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FitzGerald and Arar (2018. "The Sociology of Refugee Migration." Annual Review of Sociology 44 (1): 387–406) suggest that adapting the New Economics of Labour Migration Theory (NELM) to include the risk of violence as another risk managed through migration could provide a framework to analyze refugee and 'mixed migration' decision-making. I use original data from a case study to evaluate this proposed theoretical extension. Drawing on interviews with 21 middle-class Iraqis who settled in the Greater Toronto area following the 2003 US-led invasion, I find that participants who entered Canada as both refugee and non-refugee migrants self-insured against risks to physical and socio-economic safety through migration. I argue that foregrounding state policies, which delineate the legal statuses available to potential migrants and their associated rights and obligations, improves NELM's utility for explaining migration from conflict. By sampling on the country of origin, rather than destination country entry category, I show that host-state policies structure the risks of migration and, consequently, family risk-management decisions and mobility patterns. Additionally, those motivated to migrate due to violence can self-insure against these risks by negotiating legal status as a means to safety if they have the resources to meet restrictive policy requirements. Thus, this paper suggests that better-resourced migrants may be at an advantage when fleeing conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews economic research on labour migration which explicitly or implicitly accounts for socially mediated influences on migration choices. Both theoretical and empirical models are considered. The focus is on models analysing migration decision-making (initiation and perpetuation). The article also considers how economics accounts for non-market interactions related to settlement decisions, duration of stay, and labour market assimilation. Previous surveys have comprehensively reviewed the modelling of both migration behaviour and effects in economic theory. This paper focuses upon efforts to meld concepts traditionally pursued separately in economics and sociology into formal economic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the concepts of social navigation and vital conjunctures, this paper investigates how Cameroonian returnees experience their return in a crisis-ridden context in constant decay, characterised by material and existential uncertainties. Based on semi-structured interviews with 41 Cameroonians returning from countries in the Global North under different circumstances, we examine the ingenuity of these returnees to navigate an environment that is constantly changing. To uncover this, we first analysed returnees' perspectives on how they were received by their different communities of origin. Second, through the subjective experiences of returnees, we explain the unpredictable macro-structural challenges such as the 'anglophone crisis', labour market integration and institutional challenges in creating business. We further explore the tactics generated by returnees to navigate the socio-cultural, economic and political context characterised by uncertainties. The results illustrate the agency and proactivity by returnees who returned empty-handed and those who returned with resources to generate diverse tactics to cope with community expectations and sustain themselves economically. This article contributes to the literature on return and reintegration, where the returnees developed complex actions to manoeuvre unpredictable events in a changing spatial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the face of it, neoliberalism and race are distinct paradigms. Yet, evidence shows that, neoliberal policy profoundly influences, and is influenced by, racial politics. The present paper examines the articulation of these two ‘frames’ in the specific case of migration policies in New Zealand. Since the mid-1980s, immigration policy in New Zealand has clearly worked towards neoliberal goals of attracting skilled labour and boosting economic productivity. Equally, it has also mirrored race politics. Contrary to existing research that sees migration policy as a tool to ‘whiten the population’, this paper highlights a more complex inter-weaving between neoliberalism and race politics in New Zealand's migration policy. Focusing notionally on the construction of the ‘desirable migrant’, the analysis shows that while desirability was marked by race throughout the mid-1990s, in the new century, the interplay between race and economics has become far more complicated. In what seems to be an emerging form of new race politics, the desirable migrant is constructed as someone who shares similarities in global, consumptive ‘culture’, regardless of race. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent evolution of asylum and refugee policies in developed countries has been characterised by two apparently contradictory dynamics. Efforts to limit the number of asylum applicants have coincided with the strengthening of rights for asylum seekers and refugees inside existing protection systems. The ‘numbers vs. rights’ model seeks to explain such counter-veiling trends as a trade-off, as the result of attempts to manage costs within given budget constraints. The model suggests that high numbers of migrants will tend to go hand in hand with attempts to restrict their rights, while low numbers will typically be associated with more rights. This paper provides a critical analysis of the model when applied to asylum and refugee policies and examines its explanatory purchase through the analysis of longitudinal data on visa and asylum statistics. We argue that while the model provides an interesting framework through which to analyse executive