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Today many parties interact with members and supporters outside their national borders. One way parties do so is by establishing transnational party branches. However so far, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical research exploring this transnational aspect of party activity. This paper provides a first insight into why parties develop transnational branches, and how it affects their organization. It argues that the development of party branches abroad differs across countries due to the incentives provided by the national legal framework on voting and donations from abroad. In turn, the role and functions of the transnational branches vary depending on this legal framework. Looking at the two transnational branches of the two mainstream parties in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, this paper first briefly outlines the different national legal frameworks and the scope and size of transnational party branches. It then focuses on how they are organized, their role and function, and how this shapes their relationship to their homeland party. This explorative research is mainly based on legal and secondary data. The paper finds that the parties studied differ substantially in location, number and membership size for their transnational branches. Furthermore, the organizational links and the control by the national party over transnational party branches is the highest where parties have the most to gain in terms of votes in national elections and donations.

Although migration has long been an imperative topic in social sciences, there are still needs of study on migrants’ unique and dynamic transnational identity, which heavily influences the social integration in the host society. In Online Social Network (OSN), where the contemporary migrants actively communicate and share their stories the most, different challenges against migrants’ belonging and identity and how they cope or reconcile may evidently exist. This paper aims to scrutinise how migrants are manifesting their belonging and identity via different technological types of online social networks, to understand the relations between online social networks and migrants’ multi-faceted transnational identity. The research introduces a comparative case study on an online social movement led by Koreans in Germany via their online communities, triggered by a German TV advertisement considered as stereotyping East Asians given by white supremacy’s point of view. Starting with virtual ethnography on three OSNs representing each of internet generations (Web 1.0 ~ Web 3.0), two-step Qualitative Data Analysis is carried out to examine how Korean migrants manifest their belonging and identity via their views on “who we are” and “who are others”. The analysis reveals how Korean migrants’ transnational identities differ by their expectation on the audience and the members in each online social network, which indicates that the distinctive features of the online platform may encourage or discourage them in shaping transnational identity as a group identity. The paper concludes with the two main emphases: first, current OSNs comprising different generational technologies play a significant role in understanding the migrants’ dynamic social values, and particularly, transnational identities. Second, the dynamics of migrants’ transnational identity engages diverse social and situational contexts. (keywords: transnational identity, migrants’ online social networks, stereotyping migrants, technological evolution of online social network).

This article analyses how border guards as members of a state organisation shape the movement of non-nationals into the territory of a nation state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the Swiss Border Guard (SBG), it explores the rationalities—understood as stabilised ways of reasoning and acting—that characterise practices within this state organisation. Combining organisational and structuration theory with a street-level bureaucracy perspective allows for a differentiated analysis of the various facets of border guards’ everyday work. Four rationalities of border-control practices are identified and compared: security, humanitarian, cost-calculation, and pragmatic rationality. I argue that, by considering both the specific goals and imperatives of border control and the characteristics of street-level bureaucrats acting within a state organisation, these entangled logics explain the complex and incoherent social reality of border control. More generally, the results contribute to organisational theory by pointing to the importance of taking into account that multiple entangled rationalities structure the practices of an organisation’s members.

This article seeks to understand a common and regular feature of asylum decision-making, namely, that the majority of asylum claims are rejected, mostly on the basis of non-credibility. It draws on a bottom-up, qualitative study of an administration in which asylum decision-making takes place: the Swiss Secretariat for Migration. By adopting a practice-theoretical approach to administrative work, it advocates paying attention to caseworkers’ routinised, self-evident and largely unquestioned behaviours, not only in terms of what they do, but also of what they think, feel and know. Building on Bourdieu, it introduces the concept of institutional habitus, which refers to the dispositions caseworkers develop on the job. On the basis of a specific decision-making practice termed ‘digging deep’, the article shows how these dispositions are structured and how, through the practices institutional habitus generates, these ‘structuring structures’ are continuously reaffirmed, leading to the relatively stable outcomes of administrative decision-making that can be observed from the outside. The article argues against the assumption that regularities of administrative work should be understood as the outcome of strict rule-following, top-down orders and political instrumentalism. At the same time, it challenges the individualist quality sometimes ascribed to discretionary practices in street-level bureaucracy literature and in critiques of credibility assessment practices in asylum adjudication.

The successful Brexit referendum and the election of Trump in 2016 mark the breakthrough of populism in the West. Opposition to immigration has been central to both events. However, it has been central in different ways. This paper maps these differences and the implications of both populisms for a liberal immigration policy. Driven by hostility to free mobility within the EU, the ironic consequence of Brexit will be an immigration policy that is less discriminatory than previously, in the sense that favoritism for other Europeans is now ruled out. By contrast, Trump’s immigration policy is openly and brazenly discriminatory. In particular, its Muslim Ban breaches the “anti-populist norm” (Freeman 1995) and thus the essence of a liberal immigration policy.

In general, parental knowledge is known to support adolescents’ adaptation. Less is known about the role of parental knowledge in psychological (i.e., anxiety) and socio-cultural (i.e., school achievement) adaptation of adolescents with immigrant background, and how parental knowledge and social characteristics (i.e., gender, generational status, immigrant background, and family’ socioeconomic background) of immigrant adolescents jointly influence their adaptation outcomes. This study explores the role of adolescent-reported parental knowledge in explaining adaptation outcomes among first- and second-generation immigrant boys and girls from four different immigrant groups. The study utilizes the national Finnish School Health Promotion survey data (N = 2697, 45% female, M age = 15.6 years, SD = .91) and illustrates the complex relationship between parental knowledge and adolescents’ adaptation.

