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In this special issue on transnational urbanism, we are interested in accounts of transnational mobility that are attentive to everyday practices and geographical emplacement. Eschewing narratives of trouble-free movement by disembedded actors, consideration is thus given to the mundane and situated efforts by which people make their lives across international borders. We also wish to amplify the social scientific register of transnational migrants by considering groups whose mobility has thus far been little examined. In this introductory paper we elaborate these arguments, while also summarising the content of the substantive papers which follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study highlights how policy makers address issues of communication rights of migrants. In order to do so we conducted a qualitative content analysis of recent international migration policy papers – the UN 'Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration' (2018) and the 'European Agenda on Migration' (2015) published by the European Commission. Our analysis was informed by the model of 'media capabilities' – which are the opportunities the media enable people to do or be – that helped us analyze which media capabilities were promoted by policy makers and what roles they attributed to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the realization of migrants' capabilities. Our study reveals that out of seven media capabilities only two were fully addressed – 'to be informed' and 'to be secure' – other capabilities were either only partly addressed ('identity and belonging') or completely ignored ('voicing', 'identification and imitation', 'civil participation', 'pleasure and entertainment'). The policies, as such, disregarded most of the media capabilities for migrants and ignored the role of ICTs as media capabilities enablers. We conclude that policy makers negated migrants' ability to realize capabilities, thus hindering their 'right to communicate.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of skilled migrants moving from the Global North to the Global South has been increasing in recent decades. This paper develops and employs a capital-mobility framework to analyze empirical evidence about the new international migration of skilled U.S. migrants to the Pearl River Delta Region of China. Guided by the literature on im/mobility and capital, this paper asks the following questions: What affects skilled U.S. migrants' mobility to and from China? How do they experience the dynamics of voluntary and involuntary immobility in China? Drawing on 58 semi-structured interviews, we found that the level of capital accumulation and its transferability and convertibility influenced migrants' mobility and immobility. In addition, the global outbreak of Covid-19 facilitated mobility for some while hindered mobility for others. This study discusses the differences between North-to-South and South-to-North skilled migration and conceptualizes im/mobility as a continuum experienced by skilled migrants during their migratory trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores options for the better integration of economics into interdisciplinary research on migration. Papers include work by economists and other social scientists, showcasing both the extension of economic models to incorporate concepts from other disciplines, as well as work in sociology and political science that draws on economics. Of particular interest are models of networks, social capital and cumulative causation, as well as analyses using the rational actor model outside of economics. We conclude that, while there are substantial benefits to interdisciplinary cooperation, economists tend to resist full integration, preferring to incorporate insights and concepts from other social sciences without revising their core theoretical tenets, especially the commitment to utility-maximising agents. Nonetheless, dialogue between the disciplines can encourage researchers to clarify and refine their chosen research approach. Moreover, the co-existence of diverse approaches to social explanation produces a far richer and more variegated body of knowledge on migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how the interplay of parties' preferences, political institutions and electoral competition affects the liberalisation of immigration policies. It joins a growing body of research that focuses on the role of domestic factors in shaping immigration policies. While several studies point to the important role of partisanship and the activation of public opinion, they fail to provide a clear mechanism that takes into account differences in parties' preferences as well as the institutional context they act in. By adding two crucial factors to the analysis, this paper presents a new framework for liberal change in the field of immigration politics. First, institutional veto points determine if left-of-centre parties can reform policies according to their preferences. Second, the degree of electoral competition and the politicisation of immigration issues affect how susceptible political parties are to the anti-immigrant sentiment in the population. A time-series cross-section analysis of 11 countries from 1980 to 2006 shows that left-of-centre governments are more likely to pass liberal reforms, but only if they are not facing an open veto point. Moreover, increased levels of electoral competition coupled with a politicisation of the immigration issue reduces the likelihood of liberal reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents a guide for the contributors of the "Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies." Submission of articles through electronic mail messages; Call for papers related to social sciences; Total number of keywords supplied by authors.

