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EU containment and Tunisian domestic policies have produced a new, Black migrant, urban underclass. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork among Ivorian migrant women in Bhar Lazreg, a Tunis banlieue, this paper explores how the women navigate and negotiate everyday life. On the urban margins of society, forgotten and far from the border, migrants reinvent ways to keep moving. The paper suggests that their stuckness is still all about movement as encapsulated in the emic term bouger – akin to treading water, involving a constant motion to stay afloat, but without ever getting anywhere. Tension operates across many levels, between the physical, the temporal–spatial, and the existential. Embedded in this tension is a second emic term prison à ciel ouvert (open-air prison). Juxtaposing a space that feels carceral and limiting while simultaneously bursting with potential for movement, the paper contributes to the literature on immobility within mobility. But beyond that, the empirical findings show a far more complex reality, complicating the notion of transit. By exploring the tensions and entanglements between the emic terms it becomes clear that to understand spaces of transit it is essential to understand stuckness and movement as fundamentally intertwined, overlapping, and co-constitutive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars of migration have drawn our attention to the plight of children 'left behind' when their mothers migrate, children born to migrant women in destination countries have received far less consideration. In destinations such as Lebanon, migrant domestic worker employment – and right to residency – is governed by the kafala, or sponsorship, system which prohibits pregnancy and childbirth. Despite this prohibition, considerable numbers of migrant women do give birth, leaving them at risk of unemployment, visa and work permit cancellation, and 'illegalisation'. Compounding the situation, many mothers in this situation encounter substantial barriers to returning to home countries with their children. This paper draws on interviews with Ethiopian mothers living in Lebanon and other key informants, to examine the gendered and racialised structural, symbolic and interpersonal violence that governs the lives of these women and their children. We argue that the interlocking violence to which they are subjected results in the immobilisation of migrant mothers and their children, placing them at high risk of lifelong harm within a system that produces and reproduces global inequalities and im/mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature on older refugees has primarily focused on the experiences of those living in more developed countries in the global North. This paper examines later-life experiences in displacement settings and the global South by discussing the East Timorese case in West Timor, Indonesia. In considering how the ageing and forced migation nexus manifests in a Southern context, the paper argues that global, regional and local histories matter and profoundly shape older people's ageing and displacement processes. Specifically, they produce multiple gendered marginalities and possibilities relating to older persons' perceived (im)mobility to travel to their places of origin and the meanings they attach to place. Although East Timorese people's experiences of displacement and resettlement are diverse, the male perspective often takes precedence in scholarly and public discourse. This article thus zooms into older East Timorese women's experiences and how after over two decades of living in Indonesia, the conditions shaping their everyday lives remain deeply entangled and are negotiated within the gendered narratives of displacement and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Select research has indicated that widespread migration is catalysing the novel reimagining of eldercare and transformative changes in the local eldercare economy in the Global South. Yet research on ageing and migration from the South has largely focused on transnational care practices of providing emotional support and economic remittances. Drawing on ethnographic research among the privileged and affluent community of Syrian Christians of Kerala, India, I argue for a diverse and complex Southern reconfiguration of eldercare at the intersection of migration, which also includes 'market transfer' of proximate care services as reciprocal filial care. Further, the paper illuminates how specificities of migration, ageing and care are locally nuanced and shape diverse transnational care practices. In turn, transnational care strategies employed by the migrants to overcome distances transform the local eldercare economy and (re)produce class-stratified eldercare spaces. Through the study of a privileged community, the paper highlights the increasing marketisation of the eldercare landscape in the sending countries of the South and contributes to furthering diversified understandings of the ageing-migration nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine how migrant women make sense of their new positions in the labour market while drawing on and negotiating past meanings and experiences. I explore the individual biographies of legally privileged co-ethnic women repatriates from the former Soviet Union to Germany through a gendered perspective of work. These women found that the ethnic promise of being ‘real’ Germans given to them proved insufficient to access the labour market on equal terms, while their past Soviet socialisation led to struggles for recognition and marginalisation into low-status jobs. Although their labour-power is oftentimes devalorised, these women actively operationalise different memories of socialist work to reinvent themselves in a new context as worthy, resilient, and adaptable members of a capitalist society. Their stories of work reflect their present- and future-oriented life strategies and demonstrate how they relate different ideologies and systems of value, distant spaces and times in an attempt to challenge dominant discourses on human worth. By exploring individualised life strategies and gendered invocations of the past, this paper contributes to the discussion on post-socialist subjectivities, how they intersect with ambiguous socialist experiences and dilute the neoliberal project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslim women are often portrayed as submissive and oppressed, and blamed for a lack of political agency. At the same time, intersectional studies point out that Muslimahs manifest a pious critical agency while engaging in political activities. Yet, quantitatively and electorally speaking, less is known about gender differences in vote choices of Muslims, notably which candidates they support. