This article investigates the subjective employment mobility, defined as migrants’ evaluation of their employment situation before and after migration, of European physicians in Germany. Analyzing different dimensions of occupation (e.g., income, working conditions, use of skills, career opportunities) of physicians who migrated to Germany from within the European Union (i.e., EU physicians), it examines

The pervasiveness of food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions has resulted in increased emigration not only to wealthier countries within the continent but also to developed countries elsewhere in the world. A growing body of research has examined the welfare implications of remittances from international migrants for families left behind. A strand of that literature focuses

Immigrant fertility and the realization of fertility intentions are two topics of considerable interest in contemporary demographic research. Yet very few studies have explored the relationship between intended and actual fertility among immigrants and their children. Using data from the Norwegian and Swedish Generations and Gender Surveys, this article analyzes how both positive and negative short-term

With anti-migrant populism and strict border regimes in many receiving countries, hundreds of thousands of refugees have been entangled in transit situations and face critically vulnerable conditions. While recent research on transit migration has explored “life projects,” including work, studies, and volunteering undertaken by refugees to make their lives more bearable in a context of protracted uncertainty

Across Western European nations, politicians often problematize immigrants’ cultural values and question their fit with majority society. Within this discourse, immigrant women, especially those of Arabic origin, occupy a central place, since they are portrayed as un-agentic victims and reproducers of an oppressive culture that they pass on to their daughters. In this article, we study how, in a climate

This article investigates whether and to what extent poor proficiency in Italian impairs immigrants’ labor market integration in Italy. Using individual-level survey data, we apply instrumental variables methods to leverage presumably exogenous variations in Italian proficiency induced by immigrants’ demo-linguistic characteristics (e.g., age at arrival, linguistic distance between mother tongue and

The book Refuge: Transforming a broken refugee system (2017) by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier achieved something relatively rare in contemporary refugee and migration studies—namely, instant infamy. The highly critical reviews of Refuge make up a small subliterature in refugee studies in their own right (e.g., Munro 2017; Pascucci 2017; Tazzioli 2018; Webber 2018; White 2019; Grant 2020; Leon-Reyes

In times when immigrant integration is considered both a highly salient political topic and a practical challenge by local, national, and European decision-makers, an analysis of the governance approach developed by the European Union (EU) Urban Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees opens up new opportunities to advance research on migration studies’ “local turn.” In this IMR Dispatch from

In her book, Lorena Gazzotti focuses on the workings of border power through aid by weaving together insights from the literature on border control, development securitization, humanitarian assistance, and non-state governance. The main argument advanced by the book is that aid is an instrument of slow border control. Gazzotti demonstrates that, contrary to hard power instruments of migration control

In this IMR Country Report, we draw attention to Costa Rica as a strategic location for expanding research and theory on migrants in need of protection (MNP), who have migrated abroad primarily to evade an imminent threat to their survival. MNP constitute an increasing share of all international migrants in Costa Rica and worldwide, yet research on these migrants and their migration dynamics remains

This article advances understandings of collective remittances practices by elaborating on the case of the Armenian diaspora in the Netherlands. It argues that the collection, management, and distribution of collective remittances are crucial aspects of how diasporic immigrant groups function. Hence, collective remittances represent a lens through which to analyze a diaspora's internal life, gender

The 20th century witnessed populations increasingly concentrated in cities, and this global pattern has persisted into the 21st century. A principal reason for the urban concentration lies in the greater employment advantages offered by bigger metropolises. While this relationship is well documented, few studies have examined whether these benefits differ according to urban dwellers’ birth country

The popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa 2010/2011 were a critical juncture not only for societies and politics in the region but also for intraregional and transregional migration flows. Notably, the early days of the so-called “Arab Spring” were characterized by the return of formerly exiled opposition players as well as second-generation emigrants for whom the protest-driven regimes

This article examines the ethnic wage penalty among migrants in 11 Western European countries. It aims to extend the literature on the models of migrant occupational inclusion in European labor markets by studying the wage gap and to disentangle whether the gross wage penalty experienced by foreign-born residents can be explained by human capital-related factors and/or by migrants’ occupational segregation

This IMR Country Report examines Nigerian migration to Russia, exploring the changes in this migration stream from a flow driven by educational motivations during the Soviet era to one shaped by economic and family-reunion reasons after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. In doing so, it offers insights into the social realities of Nigerian migrants living in Russia. The research discussed here included