Whether refugees in need of protection should be granted long- or short-term residence permits in the host country upon arrival is a long-standing debate in the migration policy and scholarly literature. Rights-based models of inclusion advocate for secure and long-term residency status arguing that this will provide the foundations for successful inclusion. Responsibilities-based models on the other hand claim that migrants should only be granted such status if certain criteria, such as full-time employment, have been met, again under the belief that such a system will facilitate inclusion into the host society. Using a sudden policy change as a natural experiment combined with detailed Swedish registry data, we examine the effect permanent residency on three measures of labour market inclusion in the short-term. Our findings are twofold. On the one hand, we find that temporary residents that are subject to a relatively less-inclusive situation have higher incomes and less unemployment. However, at the same time, they are less likely to spend time in education than are those with permanent residency. First part title Permanent or Temporary Settlement? Second part title A Study on the Short-Term Effects of Temporary and Permanent Residence Permits on Labour Market Participation

This commentary paper starts by questioning the assumption that migration means international migration, and goes on to affirm that migration studies has indeed come of age as a coherent if highly diverse research field. Several emerging epistemic communities are identified: migration and development; gender and migration; lifestyle migration; and youth and student migrations. Finally, I argue that the role of geography in the study of migration has been under-valued.

The emergence of a new research field or area of study in the social sciences always is fraught with controversy, fits and starts, theoretical, methodological, and even epistemological debates. Migration studies is no different, but some things are relatively unique about this ‘new’ field of study, while others are more conventional. The article on the ‘rise of migration studies’ by the CrossMigration team, Levy et al. (Comparative Migration Studies, 8forthcoming), “Between Fragmentation and Institutionalization” under consideration here captures some of the controversies in migration studies, and poses some interesting questions about the direction of the field. Building on the ‘bibliometric analysis’ of journal articles by the cross-migration group, I ask what is unique about migration studies and what is conventional?

This commentary discusses the scope of institutionalization by providing a regional dimension of migration studies. A pivotal weakness of the article is its lack of understanding of Asian migration scholarship which has thrived in the past two decades and has been a great impetus for the development of migration studies.

Recent commentaries on migration integration suggest that researchers focus more on cities than nation states and include considerations of political economy, societal inequality and shifts in production. This article analyses how different aspects of wages of export industry (EI) migrant and borderlander workers in Tijuana, Mexico and Tangiers-Tetouan, Morocco limit their socioeconomic integration and lead to their greater identification with foreign standards, stimulating emigration northward. Using the new theory of migration systems, real and indirect wages are found to be major system elements initiating and deepening inequality, and providing for comparisons between natives, foreigners and expatriates, creating relative deprivation. System dynamics, such as border characteristics, insecurity, and currency markets uniquely contribute to inadequate settlement south of the US border. While EI wages are shown to poorly integrate migrant workers structurally in both cities, employment there supports incorporation into northern countries. The paper contributes to migration integration research by adding to the few studies which use wages as an indicator of integration and by focusing on low income regions instead of high income countries which constitute most previous research.

The Utrecht Refugee Launchpad was an experiment at city-level to create a more inclusive form of asylum seeker reception. The initiative used co-housing, bringing together young, local tenants with asylum seekers to improve social integration and local relations. This article examines the nature of social contact, and considers the value of relationships developed between asylum seekers and tenants, using qualitative data from interviews and participant observation. Our findings demonstrate the importance of context, as we show that the remote logics of the national asylum system imposed spatial and temporal limitations on the co-housing model to generate ‘adjacent’ and transient living. However, at times –through both accident and design– contact was developed with more ease: when there was an equal ratio, similarities between populations, low numbers (of around 80 people in total), access to shared space, and high commitment to the project’s ‘disposition to friendliness’. While we conclude that relationships proved ephemeral rather than sustained, the initiative nevertheless held promise by enabling asylum seekers brief escapes from landscapes of indifference encountered during reception. Recognising how wider institutional contexts impact on the development of contact however helps innovations like these to achieve a greater potential for transforming relationships and values in urban space.

This paper contributes to the migration studies literature by a comparative analysis of local migration diversity governance in large, mid-sized and small cities, analysing the broader scope of the local dimension of migration-diversity policies. While a ‘local turn’ has taken place in migration studies over the past two decades, the literature has primarily focused on capital and gateway cities. Yet immigrants arrive and settle in a much wider range of cities. Little is known about what forms migration-diversity governance across cities of different sizes and positions. This paper therefore conducts a comparative analysis of migration diversity governance across the local dimension. Based on a qualitative, comparative analysis of migration diversity policies in 16 Dutch municipalities between 2014 and 2018, I distinguish between different local migration diversity policy approaches: ‘proactive pluralist’, ‘proactive monist’, ‘reactive embedded’ and ‘reactive one-domain’. This illustrates the variety of local approaches to migration diversity and thus argues against ‘a local dimension’ of migration diversity governance, rather arguing for different types of local approaches. The proactive cities explicitly chose their own framing for their migration diversity policies, in contradiction to the supposed ‘paradigmatic’ character of the local level, instead showing that cities position their own framing of migration diversity. The types of migration diversity policies I distinguish provide an analytical framework and starting point for further research on the variety of local migration diversity approaches.