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by examining the gendered preferential voting behaviour of Muslim minorities at the local elections of 2018 in the largest city of Belgium (Antwerp), based on an innovative analysis of combined demand-side exit-poll data with supply-side data on the candidate profiles. While our analyses show that Muslims vote more gender congruent and more religious congruent than non-Muslims, this is because male Muslims vote more for male candidates, more for Muslim candidates and more for the intersection of both of them rather than that female Muslims vote for one of their own. However, this does not mean that Muslim women are not gender sensitive or religiously conscious. Interestingly, Muslimahs do not differ substantially from non-Muslim women in gender congruent or religious congruent voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how spouses waiting in Turkey to be reunited with their partner in Europe experience border regimes and deal with the transnationalised discourses on 'marriage migrants' they encounter. It is based on the analysis of a single narrative interview, that of a woman taking German classes at Goethe Institute in Istanbul in order to pass the required language test. Like other respondents, she is confronted with negative gendered preconceptions regarding 'Turkish import brides'. Her boundary work involves mobilising alternative hierarchies in an attempt to discursively construct a different Turkey than the one generally represented: she draws on social class (positioning herself as a member of the highly educated, mobile and economically better off), socio-spatial units (focusing on her urbanity) and gender (experiencing 'modern' and equal gender relationships). The paper emphasises the importance of the socio-spatial context, here the classroom, where boundary-making takes place. It also provides insights into the effects of global spatial hierarchies on migrants and their alternative narratives, a dimension that can only be understood through a decentred analysis. The article contributes to studies on cross-border marriages by analysing the 'outgoing' side, a perspective still rarely addressed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates opportunities and obstacles refugee women face in establishment in rural areas. Drawing on ethnographic research in three rural municipalities in northern Sweden, including interviews with refugee women, local employers and educational staff, I analyse the women's space for agency and opportunities to use and capitalise on different resources in relation to the local labour market and belonging. Applying Bourdieu's conceptualisation of cultural capital, as read by Skeggs, I show that the women can capitalise on embodied cultural capital of feminine and ethnic caregiving. However, due to lack of the 'right' institutional cultural capital of educational certificates from Swedish institutions, and devaluation of foreign credentials and experiences, this is mainly in difficult-to-fill, unsecure jobs in the elder care or early childhood education and care sectors. The women's limited options and opportunities to 'enterprise themselves up' contribute to ethnicisation of care work in rural labour markets. Moreover, lack of mobility and key cultural capital (cars and driving licences) for work, education and belonging in both the local masculine culture of the remote rural areas and national gender equality culture further limit the women's space for agency and establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper forms the introduction to the Special Issue: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through the Gender, Migration and Development Nexus. This article takes a broad look at the changing dynamics of migration and development through the feminisation of globalised labour flows and the gendered experiences of categorisation by states and multilateral bodies, and the gender-specific vulnerabilities and outcomes of human mobility. We illustrate how a more nuanced approach to the SDGs that incorporates gender and migration is needed in order that policy and programming designed to achieve the 2030 Agenda is accurately informed and appropriately framed. In this paper and this Issue, we argue, that it is necessary to confront the SDGs with a deeper understanding of gender, migration and development in order to illuminate the interconnected globalised and transnational realities of gendered labour flows. With this aim in mind, we look to civil society participation and the role of the existing human rights architecture, as the key to ensuring that a deep, wholistic and ultimately universal application of the SDGs can be achieved addressing those populations whose rights to development have been undermined by dint of their migration or flight and applying a gender analysis to our understanding of migration and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how material-based and identity-based concerns influence views on immigration in Japan. Our analysis, based on in-depth interviews with 28 local residents and public and policy opinion leaders conducted in 2015 in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, found widespread opposition to immigration with the exception of the immigration of care workers. General opposition to immigration stemmed from identity-based concerns, while openness to and support for the immigration of care workers was related to material-based concerns. Our findings suggest that while the identities approach to understanding anti-immigration sentiment has explanatory power in Japan, material-based concerns can, when sufficiently strong, override identity-based concerns in a phenomenon we call 'pragmatic divergence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines adult soccer leagues in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area and the level of social capital that exists through participation in these ethnically diverse social groups. Given soccer's global appeal, the communities that form around soccer are distinctly international, and include native-born players, as well as newer, foreign-born community members. In this case study, over 600 soccer players in two different leagues completed online surveys, and 20 players participated in three different focus groups. Results show that both bridging and bonding social capital develops within these communities as over 90% of respondents made new friends and socialised off the field. In addition, 9.5% of respondents reported getting a job or job interview as a result of participation in soccer. The study also uncovered barriers to participation. Women felt less welcome among the more diverse and less regulated pick-up soccer community. While the cost of formal league membership could exclude individuals who were less willing/able to pay for play. In areas experiencing demographic shifts due to increased immigration, however, the support of adult leagues (especially low or no cost ones) could improve trust and reciprocity across racial and ethnic divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic mobility is increasingly perceived worldwide as a key to academic excellence, career advancement and upward social mobility. Drawing on long-term qualitative fieldwork data, this paper interrogates the impact of academic mobility in reconfiguring class and gender identities among students, early professionals and their families from Hong Kong and Indonesia who have studied or received further training in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. This analysis problematises the crude ‘academic mobility → upward social mobility’ formula and considers