decisions in this field, it underestimates the opportunities and constraints provided by the institutional context in which policy choices are made. We argue that ‘over-time’ variation in the influence of non-majoritarian institutions (in Europe, increasingly those operating at the EU level) provide a more compelling account of the dynamics of asylum and refugee policies over time than the political economy predictions of a ‘number vs. rights’ trade-off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the results of 69 individual qualitative interviews in Cuenca, Ecuador, conducted with lifestyle migrants in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Many of the North American migrants interviewed are in Ecuador for economic reasons, a motivation that has been under-theorised in lifestyle migration literature. The paper develops the concept of geographic arbitrage to explore the motivations and strategies of migrants in a context of structural inequalities and geographic differentiation in labour costs. Geographic arbitrage consists of relocating day-to-day expenses to low-cost locations, a strategy that is perhaps of increasing importance in North American, given the lack of retirement security there. The paper argues that the strategy of geographic arbitrage of North Americans to Cuenca is framed by powerful players in the field of international lifestyle marketing and by the socio-economic context of the migrants themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the migration-development nexus affect conceptualisations of migrant agency that influence current debates about international migration? This paper discusses how treating migration as an ‘enabler’ of development limits how we understand migrants' agency. Although the migration-development paradigm defines migrants as ‘agents of development’, studies using this framework understand agency primarily in economic and financial terms, via migrants' engagement with global remittance flows. We discuss how this approach overemphasises those forms of agency that are functional to calculative measures and large-scale bureaucratic governance while obscuring migrants' capacities to navigate, adapt to and transform host societies. We suggest an alternative approach to understanding the actual diversity of migrants' experiences and practices: drawing from an ethnographic study conducted in Malaysia, we show how temporary labour migrants are able to use various innovative strategies, political technologies and devices in order to adapt to and secure dignified lives in the cities they work and live in. We conclude the paper with an invitation for migration scholars to move beyond the scope of narrow developmental frameworks to produce a more nuanced understanding of contemporary migrants' agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the literature on migrant networks, the constitutive role of employers and recruiting actors remains underexposed, despite a persistent economic demand for migrant labour which is cheap, readily available and easily dismissed. Aiming to further understand how the recruitment of migrant labour by employers is organised, this paper focuses on the example of international employment agencies (IEAs). It is argued that these agencies are currently the anchors of the circular labour migration between Poland and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, temporary staffing is a fully legal and common phenomenon, allowing agencies to transfer part of the Polish employment from the underground to a more visible presence. When viewed through the lens of geographical and work-organisation literature on the issue of labour flexibility, these migrant workers could be named migrant flexiworkers. Apart from analysing the origins and current functioning of the IEAs, the paper discusses their development prospects and other more normative aspects of migrant flexiwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper focuses on the transition from education to work among Master's-level university graduates in Norway and examines the differences in labour-market success among ethnic groups. The dependent variables used are the rate of transition to first regular employment and the annual wage in that job. The data are collected from several public register databases, and include the entire population of graduates from Norwegian universities in the period from 1993 to 2002 (n=34,702). The methods employed are Cox regression and linear regression. The findings indicate that the time from school completion to first regular employment is longer for those with an ethnic minority background compared to native Norwegians. This disadvantage applies particularly to people originating from Africa, who also earn significantly less than native Norwegians in their first job. However, no wage disadvantage is found among other ethnic groups. In addition, there are some differences when field of education is taken into account. People originating from Asia have a faster transition rate to employment when educated in communicative and cultural fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how language proficiency influences the dynamics of labour market entry among young Russians and the native populations in two former Soviet Republics—Estonia and Ukraine. We use data from the Estonian TIES survey and the Youth Transition Survey in Ukraine to compare the speed of finding any first job with that of entry to the first higher-status employment requiring good communication skills, thus revealing the role of language proficiency in the job-entry process. The results from event-history analyses show that proficiency in the official Estonian language plays a pivotal role for labour market entry in Estonia, particularly for higher-status employment. In Ukraine, on the other hand, monolingual Russian-speaking youth