With about 2.7 million nationals residing elsewhere in the European Economic Area, Poland was the second largest country of origin of all intra-European migrants in 2018. After the country’s accession to the European Union in 2004, some Polish migrants have brought abroad their families, while others continue living alone and commuting to visit their families in Poland. Based on a sample of 1153 survey respondents in three European contexts—Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—this article investigates from a comparative perspective how Polish migrants’ family reunification status is related to their integration on the labour market. Results show that only in the Scandinavian labour markets, and not in the British, is migrants’ economic integration decisive for family reunification. This article argues that in contexts which offer broader employment opportunities for family migrants, who tend to be women, such as in the UK between 2004 and 2016, the lead migrant’s labour market integration may not be crucial for family reunification. The findings may be of special interest for migration policymakers in the Scandinavian countries working towards greater gender equality outcomes among its immigrant populations.

This paper argues that perceptions towards asylum seekers are shaped by both media representation as well as lived experiences in and around asylum accommodation. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial triad, the paper aims at disentangling the conceived, perceived and lived spaces of asylum accommodation in order to understand asylum accommodation as a space that is produced and re-produced in everyday life. The paper discusses the case of the Grandhotel Cosmopolis (GHC), a prominent example of local innovation in asylum accommodation located in southern Germany. It compares and contrasts the GHC’ media representation in national and local news media with local residents’ evaluation and direct experiences with this project and its effects on how asylum seekers are perceived. The results of the media analysis highlight a difference between a national ‘utopian’ framing and a local ‘experiment’ framing of the GHC. Local residents’ direct experiences proved influential in their evaluation of the project, yet could not overrule dominant media representations of asylum seekers. The paper concludes by suggesting that the GHC’ relative openness produces a space which allows for contact and familiarization between local residents and asylum seekers, yet that dominant framings of asylum seekers as criminals or victims also contributed to a perceived closedness of its space and discouraged contact and familiarization.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century and after two turning point events – 09-11 terrorist attacks and the ‘Arab spring’ – both migration control and democracy promotion became central issues within EU foreign policy, in particular to what concern its relations with the southern Mediterranean neighbourhood. However, although many authors allude to the relation between these two policy dimensions, little is known about their linkage. On the one hand, the debate about EU external migration policies narratives has revolved mainly around the migration-security and migration-development nexus. On the other, whereas the developmental paradigm has dominated theroot-causesapproach little attention has been given to its political dimension. This article aims to overcome these limitations through exploring these other nexus: the one between these policies and the democratization of southern Mediterranean countries. To investigate this nexus I follow a Narrative Policy Analysis approach - the most suitable for investigating issues of high complexity, uncertainty and polarization, which seems to be precisely the case of EU external migration policies. Hence, drawing on longitudinal and interpretative content analysis of EU official documents covering the period between 1995 and 2018, this study seeks to expose the main narratives casted by the EU on the issue and to identify if there has been consistence or change in the stories and arguments over time and in particular, before and after the ‘Arab spring’. Ultimately, the goal was to confirm the presence of this nexus by exposing its complexity and trying to understand its configuration. This is considered as an important step towards further disentangling the logics and impacts of the externalization of EU migration policies towards its Southern Mediterranean neighbourhood.

This paper investigates regional variation in migration policy implementation, focusing specifically on the underexplored role of policy ambiguity. It chooses a salient case study of internal migration control implementation: the application of labour market access policies for migrants with precarious legal status in German municipal immigration offices. Studying the implementation approaches of eleven offices within one Land by means of semi-structured interviews with senior officials, the research design allows for drawing inter-agency and inter-policy comparisons. The data provides empirical evidence for the claim that the more conflictive and hence ambiguous a policy, the more importance can be placed on local determinants of implementation. Different logics (economic welfare and regulatory control logic) legitimizing more restrictive or expansive implementation are identified and linked to the broader migration policy context. Moreover, the difficult task of officials to determine applicants’ identity clarification efforts – a condition for receiving a work permit – serves as basis for conceptually distinguishing between collective and individual discretion of street-level bureaucrats.

The current migratory dynamics in the Mediterranean are characterized by large numbers of displaced people, refugees, and other vulnerable groups. In addition, the Mediterranean attracts more privileged individuals who are migrating for lifestyle reasons to find a better life abroad. But, while political and economic crises are at the roots of many movements across the Mediterranean, the question is whether these are also leading to the “displacement” of the privileged. In addressing this question, the article links privileged lifestyle migration to a perspective on mobile citizenship, focusing on German retirees who have found a new home on the Turkish coast. It builds on various stages of field research, including a recent field trip in May 2018. The article shows how lifestyle migrants engage and entangle emigrant and other sites of citizenship when navigating residential security and when expressing their way of local belonging in times of turmoil, and how their decision to stay in Turkey is paradoxically enabled by their option to return. The article’s focus on privileged migration thus also reveals the role of return as a neglected aspect in the study of (emigrant) citizenship.

The Mediterranean is paradoxically, rarely considered a category of analysis in most Mediterranean migration research. If it were to be taken as a geographical, regional and geo-political area, it could provide migration studies a particular framework of comparison, a much needed structure for the dispersed research currently being carried out. After drawing the main contours of “Mediterranean thinking” in migration studies and defending a postcolonial account against Eurocentric views, I review the main theoretical frameworks for formulating such criticisms. Additionally, I propose how in the coming years we may be able to further develop this Med-Thinking in migration studies. A base from which a Mediterranean migration research agenda could be built with “multiple voices” contributing to Mediterranean regional building. Finally, I place this excursus as main background of the different contributions of this Special Issue.