international academic mobility as a contextual, dynamic and multi-directional process. Through this process social positions and identities of the moving individuals and families are negotiated in an on-going manner as migrants insert into, depart from and re-insert into the various social milieus where their mobility trajectories touch ground. Narratives of interviewees illustrate the complexity and contradictions in class and gender configurations as students move across borders. They show how these individuals are inserted in contrasting social positionings, and experience how a particular social class or gender position carries different connotations. The paper concludes with a few conceptual and methodological reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the north-north migration of care workers within the industrialised world. While care migration has traditionally been conceptualised as a phenomenon of women moving from the global south to the global north, a growing number of youths are now providing care and domestic services in other industrialised countries as au pairs. Their ambiguous legal status, the rhetoric of being 'part of the family' and limited language proficiency compound their vulnerability. We argue that the current Australian government's policy can be interpreted as a deliberate strategy to increase the supply of care labour and lower the care costs. This policy signifies a shift from commodification of care which involves formal transactions of wage and labour provision to what we call 'pseudo-familialisation of care' which pushes care provision back to the family where the actual work is shouldered by 'pseudo-family members' who are neither family members nor regular workers. The institutional environment for au pairs from the global north in Australia is more fragile than that for migrant care workers from the global south. The lack of institutional assistance from governments and civil society organisations on both sending and receiving ends as well as their limited co-ethnic community support place them in a vulnerable situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two recent developments in immigration law in Western liberal democracies: security exclusions and forced marriage provisions. It aims to consider how both of these settings are influenced by a pernicious Islamophobia and by gender. And, of course, by the intersection that creates a gendered version of Islamophobia. The overarching aim of the work is to consider whether and how human rights arguments are likely to be effective in immigration law. The work proceeds by developing the ideas of 'unknowability' and 'unintelligibility' as two ways to describe how Western law responds to Islam, and in so doing, contributes to Islamophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a case-study of Somalis in Norway, this paper examines older male refugees' seek for recognition in transnational social fields. Drawing on Honneth's theory of intersubjective identity formation and Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, it explores the ways in which they renegotiate respectable ageing masculinities within four spaces of recognition: socialisation in habitual spaces, volunteer work and associational involvement, return visits, and return migration. Habitual spaces constitute spheres where older men may gain respect for their traditional knowledge. Somali associations represent spaces allowing men to enact the prestigious role of oratorical advisors, which requires that they reinterpret this role for the new context. 'Failed' men negotiate social status through return visits or return migration. Older Somalis assert masculinity through ideas of class, Islam, and notions of male authority. Yet, generational-, gender-, clan-, and class divisions within the diaspora – combined with ethnic minority position- challenge the (re)construction of respectable masculinities. This article shows that a life course perspective is essential for understanding migrants' (re-)construction of gender identities, as well as their transnational mobility and adaptation strategies. By focusing on the neglected field of ageing migrant masculinities, this article contributes to the emerging scholarships on transnational ageing and migrant masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are clear differences in labour force participation rates of women of immigrant origins, both first and second generation, across a range of European countries. Many of these differences, particularly for women with low participation rates, are not fully explained in existing studies. I argue that to better understand differences in labour force participation, and the role of 'culture' in shaping them, we need to take account of the context provided by previous generations of women. While mothers may transmit expectations regarding participation directly to their daughters through intergenerational transmission and childhood socialisation, mothers-in-law may also be important in indirectly influencing their daughters-in-law through their sons' behaviours and attitudes. Using the UK large-scale household panel study Understanding Society, the contribution of this paper is to investigate the 'mother-in-law effect' in the UK. I shed light on the extent to which partnered women's participation is affected by the work status of their partner's mother. I find a positive association between a working mother-in-law and female labour force participation, which remains sizeable after accounting for individual-level characteristics. I also show that Pakistani and Bangladeshi women's participation is more sensitive to the work status of their mothers-in-law than that of other groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of Asia’s key hubs for transient workers, Singapore’s migration regime creates particularly gendered streams of labour, especially among lower skilled occupations, as is apparent in two key sectors – domestic work and construction work. Drawing on surveys with Bangladeshi construction workers and Indonesian domestic workers based in Singapore, as well as in-depth interviews with each group, this paper examines gendered issues of temporary labour migration, precarity and risk, as they occur against a backdrop of migrant indebtedness. In this paper, we argue that migrant indebtedness occurs along a spectrum that ranges from less visible, or what we call ‘silently’ incurred forms of debt, through to more ‘resonant’ types of debt that are acquired upfront and thus more readily quantifiable. Using this spectrum of migrant indebtedness, we aim to complicate debates about debt-financed migration by underscoring the ways in which notions of debt and unfreedom can be imbricated with both constraints and opportunities for migrants’ agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous studies of migration, family, and gender have shown that migration is not only an event that changes family life, the change itself is a gendered process. How migrant women develop strategies to cope with challenges posed by either their own migration or their husbands’ migration has been widely studied. However, how migrant men adjust and change their care practices and domestic roles to accommodate