Immigrant integration scholarship increasingly discusses integration as a multidimensional process. Yet there is considerable inconsistency in how that multidimensionality is conceptualized. This article posits that there are two different logical approaches by which multidimensional frameworks of integration tend to outline their dimensions: the “thematic” (or conceptually driven) approach and the

The self-reported number of workdays missed due to injury or illness, or sick days, is a reliable measure of health among working-aged adults. Although sick days is a relatively underexplored health-related outcome in migration studies, it can provide a multidimensional understanding of immigrant wellbeing and integration. Current understandings of the association between migration status and sick

Studies of refugee belonging, as a key facet of integration, primarily focus on post-flight processes. Adopting an approach to integration that is temporally and spatially broader, this article argues that refugees’ varied experiences of belonging or estrangement in origin countries fundamentally condition their subsequent experiences of belonging or estrangement in settlement countries. To explore

Although there is evidence documenting the impacts of Mexican parents’ migration to the United States on the educational attainment of the children they leave behind, the potential role of parents’ legal status in stratifying their children's educational achievement is poorly understood. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, I estimate the educational effects of parents’ documentation status

Immigrant incorporation in cities is often explained using the theories of spatial and segmented assimilation, which differ, among other things, in their approach to the spatial aspects of incorporation. However, empirical evidence about immigrant spatial incorporation from both theories is ambiguous, since most case studies focus on a single location and a limited number of immigrant groups, which

Spatial assimilation theory claims that immigrants’ acculturation and socioeconomic progress will lead to converging neighborhood attainment relative to non-migrant natives. Recently, it has been argued that equalization of local services and life chances across neighborhoods in egalitarian welfare states may delay spatial assimilation by reducing immigrants’ incentives to move out of low-income areas

Dear readers,

As with all social processes, human migration is a dynamic process that requires regular theoretical reflection. This article offers such reflection as related to the role of the natural environment in contemporary migration research and theory. A growing body of evidence suggests that environmental contexts, as shifting social and ecological realities, are consequential to migration theory. In this

Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes by Rustamjon Urinboyev continues the recent series of monographs (see Kubal, 2019; Schenk, 2018) that introduce the Russian case of immigration policy and governance to global migration studies. The book focuses on visa-free labor migration from Uzbekistan to Russia and analyses migrants’ legal adaptation in the context of Russia's hybrid political regime. The

European countries have experienced significant inflows of migrants in the past decade, including many refugees from regions engaged in armed conflicts. Although previous research on migrant health has largely focused on economic migration, empirical evidence on refugee health is sparse. This article uses administrative data from Austria to differentiate between economic migrants and refugees and to

The interdependence of migration and family formation has been studied extensively, but studies that consider the embeddedness of this interdependence within gender and class relations are less common. Most existing research on family and migration treats gender and social class as separate determinants of family events or transitions, instead of analyzing how the intersections of both shape full family

This article investigates the intersection of care and migration regimes by comparing four carefully matched familialist countries—Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Spain. These four countries, while sharing a similar familialist culture and welfare regime, responded to the problem of eldercare deficits differently in the 1990s and the 2000s. Italy and Spain developed a ‘migrant-in-the-family model,’

This article shows that differences in the economic incorporation of Muslims and other immigrant minorities in France and in Canada are mainly related to immigrant selectivity, labor market structures, and welfare transfers. Differences in ethno-specific penalties due to national cultural frames — related to multiculturalism in Canada and secular republicanism in France — are small, affect only the

As the H-2A visa program expands to become a core component of contemporary Mexican migration to the United States, questions emerge about the tradeoffs migrants face between temporary and undocumented statuses. This article employs propensity score matching of participants in the Mexican Migration Project—an extensive binational survey of Mexican migrants and their families—to compare economic and

Newcomers to Ireland confront a context of reception shaped by large-scale historical emigration and more recent immigration defined by an increasingly diverse set of origin contexts, both within and outside the European Union (EU). How has the Irish population responded to these groups, and how openly do Irish residents express their views toward different immigrant groups? We test this response using

Foreign aid payments have been a key policy response by Global North countries to reduce increased migration flows from the Global South. In this article, we contribute to the literature on the relationship between aid and international migration flows and estimate the contemporaneous effect of bilateral aid payments on bilateral, international migration flows. The fundamental problem in analyzing

