Politics Of Migration Research Articles

Immigration Policy Preferences in Six EU Countries: The Shadow of Intergovernmental Conflicts in Public Opinion

AbstractMigration politics in the European Union (EU) is highly conflictual. The Dublin framework produces, consolidates and constantly re‐enforces divides amongst the governments of EU member states. A prime example is the country‐of‐first‐entry principle, which sets countries at the external EU border against non‐border countries. We investigate whether evidence of these conflicts amongst governments also translate into cross‐national divides in public opinion. To this end, we separate EU countries along two lines, border versus non‐border and host versus non‐host countries, and derive policy positions for six member states with respect to four immigration policies. The analysis of original survey data shows that public opinion follows, as expected, the patterns of intergovernmental conflicts. That the public is, like the governments, divided along national lines highlights the dominance of intergovernmental conflict in EU migration politics. As long as this logic prevails, the potential for collective action in EU migration policy‐making remains narrow.

Race, Interests, and Perceptions in International Migration: A Review Article

Abstract The field of international migration has largely ignored race. Does the Global North's apparent warm welcome of mostly white Ukrainian Orthodox Christians fleeing Russia's war and its hostility towards black and brown non-Christan Middle Easterners and Africans escaping war and deprivation tell us anything? Although latecomers to the study of international migration, since the 1990s, political scientists have innovated the field of the politics of international migration but few works locate race as a focal point of analysis in either migration politics or international relations. The study of race in international migration in international relations is still rather nascent and centers on the Western world with a focus on how racial differences influence perception of threat, common identities, and even standards of good governance. Andrew Rosenberg's book Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration offers a corrective to much of this in his examination of race and international migration from the perspective of international relations. It builds on the work of many critical and traditional scholars with a novel quantitative approach that “seeks to unmask” the issue of racial bias against “non-white migrants” primarily from the Global South. (11)

Advancing emigrants' rights in India: strategies of civil society in spaces for engagement

ABSTRACT This article explores Indian civil society's efforts to promote the rights of migrant Indian labourers working abroad in low-wage employment as a response to weakly institutionalized rights frameworks in the global and India's national governance of labour migration. Existing scholarship has explored civil societies' advocacy in multi-national fora, at regional levels, and as forms of transnationally organized networks, but only marginally at the analytical level of migrant-origin states. The article examines their multi-level and multi-stakeholder strategies through the analytical lens of spaces for engagement. Drawing on original qualitative data, this article shows that civil society organizations play a leading role in (e)migration governance in India and are key to understanding the politics of migration of the world’s largest migrant-origin state. In particular, the local and subnational levels are important entry points to advance their agendas in the context of migrant-origin states.

Hierarchy in the Politics of Migration: Revisiting Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Migration State

Migrants and refugees face hostile publics and organized political interests, and contend with new and evolving forms of surveillance, deportability, and political violence. Researchers show that these political dynamics are fundamentally shaped by the politics of race and ethnicity. Yet, even as this work is increasingly abundant, it has not always been taken up by mainstream accounts of migration. In this article, we revisit scholarship on the politics of international migration, bringing together a collection of — sometimes disparate — research to explore how scholars can forge new lines of inquiry regarding the relationship between migration, race, ethnicity, and power. To do so, we evaluate three types of relationships at the core of migration politics: the relationship between migration and the state, the migration-related demands of domestic publics on the state, and how migrants interact and contend with the state. Across these relationships, we examine how ethnoracial hierarchies draw on, legitimize, and reinforce uneven distributions of political power, disparate deployments of state action and violence, and projects of nation- and state-building. Combining the intellectual prowess of distinct fields and approaches, we draw on productive convergences and tensions between existing and emerging frameworks and analytic starting points across disciplines to map future research trajectories in the multidisciplinary study of immigration, citizenship, asylum, and racial and ethnic politics. We conclude with a note on the politics of knowledge production–whereby some accounts of migration have been privileged over others–and point to important epistemological and methodological interventions for advancing research on the politics of migration.