challenges brought about by migration to their family lives has not been as extensively explored. Using interview data gathered from male rural-to-urban migrant workers in South China, this paper fills this gap by studying male migrants’ agency and masculinity through the concept of masculine compromise. Masculine compromise delineates how migrant men strive to respond to changing family circumstances triggered by migration while maintaining the gender boundaries that underpin their dominance within the family. As a concept, masculine compromise underscores the material impact of migration on gender practices and family life; and the limited effect it has on gender attitudes and identity. Masculine compromise provides a feminist lens to analyse the complex effect of migration on changing masculinity and gender relationships within the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immobility is to be complicated as a topic of study in research on human migration. This paper analyses different ways of staying put, investigating the motivations, degree of (in)voluntariness and associated narratives, to show how immobility is as complex a research category as mobility. It does so in the context of irregular male migration from a rural location in Andean Ecuador to the USA. This paper also focuses on the interactions between mobility and immobility. Families with migrant and non-migrant members are imbued with and affected by changing mobility–immobility dynamics. This paper explores such dynamics to facilitate the understanding of local sociocultural logic, where mobility and immobility are infused with specific meaning, while placing such dynamics within global regimes of (im)mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the everyday anti-racist practices of the female children of immigrants in Italy. We analyse two case studies: first, a group of Muslim young women in Italy who have publicly reappropriated what is popularly known as 'Islamic fashion'; and second, a group of young Afro-Italian women who meet both online and offline to share resources about the care of 'natural' Afro-textured hair. We argue that transnational feminist analysis can shed light on the complex ways that aesthetics and the female body are implicated in struggles for social and legal recognition in Italy among the so-called second generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past decades, most Western countries have curtailed low-skilled immigration and adopted policies encouraging highly skilled migration. Accordingly, the German government began in 2000 to initiate changes in policy and legislation to encourage skilled professionals particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-professions to take up employment in Germany. Although highly skilled migrants are privileged with regard to education, competencies, and abilities, the article argues that highly skilled migrant women’s transition into the labour market and their work performance are determined by the gendered and ethnicised conditions still prevalent in STEM fields. The paper thereby draws on qualitative interviews with highly skilled migrant women who migrated to the second largest city in Germany: Hamburg. The findings show that migrant women face a traditionally highly gender-segregated sector. Furthermore, they are confronted with ethnicised ascriptions that contribute to ‘othering’ processes, which impact their professional identity and slow down the transferral of their cultural capital. Yet, the majority of the interviewed women developed a strong local attachment and sense of belonging that fostered their social integration and counteracted experienced discrimination in the workplace. As a result they were less willing to uproot themselves again and thus contrast the popular image of being ‘birds of passage’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gendered Mobilities and Work in Europe is an interdisciplinary collection of papers that, together, analyse the gendered aspects of migration and the labour market in Europe. The empirical research presented in this special issue of JEMS incorporates labour market sectors designated as both high- and low-skilled and points to shifting gendered employment opportunities and working conditions for contemporary labour migrants. The papers demonstrate how both national and regional policy frameworks intersect with specific employment sectors and different typologies of migration to produce varied outcomes for male and female labour migrants even when employed in the same sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In tune with the fundamental shift in Germany’s skill-b(i)ased immigration policy since 2005, higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly becoming ‘magnets’ for a skilled migrant workforce. While ‘internationalisation’ is often understood as something to be celebrated and (further) accomplished, some observers speak of clear signs of discriminatory experiences among racialised and migrant academics. This is a new aspect, as social inequalities have by and large been considered in migration studies to be the sole terrain of labour mobility into less-skilled sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, abundant literature on gender and higher education shows that women academics have poorer access to career progression than men, demonstrating gender-based academic career inequalities. However, the insights generated in these two strands of scholarship have seldom been in conversation with one another. This paper takes stock of the lack of an intersectional perspective, focusing on citizenship and gender within HEIs as hiring meso-level organisations that are becoming increasingly transnationalised. It explores the intersectionality of citizenship and gender in accessing academic career advancement by examining three key career stages, that is, doctoral researchers, postdoctoral researchers, and professors, in two case-study HEIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vietnamese in Britain are a small and less visible community who remain largely unrecognised in wider society. For those born in Britain, constructing a Vietnamese identity and a sense of ethnic belonging is often rendered problematic due to a lack of inclusion in, and identification with, their local Vietnamese community. Instead, ‘return’ visits to Vietnam occupy a particularly important space in their narratives of ethnic authentification. Drawing upon the literature on migrant-homeland relations, this paper highlights the importance of divisions of gender, class and migration trajectories in understanding patterns of transnational participation and engagement among Vietnamese migrants. It is argued that British-born Vietnamese women are more likely to engage actively in their ‘return’ visits and make personal and emotional investments compared to their male counterparts whose visits remain largely symbolic. These differences are shaped by social class configurations and gender expectations both in Britain and Vietnam. However, while ‘return’ visits provide more effective ethnic authentification strategies for women than men who experience a more compromised masculine status and negative experiences in the ‘homeland’, paradoxically