Temporalities Of Migration Research Articles

Discordant temporalities of migration and childhood★

AbstractChildhood, though it is understood cross‐culturally in very different ways, always has a distinctive temporal framework, since children's growth and development cannot be undone. Yet, in many contexts, the times of childhood have become discordant with the rhythms, timescales, and temporal controls of migration. Focusing on the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article explores the contemporary clash between the temporalities of migration and childhood. Children face separations and ruptures in shared time due to Malaysia's migration regime, and experience the temporariness of migrant life differently to their parents. Educational exclusion leads to temporal discontinuities between Malaysian‐citizen and migrant childhoods, and racialized understandings of national time emphasize the negative potentiality of migrants’ children. Overall, the article argues for the importance of considering the interaction between the temporal conflicts of capitalism and forms of natural time such as childhood.

Time, space and health: using the life history calendar methodology applied to mobility in a medical-humanitarian organisation

ABSTRACT In the medical humanitarian context, the challenging task of collecting health information from people on the move constitutes a key element to identifying critical health care needs and gaps. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), during its long history of working with migrants, refugees and mobile populations in different contexts, has acknowledged how crucial it is to generate detailed context-related data on migrant and refugee populations in order to adapt the response interventions to their needs and circumstances. In 2019, the Brazilian Medical Unit/MSF developed the Migration History Tool (MHT), an application based on the life history method which was created in close dialogue with field teams in order to respond to information needs emerging from medical operations in mobile populations. The tool was piloted in two different contexts: firstly, among mobile populations transiting and living in Beitbridge and Musina, at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border; and, secondly, among Venezuelan migrants and refugees in Colombia. This article describes the implementation of this innovative method for collecting quantitative retrospective data on mobility and health in the context of two humanitarian interventions. The results have proven the flexibility of the methodology, which generated detailed information on mobility trajectories and on the temporalities of migration in two different contexts. It also revealed how health outcomes are not only associated with the spatial dimensions of movement, but also with the temporalities of mobility trajectories.

“I Can't Do Anything but Wait”: The Lived Experiences of Children of Transnational Migrants in Lombok, Indonesia

Abstract This article contributes to debates about the temporal and affective implications of migration in Southeast Asia by presenting child-focused research concerned with children in rural Lombok, Indonesia, who have been “left behind” by their transnational migrating parents. The article explores the unpredictability of the temporality of migration and how parental absence can be indefinite or permanent, especially for parents who follow undocumented channels of migration. The article explores children’s lived experiences of waiting for their parents to return, often with no contact, and how multiple modes of waiting have become a distinctive part of children’s lives within transnational migrant communities.

(Im)Possible selves in the Swiss labour market: Temporalities, immigration regulations, and the production of precarious workers

This paper uses a temporal perspective to explore the relationship between immigration regulations and the production of precarious workers. More specifically, I draw on the concept of possible selves to analyse biographical interviews with regard to the changing imaginations of possible labour market outcomes among refugees in Switzerland. Building on a growing body of literature exploring the times and temporalities of migration and border control, I shed light on how these imaginaries are co-constituted by multiple temporal regulations that are mobilised by different arms of the immigration system and often conflict with refugees’ visions of progress. In this context, I show how individuals tend to downgrade their expectations of working life and accept precarious working conditions in order to minimise these conflicts. By focusing on refugees’ experiences of waiting for, obtaining, and changing status, I further illuminate how these conflicts are not automatically resolved by moving forward within the periodised immigration system. Consequently, I argue that the identified practices of downsizing, postponing, and redirecting possible selves not only serve as strategies to resolve the gap between desired self and immediate reality but also need to be understood as expressions of extended waiting.

Enforced temporariness and skilled migrants’ family plans: examining the friction between institutional, biographical and daily timescales

ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of the legal rhythms and temporalities of migration on the specific temporalities of family life, under conditions of enforced temporariness. It apprehends enforced temporariness as a mode of governance infused with chronopolitics, which – by producing specific experiences of time – deprives migrants of the right/capacity to lead their family lives according to their plans and aspirations. Through a focus on highly qualified third-country nationals holding temporary visas in Belgium, it shows that these experiences of time result from the friction between the institutional timescale of administrative procedures and policies, and migrants’ everyday and biographic timescales. Starting from the administrative timescales of highly-skilled migrants, the paper describes the existing Belgian migration legislation, with a focus on administrative procedures. It then explores the specific experiences of time those procedures generate, by highlighting different kinds of friction migrants experience as well as their effects. It presents some of the ways these migrants cope with them, and concludes by highlighting the fruitfulness of applying a friction lens to the study of intersecting timescales.