This paper considers some of the impediments to interdisciplinary integration in migration theory, focusing on the problem of combining economics and sociology. It argues that neoclassical economics has a number of methodological advantages, deriving from its elegant theoretical structure and its aptitude for measuring and predicting individual behaviour. However, these features are contingent on a number of simplifying assumptions about social action: namely, a commitment to methodological individualism, a uniform conception of rationality, and a theory of individuals as utility-maximising. These assumptions become untenable in the case of migration decision-making, which partially accounts for the failure of economics theories adequately to explain and predict migration flows. Instead of rejecting such approaches, however, the article suggests how economics methodologies can be usefully applied within interdisciplinary research: either as a tool for modelling patterns of migration decision-making already observed through more qualitative methodologies; or as a means of testing and ruling out certain hypotheses about migration decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last five decades, immigration has profoundly transformed the population of metropolitan New York, long divided by race and class. The almost-forgotten 'underclass' debate established that New York was the nation's capital of concentrated poverty, which grew significantly worse during the 1970s and 1980s. Though more recent data show that New York has achieved a remarkable turnaround since 1990, most probably associated with immigration, it remains a city of economic extremes and stubbornly high poverty. Concern about where new immigrants—and their children—might fit into this matrix of urban inequality led several leading social scientists to hypothesise that some members of the second generation would be downwardly mobile. To investigate this possibility, in 1999 and 2000, the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York (ISGMNY) surveyed 3,415 young people aged 18 to 32 years, from five immigrant and three native-born racial and ethnic backgrounds, about their life trajectories. This paper conducts an analysis of the contextual effects of the neighbourhoods in which respondents grew up on their later experiences in terms of educational attainment and labour market success. Using OLS and HLM modelling, we find small but consistent and theoretically interesting effects. In particular, growing up in a poor neighbourhood has a negative effect on later outcomes, while growing up in a black neighbourhood does not, once poverty is taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science research has produced evidence of welfare chauvinism whereby citizens turn against social policies that disproportionately benefit immigrants and their descendants. Some policymakers advocate welfare chauvinism as a means to incentivize fast labour market integration and assimilation into the mainstream more generally. These contested arguments about integration incentives can hardly be extended to the case of hospital treatment of an acute COVID-19 infection. On that premise we conducted a pre-registered online survey experiment among a representative sample of the Danish population about healthcare chauvinism against recent immigrants and Muslim minorities during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic of spring 2020. Our results show no evidence of blatant racism-driven healthcare chauvinism against acute COVID-19 patients with a Muslim name who were born in Denmark. However, we do find evidence of healthcare chauvinism against patients with a Danish/Nordic name who immigrated to Denmark only a year ago. Moreover, healthcare chauvinism against recently-immigrated COVID-19 patients doubles in strength if they have a Muslim name. Our findings thus suggest that there is general reciprocity-motivated welfare chauvinism against recent immigrants who have not contributed to the welfare state for long and that racism against Muslims strongly catalyses this form of welfare chauvinism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy and recent scholarly understandings of settlement have both neglected continued movements of international migrants post-arrival in their destination country. The concept of settlement appears tied to outdated sedentary social science approaches that recent mobilities scholarship challenges. Rather than contrasting internal movements with settlement, we argue settlement is better understood as a social process involving spatial movement as well as stasis. The conceptual value of settlement can be enhanced by understanding it as entailing temporally, relationally, and politically bound practices of spatial mobility and immobility. These settlement mobilities are long-term processes often involving multiple localities. Drawing on a qualitative study of international migrants and key stakeholders residing in and near a rural town in South Eastern Australia, we examine how multiple moves are a regular part of post-migration journeys of settlement. While settlement already includes core concerns with new arrivals' establishment of employment, family, and place-based community, our findings show that those with migrant and refugee backgrounds experience these multi-locally, as intersecting factors in decision-making and practices of moving between cities and rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most migration research is focused on migrant experiences after mobility and settlement. We argue that empirical researchers would benefit from studying