Temporary Migration Research Articles

Atrapados / trapped in space and time: protracted precarity in the homing of Argentine middle-class temporary migrants in Perth, Australia

ABSTRACT In the past twenty years, Australia has re-directed efforts to diversify the recruitment of temporary labour and students, attracting middle-class migrants from new sources, such as Latin America. This paper explores how structural, political and socio-economic contradictions in countries of origin and destination shape Argentine migrants’ everyday experiences of trying to create a new home. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper builds on work on temporary middle-class migration to show how a ‘homing’ lens contributes to refining our understanding of how precarity can become protracted for middle-class migrants moving from the Global South to the Global North. The findings demonstrate that feelings of detachment from their past home but difficulty planning a future due to their temporary status exclude such migrants from the ontological stability necessary for homing. Using metaphors of ‘walls’ and ‘skidding’, we show how spatial and temporal precarity discourage emotional and material investment in their present homes.

Migration View on the Demographic Development of the Almaty City

To characterize the demographic development of a particular region, it is necessary not only to determine population growth, but also to expand the subject area of statistical demography and conduct research to identify patterns of natural renewal of the structure of the age composition of the population. For the completeness of the study, methods of statistical and mathematical analysis were used. Official long-term statistical data for Almaty were collected and analyzed. A mathematical model was developed to determine the share of influence of each factor. It is substantiated that the demographic development of the city of Almaty cannot be characterized as a process of reproduction. Causeand-effect relationships of population growth from migration processes are revealed. It is noted that in the city of Almaty there were demographic phenomena typical for large cities of the modern world. It is substantiated that the growth of the population of Almaty does not have a positive impact on the demographic development of the country, but leads to negative consequences (high population density of the city, infrastructure, traffic jams, temporary labor migrants) of the development of the metropolis and the country as a whole. The significance of the results of the study lies in the recommendations for taking measures to limit the movement of internal migration in Almaty and aimed at natural demographic reproduction.

Floods and Sustainable Development: The Case of Nsanje District

A section of Nsanje District has been experiencing floods for over a decade and was declared a flood prone area the same time (GoM, 2006). Therefore, firstly, this research seeks to understand how the communities that live in the flood prone areas perceive their vulnerability to floods and how some of them have been coping with the floods since 1952, just over 6 decades. The overall aim of the research was to understand the impact of floods on sustainable development and how communities living in flood prone areas perceive their vulnerability to floods and climate variability, to investigate the power dynamics at household and community level and to explore the complexities associated with local adaptation programs in the flood prone areas. This research contributes towards framing vulnerability based on the perception of the different groups of people that are vulnerable to climate variability and have experienced environmental changes throughout their everyday lives. The communities living in the flood prone areas perceive floods as part of their livelihood. The communities have experienced floods for over 5 decades and have been implementing adaptive strategies to help them cope with the floods during this time. Temporary migration is one of the effective adaptive strategies that the communities living in the flood prone areas implement during floods. This research also presents evidence that the complexity of local adaptation arises from the political, economic, social, cultural and institutional factors and processes that interplay within the households and communities. Sometimes, these same factors and processes work against effective local adaptation at both household and community level. However, Engle (2011) claims that adaptive capacity of a nation or community that is affected by climate variability is influenced by the institutions, management and governance. The findings presented in this thesis illustrate that at household level, women are not given a chance to contribute to household resilience to climate variability because of cultural values that suggest that women are subordinates and that therefore only men have the authority to actively participate in such developmental activities.

A Note on Climate Change Impact and Adaptation Strategies in North Kordofan State, Sudan

The study objectives were to explore the climate changeimpacts experienced based on the perception of rural households and toexplain the adaptation strategies for rural households. Primary data werecollected using structured interviews, key-informant interviews and fieldobservations. The secondary data were collected from reports. Randomsampling technique was applied to select 200 forest-dependenthouseholds in Um-Rawaba locality (100 households) and SheikanLocality (100 households) in North Kordofan. The data were analyzedusing the SPSS statistical package. Descriptive statistics was used toidentify dominant responses between households. The study resultsrevealed that the households influenced by local climate change based ontheir perceptions. The main adaptation strategies by the households wereassets selling, saving, reliance on social relations, feeding on wild plants,wild fruits, wild animals; and temporary migration.