Geographies of migration I: Platform migration

This first report on research about the geographies of migration examines the sociotechnical platforms that enable migration and shape its outcomes. I begin by examining two areas of recent inquiry that analyse (1) commercial actors that form migration industries and (2) the broader infrastructures that underpin and direct migration. To elaborate on these insights, I also discuss observations of multinational (stepwise) migration as grounded evidence for the importance of sociotechnical systems in understanding the geographies of migration. Addressing platform migration reconfigures the spatialities and temporalities of migration, highlighting the diverse and distributed actors, networks and institutions generating, directing and constraining movement in the world.

La “política de la hostilidad” en Argentina: detención, expulsión y rechazo en frontera

Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar las transformaciones producidas en el campo de las políticas de control migratorio en el contexto argentino reciente. Se propone la noción de “política de la hostilidad” para caracterizar un modo específico de intervención política basado en la espectacularización, la expansión y la intensificación del control de las migraciones. Se sostiene que los principales cambios están relacionados con la reconfiguración del régimen de control de la “ilegalidad” migrante que ha tenido lugar a partir de intervenciones específicas sobre la detención, la expulsión y el rechazo en frontera. Con base en una metodología cualitativa que articula observación participante, entrevistas y diversas fuentes documentales, se analizan procesos, escenas, acontecimientos, intervenciones y conflictos vinculados específicamente con la detención, la expulsión y el rechazo en frontera. El análisis presta especial atención a la emergencia de nuevas espacialidades y temporalidades del control migratorio y fronterizo.

On the theoretical potential of ‘remittance houses’: toward a research agenda across emigration contexts

ABSTRACT Migrant houses in countries of origin, referred to as ‘remittance houses’, are a visible marker of emigration. Case studies from diverse geographic contexts have explored their functions. Unlike the surrounding built environment, these houses span the local and transnational realities of migrant lives, while being grounded in specific places. We argue, first, for the need to move beyond locally-oriented reifying descriptions of what is a global phenomenon; second, for the need to analyse migrant remittance houses as part of a broader agenda for unravelling the practical and emotional significance of ‘home’ in migration studies. The paper unveils the constitutive dimensions of migrant houses: their roles as symbols of migration; their significance as economic investments; their presence as physical structures necessitating follow-up locally; their function as second homes for holidays and reminders of (elusive) return migration. Researching remittance houses is a source of insights on questions of broader theoretical relevance, like the temporality of migration, the reach and sustainability of migrant transnationalism and the forms of cultural diffusion associated with it. This calls for a distinctive methodological agenda to advance research, based on a typology of transnational housing investments, which differentiates the locations, functions and rationales of migrant houses.

Introduction to the Special Issue: European youth migration: human capital outcomes, skills and competences

Human capital has been long an exceedingly important concept in migration research. Over time there have been attempts to provide more nuanced, and less economistic interpretations of human capital. Based on outputs from the EU Horizon 2020 project YMOBILITY (2015–2018) and two additional papers, this Special Issue seeks to advance this agenda further by addressing the complexities of the mobility of human capital. Migration problematises human capital assumptions due to challenges in transferring human capital across national borders. In this introductory paper we propose rethinking the human capital of migrants in a three-fold way. Firstly, we question the interpretation of skills and competences beyond the conventional divide of ‘higher-skilled’ and ‘lower-skilled’ through the concept of a ‘knowledgeable migrant’. Secondly, we probe deeper into an understanding of the transferability of skills in relation to ‘location’, exploring the possibilities and constraints to the transfer of human capital in different spatial contexts. Thirdly, we theorise human capital in terms of new temporalities of migration and the role these play in skill acquisition. We illustrate our novel theoretical thinking with selected empirical data, both quantitative and qualitative, on youth mobility in Europe.

Queer temporalities: The past, present and future of ‘gay’ migrants from India in Singapore

This article examines the temporal dimensions of migration trajectories by focusing on a small number of Indian migrants in Singapore who identify as gay. In particular it does so by examining the way ‘being gay’ factored into their decision to come to Singapore (the past), the way it plays a role in their ongoing trajectories (the present) and the way it gradually starts taking up a more prominent role in their plans for ‘the future’. Drawing upon queer migration studies as well as recent studies with a renewed focus on the temporalities of migration, this article argues that ‘queer temporalities’ need to be understood as doubly layered. On the one hand it relates to the im/possibility of a queer (migrant) future while on the other hand pointing at an issue a growing group of migrants in general are faced with: the way rights, opportunities and ‘futures’ are queered from mainstream society. While so far the attention with reference to this has mainly been focused on low skilled migrants who, as is the case also in Singapore, are often excluded from ever permanently staying on in their host nation, with the increasing fine-tuning of migration programmes, this article argues that we need to expand our attention to other groups of variously skilled migrants as well.

