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Research on the intersection between migration management and child protection is limited and, yet, contradictions between these two domains and ambivalence in the area of child migrants' rights across the developed world have already been highlighted. Based on fieldwork with policymakers and service providers in Albania, a middle-to-high income country with a significant history of emigration, this paper aims to shed light on the interaction of these institutional and policy domains and the impact they have on professional practice. The State's impact on migrant children's rights at the domestic level is affected by the resourcefulness of its system of social and child protection. This key factor appears to affect the work of professionals on the ground and ultimately mean a variety of categories of child migrants have limited access to child protection services. Professional practice in this context highlights the need to include material dimensions--the resources needed to realise child protection on the ground--in its definition, and to consider the impact of multi-scalar influences on service providers' work. The two domains of migration management and child protection appear to converge in the case of unaccompanied minors (UAMs). In turn, stateless, returned migrant children and those from very disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds are overlooked, giving rise to unequal access to state support. Nonetheless, an overall disjuncture appears in the context of transnational child protection, due to the rigid focus on nationality as a precondition for state support.

This paper utilises Lefebvre's conceptual triad of space to propose a model of migrants' welcome. This model's application in the context of migration in urban areas requires a simultaneous engagement with social practices, representation and representational aspects of space, countering this way an otherwise essentialised notion of welcome. Utilising this framework in our research with migrants and non-migrant residents in five boroughs in Liverpool, UK, showed that welcome rests on the plane of urban inequalities, which affect the ethics of sharing resources, accepting and enabling the other. A multi-scalar dialectical dynamic of welcome emerges between the discursive notions of welcome as deployed in the everyday encounters and the way welcome is experienced and rephrased in the public domain or lamented in the private one. Dispersal and urban planning policies should regard migrants as stakeholders of welcome at local level for the purpose of migrants' inclusion and managing social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how asylum seekers and refugees living in Glasgow use various tactics to survive and navigate everyday challenges within the restrictive UK immigration system. Thirty interviews were conducted with asylum seekers and refugees of various nationalities and personal backgrounds (ethnicity, class, education and migratory circumstances). Twenty state and third sector organisation staff were also interviewed. Participant observation within third sector organisations was also undertaken. While asylum seekers and refugees feel uncertainties and challenges, we found that they actively use various tactics to navigate the often-lengthy UK asylum process. 'Agency in waiting' encompasses the negative impact of a long stagnation period endured while awaiting confirmation of refugee status and the tactics developed despite the difficulties that asylum seekers and refugees face. We consider three ways that tactics are used: to gain familiarity, to engage in meaningful activities, and to establish social connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on migration and integration in Britain have noted the paucity of research on ‘new’ migrants, especially ‘illegal’ migrants and asylum seekers. This paper focuses on one understudied group – Albanian immigrants and their children – and looks at their migration and settlement, based on sixty interviews conducted in two phases either side of a 2003 mini-amnesty that gave many indefinite leave to remain. This regularization is the fulcrum around which our analytical narrative is built. Focusing on the interaction of migrants' agency with host-country structure, the paper shows that an unsettled asylum policy and delays in implementation have had deleterious effects on migrants' integration and sense of belonging, even after citizenship acquisition. As they search for a social and ethnic positioning within a multi-ethnic host society, the eventual realization of Albanians' migration project is accompanied by culture shock, intergenerational difference and ambivalence towards integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]