Too sick to move: distant ‘crisis’ care in transnational families

This paper examines the crisis of acute and chronic illness, death, and dying in transnational families. These are the stages in the family life-course when physical co-presence is required to deliver hands-on care and intimate emotional support for the sick family member. It is a time when distant kin feel they need ‘to be there’, including for their own sense of well-being. This period of ‘crisis’ (in the anthropological sense) makes visible all of the impediments to transnational family caregiving that often remain hidden during those periods when ‘routine’ forms of distant care are adequate. Of particular relevance are the macro-level factors generated by national borders and the policies that define them, including those that govern employment, travel, visa, health, and aged care provisions. It is in these family life phases of crisis that nation-state structures can work to constrain individual agency and rights, making compellingly evident the growing need for transnational structures and policy. At issue are the largely invisible (in a policy sense) but increasingly common micro-level responses of family and individuals that characterize ‘crisis distant care’, which are characterized by the urgent need to visit and to intensify use of ICTs. The paper examines the experiences of migrants living in Australia who are trying to care for acutely unwell family members abroad.     

Yearning for faraway places: the construction of migration desires among young and educated Bangladeshis in Dhaka

These days, the imagined destinations of ever more people, particularly in the ‘global South’, are not where they were born but elsewhere. Using a case study of educated (lower) middle-class youth in Dhaka, this paper attempts to demonstrate that for many ‘aspiring migrants’, the yearning for leaving is a metaphor for disappointment and disengagement rather than the first step towards transnational migration. Economic growth, rapid urbanisation and the increasing investment in education infest the emerging urban (lower) middle-class youth with new ‘modern’ lifestyle desires that cannot be fulfilled in their home country and generate a sense of disengagement with Bangladesh. The paper focuses in particular on how the – culturally embedded – imaginations of foreign places link up to personal (re-)evaluations of local lives. Nearly all informants explained how local socio-economic, political and existential insecurities made them yearn for ‘safe’ places where their dreams could be fulfilled.     

Cosmopolitanism and the relevance of ‘zombie concepts’: the case of anomic suicide amongst Alevi Kurd youth

Against Beck's claims that conventional sociological concepts and categories are zombie categories, this paper argues that Durkheim's theoretical framework in which suicide is a symptom of an anomic state of society can help us understand the diversity of trajectories that transnational migrants follow and that shape their suicide rates within a cosmopolitan society. Drawing on ethnographic data collected on eight suicides and three attempted suicide cases of second‐generation male Alevi Kurdish migrants living in London, this article explains the impact of segmented assimilation/adaptation trajectories on the incidence of suicide and how their membership of a ‘new rainbow underclass’, as a manifestation of cosmopolitan society, is itself an anomic social position with a lack of integration and regulation.     

Struggle as opportunity: making sense of U.S. migration experiences through Buddhist practice

Recent scholarship demonstrates how immigrants rely on religion for resources and psychological and social support at various stages of migration. Many studies of religion focus on the institutional role of faith-based organisations, with little regard for the social importance of religious experiences in daily life. Using interviews with U.S. immigrants who identify as Buddhists, I examine how migrants use Buddhist philosophies as a lens for finding meaning in the struggles associated with migration, including language acquisition, employment, and legal status. Through their practice, migrants gain a sense of agency amid vulnerable circumstances. I also explore the potentially negative consequences of the practice’s individual focus, including the propensity to mask structural causes of inequality and impede possibilities for collective action.     

“Who Are You?”: The Making of Korean “Illegal Entrants” in Occupied Japan 1945–1952

Recent progress in the study of migration history in Japan has cast new light on the influx of Koreans to Japan just after the end of the Second World War in August 1945. Both the Japanese Government and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers called this migration illegal entry or smuggling, and tried to suppress it., One important question remains to be solved about this migration; namely; how was it prohibited? Before the Immigration Control Act (1951) was enshrined, and at a time when Koreans in Japan still held Japanese citizenship, how were the authorities able to regard Korean migration to Japan illegal? How did this migration became a political and social problem? Focusing on the legislation process and performance of the law, this article attempts to answer these questions. Politics, legislation, and social interaction all contributed to making the ethnic and legal category of Korean in postwar Japan.     

