Recent Studies Of Migration Research Articles

Paradoxes of Mobility by the Sea: Water as a Site of Threat and Rescue in the Exodus Story

ABSTRACT The Exodus story is one of many migration stories in the Hebrew Bible, composed of various experiences of expulsion, deliverance, hospitality, and alienation. The current study relates the topic of migration to water and, more specifically, how rivers, streams, wells, springs, and seas are simultaneously life-enhancing, life-challenging, and life-threatening for people on the move. Reading Exodus with water as its lens shows how the story has an inherent ambiguity that gives rise to a plurality of interpretations related to composite experiences of threats and rescue, thirst and nourishment, death and survival. Decisive for the various interpretations of the story is a question of perspective. An option for the oppressed, drowning, rescued, thirsty or nourished is a matter of definition from, for instance, Egyptian, Midianite, Canaanite, and Israelite points of view, male or female, or from the perspective of the Nile, the fish or the sheep. In this contribution, I will show how the Exodus story can shed light on the current topic of migration and how recent migration studies might bring new perspectives to the ancient story. Both instances concern questions of belonging and alienation, in which bridges and barriers are involved.

Circular visualisation of historical migration in England in the long eighteenth-century

Migration is a central component of both individual life-courses and macro-level demographic systems. In the absence of population registers and other surveillance systems, however, it is often difficult to measure. This is especially the case in historical populations. Compared to measures of fertility, nuptiality and mortality, then, migration processes are rather less studied. Recent studies in the English historical context have challenged long standing theoretical constructs concerning the relationship between migration and modernisation; gender and distance travelled; motivation for movement and the very nature of the movers themselves. Using a set of marriage registers for a large, agricultural county, this study explores intra-county migration among a predominantly young population over the period 1700 to 1836. The proportion of migrants is explored as well as the distance between ‘home’ and ‘marriage’ parishes. For perhaps the first time, chord diagrams are deployed for historical English migration data to visualise inter- and intra- regional/district migration. Although there are numerous limitations concerning the scope of the sample and the study, the evidence presented here broadly accords with recent studies of migration in pre-industrial England; and shows the potential to both use circular visualisation and exploit large scale samples of marriage registers to gain a further insight into a particular type of historical migration.

Introduction to the Special Issue

Introduction to the Special Issue Yvonne Ivory (bio) and Ed Madden (bio) In In a Queer Time and Place (2005), Judith (Jack) Halberstam argued that “part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description [ . . . ] has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (1–2). Queer uses of time and space can operate “in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (1). Halberstam suggests that we consider queerness beyond the merely sexual to understand queer identity as a mark of “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” (1). Elsewhere, David Lloyd has argued, in Irish Times (2014), that Irish culture is marked by “layered time”: haunted by unfinished pasts that may resist capitalist logic and historical time. In the call for papers, we asked: how might these insights be thought together? Queering Ireland 2017, the conference upon which this special issue is based, was a joint event— the nineteenth annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference, and the fifth in a series of Queering Ireland conferences. In 2009, the first Queering Ireland conference was held at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, bringing together a small international contingent of Irish studies and sexuality studies scholars. Queering Ireland 2011 was held in Cork, Ireland, and focused on activism and activist communities, a felt absence at the 2009 conference. Queering Ireland 2013 moved to Buffalo, New York, with a focus on diaspora. The 2015 conference, focused on queer politics, was held in Dublin in August of that year, the perfect time and place for thinking about the relation of queer politics to neoliberalism and [End Page vii] normative identity politics, given the passage of the marriage equality referendum in May, the first successful national vote on marriage equality in the world. Over four international conferences in three countries, Queering Ireland has remained small, which has encouraged a rich and developing conversation. The conference has always included activists and performers alongside academics. Also consistent has been an ethos of collaboration and support and a special attention to the needs of graduate student scholars and activist-scholars outside the academy. The 2017 conference was the first to include a session on dance, and the collaboration with the University of South Carolina’s Comparative Literature conference facilitated a broader conversation on sexuality and citizenship. The conference took as its theme Queer Times, asking that participants think about strange temporalities, queer life schedules and narratives, eccentric economic practices, as well as issues of age and movement sustainability. How can queer times help us to understand Irish times, we asked? What can queer times say about the representation and politics of marriage, about the intersections and disjunctions of queer and feminist politics? How do we think about queer time across borders, nations, communities? How can queer time reframe economic crisis, austerity politics, the biopolitical, and narratives of nation, economy, culture, and family. How can the theoretical work on queer time by Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Heather Love, José Esteban Muñoz, Kathryn Bond Stockton, and others, enrich our understanding of Irish history, literature, and culture. We asked that participants consider such topics as: queer and trans temporalities (queer life narratives, legibility, and limitations), queer futurity and a queer political imagination, queer methodologies and temporality, the relation of the body to time, temporality and narrative (histories and counter-histories, secret histories, cause and effect, duration, chronology), memory studies (trauma, commemoration and public memory, queer nostalgia), generational differences and continuities, HIV/AIDS, and archives and archival work. (University of South Carolina archives staff put together a small exhibit of queer and Irish materials from the University of South Carolina Hollings Library, Special Collections.) We also asked that participants think about the relation of queer time to citizenship, as migration studies and sexuality [End Page viii] studies have developed a rigorous and multi-faceted account of the relation of sexuality to citizenship, from the sociological overviews of gay and lesbian cultures by Jon Binnie to more recent studies of migration, sexuality, and citizenship by Eithne Luibhéid, Jasbir Puar, and others...