Slap a Label on It—Civic Registration Categories for (Non)Citizens and the Digital Promise

As we experience a sudden leap forward with machine learning models put into the decision-making apparatus of the state, social scientists are putting scrutiny on what actually goes into these datasets. Issues of ethics and representational harms are relevant questions that come up in the present day. Against this background, there has been little work thus far, bringing together various trajectories about the interplay between forms of contemporary citizenship and the politics of migration and diversity. Despite the persistent presence of diversity and migration as constructs that shape social relations in modern society, this gap is notable. Given their importance, it is crucial to continue analyzing these factors. This will contribute to more progressive ways of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. In this article, I draw attention to the civil registry identity categorizations in The Netherlands to explore some of the complexities surrounding the relationship between digitization and the often absent dynamics in public policy debates about migration and diversity. Drawing on cultural and political themes, I look at the digital as a language that can offer new perspectives on migration. I suggest that technology and its uses may work to enable the state to address and possibly resolve tensions in policy and practice between the intersection of regimes of rights (legal status) and diversity (forms of social cleavages).

Borders: Exclude or Relate?

Executive Summary US political discourse characterizes the US-Mexico border as a site of threat and, of necessity, exclusion. This frame ignores the importance of borders to economies, families, and culture in our increasingly interconnected world. Moreover, it leads to policies that place people at risk of victimization and death. In conceiving of the border solely in terms of exclusion, nations forego the opportunity to strengthen relationships across borders. This paper argues that the politics of humane migration require a vision of borders as sites of encounter, engagement, and relationship, rather than solely exclusion. This reconceptualization of the US-Mexico border, in particular, would strengthen relationships across borders, and prioritize cooperation between Latin America/the Caribbean and the United States, starting with regulated legal flows. It would also respond to the shared contexts of migration, including contraband in arms and drugs, criminal violence, and climate change. It articulates an alternative vision of borders as a “commons” in which mutual needs can be addressed (a commons is an issue or resource in which every one has access and involvement). Migration itself provides a perfect example of such a need. It takes place in a political climate partially but powerfully shaped by racism and classism. Thus, it has become a polarized “issue” that appears insolvable. In fact, it may not be a problem at all. Rather, in our current demographic-economic situation, as well as for our cultural well-being, migration should be treated as an asset. Insofar as it needs to be addressed, this paper delineates many possibilities. The options are not perfect and magical — the challenges are hard and diverse — but they an advance a vision of a shared cross-border space on migration. That might be a crucial move, not only for migration, but along a path that recognizes relationships and commitments of many kinds across the hemisphere and world. Recognition is not enough; real change in resources and power needs to follow. But a vision of connection rather than exclusion provides the political starting point needed for change to happen. In every political instance in which borders are used to frame migration in terms of who, how, and how much to exclude, connectedness loses ground. A politics of humane migration can only emerge if rooted in a positive vision of borders as sites of engagement and encounter.

The affective economy of removal: ethnographic perspectives on deportation and (In)voluntary return

ABSTRACT The removal of undocumented migrants has become a widespread preoccupation of current European migration politics and one of the most emotionally contentious state practices of our times. Not only right-wing populists and their constituencies demand an increase in expulsions, but also mainstream society. Others accuse these positions of being racist or lacking humanism and instead promote solidarity to help people seeking protection in Europe. These divisive views and migrants’ often long-term experience of being ‘unwanted’ and deportable provoke strong and often irreconcilable emotions. The ethnographic explorations assembled here zoom in on the ‘affective economies’ inherent in the arbitrary processes and unpredictable experiences of removals of people from Europe to different parts of the world. This special issue puts forward a twofold argument: First, conceptually, we argue that a focus on affects is indispensable in order to fully unearth the complexities of removal processes. And second, methodologically, we contend that an ethnographic approach, with its deep and often long-term commitment of researchers to their respective field(s) including multiple actors, is essential to comprehensively grasp the affective economy of removal.

An EU Sustainable Migration: Institutional Discourse and Migration Politics

AbstractFrom 2015 to 2016 onwards, migration has been subjected to intense political contestation within EU Member States. In this context, sustainable migration has become the new overarching objective of the Commission. Despite the various references to sustainable migration, a closer investigation of EU migration law and policy does not provide a coherent picture of the legal implications of this concept. This article examines the links between sustainability and migration in EU law and policy and suggests that sustainable migration should be perceived as a political concept that was central for EU migration politics following the so‐called migration crisis. Sustainable migration is a powerful tool at the hands of the Commission and has been used to forge consensus between Member States that might profoundly disagree on the future of EU migration. At the same time, the concept offers little guidance in terms of legal obligations for the protection of migrants.