howcognitive migration, the narrative imagining of oneself inhabiting a foreign destination prior to the actual physical move, influences migration behaviour. This article notes a gap in our current understanding of theprocessby which individuals decide to cross international borders and offers an agenda for remedying this. The interdisciplinarity of migration research has not fully extended to social psychology or cognitive social sciences, where a dynamic research agenda has examined human decision-making processes, including prospection and the connections between culture and cognition. The study of socio-cognitive processes in migration decision-making has been largely overlooked because of the after-the-fact nature of data collection and analysis rather than an aversion to these approaches per se. We highlight a number of strategic findings from this diverse field, provide examples of migration scholarship that has benefited from these insights, and raise questions about the sides of migration process that have received insufficient attention. A more nuanced understanding of prospective thinking—imagining potential futures—can shed light on the classic puzzle of why some people move while others in comparable situations do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that an emerging ‘mobilities paradigm’ within the social sciences reproduces an analytical gaze that is predominantly fixated on the movement of people across national borders. This privileging of state borders and categories in many of the mobilities studies should alert us to the extent to which it brings novelty to our examination of human mobility in the world. By analysing the flow of migrant workers from rural China to Israel, this article demonstrates how new insights regarding the importance and meaning of crossing national borders can be generated by looking at mobilities through the eyes of those involved in them, allowing state categories and national borders to prefigure in the analysis to an extent and form that are relevant for migrants. The article depicts the mobility-ridden life of Tseng, who comes from a small village in Fujian province and who, after migrating internally in China several times, decides to go to Israel. Highlighting the importance of unequal capital accumulation in shaping human mobility, the article questions some taken-for-granted assumptions about the motivation and situation of those who exercise international mobility; it particularly upsets a prevalent association in migration studies between physical and socio-economic mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the school performance of migrants and peer group effects in different national schooling environments. Using data from the international OECD PISA test, we consider social interaction within and between groups of natives and migrants. Results based on social multipliers suggest that both native-to-native and migrant-to-migrant peer effects are higher in ability-differencing school systems than in comprehensive schools. Thus, non-comprehensive school systems seem to magnify the prevailing educational inequality between students with a low parental socio-economic migration background and children from more privileged families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disciplines of economics and political science have a good deal to offer each other in the study of migration policy, but economists have until recently mostly ignored the ways in which politics constrain migration markets, and political scientists - although giving considerable credence to economic aspects of migration - have not always pursued these matters systematically. We consider economic ideas drawn from theories of labour markets, international trade and public finance and link them to political analyses stressing the role of states, institutions and interest groups. A review of literature incorporating these perspectives suggests the promise of a political economy of migration, but also indicates the considerable work that remains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the research optic proposed in Transnational Urbanism to take stock of the field. Social relations 'from the middle' are conceived in two distinct ways in the field. Transnationalism 'from in-between' refers to actors who mediate between transnational actors 'from above' and 'from below'. 'Middling transnationalism' refers to the transnational practices of middle-class social actors. Both are useful and potentially complementary. Research on transnational urbanism is aware of the socially situated subjectivity of human agents while also providing a way to study spatially distanciated social relations. Research has begun to attend to the emplacement of mobile subjects and the embodiment of their everyday practices and mobilities. Future studies need to attend to the power-knowledge venues by which states, institutional channels and other actors broker mobile subjects' cross-border interconnectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the establishment of the Ethnobarometer Programme, a network of social scientists producing independent and research-based reports on levels of racism, xenophobia and ethnic conflict in selected countries of Central, Eastern and Western Europe. Kinds of ethnicity and conflict; Examples in Eastern Europe of encounters involving territorial minorities.

Focuses on the concept of ethnicity and nationality. Views of Walker Connor on ethnicity and nationality; Contribution of rational choice theory to the understanding of ethnicity and nationality; Absence of a distinction between nation and ethnic group.