Investigating the differential mobility experiences of Chinese cross-border students

Recent migration studies have adopted the lens of mobility to examine the stratifying effects of border policies, but few investigate the differential mobility of migrant families and children. This paper aims to contribute to the migration literature by considering the interplay between border policies, family configurations, and differential mobility. We apply the lens of differential mobility to the experiences of Chinese cross-border pupils – young child migrants with Hong Kong permanent residency who reside in Shenzhen, China, and cross the border to attend school. We begin by describing shifts in Hong Kong’s border and immigration policies since 1997, which have created a typology of families differentiated by mixed status, citizenship rights, and mobility. We then turn to four case studies of students with unequal border-crossing experiences to elucidate how border control constrains or promotes family mobility and perpetuates inequalities.

Lifecourse perspectives on immigration

The lifecourse perspective examines individual life histories in order to understand how prior events, social and economic conditions, and individual characteristics influence decisions and events over time. The lifecourse approach emphasizes the connection between individuals and the historical context in which their lives take place. This approach has its origins in Thomas and Znaniecki’s pioneering studies (1918–1920) of the migration and adaptation of Polish peasants in Europe and the United States (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958). Their work examined how the lives of Polish peasants changed over time within social, economic, and cultural contexts. In recent years, the lifecourse perspective has been used to study how events earlier in life—such as schooling or teenage experiences—affect later decisions and events, such as childbearing, marriage and divorce, and retirement. In early studies in the 1930s and 1940s, longitudinal studies of individuals followed children or adults only for a few years. Generally, this early work was interested in the sequence of social roles, such as childhood socialization, becoming married, or transition to parenthood—a process that demographers called life cycle studies or the study of key transitions in individual lives. Studies dealing with the life cycle were particularly prominent in family demography (Glick 1988), as evidenced by the large number of publications dealing with family trends, religious and racial intermarriage, social-economic changes and family stability, changes in age at first marriage, and the prevalence of divorce in the 1950s and 1960s. Recent studies in family demography demonstrate the continued usefulness of the life cycle for studying such topics as cohabitation outside marriage, one-parent families, gender preferences in children, nofault divorce, divorce among children of divorce, and stepfamilies. Other researchers, notably at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Human Development in the 1950s, realized that the study of single individuals oversimplified the lives of people, who were interacting with others and were entrenched in a broader historical context. As longitudinal studies developed—in ways discussed below— life cycle theory was expanded to what is now called lifecourse perspective. Although the early use of a lifecourse perspective dealt with migration, very few recent studies of migration have explicitly employed a lifecourse approach. In June 2010, the Committee on Migration and Immigration of the Population Change and Lifecourse Strategic Knowledge Cluster1 organized a workshop at the University of Montreal to explore the value of a lifecourse perspective on immigration. This workshop included ten papers that dealt with a variety of immigration topics. Six papers from that workshop have been revised for publication in this special issue of Canadian Studies in Population.

Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 (review)

Reviewed by: Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 Marilyn Barber Chilton, Lisa —Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. 240. Agents of Empire is a welcome contribution to the rapidly growing field of studies in gender and imperialism. The title aptly conveys the main analytical focus of the book. Lisa Chilton concentrates on the network of women who worked to promote and control female migration from Britain to Canada and Australia between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s. In particular, the British Women's Emigration Society (BWEA), the Girls' Friendly Society (GFS), the Colonial Intelligence League (CIL), and their Canadian and Australian associates are the central interest. Chilton perceptively assesses the motivations, strategies, and struggles for power of the women emigrators who asserted their agency in building the empire. The female migrants who were recruited to form living links of empire are marginal figures in the book, appearing mainly in chapter 4, where Chilton explores the significance of their published correspondence with the emigrators. Throughout the book, Chilton explains clearly how she draws upon and seeks to extend or challenge the literature on gender, culture, and imperialism. Considering the theoretical linking of discourse and power, she shows how reform-minded women emigrators were able to manipulate narratives of sexual danger to claim control for women as protectors of female migrants. Similarly, Chilton applies an understanding of sexually charged discourse regarding space and place to develop how the emigrators wanted to transform "unsafe" public spaces for single female migrants into domesticated safe environments. The threat shifted from initial concerns regarding sailors or fellow passengers to a moral panic concerning an organized white slave trade and subsequently even included the danger posed by polygamous Mormons in Utah. By contrast, the construction of safe passage discourses that emphasized the importance of maternal authority in the close management of vulnerable female migrants remained constant until the 1920s. Chilton challenges some assumptions in the historiography. Recognizing that emigrant letters were solicited and edited by the publishers for their own purposes, she convincingly claims that the letters nonetheless reveal a more complicated range of relations than has often been assumed. Some emigrants might exert agency through resistance or short-term tolerance, but others sought to benefit emotionally or practically through extended involvement with an imperial family of women. Chilton herself makes assumptions that need to be queried when she challenges Julia Bush's claim that female imperialism was dominated by a small group of elite women. Highlighting the important work of Ellen Joyce, Adelaide Ross, and Grace Lefroy, Chilton argues that the efforts of such middle-class women were critical to the success of female emigration societies. She observes that Joyce and Ross were the wives, then widows, of Anglican clergymen and that Lefroy, who never married, was a clergyman's daughter. This brief reference is not sufficient to establish the class position of these key women. Anglican clergy might have status above middle class, and women, especially in the higher social echelons, continued to draw [End Page 234] their social standing from their birth families as well as their husbands. Bruce Elliott, who has used genealogical methods to study migration, has noted that Ellen Joyce's appellation "The Hon." indicates she was the daughter of a peer and that her brother, the Sixth Baron Dynevor, lived in a castle on the family's 10,000-acre Welsh estate. He also found that Grace Lefroy was niece to Sir J. H. Lefroy, Governor of Bermuda and administrator of Tasmania, and that Adelaide Ross was descended from a wealthy merchant family and had two sons who were knighted, one of whom, Sir Denison Ross, was the first director of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and head of the British Information Bureau in Istanbul. Thus all three women potentially could derive assurance and recognition from family connections that would place them in a very different social position than the wife or daughter of a local vicar. Agents of Empire adopts the transnational approach of recent migration studies that use comparative analysis to investigate the complexities...