Politics of International Labor Migration and the Survival of (Illegal) Brokers in Indonesia

Indonesian labor migration is a multifaceted process heavily influenced by private actors, particularly brokers who operate both within the bounds of legality as recruitment agencies and outside it as illicit recruiters. These brokers are frequently accused of exploiting Indonesian migrant workers, leading to government efforts to limit their roles. However, despite legislative efforts, such as the 2017 law aimed at restricting the roles of labor-recruiting companies and illegal brokers, these intermediaries persist. Drawing on the concept of brokerage and the Theory of Strategic Action Field, this article explains why brokers remain despite legislative challenges. This study also argues that state regulations inadvertently create structural holes, thereby providing brokers with opportunities to maintain their involvement in labor migration. Through 56 in-depth interviews with various actors—including current and former migrant workers, recruiters, recruitment agencies, civil society organizations (CSOs), and government officials—the study illuminates how the Indonesian government’s framing of "procedural migration” contains inherent loopholes. Brokers then exploited these gaps to legitimize their presence and assert control over workers’ destinies. These brokers adeptly adapt to regulatory changes and influence migration.

Queer mountains: Migrant drag performers reimagining sexual citizenship in Germany

This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and politics in today’s Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of ‘migrant drag’ in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, ‘building queer mountains’ appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, ‘building queer mountains’ shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be ‘crossed’ and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.

Book Review: Noncitizen Power: Agency and the Politics of Migration by Tendayi Bloom

Book Review: <i>Noncitizen Power: Agency and the Politics of Migration</i> by Tendayi Bloom

‘Freedom within the framework’? The everyday politics of religion, state repression and migration in Vietnam’s borderlands and beyond

ABSTRACT How do peripheral, ‘voiceless’ people engage with politics in authoritarian contexts where formal politics is not a viable option? This article demonstrates the value of applying an everyday politics perspective to grassroots religious activity and mobilities, by providing an in-depth case study of a recently Christianised ethnic minority group based in Vietnam’s politically sensitive borderlands. In the face of religious persecution and social conflict sponsored by an overbearing state, hundreds of thousands of ordinary ethnic Hmong Protestants subtly resist, evade and/or support religious policies through mundane, everyday behaviour which have unintended geopolitical consequences, collectively undermine state legitimacy and can be credited with substantial policy changes over time. Based on rich qualitative data, I argue that a careful investigation of everyday spaces as sites of political contestation not only highlights the agency of non-elite religious actors but can also reveal insights about the nature of the ‘top-down’ forces they engage with.

Temporalities in asylum childhoods: time politics and children’s rights in Sweden’s asylum reception and resettlement

ABSTRACT The study of time and temporality can provide a critical understanding of the migration process and be analysed to understand temporal governance and migrants' lived temporal experiences. This article draws on Cwerner's understanding of time politics and Griffiths' theorisation of temporal tensions to consider how temporal governance and temporal regulations affect children's lived temporalities. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the tradition of the sociology of childhood to explore children's lived experiences of time and temporalities in the Swedish asylum reception system and the resettlement process. The article shows how the children's lived experiences entailed different dimensions of time and temporalities and considers how time politics and temporal tensions affect childhood conditions. The article particularly explores children's lived experiences of the temporalities embedded in migration politics concerning school and housing. The article argues that children's lived experiences of time and temporality may contribute to an understanding of how the time politics embedded in the asylum reception system and the resettlement affects the conditions of asylum childhoods and in turn has an impact on children's rights.

(Doing) belonging as technology of power: how the principle of ‘gender equality’ governs membership in Swiss society

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how the principle of gender equality informs politics of belonging in Switzerland. We propose to conceptualize ‘doing belonging’ as a technology of power and we examine how actors in (non-)institutional settings employ it as part of professional and personal action. The paper draws on two case studies: an ethnography of institutions in charge of Swiss naturalization procedures and a series of qualitative interviews with migrant descendants. It unpacks how individuals negotiate belonging in different social contexts that are marked by specific power relations. First, we reveal how ideas of gender equality shape the implementation of state policies in naturalization procedures by selectively assessing the candidates according to their national and assumed cultural background. Second, we show how naturalized individuals are doing belonging when confronting external ascriptions as being ‘gender unequal’. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of the role the principle of gender equality plays in politics of belonging enacted at a micro-sociological and individual level, thus illuminating the gendered underpinnings of migration politics.