Epidemiology of chronic multimorbidity and temporary migration in a rural South African community in health transition: A cross-sectional population-based analysis.

In sub-Saharan African settings, the increasing non-communicable disease mortality is linked to migration, which disproportionately exposes sub-populations to risk factors for co-occurring HIV and NCDs. We examined the prevalence, patterns, and factors associated with two or more concurrent diagnoses of chronic diseases (i.e., multimorbidity) among temporary within-country migrants. Employing a cross-sectional design, our study sample comprised 2144 residents and non-residents 18-40 years interviewed and with measured biomarkers in 2018 in Wave 1 of the Migrant Health Follow-up Study (MHFUS), drawn from the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System (AHDSS) in rural north-eastern South Africa. We used modified Poisson regression models to estimate the association between migration status and prevalent chronic multimorbidity conditional on age, sex, education, and healthcare utilisation. Overall, 301 participants (14%; 95% CI 12.6-15.6), median age 31 years had chronic multimorbidity. Multimorbidity was more prevalent among non-migrants (14.6%; 95% CI 12.8-16.4) compared to migrants (12.8%; 95% CI 10.3-15.7). Non-migrants also had the greatest burden of dual-overlapping chronic morbidities, such as HIV-obesity 5.7%. Multimorbidity was 2.6 times as prevalent (PR 2.65. 95% CI 2.07-3.39) among women compared to men. Among migrants, men, and individuals with secondary or tertiary education manifested lower prevalence of two or more conditions. In a rural community with colliding epidemics, we found low but significant multimorbidity driven by a trio of conditions: HIV, hypertension, and obesity. Understanding the multimorbidity burden associated with early adulthood exposures, including potential protective factors (i.e., migration coupled with education), is a critical first step towards improving secondary and tertiary prevention for chronic disease among highly mobile marginalised sub-populations.

Seroprevalence of hepatitis B infection and active immunization in Ecuadorian Amazonian indigenous people: A cross-sectional study

Introduction: Hepatitis B surveillance is crucial. We proposed to describe the seroprevalence of Hepatitis B infection and the associated factors among Ecuadorian Amazonia communities. Outline: A serologic cross-sectional study was carried out in subjects over two years old. We classified seropositivity according to the Centers of Diseases Control criteria and recorded sex, age, temporary migration, sometime Hepatitis B in their life, and previous vaccination. Results: Out of 215 participants, 50.0%, 8.8%, 1.9%, and 1.4% were susceptible, immune due to natural infection, chronic infection, and early acute HBV infection, respectively. Of the 8 people who reported having ever been diagnosed with Hepatitis B, none showed chronic or acute infection and one was positive for immunity due to the vaccine. HBsAg was found in 3.3% (95% IC 0.9-7.0) and was higher among those who migrate 7.7% (p-value 0.04). 16.3% (95% CI 11.6-21.4) was immune due to HBV vaccination. Among the 58 participants who declared having received the vaccine, 20.7% presented post-vaccine immunity. Implications: Participants who should have benefited from the vaccination campaign (susceptible) are those with the lowest immune response due to vaccination. To assessing the burden of viral hepatitis in people living in marginalized areas and guide preventive measures is mandatory.

Temporary Migrants' Claims to Democratic Inclusion: A Review Essay on Valeria Ottonelli and Tiziana Torresi's : The Right Not to Stay

Temporary Migrants' Claims to Democratic Inclusion: A Review Essay on Valeria Ottonelli and Tiziana Torresi's : The Right Not to Stay

Agency and Temporary Migration: Afropolitan Challenges

Agency and Temporary Migration: Afropolitan Challenges

Accomodating the Life Plans of Temporary Migrants

Accomodating the Life Plans of Temporary Migrants

Accomodating the Life Plants of Temporary Migrants

Accomodating the Life Plants of Temporary Migrants

A Non-Remedial Case for a Temporary Migration Package?

A Non-Remedial Case for a Temporary Migration Package?