Migrant Domestic Workers as ‘Agents’ of Development in Asia

Temporary contract migration represents the predominant form of legal migration policy in Asia. With its rationale of the filling of jobs and provision of income-generating opportunities, it is linked to the migration–development nexus debate. This paper focuses on the impact of migrants’ agency as development actors within a transnational sphere. The mainstream migration–development nexus debate and policy prescriptions imagine diaspora groups as the ideal conduit for grassroots-driven development initiatives. While ‘diaspora group-led’ initiatives assume long-term, if not permanent, migration, temporary migration creates a dynamic that is fundamentally distinct. Temporality of migration, as mandated by bilateral agreements and promoted by global institutions in Asia, shapes migrant agency and migrants’ development aspirations in essentially different ways, but temporary contract migrants are nevertheless constructed as the ‘agents of development’ at the macro level of politics and policies, while receiving limited research attention. This paper analyses temporality, migrant agency and the migration–development nexus debate in relation to female domestic workers who epitomise the feminisation of migration and constitute the largest number of newly hired migrants in many key source countries in Southeast Asia. This introduces a gender dimension to our discussion of temporary migration in its link to migrants’ developmental agency.

“The Ending Is Not an Ending At All”: On the Militarized and Gendered Diasporas of Korean Transnational Adoption and the Korean War

Through an analysis of two recent films, Deann Borshay Liem's In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010) and Jane Jin Kaisen's The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger (2010), this essay argues that Korean transnational adoption is constituted by militarized and gendered diasporas that mark the ongoing presence of the US military in South Korea. The analysis highlights the ways in which Borshay Liem's and Kaisen's films make visible how such diasporas, linked to the larger diaspora produced by the Korean War, unsettle linear narratives of migration, arrival, and settlement. The failures and contradictions of the rescue narrative illuminate how the very problems that transnational adoption putatively resolves—those of displacements wrought by war, global inequality, uneven development, reproductive injustice, severed kinship, and gendered racial hierarchy—loop back in disturbing and unending proliferations. The militarized and gendered diasporas of Korean transnational adoption constitute a particular mode and temporality of migration whose specificities and complexities cannot be captured sufficiently via general tropes of immigration, refugee displacement, and adoption. The essay thus conceptualizes Korean transnational adoption as a militarized diaspora and gestures to the pervasive force of militarization as a logic that structures not only international geopolitical relations but also the intimate scales of adoptee kinships and subjectivity. Moreover, this militarized diaspora is also gendered, revealing a transnational and transgenerational economy of reproductive injustice for Korean women. The essay concludes with an analysis of how a regime of reproductive injustice is a significant and gendered biopolitical effect of the Korean War.

Temporalities of migration and reflexive ethnography

Negli ultimi decenni gli etnografi hanno faticato a trovare la metodologia di ricerca appropriata per studiare il nostro mondo altamente globalizzato. C’e stato, infatti, un intenso e proficuo lavoro che ha aperto nuovi ambiti ricerca. In questo articolo, vorrei esaminare una seconda dimensione che - credo - gli etnografi della migrazione dovrebbero prendere in considerazione: il tempo. Gli etnografi devono affrontare la coesistenza di piu beni temporali. Nell’articolo classifico tre diversi beni temporali in gioco nel processo di migrazione: indeterminazione, cronologia e convergenza. Mi concentro sull'Italia, come terreno di diversi progetti migratori e frangenti temporali e rifletto sulle implicazioni di questi diversi fattori e su cio che significa metodologicamente per gli studi antropologici. La ricerca sulla migrazione necessariamente invita ad altri luoghi e ad altri tempi, sia per quanto riguarda la messa in opera delle pratiche etnografiche sia per la produzione delle conoscenze. Secondo Fabian la sfida degli etnografi e quella di analizzare entrambi i dilemmi introspettivi: studiare la mobilita attraverso lo spazio-nazione e vedere come tale ricerca venga influenzata da altri luoghi, da altri tempi.