Organising for System Change: “From the Sea to the City” and the Movement Ecology of Migrant Solidarity in Europe

AbstractThis paper engages with the relationship between dissident European mayors and the migrant solidarity movement in Europe after 2015. With the case study of the coalition “From the Sea to the City”, I examine how its members institutionalise mayors’ dissent at a transnational level through the International Alliance of Safe Harbours. Employing primary empirical data, the study finds that coalition members create a political sequence in four ways: developing a storyline and setting up a broad coalition of migrant solidarity; referencing mayors’ disruptive acts; nurturing counter‐imaginaries; and laying the foundation for further action towards transforming the instituted order of European migration politics. To conceptualise the empirical findings, I draw on concepts of political organisation. In this vein, the paper calls for an assessment of movement politics that goes beyond the belief that local disruptions will suffice to set in motion a progressive transformation of European migration politics.

Denigrating democracy: How electoral competition fuels xenophobia in Lebanon

When do electoral incentives encourage candidates to target immigrants with discriminatory rhetoric? I address this question through a novel dataset of refugee-related tweets by elites in Lebanon, the country hosting the most Syrian refugees per capita globally. I find that Lebanon’s 2018 election, the first under a new set of electoral rules, precipitated an increase in anti-migrant tweets. However, the electoral campaign did not affect candidates’ rhetoric uniformly, but rather fueled xenophobic discourses specifically among Christian candidates, whose voter base is particularly hostile towards refugees, and especially among Christians facing the fiercest electoral competition. This paper makes three contributions: theoretically, it elucidates the consequences of partisan competition for xenophobia; conceptually, it relaxes an assumption common in the ethnic institutions literature that ethnic composition is fixed over time; and empirically, it demonstrates how social media data can be harnessed for expanding a nascent literature on migration politics in the Global South.

Conflict, gender and ontological security-seeking between Eritrea and Tel Aviv

ABSTRACT The proliferating research in ontological security (OS) studies explores how irregular situations of ‘radical disjuncture’ remove the protective cocoon of routinised trust relations that enables the actors to ‘bracket out’ daily threats and dangers. Following this loss of trust, the actors perform a variety of OS-seeking strategies in their attempts to re-establish their lost trust in themselves and their surroundings. But how do disempowered actors in global politics, who suffer multiple marginalities and flee states that turn against their own citizens, seek ontological security (OS)? Focusing on Eritrean asylum-seeking women in southern Tel-Aviv, we rely on ‘thick’ ethnographic data to demonstrate how even when statist violence is the norm, the quest for OS persists in unexpected ways. Adding new insight to the growing research on trust and OS in international relations (IR) and security studies, the article exposes the multiple emerging OS-seeking strategies that thrive in the developing spaces of global politics, while shedding new light on the gendered politics of migration.

The politics of (un)counting international migration in Senegal and the Gambia

ABSTRACT Since the European ‘migration crisis’ in 2015, various actors in politics, media and science have called for better data as a basis to efficiently manage migration. This includes a rising demand for more reliable, timely and comparable statistics on the international movement of people, especially on the African continent. International Organizations (IOs) have responded by offering various forms of ‘capacity building’ to their member states. The article looks at the development of statistical knowledge production in Senegal and the Gambia, exploring how interventions by IOs have changed statistical data practices in West Africa. West Africa is a particularly interesting case because, until recently, most post-colonial states did not generate census or survey data on questions of international migration, citizenship or ethnicity. Drawing on recent works in Science and Technology Studies on the performative power of numbers and categories, the article argues that changing data practices have enacted multiple conflicting migration realities in West Africa. Looking at IOs’ epistemic interventions in Senegal and the Gambia, the article offers insights into the ontological politics of counting and categorizing migration in a post-colonial context. It also contributes to a better understanding of the co-production of statistical knowledge and programs of migration management.

Ideational Legacies and the Politics of Migration in European Minority Regions. By Christina Isabel Zuber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 208p. $90.00 cloth.

Ideational Legacies and the Politics of Migration in European Minority Regions. By Christina Isabel Zuber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 208p. $90.00 cloth.

Indentured archives and speculative futures in Singapore: A conversation with artist Priyageetha Dia

Priyageetha Dia is a Singapore-based transdisciplinary artist whose work brings together South-East Asian plantation histories, postcolonial memory, migration politics, and extractivism as it relates to both labour and data. The conversation focuses on submerged and speculative archives of indentureship in Dia’s work. Dia describes how specific strategies, such as layering archival images, embodying diasporic Tamil ritual, as well as incorporating CGI and 3D animation in her moving image installations create a counter archive of the histories and afterlives of indentureship in present-day Malaysia and Singapore.