The production of precariousness and the racialisation of Pacific Islanders in an Australian horticultural region

ABSTRACT Over the last ten years, temporary migration schemes in the horticultural sector have received increasing attention in the Global North. The often precarious conditions of such work have been recognised, however, little attention has been paid to horticultural workers with migration backgrounds who have gained permanent residency or citizenship in the host countries. Ethnographic fieldwork with Pacific farmworkers and their families with various migration statuses in Australia, including seasonal workers, irregular migrants, and permanent residents, revealed that precarious employment conditions in horticultural work impact Pacific people across and beyond different legal statuses, challenging the notion of a clear correlation between irregularity and precariousness. This includes the children of migrants with Australian citizenship who are often employed as casual farmworkers and find it difficult to secure any other work. We argue that their experiences are fundamentally related to their position as ‘racialised’ workers. This paper sheds light on this racialisation of farmwork and its implications for the experiences of Pacific people as residents and workers in regional Australia.

Canada’s Temporary Labor Migration Policy: The Case of Mexican Seasonal Agricultural Workers

The article analyzes Canadian temporary foreign worker migration policies through the prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), one of the largest and oldest seasonal worker programs in Canada’s postwar immigration policies, whose main participants are seasonal farmworker migrants from Mexico. The article outlines the premises of Canadian labor migration policies and presents a brief history of Mexican migrations to Canada. Most importantly, however, it focuses on the functioning of SAWP, presenting the program’s positive impact as well as its shortages and failures through the lens of experiences of its Mexican participants. The summary of this text proposes certain reforms and changes to SAWP that might help eliminate some of the program’s deficiencies.

The ‘contract’ and its discontents: Can it address protection gaps for migrant agricultural workers in Canada?

AbstractCanada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and considers the possibilities and limitations for ameliorating it. It outlines formal recommendations that the article co‐authors presented during the annual Contract negotiations between Canada and sending states in 2020. The article then explains why these recommendations were not accepted, situating the negotiation process within the structural context that produces migrant workers' vulnerability, on the one hand, and limits the capacity of representatives of sending and receiving states to expand rights and offer stronger protections to migrant farmworkers, on the other hand. We argue that fundamental changes are required to address the vulnerability of migrant agricultural workers. In the absence of structural changes, it is nevertheless important to seek improvements in the regulation of the programme through any means possible, including strengthening the Contract.

The export of know-how at the (semi-)peripheries: the case of Yugoslav–Iranian industrial collaboration and labor mobility (1980–1991)

ABSTRACT The paper explores experiences of temporary labor migration that entailed Yugoslav export of know-how (highly skilled knowledge and expertise) between 1980 and 1991, a result of industrial collaboration between Mining and Smelting Combine Bor, a state-owned copper-processing ‘giant’ in former Yugoslavia, and the biggest copper company in Iran, National Iranian Copper Industries Company. Based on interviews with individuals engaged in the Yugoslav project, supplemented by analysis of documents and historic newspapers from that period, the paper analyzes everyday practices of managerial bureaucratic improvisations and improvisations at work. The article shows how such improvisations helped overcome excessive and rigid Yugoslav socialist bureaucracy and made Yugoslav entrepreneurial capitalist ventures possible. Moreover, it argues that the export of know-how was constitutive of silent acceptances of reproduction of capitalist relations, which helped consolidate the process of liberalization of the socialist market in the late 1980s. We argue that such temporary labor migration and the often improvised work carried out by the Yugoslav workers cannot be seen as a resistance or alternative to the Western/Northern hegemonies. Rather, we argue that such practices were facilitators of the capitalist ventures at semi-peripheries.

Nammakam, wasta and the cultivation of differential mobility capital between South India and the Gulf

This ethnographic study, which draws from critical mobility studies and puts it in a productive conversation with migration infrastructures literature, foregrounds the cultivation of and access to differential mobility capital by Rayalaseema inhabitants chain migrating to Kuwait. By fostering embodied and affective relations of trust with different set of actors throughout the migration trajectory, temporary migrants instrumentalise namakkam (trust) and wasta (connections), in both the region of origin and destination, to build their highly variegated mobility capital. In this way, they sustain a transregional licit, if illegal, visa-centered migration infrastructure. Migrants use their mobility capital to buy visas, prolong their stay and embed themselves in the migrant lifeworld of Kuwait, but its full value is realizable back in their region of origin, the socio-economically intractable Rayalaseema, to attain upward social mobility. Requiring considerable social, economic and affective investments over a long period, mobility capital is highly uneven and asymmetrical and often reproduces gendered, caste-based and racialized hierarchies even as it becomes a vehicle for social and spatial mobility for some migrants.