do not experience any difficulties in finding high-status first employment, even though the official language of the country is Ukrainian. We do not find any positive effect of bilingualism in either of these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introductory article sets out the main challenges that the study of children poses for the understanding of transnational migration. Children are not simply a neglected empirical group, whose perspectives are rarely considered; children can also provide researchers with important insights concerning the nature of transnationalism if the phenomenon is considered through their eyes. Research on transnational children brings to the fore issues concerning familial practices and discourses, the importance of the life-course and of generation, and the role of feelings in creating and changing transnational relationships and imaginaries. Focusing on children and children's places raises important questions concerning the relationship between the life-course and the global political economy. Finally, researching with children raises particular methodological challenges and approaches. [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]

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]

This paper focuses on the commercial exploitation of ethnic diaspora-based networks. Using qualitative data from four London minority-owned enterprises, diaspora-based linkages in the UK and beyond are examined and the implications for policy discussed. We conclude that, under certain conditions, diaspora-based networks enable higher levels of business competitiveness. They facilitate access to resources and markets by minority-owned businesses, particularly for those supplying ethnic goods and services,. Exploiting diaspora-based networks effectively depends not only on business owners' capabilities and motivations to do so but also on diaspora structures—their size, geographical and sectoral locations—and the resources and opportunities they make available to business owners. Conversely, in certain circumstances, engagement with diaspora-based networks can constrain business competitiveness, particularly where this restricts the resources and markets available. Diaspora-based networks are potentially important influences on business competitiveness but do not negate the importance of class resources such as property, education and skills in processes of business formation and development among minority groups. The implications for existing theory and for policy are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The labour market incorporation of high-skilled immigrants is of key concern to receiving societies and migrating individuals alike. This paper draws on life-story interviews with 19 high-skilled Eastern Europeans in Denmark to develop a time-geographical trajectory notation for analysing immigrants' individual movements in social space across time. I propose a typology of five paths, each partly shaped by variations in the intersections of individual and historical temporalities. Three of these paths—'re-entry', 'ascent' and 're-education'—lead into the higher parts of the host country labour market, while the two paths of 're-migration' and 'marginalisation' remain outside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the issue of changing labour-market opportunities and the position of members of minority groups in advanced service economies is addressed, focusing on the Dutch case. We distinguish between two social hierarchies, one of traditional 'fordist' occupations and one of post-fordist occupations. Compared to the native Dutch, all immigrant groups are over-represented at the bottom of the labour market, both in the fordist and in the post-industrial hierarchy. Increased immigrant labour-market participation in the 1990s was accompanied by a strong rise in the number of flexible labour contracts. Native Dutch also work more frequently on flexible labour contracts, but not to the same extent as immigrants. The lower occupational level of the Surinamese, Antilleans and other non-Western immigrants employed in post-industrial occupations can be attributed to their low educational level. This is not true, however, for Turks, Moroccans and other non-Western immigrants employed in fordist occupations. Their low occupational level can not be completely explained by their low educational level. The effects of changes in the economic structure differ for ethnic groups, depending on their past employment, their cultural capital and the institutional framework in which they have to operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the huge influx of immigrants into the United States in recent years, considerable efforts have been devoted to describing the extent and variation of labour market concentration across ethnic groups within or between regions. However, there is no consensus among social scientists on how to measure and identify ethnic labour market concentration patterns. The issues mainly include, firstly, how to define an employment sector - as an industrial or an occupational sector; secondly, how to break down employment categories; and thirdly the extent to which a job sector can be identified as an ethnic-concentrated sector, that is, what index and what threshold value should be used to define a 'niche' sector? Using the case of Chinese in the San Francisco Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area, this paper demonstrates how different choices could encourage different evaluation and understanding of multi-ethnic urban labour market segmentation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists studying the economic behaviour of immigrants have tended to avoid serious interdisciplinary work. I argue that, when presented with a particular set of research questions that lend themselves to a