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Despite an increasingly globalised world, the effects of ever more restrictive barriers to people's movement result in people developing complex and innovative ways to enter and settle in countries beyond their own. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative research with Latin Americans in London from a range of nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds, this paper examines how migrants across the spectrum of immigration statuses have responded to these restrictions with a particular focus on negotiating irregularity. Through analysing how migrants develop a range of entry, regularisation as well as spatial, economic and social invisibility practices as they arrive and settle, the paper challenges a binary hierarchy of immigration status and subsequent well-being. Instead, it argues that conceptualising these as the creation of webs encapsulates the complexity and dynamism of migrant irregularity as migrants negotiate from above and below. The paper highlights how these webs and practices emerge from below in innovative ways that entail negotiation of fluid migration regimes that structure a wider context of exclusion within which migrants can exercise agency from below. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholarly interest has increasingly focused on the predicament of second-generation counter-diasporic return migration to an ancestral homeland. The present paper portrays two generations of Pakistani middle class women migrants: two mothers, who arrived in Manchester in the 1970s, and their daughters, who both returned to live in Pakistan, one at the age of 11 and the other in her twenties, to marry. The latter in particular experienced Pakistan as culturally alien and unhomely. In Britain one mother has become extremely pious after 9/11. The paper looks at the moral careers of mothers and daughters, starting from the fact that migration initiates an irreversible process in which everyday, taken-for-granted intimacies and socialities of home and identity are subverted. Refuting simplistic theories of a continuous 'transnational field', it argues that migrants experience 'double consciousness', an awareness of competing rules, expectations and a doubling up of a subject's sense of belonging and alienation, which no return home can reverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than focusing on either bounded conceptions of migrant assimilation or unbounded transnational linkages, this paper situates migrant experiences in broader "routes of identity." In the case of Malay ex-seamen in Liverpool, UK, all of whom are now in their seventies or eighties, this has meant tracing life geographies extending back well over half a century. During the middle decades of the twentieth century when these men arrived in Liverpool, the city was a major seaport with longstanding maritime connections to Southeast Asia and across the Pacific. Drawing upon fieldwork carried out in Liverpool and Southeast Asia between 2003 and 2008, the paper gives attention to four geographical dimensions of the shifting identities of Liverpool-based Malay ex-seamen: (1) the always-already fluid and mobile nature of their identifications which preceded long-distance migration; (2) shifting political geographies of identity (re)formation, particularly the establishment of post-colonial national boundaries which cut across prior modes of identification; (3) historically variable constitutive geographies of long-distance interconnection, most notably the transition from maritime socioeconomic networks to a post-maritime period; and (4) social sites through which individual and collective identities are emplaced. The intention is to sketch these four different dimensions in such a way as to allow them to speak critically to issues of transnationalism and migrant identity beyond the specific case of Malays in Liverpool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]