Migrants, Thinkers, Storytellers, edited by Jonatan Kurzwelly and Luis Escobedo, uses the concept of "life story' as its overarching methodological framework to tell the stories of migrants coming from various backgrounds and living in the town of Bloemfontein, South Africa. The book is positioned largely within scholarship on international migration and identity formation. Since much of the migration

In most societies, resources and opportunities are concentrated in neighborhoods and workplaces occupied by the host population. The spatial assimilation and place stratification theories propose trajectories (the sequences of events) leading to minority and migrant access to or exclusion from these advantageous places. However, most previous research on these theories did not ask whether such theorized

A considerable literature explores whether the fertility of migrants from high-fertility contexts converges with that of women in lower fertility destinations. Nonetheless, much of this research compares migrants’ reproductive outcomes to those of native-born women in destination countries. Drawing on research emphasizing the importance of transnational perspectives, we standardize and integrate data

Countering linear acculturation theories, the adoption of Western European gender customs over time differs across migrant groups. This diversity implies that acculturation into support for gender equality is context dependent. However, little quantitative scholarship has identified what sort of contexts strengthen or impede acculturation. This article investigates one source of context-dependent acculturation:

Transnational parents are migrant mothers and fathers who have at least one child left behind in the home country. Despite their non-negligible prevalence in many destination countries, scarcity of data on the topic has caused a lack of attention to this phenomenon in both policy and scholarship. In particular, little is known about how the interplay between migration and family relations at a distance

For a century, scholars have studied immigrant integration in a range of destinations. Yet, the precise role of context in shaping integration outcomes remains poorly understood. Drawing from an analysis of an original database of articles and books in migration studies, I argue that this knowledge gap may be due to two closely related tendencies in the scholarship. First, case selection has relied

Wage gaps between migrants and natives persist in Germany, and traditional human capital endowments or work environments only partially explain these gaps. This article investigates whether noncognitive skills contribute to explaining male migrant wage gaps in Germany. While the economics literature shows that noncognitive skills affect educational and occupational outcomes, such as gender wage gaps

This IMR Dispatch attempts to elucidate the different concerns of human right groups and international communities over the relocation of the Rohingyas, a forcefully displaced ethnic minority of Myanmar, from the Cox's Bazar refugee camps, in mainland Bangladesh, to a newly developed island, Bhasan Char, in the Bay of Bengal. Of the nearly 1 million Rohingyas currently living in Cox's Bazar camps,

Muslim migrants and their descendants in Western Europe have consistently been shown to hold more negative attitudes toward homosexuality, the more religious they are. In this article, we go beyond this mono-dimensional view of religiosity and develop a theoretical framework that combines (a) the role of different dimensions of religiosity in anchoring cultural attitudes and (b) the potential impact

Gillian Brock‘s Migration and Political Theory is a deep dive into the contemporary immigration debates in analytic political philosophy. These debates are diverse and interrelated, with disputes in one domain frequently turning on claims made in others. For example, the extent to which states have responsibilities to receive asylum seekers is related to the grounding conditions for states’ authority

This IMR Dispatch engages with Ireland's White Paper to End Direct Provision (2021) - the Government of Ireland's most recent policy statement on the provision of settlement services for migrants seeking asylum in Ireland. The actions outlined in the White Paper promise to reorder the provision of accommodation and support for such migrants. A range of positive inputs are included, the most significant

Drawing on intergroup threat theory, this article argues that immigrant integration policies can improve public attitudes toward immigrants and, particularly, toward refugees and asylum-seekers. Examining evidence from an original survey experiment conducted in the United Kingdom, I find that support for admitting asylum-seekers increases when respondents are made aware that prospective asylum-seekers

While most boundary-making studies examine native-born citizens’ opposition to immigration, this article explains why immigrants develop anti-immigrant attitudes. Under what conditions do previous generations of immigrants develop solidarity with newcomers? When might immigrants, instead, police national boundaries and oppose further immigration or naturalization? I argue that under uncertain citizenship

The coffin ship constitutes a core element of both the popular and scholarly imaginations concerning Irish emigration during and after the Great Irish Famine (1845–50). As a symbol of the potentially deadly outcome of the overseas voyage, it has appeared as a staple feature in histories of Irish emigration and inspired creative expressions from songs by Primordial and The Pogues to Brendan Behan's