Studies demonstrate that both group status and geographic location influence media coverage of immigrants, ethnic groups, and marginalized communities. We examine a systematic sample of headlines about Muslims and Jews from The New York Times and The Guardian between 1985 and 2014 to understand these two factors. We find that headlines about Jews have a more positive tone than those about Muslims, and that headlines about each group situated within the newspaper’s country—such as American Jews or British Muslims—have a more positive tone than those set in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region—such as MENA Jews or MENA Muslims. These findings provide independent confirmation of prevailing research on group status and on the differences between coverage of domestic and foreign events. We expand this research agenda by intersecting these two strands of scholarship to examine the interaction between group status and geographic location, comparing the tone of headlines about lower-status domestic groups—such as Muslims in the United States or Great Britain—to that of the higher-status foreign group of Jews in the MENA region. We find that there is no meaningful difference between the portrayal of American Muslims and MENA Jews in The New York Times, but that Guardian headlines are significantly more positive toward British Muslims compared to MENA Jews. We explore these cross-national differences to show how the relationship between group status and geography is context specific.

Notions, features, and forms of citizenship, understood as legal membership in a state, are changing the world over. While contestations of the monolithic understanding of citizenship generally focus on the content of individuals’ rights and their belonging and participation in social and political institutions, this essay shows that official membership categories that are labeled ‘citizenship’ by state actors vary. Drawing on the experiences of the Overseas Citizenship of India, the British Overseas Citizenship, and Citizenship of the European Union the essay proposes an analytical framework that aims at advancing the comparative study of state membership policies by introducing six key dimensions that policy actors consider when designing citizenship policies. Apart from systematizing the content of citizenship, the framework sheds light on the importance of citizenship terminology, as states employ the label of citizenship and use the status as a vehicle of communication. The essay highlights differences in the construction of special subjects, moral obligations and the exercise of power, analyzes the aspirations of political actors, the political rhetoric, and explores the interplay between tangible rights and intangible narratives. The discussion of the three atypical membership regimes reveals that states operate in grey areas of membership statuses that partly mimic existing forms of state membership and partly push the boundaries of what state membership means. This has significant repercussions for comparative citizenship and democracy theory and the meaning of membership.

Turkey hosts more refugees than any other country in the world. Incoming numbers have increased steadily since the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011. This raises enormous challenges for the host country, not least with regard to the provision of healthcare. This article examines the developments in the light of stratified membership theories. More specifically, it asks how far the healthcare system in Turkey can be categorised as a system of stratified membership for different groups of urban refugees, focusing on refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Following a theoretical debate about stratification in the provision of social rights, 16 semi-structured interviews with experts and active participants were carried out in Ankara to understand the situation of urban refugees in need of healthcare. The results confirm assumptions of stratified membership theories which understand citizenship in a broad sense as comprising the interconnected dynamics between social rights, legal status and identity requirements. Next to ethnic categories of origin defining the status in Turkey, factors such as language skills or the individual economic situation also play crucial roles for stratified membership both as an empirical fact and as a constructed practice.

The world appears to be moving into a new era of international migration during which gaps between policies needed to manage migratory flows and those enacted in practice will widen. Whereas immigrants in the late 20th century were motivated by a desire to improve their wellbeing by accessing opportunities in richer countries, in the early 21st century they are increasingly motivated by a desire to escape threats at places of origin, yielding very different patterns of migration and selectivity. Using the United States as an example, this paper reviews how mismatches between the underlying realities of international migration and the policies adopted to manage them, in both eras have produced and continue to produce dysfunctional outcomes. Although deleterious policy outcomes might be avoided in the future by combining a well-grounded conceptual understanding of the forces producing immigration with a clear statement of the goals to be achieved through specific policy interventions, the avoidance of further dysfunctional outcomes is unlikely to be achieved in an age of rising populism, disinformation, and xenophobia.

This introduction to the special issue provides a critical state-of-the-art of the literature on second-generation migrants which has hitherto subsumed the case of the children of refugees. It highlights the theoretical and methodological orientations taken by the literature and examines the main findings on the second generation’s social, educational, economic, cultural and inter-generational lives, before turning to the few findings available on conditions and performances of children of refugees. The editorial concludes by suggesting gaps in our knowledge and areas for future research.

In recent years, forcibly displaced populations have attracted enormous media attention as an increasing number of disasters and political conflicts push more and more people to move away from their homes and seek refuge and opportunities in other places. At the same time, political nervousness about the financial and institutional capability of ‘receiving’ locations to adequately respond to the needs of these large-scale population movements contributes to the shrinking space for thinking about the rights and needs of people on the move. It is precisely because of these global trends that the plight of forcibly displaced populations is becoming more precarious and vulnerable, yet standard social protection provision rarely attends to the plight of these people. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the remit and implications for including a consideration of forcibly displaced populations (including internally displaced people, refugees and asylum seekers) within social protection policy and programming. Drawing on a limited number of recent initiatives, we suggest some ways in which social protection can be ‘opened’ for these groups.

Debates on border control increased in Europe, especially since the refugee movement in 2015. But to what extent does cross-border migration has its own momentum, independently of labor market conditions and of migration policies? Taking the example of the long-term migration dynamics between Mexico and the USA the article argues that the existence of transnational social spaces is an influencing factor in its own. Therefore, first we review some basic approaches of migration theory that could explain cross-border migration dynamics (section 1). Then, for the second half of the twentieth century the migration regime between Mexico and the USA is analyzed (section 2). Considering the related labor market conditions and the aggregated flows and stocks of migration there remains an explanation gap (section 3). Therefore, based on analysis of individual cross-border mobility and on remittances dynamics, the factor and momentum of transnational social spaces is stressed as crucial intervening factor (section 4). This has consequences on the degree to which cross-border migration could actually be managed (section 5).

