What are the costs of attempting to migrate internationally for work but being deterred by unexpected changes in states’ policies? Building on recent insights into involuntary immobility, I examine immobility's financial consequences, including how these consequences vary across levels of household wealth. Drawing on an original panel survey of 70 aspiring Pakistani labour migrants and their heads of household, I find that poorer households more often expected to pay to migrate. They also lost the most in financing overseas employment attempts gone awry. I additionally use the findings to specify a dynamic of immobility: “capability conversion”, or the process by which migrants’ capability to migrate at one point in time crashes up against unexpected constraints, thereby affecting their future capability to migrate. Capability conversion helps explain how migratory attempts can lead individuals to becoming more “stuck” over time, and, more generally, helps develop the aspiration-mobility framework for analysing (im)mobility.

中文翻译：

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不动的动态：巴基斯坦有抱负的移民的能力转换

为工作而尝试国际移民但因州政策的意外变化而受阻的成本是多少？基于最近对非自愿不动的见解，我研究了不动的财务后果，包括这些后果如何随着家庭财富水平的不同而变化。根据对 70 名有抱负的巴基斯坦劳工移民及其户主的原始小组调查，我发现较贫穷的家庭更经常期望为移民支付费用。他们还在为失败的海外就业提供融资方面损失最大。我还使用这些发现来说明一种不动的动态：“能力转换”，即移民在某个时间点的迁移能力因意外限制而崩溃的过程，从而影响他们未来的迁移能力。