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Based on ethnography conducted in Tigray (northern Ethiopia), this article investigates narratives, experiences, and imaginaries of Eritrean refugees about their past journeys and their desired and hindered future ones. It aims at scrutinizing some of the analytical dichotomies through which contemporary migration is described (i.e., forced and voluntary mobility, mobility and immobility, spatial im/mobility and existential im/mobility, migration and mobility). By adopting a phenomenological approach, it recognizes the socially, historically, and politically constructed character of the categories of migration, as well as their inability to account for the complexity of individual experiences and collective frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the impact of the fall of the Iron Curtain on migration and migration policy in Austria. The introduction explains Austria's reasoning for prioritizing trade over migration policy relative to the Central and Eastern European countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain. This decision was a paradigm shift, abandoning the guest worker model of migration and introducing immigration legislation with family migration as a core element. The legislative reforms brought about changes in all areas of migration governance. Despite the restrictive policy stance toward migration, in-migration gained momentum to the extent that, by 2022, Austria had one of the highest shares of migrants in its population in the European Union. As the official understanding of Austria is to be an immigration country by chance rather than by choice, it has consequently been unable to develop the necessary instruments to promote innovation and economic growth with the help of migrants. Instead, restrictive policies that guide the settlement and integration of migrants in general, and of asylum seekers in particular, may jeopardize social cohesion and the sustainability of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction bridges the often-separated bodies of research on institutional boundary work in the policy field of "integration" and on migrant minorities' responses to these boundaries. We engage with the contributions to this Special Issue and demonstrate the relevance of an intersectional analysis in studies on state "integration" policies and the boundaries they draw between communities and on migrant minorities' strategies to navigate and respond to them. Through engaging with issues of "integration", boundary-making, and intersectionality, we show how the Special Issue contributes to debates on "integration" and boundary work by presenting analyses of which subjectivities are accepted in "integration" policies' reproduction of an (imagined) national community and how conditions of national membership do not apply equally to all individuals of migrant origins, nor to all social spaces. We advocate for research that is attentive to the relevant socio-political context, and where possible, responsive to self-identified needs of the affected communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining the theoretical background of Critical Discourse Studies (van Dijk 2015a, 2015b; van Leeuwen 2008; Wodak 2015a) with a corpus-assisted methodology (van Diik 2015a; 2015b), this paper contrastively investigates the discursive representation of migration and migrant people by leading British (Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn) and Italian politicians (Matteo Salvini, Matteo Renzi) in the years 2016-2018, starting from the examination of the collocational profile of such migration-related terms as immigration, immigrant, migrant, refugee and asylum seeker. The period is salient for the global upsurge of populism (Mudde 2004), the Brexit referendum, and the so-called ‘refugee crisis,’ which turned immigration into a hot topic in the political agenda of parties of different orientations. Our empirical analysis sheds light on two opposing views: the negative portrayal of migrants as a threat by right-wing populist politicians across countries (Lorenzetti 2020), while left-wing politicians display a more humanitarian attitude. Regardless of political stance or specific migrant terms, however, the representation of migrant groups as social actors is crucially founded on the strategies of aggregation, collectivisation and functionalisation (van Leeuwen 2008), which ultimately result in the perpetuation of stereotyped and partial depictions that overlook their features as individuals.

This paper aims to reflect from an anthropological perspective on the fact that, by taking the category of ‘refugees’ as both the primary focus and the boundary for its research, Refugee Studies is underpinned by definitions that originate from policy. It contends that the definitions of categories of people (such as “refugees”, “migrants”, “IDPs”, etc.) arising from the refugee and humanitarian regime are not necessarily meaningful in the academic field from an analytical point of view. Empirical research has demonstrated that in practice it is not possible to apply these definitions to separate discrete classes of migrants. They are policy related labels, designed to meet the needs of policy rather than of scientific enquiry. Moreover, as products of a specific system, they bear assumptions which reflect the principles underlying the system itself. For these reasons Refugee Studies needs to maintain analytical independence from the refugee regime. This would require inter alia disentangling the analysis from policy categories and including policy as one of the objects of study. The first section argues that in the context of academic research the descriptive scope of the term “refugee” is limited; in fact, empirical research shows that the refugee label does not define a sociological relevant group. The second section turns to the policy arena and to the shaping of labels by international actors. Two moments are analysed: the creation of a refugee regime separate from the one of migration after the Second World War and the current debate on the “asylum-migration nexus”. The third section presents the main assumptions conveyed by the refugee label as a product of the international refugee regime, that is a state centred and sedentary bias. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]