The paper traces the crucial role of visa policies in externalizing border control. Since the European Union has agreed upon a highly selective visa policy in 2001, most neighbouring countries are (newly) confronted with visa requirements for short-term travel. Because of this standardization of travel opportunities, visa-free travel to the European Union has become a rare and valuable political asset both for third country nationals and their governments. Consequently, visa liberalization became a major issue in bilateral negotiations with the EU over cooperation in migration management and is frequently used as an incentive by the EU institutions. However, the EU is not the only cooperating partner that strategically engages in border and migration diplomacy. As the case studies of Moldova, Morocco and Turkey show, all governments involved use issues of mobility regulation as a foreign policy tool, though with varying success in regard to visa liberalization.

This paper studies changes in attitudes toward immigration over a 10-year period, with an examination of the long-term effects of economic downturn.The focus is on changes before and after the financial crisis. I use data from the European Social Survey (2002–2014), combined with economic indicators at the country level. This intends to observe links between economic performance and attitudes with a comparative analysis of data from 25 European countries. Overall, European public appear to become less positive toward immigration during economic crisis, although there are notable variations among the countries. The results show more pessimistic attitudes toward the immigrations’ contribution to the economy, especially in countries where the crisis had the most severe economic impact. Overall, the findings suggest that a downward economic spiral correlates with more negative attitudes towards immigration. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Starting from the idea that border externalization – understood as the spatial and institutional stretching of borders – is enmeshed with the highly contextual humanitarian and securitarian dynamics of migrant trajectories, this article addresses the reach of border externalization tentacles in Costa Rica. Although Costa Rica does not formally engage in border externalization agreements, it is located in a region characterized by transit migration and transnational securitization pressures. Moreover, externalization efforts across the Atlantic have contributed to a relatively new presence of so-called extra-continental migrants. Given these circumstances, we aim to interrogate the ways in which border externalization plays a role in Costa Rica’s discourses, policies and practices of migration management. We do so by analysing a migrant reception centre in the northern Costa Rica border region, and by focusing on African transit migration. Our analysis is based on exploratory field research at the centre as well as on long-term migration research in Central America. Building on these empirical explorations and the theoretical notions of mobility regimes, transit and arterial borders, the article finds that Costa Rica’s identity as a ‘humanitarian transit country’ – as enacted in the migrant reception centre – both reproduces and challenges border externalization. While moving towards increased securitization of migration and an internalization of its border, Costa Rica also distinguishes itself from neighbouring countries by emphasizing the care it extends to African migrants, in practice enabling these migrants to move further north. Based on these findings, the article argues for a deeper appreciation of the role of local-regional histories, perceptions, rivalries, linkages and strategies of migration management. This allows for a better grip of the scope and shape of border externalization across a diversity of migration landscapes.

While the presence of foreign-born footballers in national teams has a long history, it is often believed that the World Cup has become more migratory over time. The presumed increases in the volume and diversity of foreign-born footballers have, however, remained empirically untested. In this article, we empirically test whether the presence of foreign-born footballers at the World Cup has changed over time in respect to these two dimensions of migration. We conducted an analysis on 4.761 footballers, derived from the fifteen national teams that competed in at least ten editions of the World Cup between 1930 and 2018, which comprises of 301 foreign-born football players. We argue that countries’ different histories of migration, in combination with historically used citizenship regimes, largely influence the migratory dimensions of their representative football teams. Our outcomes show that the (absolute) volume of foreign-born footballers in World Cups is indeed increasing over time. Moreover, foreign-born footballers seem to come from an increasingly diverse range of countries. We, therefore, conclude that the World Cup has become more migratory in terms of volume and diversity from an immigration perspective.

This article explores the various types of racism and racialization comparing the experiences of descendants of Kurdish, Tamil, and Vietnamese refugees in Switzerland. Drawing on qualitative data from 45 interviews, the article shows that children of refugees experience several forms of racialization, the impact of which varies. The article shows that children of refugees tend to deny or relativize the interpersonal racism they experience daily, whilst they name and reject forms of racialization that have an effect on their socio-economic mobility as discrimination and racism. The paper argues that experiences of racialization explain why some adult children of refugees do not feel they ‘fit in’ despite their upwards socio-economic mobility.

Though a common EU-African agenda of dealing with migration goes back at least a decade with bilateral, regional and continental approaches, it has gained in visible importance in recent years. But what are the actual approaches and does the rhetoric they evoke speak to their actual practice? Unpacking 76 policy documents relating to the governance of migration from African and European institutions between 2005 and 2016, the paper finds that the rhetoric is diverting in itself (both managing and controlling mobility) but also surprisingly similar. There is however a pronounced difference between a management-orientated discourse and the restriction-orientated practice. This is likely tied to hidden agendas: for the EU moving migration controls away from Europe’s borders to the African continent, whilst simultaneously strengthening the rhetorical EU-African partnership. The rhetorical mirroring in African documents may also be an attempt by African states to achieve leverage in an otherwise asymmetric relationship.