Migration Studies and Colonialism is a long-overdue call to make the analysis of colonialism central to migration studies. Even though contemporary migration is often rooted in histories of colonial expansion, core texts in the field of migration studies, Mayblin and Turner (2021) argue, have rarely mentioned colonialism, postcolonial racism, or decolonization. The authors critically characterize migration

In What do we owe to refugees?, David Owen questions how refugee protection can be (re)considered as a shared responsibility. This accessible and thought-provoking book explores, from a political philosophic level, what states and their citizens owe refugees. Addressing this question is an urgent matter and a complex journey, and studies like this one are crucial to reflect on how to do better for

From the very beginning of Pugh's book, the reader will discover the author's empathy with the people who are subjected to “the invisibility bargain”, namely migrants and refugees who—to access protection and rights—have to meet the host society's dual expectation of both contributing to the economy and remaining invisible in social and political life. The close examination of the integration and protection

In this book, Pailey presents a fascinating and comprehensive overview of contestations over dual citizenship and the political economy of belonging in Liberia. The book broadens our understanding of citizenship and identity in the Liberian state as well as Africa more broadly through tracing the history of citizenship and displacement in Liberia as well as the tensions between what the author regards

In Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean, anthropologist Megan A. Carney draws on rich, in-depth ethnographic material collected in Sicily between 2014 and 2019 to explore “the lived experiences of the citizens and non-citizens who have been performing various aspects of migrant solidarity work at the front lines of Europe's ‘migration crisis’” (p.2). The author provides us

Jungle Passports by Malini Sur starts with a fresh approach to the northeast India-Bangladesh border by portraying it not primarily as a disruptor but as an “assembly of life forces” (p. 8)—a border that does not stop, but instead animates daily activities. Through a reading of ecologies, infrastructures, exchanges, and mobility, Sur zooms into the heart of borderland communities in Bangladesh and

This article examines discrimination against black and Muslim minority groups in 20 Western labor markets. We analyze the outcomes of 94 field experiments, conducted between 1973 and 2016 and representing ∼240,000 fictitious job applications. Using meta-analysis, we find that black minority groups are more strongly discriminated against than non-black minority groups. The degree of discrimination of

Initial relations between the host society and migrants are likely to influence whether and to what degree migrants receive tangible and intangible settlement support that might affect their children's educational integration. As part of the 1980 Refugee Act, the United States officially began to provide settlement support to one group of migrants - refugees, thus institutionalizing more favorable

In the United States, there is a wide academic achievement gap, beginning in early childhood, between children with more and less educated parents. However, we know little about the differences in size and trajectories of achievement gaps associated with parental education and nativity. Drawing on two US education datasets that enable me to follow a cohort of children from kindergarten to high school

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers—the requests from ICE to a state or local law enforcement agency to hold someone until the person can be taken into immigration custody—have been instrumental in supporting the growing number of deportations from the United States. However, as migrant detentions expanded after 9/11, law enforcement agencies have been increasingly reluctant to comply

Maddalena Marinari's Unwanted appears at a perfect—which is to say, pointed—moment for US immigration policy, as the 100-year-old deliberations about immigration priorities feel irredeemably and tragically present. Marinari knows this as well as readers of her book and students in her classes: her conclusion describes a student who “could no longer tell whether we were studying the history of US immigration

“Could asylum actually disappear?” (p. 234), Alison Mountz asks, in the final chapter of her provocative new book. The evidence she marshals to address this question suggests a disturbing answer. Inspired by Judith Butler, Mountz argues that we are witnessing the death of asylum, evident in three interlinked ways. The first is physical death. In two chapters, we learn about the legal and political

The Outside: Migration as life in Morocco, by Alice Elliot, is a rich, deep, and nuanced ethnographic account of the transformations that migration generates in sending communities in the Tadla plain in central Morocco. The book is a thought-provoking account of migration where migrants are not the center of the attention. Instead, building on long-term fieldwork in both urban and rural Morocco, Elliot

In 2015, during the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe, Finland was among the European countries receiving exceptionally large numbers of asylum applications. As the volume of asylum applications surged, however, the percentage of positive asylum decisions in Finland declined substantially. In this article, we explore reasons for this dramatic drop in recognitions rates and examine Finnish immigration