Recent Migration Studies in Turkey

This book review presents a collection of five books from the Migration Series of Istanbul Bilgi University Publishing, all of which are reflecting different level of analysis within the framework of different theoretical backgrounds on recent migration studies. Of course, these books are also illustrating the current research trends and methodologies used and applied in the recent Turkish migration studies. Migration Studies Series are one of the prominent categories of the Istanbul Bilgi Un...

Migration, common property, and communal labor: cultural politics and agency in a Mexican village

Abstract This article examines the politics of migration in an indigenous Oaxacan village (Mexico), and finds that the village acts, with measured success, to shape the timing and rhythm of migration. Villagers regard migration as necessary yet problematic. Migration provides income for village families yet undercuts traditions of community service and disrupts the integrity of local development networks that link the community to NGOs, state bureaucracies, and product markets. As a consequence, villagers engage in a cultural politics of negotiation and contestation that moulds both the meanings of migration, and the village social practices that regulate migration. Regulation operates via the setting of norms for village communal labor participation: those who do not undertake assigned tasks (cargos and tequios) face loss of usufruct of communal lands. This finding of strong sending community agency is contrasted with recent migration studies that emphasize the agency of migrant networks and transnational spaces. The paper presents a case study of migration that examines the exercise of community agency via collective labor participation, and the study concludes by calling for a greater analytical focus on the cultural politics of sending communities.

MIGRATION: RAVENSTEIN, THORNTHWAITE, AND BEYOND

Over one hundred years have passed since Ernst Georg Ravenstein published his “Laws of Migration.” This paper addresses the question of how these laws have withstood the test of time. Ravenstein’s 1885 paper also includes a map of “Currents of Migration,” not mentioned in the text, which this article examines for its impacts on the study of migration. Warren Thornthwaite (1934) also compared migration to currents, but did not pursue this analogy in subsequent work. Others have used similar terminology, and examination of more recent migration studies suggests that they may yield new laws.

The Flight Behavior of Migrating Birds in Changing Wind Fields: Radar and Visual Analyses

This paper examines the influence of atmospheric structure and motion (principally winds aloft) on the flight behavior and altitudinal distribution of migrating songbirds. Bird migration data that I gathered using surveillance radars operated by the United States National Weather Service and the Federal Aviation Administration and a vertically directed fixed-beam marine radar mounted on a mobile laboratory are analyzed in relation to winds aloft. Migrating birds appear to fly at altitudes where winds will minimize the cost of transport and assist movements in seasonally appropriate directions. When migratory flights occur at altitudes that are higher than usual, a significant correlation exists between the altitude of densest migration and the altitude of most favorable wind. Lower altitudes may be favored over slightly more favorable winds at much higher altitudes. Radar data on the flight behavior of migrating birds in the vicinity of frontal systems is also examined. The flight strategies of migrants (fly over the front, change the direction of flight, or land and terminate the flight) differ depending on season and the “thickness” of the front. Recent migration studies that are related to atmospheric structure and motion are summarized and related to atmospheric processes operating simultaneously at vastly different spatial and temporal scales.

The Role of Migrant Stock and Lagged Migration in the Settlement Patterns of Nineteenth Century Immigrants