Belgium had a long tradition of direct informal employment in paid domestic work, which has undergone formalisation through the introduction of the ‘service voucher system’. This policy triangulates the employment relationship between workers and clients through introducing third-party employing agencies, and guarantees workers’ access to labour and social security rights. Up until now, most international studies of paid domestic work have focused on direct and privatized worker-employer relationships (Anderson, Doing the dirty work?: The global politics of domestic labour, 2000); Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica: Immigrant workers cleaning and caring in the shadows of affluence, 2001); (Lutz, The New Maids: Transnational women and the care economy, 2011); Moras (Sociology Mind, 3(3), 248–256, 2013); (Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 1992). This literature has shown that paid domestic work often features ‘personalised’ (emotionally-loaded) worker-employer relationships. The goal of this article is to analyse the impact of the introduction of the service voucher system on personalisation processes affecting paid domestic work in Belgium. Is personalisation bound to disappear with the sector’s formalisation or is it intrinsic to paid domestic work? We show that personalisation is not threatened by formalisation policies which do not challenge the structural inequalities underpinning paid domestic work (and to which personalisation develops as a remedy). In the Belgian case, the service voucher policy did not challenge the crucial role of personalisation for finding and keeping jobs, as well as improving working conditions. The article shows that personalisation is an informal social protection strategy which developed in the exploitative conditions of informality, but is likely to survive formalising policies. Indeed, formalisation did not eliminate the need for personalisation, as it did not substantially improve working conditions in the sector, failed to recognise workers’ qualifications and to challenge the gendered and migrantized character of domestic work employment.

Since the war in Syria started in 2011, many children left their war-torn country, alone or together with their families, and fled to neighboring countries in the Middle East, to Turkey or to Europe. This article will compare how Syrian refugee children are included – or not - in school systems both in Europe (Sweden, Germany and Greece) and outside Europe (Turkey and Lebanon). These five countries represent very different ways of receiving children in their educational system. We will compare national institutional arrangements like access to compulsory school, access after compulsory school age, welcome or immersion classes, second language education and tracking mechanisms. Including children as soon as possible in regular classes seems to provide the best chances for school success, whereas educating refugee children in a segregated parallel school system for extended periods often results in early school leaving or not attending school at all.

This article sheds novel, light on how Senegalese men and women adapt to European border governance by finding new ways to ‘look for life’ (chercher la vie) in Latin America, as an alternative to the perilous clandestine routes to Europe. The article follows how Senegalese migrants’ mobility to Argentina has evolved over the last two decades. It particularly focuses on the migrants’ journey to Argentina and explores the migrants’ accounts of their experiences en route and compares them to how different intersecting state-driven national and supranational migration policies become entangled in their mobility. By analytically focusing on the changing migration infrastructure and the different forms of friction the migrants encounter and respond to while moving, the article shows how the risk and uncertainty along the journey increasingly mirror the struggles which African migrants face at EU–African borderlands, and thus how similar features of global mobility regimes seem to be reproduced along this new route from West Africa to Latin America. In this way the politics and hierarchies of mobility are brought to the fore. Yet the article also points to how migrants find new openings and ways to contest the hindrances that aims to stop them as they move through these newly traversed borderlands.

Studies of transnationalism typically account for homeland-oriented transnational political action (TPA) as the product of varying political opportunities. Yet, the opportunity-driven perspective overlooks why some immigrant and diaspora communities refrain from engaging in homeland politics or are forestalled in their attempts to do so. We address this shortcoming by theorizing how sociopolitical conditions can constrain TPA. Drawing inductively from primary data on Pakistani, Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni diasporas as well as secondary sources, we identify four sources of constraint: 1) geopolitics and interstate relations; 2) origin-country authoritarianism; 3) weak origin-country governance; and 4) exclusionary receiving-country contexts. By demonstrating how these socio-political forces suppress TPA, we contribute a new theoretical approach that emphasizes the conditions and relations that hinder cross-border political action. In sum, the article illustrates the theoretical importance of understanding variation in TPA and the utility of examining negative cases in the study of immigrant and diaspora transnational politics.

In recent years, an increasingly international competition for highly-skilled professionals has become apparent. Many countries try to attract highly-skilled migrants and to keep them for the long term. These countries also allow the immigration of close family members, who are expected to play an important role in the decision to migrate and to stay in a country. However, accompanying partners often face significant difficulties when entering the foreign labour market. The paper is based on 26 qualitative interviews with the accompanying partners of highly-skilled migrants in the United Kingdom [UK]. It explores the challenges that they face when trying to take up work after migration, elaborates on their strategies of finding work and examines the conditions for their labour market integration. The paper draws on Bourdieu’s concept of capital accumulation and conversion and asks how partners negotiate the value of their cultural capital after migration. In order to better understand their professional integration, accompanying partners’ positions after migration are related to their career plans before migration. Consequently, the paper differentiates between family migrants who use their expatriation as an occasion for a career change, family migrants who continue their career abroad and family migrants who wish to continue their career, but do not succeed.

Care for young children continues to highly influence the life chances of men and women, even more so when they are migrants. For migrant women, childcare remains a particular challenge when their kin are absent and the gendered norms of work and family life abroad diverge from what they have known in the country of origin. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of social class and childcare strategies of migrant women by combining two research projects with migrants from Poland to Germany and the UK. Accounts represented in this article depict the ways in which migrant mothers interpret and use the available childcare options, thereby highlighting how class-based resources are deployed and reproduced in two different welfare regimes. The comparative approach pursued in the article reveals that it is neither class nor national context that has a capacity to determine early childcare choices on its own. Instead, it is an intricate interplay of social protections’ availability, gender norms and social class, which together engender various childcare strategies.

This article addresses migration-security nexus in the EU by assessing Member States’ national security and defence strategies as well as the 2016 EUGS in a time of migration crisis, a crisis that stands as one of the most important geopolitical challenges today in the EU. After developing and applying a framework for analysis derived from a literature review, the existing differences among Member States are clear in terms of strategic cultures and approaches to migration issues. The idea of ‘EU’rope without internal borders is at stake as Schengen is under serious attack due to increasing Eurocentrism and growing extreme right-wing populism, which are a consequence of increasing economic protectionism and international terrorism. The solution seems to depend on two critical uncertainties: the evolution of political and social instability in the North Africa and the Middle East, and the future of the EU itself. The results enlighten a securitization of migration mostly centred on the nation-state and national security rather than on people and human security.