Staggered Inclusion: Between Temporary and Permanent Immigration Status in Quebec, Canada

Pathways to permanent residency among immigrants in Canada have become more often preceded by a phase of temporariness. Research on these processes indicates that a two-step immigration regime is gaining momentum. However, we know little about those who qualify for permanent residency and experience a transition to permanent status inland. This article examines such experience of encountering federal and provincial administrative borders from within Canada. The analysis is based on 43 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted in the province of Quebec between 2016 and 2020 with temporary migrants in the process of transitioning to permanent residency or having recently acquired it. The article argues that migrants find themselves in spaces of ambiguity and in-betweenness regarding their transition process, access to rights and life perspectives over a period during which their status, as a lived experienced rather than strictly an administrative category, is neither temporary nor permanent. It sheds light on how bureaucratic processes that throw people into precariousness produces different shades of inclusion, not only based on the type of residency permit, but on the staggered transition process resulting from Canada’s immigration multi-governance itself. Furthermore, it calls for a rethinking of the permanent-temporary resident binary that structures Canada’s immigration policies.

The immigration scholarship of Stephen Castles

The immigration scholarship of Stephen Castles

Gendered effects of migration on social organization and smallholder production in Oubritenga Province, Burkina Faso

Shifting and intensifying migration flows are causing profound changes in household structures, livelihood portfolios, and rural landscapes worldwide. Yet, migration trends, including who migrates within the household, whether migration is permanent or temporary, and the relationship the migrant maintains (or not) with the household, have strong geographic particularities. In certain regions of sub-Saharan African, outmigration dominated by able-bodied men from their rural homesteads is causing a redistribution and redefinition of responsibilities, with women, children, and elders who remain on the farm negotiating ways to adjust to changing household demographics. In our study, we aim to understand migration trends and their impacts on the organization of farming households and their production systems in Oubritenga Province, in the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso. To do so, we draw on case study data acquired using mixed-methods in 12 villages in Oubritenga Province. We analyze how rural outmigration affects gendered knowledge and decision-making, labour organization and availability, investments in agricultural production systems, and future aspirations for household members who remain on the farm. We find that, in our study site, migration is highly economically-motivated, and underpinned by environmental and socio-cultural push factors. A shift toward temporary migration is shaping seasonal labour availability on the family farm, and although outmigration is overwhelmingly undertaken by young men, we do not find that a ‘feminization of agriculture’ is occurring. Instead, migrating and non-migrating men maintain most influence in decision-making, and temporary migrants contribute labour to household agriculture when they return to their farms during the wet season. We argue that the high rates of male outmigration in this context do not imply a fracture from agriculture nor a ‘feminization of agriculture’. Instead, outmigration offers potential for complementarity with and indeed new investments in the family farm, while deeply entrenched gender norms and cultural expectations raise questions about the sociocultural and intra-household outcomes of diversifying livelihoods through migration.

THE MARGINALIZATION OF PASTORAL COMMUNITIES COHABITING WITH THE ASIATIC LIONS: A CASE OF MALDHARIS LIVING INTHE PROTECTED AREAS OFGIR FOREST, INDIA

The wildlife conservation approach that insists on making forests free from human activity brings a drastic change for communities residing inside the forest risking their very existence. This ethnographic study of pastoralists, cohabitating with Asiatic lions inside the wildlife-protected area, explored the influence of restrictions imposed on their lives. Data was collected through participant observations, informal discussions, and in-depth interviews. Ordered and social arena maps as described in the situational analysis approach by Adele Clarke, were used for analysis. The social arenas of State, Temporary migration, and Market were found to shape the lives of the Maldharis. Their life after the declaration of the protected area was characterized by economic insecurity, lost identities, loss of networks, dignity, and honor. The multiple and multifold vulnerabilities of the marginalized Maldharis, who made forests their homes for generations, warrant an integrated approach towards conservation.