their class differences with the majority of the population weakens and questions this authenticity leading to an ‘arrested’ achievement of ethnic authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is a cluster of grassroots movements and networks of networks: the Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers (ATKI) based in Hong Kong. By using Kelly's [2007.Filipino Migration, Transnationalism and Class Identity(ARI Working Papers Series, 90). Singapore: Asia Research Institute.] typology of four dimensions of class (i.e. position, process, performance and politics) as a framework of analysis, the article shows that Indonesian migrant domestic workers can hold multiple class identities at various positions in transnational political space(s). Through organising in these particular spaces, Indonesian migrant domestic workers express agency, reformulate their gender roles and identify themselves as a transnational social class. This social class identification is based on their awareness of the transnational nature of the exploitation that migrants experience but is also framed within a wider global perspective of ‘root causes’ such as neoliberal policies and unjust trade agreements. By not accepting the class position ascribed to them as domestic workers, these migrant organisations chose to define their social class by performance and generate political capital. The article adds the notion of positionality to the intersectionality approach, that is, the way social class intersects with gender, economic status/occupation, ethnicity and transnational status might differ depending on the position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between migration and gender roles has received increased attention in recent decades but most of the literature has focused on transnational migration while the relationships between transnational and internal migration, and gender roles and internal migration have not been widely studied. In this paper, I analyse internal migration as a ‘transborder experience’. I argue that indigenous women from Zegache who engage in internal migration to Mexico City pose greater challenges to ‘traditional’ gender roles in their community because their experience as single young women navigating Mexico’s capital and their reliance on female social networks allow them to obtain social legitimation by claiming migration experience and courageousness. I contrast migration to Mexico City with transnational migration. Although transnational migration challenges, to some extent, existing gender roles, women from Zegache who migrate transnationally often do so as part of couples and within gendered social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promotion of British cultural values to which all citizens can and should sign up to has taken on unprecedented urgency and momentum in political and public discourses. This paper explores the meanings and values attached to contemporary forms of Britishness from the perspective of migrant refugee women, and outlines the conflicting interpretations and expectations of different projects of feminine citizenship. Drawing on empirical research it suggests that gendered migrant identities and values are formed and performed in relation to real and imagined understanding of British (white) heterosexual women and can be seen, at least in part, as asserting moral value and distinctiveness. The women invoked migrant cultural pride in the form of caring, community, close family ties and heterosexuality to claim recognition and resist the lack of moral value ascribed to migrant identities. However, this is achieved through a re-inscription of gender identities in which heterosexuality and sexual restraint become technologies of regulation and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the dichotomies which has affected migration studies for some time is that between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ movements. Yet there is a growing realisation of the importance of understanding how the two overlap. Focusing on the Albanian Roma, this paper adds weight to the argument that a ‘mixed migration’ approach is necessary to understand a number of migratory situations which do not neatly fit the forced/voluntary categorisation. The paper draws on empirical material collected through household questionnaires, in-depth interviews, group discussions and ethnographic observation during 2007–08 within the framework of a broader study on gender, remittances and development in Albania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative interviews in six Roma communities from Transylvania (Romania), the paper examines women's histories of migration. It explores how gender norms and expectations intersect migration and what the perceived benefits and costs associated with mobility may be. Women's personal meanings of migration vary, from ensuring social mobility at home, to family survival. My research indicates that Roma women's migration is highly dependent on the ‘gender regime’ in their home communities. Whilst migration does not necessarily raise contestations of motherhood, migrants need to expend considerable effort to ensure a sense of respectability. The paper supports the argument that Roma women's migration is highly dependent on the ‘gender regimes’ in their home communities. Lastly, it calls for more refined policy interventions that consider the various ‘subgroups’ of women within Roma communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influences of gender as an identity on an individual's ability to exercise agency in decision-making about internal migration in Vietnam. Women and men exert agency with reference to prevailing social norms in order to negotiate for or against their own migration and that of others. It has been well recognised that, beyond sex, their specific gender identity as mothers or fathers, daughters or sons, husbands or wives, etc. impacts on who can migrate for what kind of work. However, this study explores the more neglected ways in which gender structures migration. While my findings show that decision-making about migration was overwhelmingly consensual in nature, this did not necessarily mean that migration was equally in everyone's best interests. Women's agency around their own migration was in part constrained because they were forced to negotiate for their interests whilst trying to preserve family harmony. While social norms supported men's power to make unilateral decisions and while they resorted to powerful threats of divorce to get their own way, this did not prevent wives from resisting unwelcome decisions by ‘passive' means. The paper deepens feminist insights into the ways in which migration is gendered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues for treating gender as a key category in the understanding of migratory processes. Starting with an illustration of the absence of women in mainstream migration research, it presents the debate on this phenomenon and its development from a focus on women to one on gender. Through discussion of the debate on current migration phenomena it is demonstrated how gender can be used in a conceptual framework which includes various levels (micro, meso and macro). The paper