Federation is a common research topic, while the radicalization of migrants themselves in Russia and their participation in extremist movements remain poorly studied. The proposed study focuses on the conflict potential created by both temporary, labor, and permanent, long-term migration of the indigenous population of Central Asian countries to Russia. The relevance of the study is related to the sharp aggravation of the problem of Central Asian migration in Russia. Signs of this aggravation appeared even during the COVID-19 epidemic in the form of a sharp increase in the number of conflicts involving migrants, and became especially acute after the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall. The practical significance of studying the conflict-causing potential of Central Asian immigration is due to the need to timely identify the social risks associated with it and develop measures to neutralize them.

The work of fluid metaphors in migration research: Geographical imaginations and the politics of writing

Fluid metaphors describing “floods of migrants” or an “influx of migrant workers” are often used by journalists, politicians, and scholars to describe migration processes. While scholars have critiqued these metaphors as part of popular discourse, the roles fluid metaphors play in migration scholarship itself have received less attention. Through analysis of five academic journals, this article analyzes scholarly usage of fluid metaphors in contemporary migration research. We argue that fluid metaphors foster specific geographic imaginaries, which often run counter to otherwise complex theorizations of migration and mobility. In response, we call for practices of writing that center precision and care.

Determinants of Intra-City Residential Migration Patterns of Older Adults: A GIS and Decision Tree Analysis of Yancheng City, China

This study investigates the spatial patterns of residential migration among older adults in the city center of Yancheng and the influencing factors using data on the home purchases of individuals aged 65 and older from 2016 to 2018, along with peripheral point of interest (POI) data, analyzed with ArcGIS and a decision tree model. The results indicated that persons aged 60–65 accounted for 42.8% of the total sample and primarily chose to migrate in the early stages of retirement. The intra-city migration of older adults exhibits both centripetal and centrifugal patterns, with a greater tendency toward the city center. House prices, floor levels, and commercial facilities significantly impact their choice of migration destinations. Among these, house prices were the most critical determinant, with the majority of older adults migrating to neighborhoods with lower house prices. This study contributes by integrating residential migration and location choice research and constructing an analytical framework based on facility accessibility. The findings provide insights into the key determinants of location choice for intra-city residential migration among older adults and the construction of livable neighborhoods for them.

The Migration Intersections Grid: An Organizing Framework for Migration Research in and through the Twenty-first Century

For this special issue of the International Migration Review, we develop and provide a comprehensive organizing framework, the Migration Intersections Grid (MIG), to inform and guide migration research in and through the remainder of the twenty-first century. We motivate our work by conducting a high-level scoping review of summaries and syntheses of different directions of travel in migration research over time. Informed by these results, we then identify and describe 12 components that constitute the MIG, which, as we later discuss, is an interactive intersectional organizing framework. Finally, we illustrate the MIG's interactive intersectional nature by applying it to several areas of migration research where a comprehensive organizing framework of this sort is needed to address existing and emerging issues and questions now and in the coming decades.

African Migration at a Crossroads: The Social and Theoretical Implications of Emerging International Migration Trends

This study examines international migration trends in Africa since the mid-1960s. It argues that African international migration trends are at a turning point that could significantly affect the future of migration studies. New African immigrant communities are emerging in Asia, South America, and other world regions, while the influence of state and non-state institutions is increasing. Moreover, interstate migration in Africa is now more disconnected from the legacies of the continent's colonial labor migration systems. By 2050, Africa is also expected to have the world's largest population in the age-groups that typically have the highest probabilities of migration, while per-capita incomes will increase in ways that could reduce the costs of migration. Although Africa's influence on future migration research is likely to increase, progress in developing theories to examine its emerging trends has been limited. With few exceptions, studies on migration in Africa focus on theory application rather than theory building. New theoretical approaches are therefore needed to adequately situate Africa's emerging migration trends within the larger context of migration studies. The building blocks for developing these theories include decolonial approaches that highlight African perspectives and the integration of the substantive influences of future migration trends into theory-building processes.