The ways border regimes affect migration patterns remain ambiguous. Closed borders may constrain migration but also encourage migrants to pursue alternative migration channels and destinations. While open borders may be associated with higher migration, oftentimes they promote circulation and return. To clarify how different border regimes influence migration patterns, this article examines the impact of open and closed border regimes on migration outcomes in Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana in the 1950s–1980s period, when all three gained independence or non-sovereign status and colonial ties were strong. The article proposes a conceptual schematic model that can accommodate varied post-colonial political and border regime transitions and explains changes in the timing, destination and composition of migration. The analysis finds that, counterintuitively, closed borders can lead to high emigration while open borders can encourage people to stay. The proposed model also illustrates the relevance of three dimensions of time: thehistorical juncture, thesequence of changeand thetime span. In sum, rather than preventing migration, border regimes yield important effects that lead to migration diversification.

This paper elaborates an aspirations–capabilities framework to advance our understanding of human mobility as an intrinsic part of broader processes of social change. In order to achieve a more meaningful understanding of agency and structure in migration processes, this framework conceptualises migration as a function of aspirations and capabilities to migrate within given sets of perceived geographical opportunity structures. It distinguishes between the instrumental (means-to-an-end) and intrinsic (directly wellbeing-affecting) dimensions of human mobility. This yields a vision in which moving and staying are seen as complementary manifestations of migratory agency and in which human mobility is defined as people’s capability to choose where to live, including the option to stay, rather than as the act of moving or migrating itself. Drawing on Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty (as manifestations of the widely varying structural conditions under which migration occurs) this paper conceptualises how macro-structural change shapes people’s migratory aspirations and capabilities. The resulting framework helps to understand the complex and often counter-intuitive ways in which processes of social transformation and ‘development’ shape patterns of migration and enable us to integrate the analysis of almost all forms of migratory mobility within one meta-conceptual framework.

Much has been written on the positive effect of direct democracy (initiatives, referendums) on voter turnout. However, we have limited knowledge about potential differential effects on voters belonging to various ethnic groups. The paper argues that depending on a group’s responsiveness to the political context, direct democracy can (dis-)integrate voters (from) into the electorate. Empirical analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) voting supplement survey data, together with data on the absolute use of direct democracy across US states, corroborates this theoretical expectation, however lending more support for the disintegrating assumption. Frequent direct democratic elections further widen the negative voting gap between first-generation Asian voters and voters living in the US for three generations or longer, whereas they tend to diminish this voting gap for first-generation Hispanic voters. The disintegrative pattern for first-generation Asian voters remains even significant when excluding California from the state sample, yet not the integrative tendency for first-generation Hispanics. Additional analyses using alternative measures of direct democracy and voting, and applying statistical adjustments to address causality concerns, confirm the robustness of these findings, which shed light on the so-far underexplored (dis-)integrative potential of political institutions.

The underlying research funding for this article comes from the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe, with support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No 693443. This article will explore the extent to which a focus on the ‘local’ can tell us something meaningful about recent developments in the governance of displaced migrants and refugees. Taking a multi-sited approach spanning cases in the south and north of Europe, we consider how the challenge of housing and accommodation in particular, a core sector of migrant reception and integration, can shed light on the ways local and city level approaches may negotiate, and sometimes diverge from, national level policy and rhetoric. While it can be said that despite variation, local authorities are by definition ultimately ‘always subordinate’ (Emilsson, Comparative Migration Studies, 3: 1-17, 2015: 4), they can also show evidence of ‘decoupling’ across geographies of policy delivery (Pope and Meyer, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 3: 280–305, 2016: 290). This article traces how possible local variations in different European cases are patterned by ground-level politics, local strategic networks, and pre-existing economic resources in a manner that is empirically detailed through the study of housing. Publisher PDF

Many refugees fleeing from persecution across borders, find navigating the refugee registration system extremely complicated. In many border spaces, destination or transit countries, the difficult registration processes and the lack of support services requires the intervention and support of many non-state actors. Over the past decades, neoliberal policies have increasingly relegated public responsibilities to the private sphere. In this vein, a range of organisations have been working with refugees to assist them access to their legal status. This paper seeks to critically examine on-the-ground practices of these individuals, international and local non-profit organisations—or brokers—in Malaysia and the United States of America. Using ethnographic fieldwork data from these two very disparate fieldsites—one a signatory of the Protocol to the Convention, the other a non-signatory country—we document shared difficulties, frustrations, opportunities and specific obstacles, strategies and tactics refugees and organisations deploy. Building on Hannah Arendt’s insights of an internal contradiction in the human rights framework, we point to a new aporia: Whilst there now exist international instruments to protect refugees, access to this framework and its protections is becoming ever more challenging. This means that those seeking asylum need the assistance and mediation of third-party organisations in order to access their rights. The struggle for recognition and protection thus is no longer about achieving universal rights, but rather on how vulnerable populations can access them., Dr. Hoffstaedter received a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (project number DE140100052) funded by the Australian Research Council

This article analyses how organizations shape migration trajectories. More specifically, by looking at the Philippine migration industry, this ethnographic research highlights how organizations such as recruitment agencies, and governmental organizations, frame migration trajectories in terms of directionality, spatiality, but also by marketing migrants in the case of domestic workers. By looking at organization’s rationalities, it shows how migration flows have become institutionalized and ruled by organizations based on economic and protection rationalities in order to remain competitive on the global domestic labor market. Moreover, it underlines the crucial role played by these organizations to ensure the matching between the employers and the employee. This article highlights thus how agencies proceed by mobilizing migrant sociodemographic data to market skills such as docility, hardworking and flexibility. In addition, this research describes in detail how age, religion, marital status become key information mobilized by agencies in order to market migrants, meet employers’ expectations, and remain competitive on the global market of domestic labor. Finally, this article emphasizes the contribution of the organizational approach in the field of migration studies.