advocates the analysis of migratory processes within a broader framework of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as a starting-point the striking disjunct between the wealth of historical studies on 'gender and empire', and a comparative lack of work that examines corresponding issues in the present. I suggest that discussions of gender and global capitalism are shaped by a focus on poor women, producing limited perspectives. The paper asks if analyses of colonial women could be used to elucidate the positions of a group that shares some of their characteristics, namely corporate expatriate wives. This is illustrated through the pejorative discourses surrounding colonial and contemporary expatriate wives. I argue that such discourse serves to both downplay and legitimise women's incorporation into imperial and commercial enterprises. While it has been demonstrated that women perform substantial emotional labour, I argue that their ideological labour within these projects tends to be overlooked. Expatriate women can thus become the embodiment of their exploitative nature, which problematises the tendency to conceptualise, for example, global capitalism as an inherently masculine enterprise. Recognising expatriate wives as postcolonial subjects also significantly broadens the concept, in the sense that they live in the context of imperial legacies which have been much less examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores identity transformations of the Kosovo Albanian diaspora in the United Kingdom by focusing on the dimensions of education, gender and religion. Taking into account both the structural factors of the adopted country and the impact of a strong sense of nationhood based on traditional beliefs and mores, the analysis traces the emergence of internal lines of identity differentiation within the Albanian community in a diasporic context. The uniform interpretation of the Albanian identity is under growing pressure to incorporate alternative views of Albanianhood as they emerge from the process of interaction with the political, social, economic and cultural environment of the host country. The paper shows that the persistence of a commitment to such a rigidly defined sense of nationhood has thus far stopped these alternative views from turning into lines of division within the Kosovo Albanian diaspora. It posits that a constructive internal redefinition of the Albanian identity in the UK is necessary in order to forestall the process of fragmentation of the Kosovo Albanian diaspora community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature demonstrates that social networks play a key role in international migrants' selection of destinations. But how do such networks begin? The Republic of Georgia is an example of a country from which migrants travel to many different destination countries, most of which had no Georgian population before the collapse of the Soviet Union. This paper uses a combination of nationally representative survey data and semi-structured interviews to identify the patterns and logic of men's and women's destination choices. I find that a wide variety of micro- and macro-level factors influence the desirability of destinations and that perceived gender differences in the labour market demands of the destination countries and variation in the accessibility of different countries explain much of the variation in destination selection among migrants. Social networks play a vital role in shaping perceptions of destination countries, which can be highly localised and changeable in the early stages of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deportation, as a coerced and involuntary mode of return migration, contradicts common assumptions and understandings of transnational livelihoods. This can be felt particularly strongly in the realm of the family—the social sphere where migration is facilitated and enacted. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Cape Verdean transnational social fields, this paper applies a gendered perspective in examining how deportation affects individual positions within transnational families. It studies how female and male deportees try to re-establish their social and affective lives after their return and also takes into account the perspective of family members who continue to live in the (former) destination country and who have to cope with the absence of a deported relative. These findings reveal power relations and social inequalities produced by state removal, unfolding not only between states and non-citizen residents but also among family members whose lives are divided involuntarily by state borders. The article comes to the conclusion that deportation not only ‘reverses’ the position of migrants in their (alleged) countries of origin but also that these processes of ‘reversal’ extend to all achievements of migratory family lives—both in the migrants' country of origin as well as in the country of destination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the upward occupational mobility trajectories of immigrant women performing unskilled work as a first job in Spain. The goals of the research are to go beyond the debate that focuses on the structural elements that condition their labour trajectories in Spain and to include both personal factors and the way in which these women use their agency in order to shape their labour trajectories. We have opted for a mixed-method approach, using data from the National Immigrant Survey ENI-2007, combined with 42 socio-biographical interviews with immigrant women from Latin America living in the metropolitan areas of Barcelona and Madrid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Return migration has recently become an important topic of research within the gender and migration literature. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out in Romania and Italy, this paper focuses on the gendered patterns of return, highlighting the relationship between the motivation to return, family life plans, challenges and individual responses to structural factors that shape the decision to return. Based primarily on participant observation and in-depth interviews with women and men from a Romanian village, the findings suggest competing ways in which men and women resettle in their community. While men transfer large amounts of money and make use of their new skills and their contacts with their Romanian peers in Italy in order to gain their livelihoods in the village, women encounter conditions that are deterrents to such economic transfers. Women tend, therefore, to maintain contact with Italian families as an alternative to their imperfect economic reintegration into the village. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on a large British Medical Association (BMA) survey which allows the comparison of doctors who qualified in the UK with International Medical Graduates (IMG) who qualified overseas. It does this with respect to inequality, morale and career aspiration. The paper argues that the human-capital protection of qualifications, profession and status is not sufficient to equal the experiences of migrant doctors with those of doctors who qualified in the UK. Moreover, the article provides a gendered analysis which demonstrates clear differences between women and men and shows that place of qualification intensifies the gendered experience of a medical career. Drawing on intersectional insights shows that women IMGs are the most disadvantaged despite the apparent protection of high human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the dichotomies and gendered invisibilities underpinning the concept of the knowledge economy and society through a closer examination of two emblematic and contrasting figures working in Information and Communication Technology and domestic/care work as bearers of different configurations of knowledge and skills in the contemporary circuits of globalisation. Such knowledge can be broken down into different types—such as embrained, encoded, embodied and encultured—which are valued differentially and with consequences for gendered labour markets. These gendered differences are reflected in current immigration policies which privilege migrants in scientific and information technology sectors and discount those engaged in care work, associated with embodied knowledge and skills. The impact of these differences has been reinforced during a period of economic recession when immigration has become increasingly restricted, even amongst the skilled. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Migration scholars should give attention to migration as seen through children's eyes for at least two reasons. Firstly, children's perspectives help us to understand whether or not children are being socialised into their community's culture of migration, a culture which shapes migration patterns and flows. Secondly, given that some children migrate and some children are left behind by migrant parents or relatives, children's imaginings of whether they as children ought to migrate affect where the responsibility and costs for their care will be located between family members, countries and states. In this paper I examine how children aged 8–22 in a town in southern Ghana imagine life abroad, conceptualise the timing of migration in their life-course, and articulate their goals in migrating. I use this rich material as a case study for exploring the wider issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Migrant remittances are widely considered as one-way transfers from migrants to families in their communities of origin. Because remittances are unrequited, they can serve developmental purposes. But what if remittances are requited? Reverse remittances—money and goods which families send to their migrant members—do exist and can be substantial. Research on internal migration in South Korea reveals that reverse remittances can even exceed remittances. This paper draws on surveys of migrant transfers to outline patterns of reverse remittances. The high level of reverse remittances in South Korea can be attributed to that society's truncated urban transition: because massive permanent village-to-city migration was not preceded or accompanied by short-term circulation between urban places of varying sizes, migration was poorly integrated into rural economic activities. The South Korean experience raises questions about the role of remittances in the relationship between migration and development in communities of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Throughout history, conservative groups of Low German-speaking Mennonites have collectively migrated to preserve their religious integrity. However, their contemporary migrations to North America are not collective or church-sanctioned, but primarily economically motivated. This paper explores the intertwined processes of gender and religion in transnational social spaces through the destination experiences of Mennonite women in Canada. The paradoxes of the transnational social field-each simultaneous gain and loss-constitute a double-bind wherein choice is elusive. Caught in the contest between physical and cultural survival, women find themselves in the 'nothing' of in-between, as conflicting social fields and systems of capital-secular and sacred-collide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants often bunch together in particular lines of work, which many scholars call employment niching. They also may cluster geographically; these districts can be neighbourhoods where workers reside or places of work (industrial quarters where labour is performed). The intrametropolitan spatial division of labour is perhaps best conceived as the relationships among employment concentrations in industrial niches and places of work shaped in large measure by the geographies of residence. The analysis of six immigrant groups reported in this paper models the effect of residential concentration on the chances that an immigrant holds a job in a particular line of work, labours in a particular work place, or does both—works in a particular job and work place. The study, which uses Greater Los Angeles' census tracts for the analysis, reveals that residential patterns help to govern the extent of this industrial segmentation and employment geography but that this relationship is not consistent across immigrant groups. The investigation adds to the literature on labour market segmentation by ethnicity, gender, nativity and home-work relations and offers new perspectives on the relationship between spaces of production and social reproduction in metropolitan places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's migration spurs the reconfiguration of the gender division of labour in transnational families, while the migration of men maintains it. Father-away migrant families usually mirror modern nuclear households. The only difference is the temporal and spatial rearrangement brought by the father's work: instead of the father routinely getting back home to his family during suppertime, he comes back home from work every ten months. My paper looks at the transnational families of migrant men as unexpected sites of gender conflicts in the maintenance of intimacy. Using interviews with adult children left behind in the Philippines and their guardians, I show that intimacy is more of a challenge for migrant men to achieve with family in the Philippines than it is for migrant women. Their families suffer from emotional distance, because: generations operate in 'time pockets' that are 'outside the real time of the outside world'; migrant men do not accordingly adjust their performance of fathering to accommodate the needs created by distance; and fathers insist on maintaining gender-normative views of parenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this special issue of JEMS is to explore the inherent contradictions and tensions of transnational engagement and reveal how these are played out at different levels, intersecting with other social markers based on gender, class, ethnicity, etc. While transnational engagements span territories and transcend spatial fixation, they might also provide stabilised identities for those involved, as diasporic imaginaries temporarily 'fix' subjectivities in a world of flux. This fundamental tension creates other concrete tensions at various levels, as struggles emerge over the right to draw new boundaries and to define and 'fix' transnational