新经济地理学视角下的劳动力跨省转移机制研究--以长三角城市群为例

新经济地理学理论认为劳动力出于商品多样性偏好和节约商品运输成本的目的集聚于厂商集聚的地区。文章以长三角城市群为例，利用第六次人口普查数据和NEG模型研究了劳动力流动跨省迁移的影响因素，着重考察了市场潜能对劳动力跨省迁移的作用。研究发现：市场潜能对劳动力跨省迁移有显著的正向效应，从而证明了新经济地理学的“前向联系”；地理距离对劳动力跨省迁移有弱化效应，但没有通过显著性检验；工资水平、就业率、边界效应对劳动力跨省迁移有显著的正向效应。     

Left Behind by Parents in China: Internal Migration and Adolescents’ Well-Being

This study investigates how growing up as a left-behind child due to parents’ labor migration in China is associated with adolescents’ cognitive and socioemotional development, based on data from the China Family Panel Studies. We find that adolescents do worst when both parents are absent in all developmental indicators we examined: short-term and long-term word recall tests, numeracy test, self-concept, and self-expectation of educational attainment. However, the differences between left-behind children and those in rural two-parent families are not statistically significant. Left-behind adolescents do have significantly lower well-being than those in urban two-parent families. These differences can largely be accounted for by father's education, family spending on the adolescent's education, quality of parenting, and the social support available to an adolescent. The gap in Chinese adolescents' development is, thus, not so much related directly to how many parents one grows up with as it is to whether one grows up in a rural or urban environment.     

Back to Brit: retired British migrants returning from Spain

Since the seminal research of O'Reilly, Karen [2000. The British on the Costa del Sol. London: Routledge] and King, Russell, Anthony Warnes, Allan Williams [2000. Sunset Lives: British Retirement Migration to the Mediterranean. New York: Berg Publishers] about British citizens on the Costa del Sol there has been a surge in the publication of lifestyle migration papers, books and research. Nonetheless, there is a part of the lifestyle migration process that has been rarely explored: a return move to the country of origin following retirement migration. Research has indicated a broad increase in the number of older British returnees, yet there has been no substantive research on the topic. This paper therefore attempts to fill this gap by using Spanish registry data to examine the number of British retirees since 2009 who have returned to the UK. In addition, the results of an electronic survey to older British people in Spain are presented which suggest that considerable numbers of British citizens aged over 55 living in the Northern Costa Blanca are likely to return in the next few years. These data therefore indicate the relevance of return migration from Spain to the UK as a significant issue to the academic community as well as to British and Spanish policy-makers.     

Gendering international student migration: an Indian case-study

ABSTRACT

Despite the mainstreaming of gender perspectives into migration research, very few attempts have been made to gender international student migration. This paper poses three questions about Indian students who study abroad. Are there gender differences in their motivations? How do they negotiate their gendered everyday lives when abroad? Is the return to India shaped by gender relations? An online survey of Indian study-abroad students (n?=?157), and in-depth interviews with Indian students in Toronto (n?=?22), returned students in New Delhi (n?=?21), and with parents of students abroad (n?=?22) help to provide answers. Conceptually, the paper draws on a ‘gendered geographies of power’ framework and on student migration as an embodied process subject to ‘matrices of (un)intelligibility’. We find minimal gender-related differences in motivations to study abroad, except that male students are drawn from a wider social background. However, whilst abroad, both male and female Indian students face challenges in performing their gendered identities. The Indian patrifocal family puts greater pressure on males to return; females face greater challenges upon return.     

‘There it will be better … ’: Southern Sudanese in Khartoum imagining a new ‘home’ away from ‘home’

At the time of the research, Khartoum was a multi-ethnic and multinational metropolis of 8 million people. A considerable part of the population consists of Southern Sudanese migrants and displaced persons that came during the 20 years plus of civil war in South Sudan to the capital. These people were categorised after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), as displaced people regardless as to whether they come to the capital as labour migrants, students or because of the war to the capital. The notion of displacement assumes that they are people who are ‘out of place’: thereby assuming a former situation of being in place, a place that can be called ‘home’. After the CPA from 2005, this frequently only imagined home became a real place for the IDP’s to which they are supposed to go back. Yet, many migrants and displaced people are reluctant to move to Southern Sudan. Their decision about going to the South or staying in Khartoum depends not only on the opportunities and perspectives in their respective ‘home’ areas but also on the perceptions of belonging and identity. The imaginations and aspirations about the future life in South Sudan, which I analyse in this article, reflect this ambivalent positioning.