utility maximisation framework, an economist will be able to pursue interdisciplinary work. I further argue that the necessary, if not sufficient, ingredient for true economic collaborative research is met in the field of citizenship acquisition. I review the empirical research on citizenship acquisition and its economic impacts to support this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a network approach, we investigate the determinants of intra-EU migration flows between all 28 EU member states in the years 2001, 2005, 2008 and 2013. Our descriptive analysis of the networks of intra-EU migration flows shows that the EU migration space is dominated by two core destination countries (Germany and United Kingdom). The results of our cross-sectional exponential random graph models (ERGM) reveal that the status of Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) as core destination countries remains a robust characteristic of the network of intra-EU migration flows over time, even when controlling for GDP, unemployment rates or shared geographical borders between destination and source countries. Furthermore, our results point to the differentiated effects of national economic performance on outgoing and ingoing flows: GDP per capita mainly affects intra-EU inflows, while unemployment rates tend to influence outmigration. Lastly, regulatory linkages – measured with the accession to the EU of source countries and the opening of the labour market of destination countries – exert a moderate effect on intra-EU migration flows when taking into account the national economic performances of source and destination countries, the core status of Germany and the United Kingdom, and the shared borders between destination and source countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effects of out-migration on social capital in sending communities. I first conceptualise social capital as the presence of social trust and engagement at the individual-level of analysis. Drawing from established theories of cooperation, I then argue that subnational out-migration acts as a structural-level signal that changes people’s incentives to trust others and engage in social activities. I use the current migration crisis in Bulgaria to test this argument. Findings from multi-level models that combine cross-sectional survey data and subnational migration flows indicate that high out-migration is correlated with lower levels of generalised trust. Out-migration is also associated with higher frequencies of informal social engagement, indicating that people rely more on their immediate social networks in environments of heavy out-migration. The overall evidence suggests that out-migration is a threat to social capital in sending communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of the institutional characteristics and structure of host societies and the labour market has become increasingly important to explain the processes of immigrant integration. From this viewpoint, Italy would appear an optimal case study. Economic and employment imbalances between the Centre-North and the South have represented the background in which the immigrant labour market integration in terms of employment opportunities, distribution by sector, professions and working conditions have historically differed at a territorial level. This article contributes to the debate analysing territorial disparities in terms of ethnic penalty, looking at the employment performances of immigrants compared to natives: an attempt to verify if and to what extent, within the same institutional context, the differentiation of the structure and the informal regulation of the labour market lead to significantly different mechanisms of penalty. Results show that also from this viewpoint, labour market integration of immigrants in the two macro-areas seems characterised by significant differences, which may be summarised in the considerable trade-off between employment entry chances and job quality. A finding that confirms the results of recent comparative analyses between old and new European receiving countries and offers important insights to define a South European model of immigrant employment integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with immigrants who were legalised through a one-off collective amnesty issued by the Dutch government in 2007, this article proposes a tentative typology of three types of immigrants in terms of their economic integration (self-sufficient, dependent, and isolated) and the trajectories that led to these differences. An analysis of immigrants' characteristics and experiences before and after legalisation suggests that these are closely related. The three trajectories consist of different interactions between immigrants' access to and mobilisation of cultural, economic and social capital, their psychological and psychosomatic problems, and their attribution styles. Our findings show how interactions between these factors reinforced economic integration (in case of self-sufficient immigrants), undermined it (in case of isolated immigrants), or resulted in mixed outcomes (in case of dependent immigrants). As such, this study contributes to our understanding of how different factors previously found to be associated with the economic integration of amnestied immigrants relate to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on a novel experimental design, the current study examines the impact of economic and cultural characteristics of potential immigrants on anti-immigrant sentiments. We investigate the extent to which individuating cues affect public support for individual immigrants in the USA and the Netherlands through a series of online survey experiments carried out by the YouGov online panel in 2010 and the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences Panel in 2011. Our findings