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Paperwork has always been a central part of bureaucratic work. Over the last few years, bureaucratic procedures have become increasingly standardised and digitalised. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within welfare offices in Switzerland and Belgium, we reflect on the way evidence is constructed within social policy and cases built for or against noncitizen welfare recipients in order to show how paper truths are established and challenged. The focus on digital practices within public policy implementation highlights how it contributes to enhanced control mechanisms on the implementation level and how migration law continues to guide welfare governance for noncitizens. This allows targeting of the most marginalised groups, whose rights to access state support are institutionally impeded. Through database information flows, official forms, paper reports and face-to-face meetings, we further show how a hybrid form of bureaucratic work emerges, where direct contact with the client is still key, yet highly influenced by standardisation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although people with a migration background (MB) have more unmet mental health needs than the general population, patients with a MB are still underrepresented in mental health care services. Provider bias towards these patients has been evidenced repeatedly but its driving factors remain elusive. We assessed the moderating effect of the individual (e.g. age and ethnicity), interpersonal (e.g. healthcare provider trust), and organisational (e.g. perceived workload) factors on general practitioners (GPs) differential decision-making regarding diagnosis, treatment, and referral for a depressed patient with or without a MB. An experimental study was carried out in which GPs were shown one of two video vignettes featuring adult male depressed patients, one with a MB and the other without. Belgian GPs (n = 797, response rate was 13%) had to decide on their diagnosis, treatment, and referral. Analysis of variance and logistic regression were used to analyse the effect of a MB, adding interaction terms for the explanatory variables. Overall, we found that there were ethnic differences in GPs' decisions regarding diagnosis and treatment recommendations. GPs perceived the symptoms of the patient with a MB as less severe (F = 7.68, p < 0.01) and demonstrated a reduced likelihood to prescribe a combination of medical and non-medical treatments (F = 11.55, p < 0.001). Those differences increased in accordance with the GP's age and perceived workload; at an interpersonal level, we found that differences increased when the GP thought the patient was exaggerating his distress. This paper showed that lower levels of trust among GPs' towards their migrant patients and high GP workloads contribute to an increased ethnic bias in medical decision-making. This may perpetuate ethnic inequalities in mental health care. Future researchers should develop an intervention to decrease the ethnic inequities in mental health care by addressing GPs' trust in their migrant and ethnic minority patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family reunification is one of the main channels for migration to the EU, yet little is known about the skills and labour market trajectories of family migrants. Family migration continues to be seen within a gendered and binary paradigm of the male economic migrant and female dependent. Related policies disadvantage migrant women and limit their participation on the labour market in material and structural ways. While EU's Single Permit Directive gives family migrants immediate and unlimited access to the labour market, its efficacy is limited as highly skilled migrant women are a blind spot in existing infrastructure and integration policies. This paper studies how migrant women push back against being categorised as dependents and circumvent the penalty of family migration policies. Migration categories become key sites of negotiation as women opt to move as students, labour migrants, by acquiring citizenship or as temporary workers to gain better access to the labour market while accomodating familial roles. Findings highlight the need for disaggregated data on family migrants in terms of skill and education, and for data collection that can capture the dynamism of lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andalusian migration in the 1960's and 1970's was expanded in different parts of Europe, and has developed the presence of Flamenco dancing, playing and singing in many different countries. During two and three generations, Flamenco has been deeply enrooted also among people who did not have had any previous connection with the original migrant places. The presence of Flamenco has created an interesting cultural phenomenon in these countries that has not been totally studied. This paper is based on an ethnographic research in Brussels and Flanders, explores the details of the Flamenco culture in these places, and identifies the processes of heritage construction that takes place in this area. The paper looks into the ways that Flamenco artists use to legitimate themselves and to occupy the space in the settlement of this heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the reconstruction of social identity in which Polish pendulum migrants to Belgium engage, and pays specific attention to the civic components of this process. Social identity is here understood as an interactional, changing, and contextual phenomenon. Migration means being in a world in which neighbouring families and surrounding actors represent completely different cultures with different customs, traditions and lifestyles. The reconstruction of