FOLLOWING the seminal work of Nelson (1959), recent studies of migration have emphasized the role of prior migrants in influencing the settlement patterns of subsequent migrants. Nelson hypothesized that the new migrant is more likely to receive information about those regions populated by relatives and friends,' and that he is more apt to receive temporary accommodations and to feel more at home in those areas. Therefore, it is anticipated that new migrants will be attracted to those destinations inhabited by earlier migrants from the same region of origin. Greenwood (1969, 1970), Vedder and Gallaway (1972), and Levy and Wadycki (1973) among others have attempted to account for these and effects by including a migrant stock variable in their explanatory models. In general, these authors have obtained positive and highly statistically significant coefficients on the migrant stock variable. The proper interpretation of these results, and of the migrant stock variable, however, is not a settled matter. Migrant stock may emerge as a regressor from either of two models of the migration process. It may represent the influence of family and friends or it may capture a partial adjustment mechanism. Further, it may introduce multicollinearity into the statistical results. The main elements of these issues were raised by Laber (1972) in his comment on the Greenwood papers. Laber argued not only that Greenwood inadvertently estimated a lagged adjustment but also that on the basis of his (Laber's) model Greenwood's estimates obtained incorrect algebraic signs. At issue then is whether the alternative models are representative of the migration process. The uncertainty regarding the role of migrant stock is largely due to its correlation with other explanatory variables. Broadly, migrant stock is the sum of all past gross migration less deaths and secondary migration of the earlier migrants. Migrant stock, therefore, is itself a function of all those factors which influenced the earlier migration. As a result it may act as a proxy for lagged explanatory variables. Further, to the extent that current values of the other independent variables are correlated with their lagged values, migrant stock will also be correlated with these current explanatory variables, possibly resulting in serious multicollinearity. Omission of the migrant stock variable, on the other hand, may result in specification bias as well as in the loss of information regarding the family-friends effect. Discussion of the interpretation and role of migrant stock has been primarily in terms of the consistency of Greenwood's model, and in terms of the statistical problems of specification bias and multicollinearity. As a result, the original interest in the family-friends effect was soon obscured. Greenwood, for instance, after briefly discussing the rationale for using migrant stock, devotes much of his theoretical evaluation to econometric questions.2 Following Nelson, Greenwood demonstrates that omission of the migrant stock variable in empirical work will, because of its relationship to the determinants of prior migration, cause the parameter estimates to overstate the true effect of the variables. Thus, interpretation of Received for publication September 26, 1975. Revision accepted for publication May 10, 1976. * The authors thank Raouf S. Hanna and Walter J. Wadycki for the helpful comments and suggestions they have made on earlier drafts of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Western Economic Association Conference, June 26, 1975. Responsibility for remaining errors and omissions, of course, rests with the authors. 'The information could be of a discouraging nature rather than encouraging. However, the current presence of the prior migrant in the destination region seems to increase the likelihood of the information being positive. 2This is true of both the 1969 and 1970 papers.

Some statistical problems in migration analysis

Although the migration of population in the United States has been of interest for some time, there seems to be considerable variation in results from studies of the quantitative structure of migration behavior. This leads to confusion over proper policy actions and forecasts. We believe a large part of the problem is that there are important econometric shortcomings in recent studies of migration which use aggregated cross-section data. We will concentrate on only four sources of difficulty in recent empirical studies: (I) a-priori specification i (2) internal consistency; (3) lagged responses; and {4) simultaneous equations bias. Other problems are present which can result in variations in the results of different studies. The type of data which are now available have quite different c l a s s e s of m i g r a n t s agg rega t ed into to ta l f lows, the t r u e flow of m i g r a n t s is not r e c o r d e d fo r r e a s o n a b l y s h o r t pe r iods of t i m e , and the r e s e a r c h e r of ten has l i t t l e o r no choice of reg ion . Much work is a lso needed to o v e r c o m e t h e s e p r o b l e m s , but s i nce they a r e not usua l ly c l a s s i f i e d u n d e r the sub j ec t of i den t i f i ca t ion and spec i f i ca t ion , we wil l not t r e a t t h e m d i r e c t l y in th i s p a p e r . Our focus in th i s p a p e r is on the p r o b l e m s of obta in ing ef f ic ien t unb ia sed e s t i m a t e s of the p a r a m e t e r s of the under ly ing s t r u c t u r e . Mos t m i g r a t i o n s tud ies a r e c o n c e r n e d wi th bo th F o r e c a s t i n g and s t r u c t u r a l e s t i m a t i o n at the s a m e t i m e . Thus , whi le s o m e of the th ings done in the s tud ies m a y be a p p r o p r i a t e fo r F o r e c a s t i n g , we a re c o n c e r n e d wi th the i m p l i c a t i o n s of t h e i r work fo r advancing our knowledge of the s t r u c t u r e of m i g r a t i o n b e h a v i o r .