demonstrate that individual immigrants elicit different levels of public support for their temporary and permanent immigration applications, and that support depends overwhelmingly on educational and occupational credentials of potential immigrants. Other individual attributes, such as presence of family dependents, country of origin and skin complexion also affect acceptance rates, but to a much lesser extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws insights from the Austrian capital, a city with a long history of immigration, and from the Irish capital, a city of recent immigration, in order to explore urban approaches to immigrant integration, across Europe. It analyses the emergence of current immigrant integration policy types in the two cities, and scrutinises the vision of immigrant integration that informs the policy approaches in place. The findings show that in both cases immigrant integration is essentially used as a tool to foster and to maintain economic growth in the city. Ethno-cultural diversity is seen increasingly as a competitive asset, with which to improve the socio-economic performance of cities. The article emphasises that it is international experts, international cooperation among cities, as well as transnational communication networks,who have promoted this idea, and as a result have stimulated policy convergence across European cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deportability, or a threat of deportation, can be viewed as a technique of discipline employed to make migrant workers efficient and compliant. Under the threat of deportation, migrants accept dangerous, dirty, degrading and difficult jobs for low pay. Deportability also prevents them from challenging their working and living conditions either individually or collectively. Most of the literature on deportability applies to unauthorised migrants. Yet, as illustrated in this article, migrants employed legally on temporary contracts are also disciplined through a threat of deportation. While for unauthorised migrants, it is the receiving state that is the most important actor (re)creating the regime of deportability, for legally employed migrants, other actors––such as employers, the sending states, recruiters and international organisations––assume a more important role in employing the threat of deportation as a disciplinary technique. In this article, we explore how power is reproduced in this disciplinary regime of deportability. We examine migrants' responses to the techniques of discipline that subjugate them. We argue that when migrants adopt calculative and reflexive practices to avoid deportation and secure their own employment, they often end up reproducing the disciplinary power of the deportation regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do undocumented immigrants survive in a punitive regulatory environment? Drawing upon four years of ethnographic research, this article examines how local repressive policies affect the economic mobility of immigrant fruit vendors in Los Angeles County. In the face of government enforcement, fruit vendors have implemented strategies that allow for short-term survival but fail to bolster long-term upward mobility. The four strategies include a reliance on kinship andpaisanonetworks, street patrols and alerts, geographical positioning and alliance-building, and the performance and maintenance of personal, professional and symbolic hygiene. I argue that the limited gains and continuous losses experienced by fruit vendors following health and police department enforcement create a cycle of low income, high debt and minimal to no mobility. Consequently, fruit vendors have fared much worse than their immigrant informal sector peers (i.e. gardeners, day labourers and domestic workers). In the end, however, the local regulatory enforcement on fruit vending has not disrupted network-driven immigration nor displaced these informal workers because the survival strategies have fostered a sense of community and reciprocal relationships cemented by financial obligations among the fruit vendors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this study is to examine the attitudes of Lithuanian pharmacists towards migration to other countries of the European Union or European Economic Area. Using a questionnaire developed by the Ministry of Social Affairs, Labour and Solidarity of France, surveys were sent to 654 Lithuanian pharmacists (response rate 47.5 per cent). Univariate logistic regression was used to estimate risk factors for intention of pharmacists to go abroad. More than one quarter of Lithuanian pharmacists intended to work in other EU/EEA countries; however this was a definitive decision of only 2.3 per cent. Target destination countries were the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The major reasons for leaving were higher salary, better quality of life and better professional opportunities. English language skills significantly increased the potential risk of working abroad by four times. Other significant factors were age less than 30 years, graduation since 1990, urban residence, and friends/family abroad. Even though the study did not find evidence of large-scale migratory flows, it found a significant percentage of Lithuanian pharmacists who intended to migrate. The potential effects of migration ought to be tackled systematically and in a coordinated way, because emigration affects the health system and health workers remaining in the country. In order to observe future trends, the survey should be repeated every two or three years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the effects of unemployment in Sweden on Iranian migrants. Emergence of ethnic economy; Role of ethnic resources and work previous work experiences in Iran in shaping economic activities; Entry of Iranian into self-employment.