identity is an essential condition for adaptation and assimilation in the new place of settlement. This process of identity reconstruction, based on changes in stereotypes, is linked with the acceptance of pluralism as an important feature of the socio-cultural reality. The acceptance of a pluralist world brings migrants to a wider tolerance of diversity. This paper examines different circumstances of the processes mentioned in concrete empirical reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superdiversity, on the one hand, calls for new frames, concepts, and methodologies to deal with a fluid reality characterised by rapid (social) changes. On the other hand, we also have a need to broaden our scope beyond the heavy focus on the urban metropolis as the locus of superdiversity. With this paper I want to contribute to the research addressing these challenges by infusing existing research within Linguistic Landscape Studies with a semiotic and ethnographic perspective and add to our existing knowledge of superdiversity by focusing on a ‘small’ Belgian city called Ostend instead of a cosmopolitan world city with millions of inhabitants. I argue that ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis (ELLA) enables us to describe, quite accurately, rapid social changes in complex superdiverse neighbourhoods. Moreover, ELLA enables us to move beyond a mere synchronic picture of superdiverse neighbourhoods and sketch a ‘stratigraphy’ and a historical perspective on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration of Turkish guest-workers to Western European countries in the 1960s and 1970s laid the ground for the emergence of various transnational religious organizations. This paper examines transnational organizations of Turkish origin that gained major support and membership in their host societies. Drawing upon a case study on Turks in Belgium, it shows that in the last four decades these organisations went through various transformations depending on the dynamics in their respective immigrant communities, host societies and countries of origin. This essay captures the role and self-adaptation process of Turkish Islamic organisations vis-à-vis the changing environment both in their host countries and countries of origin. It focuses on two Turkish transnational organisations in Belgium: The Islamic Federation of Belgium (IFB) and the Turkish Islamic Foundation of Belgium (TIFB). This essay concludes that political structure in the countries of origin constantly induces transnational organizations to further adopt and position themselves according to changing circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life histories can often be reconstructed from administrative sources and other documents that report specific events, like birth, death, visiting a physician, applying for insurance, or using a service. In a "passive registration" system, individuals are not under continuous surveillance, and subjects are only known to be present when an event occurs. When individuals move out of the registration area without reporting their movements, the censoring times for those life histories are unobserved. This paper describes a new technique for imputing missing exit dates. Our approach uses information from other events (e.g. births, marriages, deaths) affecting the subject and closely related individuals to estimate the distribution of times between last observed events and (unobserved) exits from the registration area. We take into account differences related to age, sex, marital status, and past migration history. The method is tested on data from nineteenth-century Belgium in which exit dates are explicitly reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring migration dynamics associated with gentrification is particularly important in order to shed light on the nature and contested effects of such processes. Quite paradoxically, however, this aspect remains underinvestigated in the gentrification literature. This paper explores the migratory dimensions of gentrification in Brussels' historical core, hence offering a view from a city wherein current rounds of middle-class reinvestment of inner urban space operate under circumstances that partially contrast with those reported from more prominent global cities. Findings stress that educated young adults living alone and renting from private landlords are predominant among both in- and out-movers to or from Brussels' historical core, suggesting in turn that renting in a gentrifying area is for most of them associated with a transitional step in their housing career. In addition, findings indicate that displacement of vulnerable residents is a limited but actual constituent of the migration dynamics in Brussels' historical core and point to other harmful consequences of gentrification in the area. In Brussels, gentrification and its effects operate under circumstances associated with the preponderance of a poorly regulated private rental housing market in the city's inner neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the matrimonial and reproductive behaviour of Italians who migrated to Belgium after the Second World War. Migrants were either already married, or later became married, to other Italians. Among the children of migrants, men equally chose Italian or Belgian wives but women tended to prefer Italian partners. Italian-Belgian marriages were more frequent among the better educated groups. Family size is smaller among migrants marrying after migration and in heterogamous marriages. Significant differences in birth intervals are found when marriage occurred before or after migration, between generations, and between homogamous and heterogamous marriages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]