communities. Many of the individual migrants who defy borders are severely restricted with respect to other types of mobility, creating yet more tension between mobility and immobility. The stories in this collection of papers are about the ways in which these tensions are fought out and resolved in the creation of diaspora communities and transnational identities. They show, through concrete ethnographies, how these tensions materialise in a number of different ways, as conflicts are transnationalised and diasporas claimed, reclaimed and disclaimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approaching women's economic niches and earnings inferiority from the point of view of the ethnic economy literature, this paper introduces new data on women's entrepreneurship. Like ethnic minority employers, who prefer co-ethnic employees, women employers exhibit a hiring preference for women. As it does for ethnic minorities, this hiring preference modestly corrects women's earning inferiority, but it does not reduce industrial niching. Although often conflated, segregation and earnings are two distinct dimensions, not one. Women employers increase demand for women employees, raising their earnings, but women employers do not also reduce gender segregation. Because women are under-represented in entrepreneurship, the corrective effect of women's entrepreneurship on women's earnings is modest but positive. This result also parallels the limited advantage that ethnic employers afford co-ethnics. Therefore, in a technical sense, under-representation of women in entrepreneurship is an unacknowledged cause of women's earnings inferiority. Women's entrepreneurship will not reach parity with men's in the short run. But, in the longer run, women's entrepreneurship has the potential, appreciably if not fully, to reduce women's earnings inferiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many Western governments, the Australian government increasingly views migration through the lens of economic efficiency, arguing that skilled professionals achieve the best employment outcomes and therefore constitute the ideal migrant. This paper challenges these claims, showing that skilled migrants do not always successfully transfer their skills to new labour markets. It argues that the government's ‘success story’ narrative disguises a much more complex reality, in which migrants’ employment outcomes are shaped by broader social and cultural factors, as well as just economic ones. In particular, it shows that men and women typically experience migration differently, and the challenges of re-negotiating work and care in a new setting often lead to a ‘feminisation’ of women's roles, as they find themselves taking up more traditional gender roles as wives and mothers. Using in-depth interviews with Chinese women and survey data from the Australian government, I show that, in Australia, migrant women often experience downward occupational mobility and a re-orientation away from paid work and towards the domestic sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the international literature on migration and immigrant associations, mainly in the context of North and South America, but also including several other global immigration contexts, this essay highlights several main questions and issues. It discusses the definition of voluntary associations and the principal impetus for associational activities among immigrant newcomers. Using examples from specific types of organisation (secret societies, credit associations, mutual benefit societies, religious groups, hometown associations, political groups), it examines the factors that shape immigrants’ formal sociability. The paper then addresses the class and gender composition of memberships, compares the associative practices of the mostly European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the mostly Asian, Latin American and African arrivals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and discusses the issue of state involvement. The essay approaches the topic from a global and historical perspective to show how quasi-universal processes on the one hand, and local and temporal specificities on the other, shaped associational practices in a way that transcended the ethno-national traditions and characteristics of particular immigrant groups and host countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tied migration for (heterosexual) partners has been shown to have a clear gender dimension; it is usually the female migrant who is `tied'-whose employment career is negatively disrupted for the sake of her male partner's employment career progression. A clear policy and cultural outcome from this work would be to advocate the diffusion of egalitarian household decision-making environments with respect to employment careers. Thus, labour migration will become `de-gendered'. This paper problematises this liberal and meritocratic agenda by pointing to some of its more problematic elements. These difficulties arise from a discursive narrowing of the concept of `career' and serve to promote a limited instrumentalist esprit de vivre on the part of both men and women. More generally, dc-gendering labour migration fits conveniently with the enhanced globalisation project of contemporary capitalism. The importance of ties to distinctive places for people's everyday life and well-being is excised from such a project, and de-gendering labour migration can facilitate this excision. Thus, I argue for a radical utopian political project that enmeshes de-gendering within a broader critique of current socio-political structures. In sum, migration must be untied completely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being the dominant mode of legal entry for the past two decades in European Union states, the study of family migration has been marginalised theoretically, methodologically and empirically. In settler societies, family migration has been interpreted more loosely and has been encouraged. The definition of who constitutes the family is determined by the state and is generally interpreted in highly restrictive terms in EU states. Family-related migration has been neglected because of the emphasis in migration studies on the individual, a heavily economic focus, and an association with female migration based on the dichotomy of male producer and female reproducer. In policy terms it is treated as a secondary form of migration subordinate to and divorced from labour markets. However since the late 1980s family-related migrations have become the subject of scholarly research, especially North American and Asian-Pacific, using network analysis and, more recently, concepts of transnationalism. In this paper I firstly explore the reasons for the relative neglect of family-linked migration in European research which has focused on the integration of migrant families in receiving societies and the legal and policy conditions of family reunification. Secondly, I examine some of the implications of changing family-led migration, especially at key moments and stages of the lifecourse, and the increasing restrictions imposed on this form of migration, highlighting the continuing role of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]