In both Germany and France, perceptions of immigration, diversity and their societal consequences have undergone important transformations in the past two decades. However, existing research has only partially captured such processes. The “grand narratives” of national approaches, while still influential, no longer explain contemporary realities. Further, analyses of national politics and discourses may not sufficiently reflect the realities across localities and society more broadly. While emerging in different national contexts, little is known about how diversity is actually perceived by political stakeholders at the urban level. Given the key role of immigration and diversity in current conflicts over Europe’s future, it is imperative to assess present-day conceptualisations of migration-related diversity among important societal actors.This article investigates perceptions and evaluations of socio-cultural heterogeneity by important societal actors in large cities. We contribute to existing literature by capturing an unusually broad set of actors from state and civil society. We also present data drawn from an unusually large number of cities. How influential is the perception of current society as heterogeneous, and what forms of heterogeneity are salient? And is socio-cultural and migration-related heterogeneity evaluated as threatening or rather as beneficial? Based on an original data set, this study explores the shared and contested ideas, the cognitive roadmaps of state and non-state actors involved in local politics.We argue that, in both German and French cities, socio-cultural heterogeneity is nowadays widely recognized as marking cities and often positively connoted. At the same time, perceptions of the main features of diversity and of the benefits and challenges attached to it vary. We find commonalities between French and German local actors, but also clear differences. In concluding, we suggest how and why national contexts importantly shape evaluations of diversity.

The myth that Ghana is stable and peaceful, cause many refugees from across Africa and elsewhere, escaping wars from their countries to flee there. Whilst here, refugees face transitional problems in acculturation and settlement, stemming from a lack of education, as many have not had formal education before coming to Ghana. The problem is worsened by an immigration system and a social structure that delays responding to refugees’ needs. With a lack of viable employment to support parents’ settlement needs, these cumulatively function to affect refugee children’s educational attainment. Using ideas from Giddens’ structuration theory as a conceptual framework, the research seeks to understand how immigration rules and other mediated rules at the Ganfoso Refugee Camp, interlacing refugee parents’ acculturation/settlement experiences, impact children’s educational lives. The article uses narratives from teachers/head-teachers, refugee camp management, and a cross-section of community members to highlight how social structures, policy regulation and implementation, combined with issues of refugees’ agency (personal experiences and responses to situation), impact upon their settlement and affect their children’s education. Through qualitative interviews with 69 participants, the article highlight discussions on the effect of institutional barriers to refugees’ experiences, and impact on educational access of refugee children in Ghana.

For two decades, counter-trafficking organizations have been operating under the assumption that rural populations are less informed about human trafficking. Based on a public survey of 300 people in Moldova, I found that anti-trafficking organizations operating in Moldova have flawed assumptions about the public knowledge. Findings show that rural people are, in fact, more knowledgeable about human trafficking than other surveyed groups. In-depth interviews revealed that these people are more informed than others because (1) anti-trafficking organizations mainly have targeted them, (2) they are more likely to know families who have lost members to the traffickers, (3) they tend to think of themselves more likely to be trafficked because they share the same characteristics with the trafficked victims. These findings suggest that counter-trafficking organizations have to revise their anti-trafficking efforts and re-conceptualize the targeted population for their work to be more efficient in tackling this problem.

Cities are taking a prominent role in solving global challenges, with a ‘new localism’ inviting a reorientation of power from nation-states downwards, outwards and globally. This special issue explores this phenomenon through extending the existing analyses of multi-level governance and the ‘local turn’ to the underexplored area of asylum seeker and refugee reception in European cities. The special issue draws on research in European cities where new strategies were piloted especially in the wake of ‘the refugee crisis’ from 2015, consolidating the ‘local turn’ evident in immigration and integration policy-making. The collection is in two parts: the first part explores innovation in local governance of asylum seeker reception. Here, case studies demonstrate how cities responded through forging new alliances both vertically and (especially) horizontally in networks within and between cities. The second part explores innovation in practice, analysing novel initiatives premised on local engagement and inclusivity of newcomers within the social fabric of the city. This editorial paper draws out the wider lessons of efforts from this comparative exploration of attempts to rethink asylum seeker and refugee reception at the local level.

In this contribution to the formation of an epistemic community and its knowledge production developed in the PaperBetween fragmentation and institutionalisation: the rise of migration studies as a research field, I seek to go beyond the bibliometric analysis, and in particular explore the nature of its internationalisation, the connections authors have across the globe and the unequal valuation of differently located research. These aspects underpin networks in the formation and evolution of epistemic communities. I shall illustrate my points through an epistemic community which has grown significantly in the past two decades, but scarcely gains a mention in the Paper. Gender and migration can be placed within the much broader cluster of globalisation, and especially in more recent years, transnationalism. My analysis does not start from bibliometric measures, which I do not have, but is based on selected reviews at different stages of the emergence of this field and my own involvement in it since the early 1990s.