‘I was forced here’: perceptions of agency in second generation ‘return’ migration to Tonga

Migrants’ adolescent children sometimes live for periods of time in their parents’ homeland; however, little attention has been paid to this in the literature on ‘return’ migration and transnationalism. This paper explores the experiences of overseas born Tongan youth spending time in high schools in Tonga, whether by choice or because they have been taken or sent due to concerns about their behaviour. The importance of these young people’s perceptions of agency in relation to their move is considered as a factor in their responses to their experiences in Tonga. Other factors shaping those experiences include their family situation, the school they attend and the wider attitudes in Tongan society towards these young people. The paper also considers the question of agency in relation to the cultural expectations these overseas born youth must learn to meet, which entail significant restrictions on their behaviour yet are also a means of strengthening their cultural identity and sense of belonging.     

Between humanitarian assistance and migration management: on civil actors’ role in voluntary return from Belgium

Whilst European governments have increasingly externalised restrictive migration policies to civil actors, the latter’s main interests lie in improving or defending immigrants’ well-being. This raises the crucial question as to how civil actors deal with the puzzling position they find themselves in: to what extent do they execute or transform their funders’ policy objectives? And which mechanisms enable them to do so? This article contributes to answering these questions by detailing the historical shifts in the roles played by civil actors in the Assisted Voluntary Return programme in Belgium. Most importantly, the article argues that the considerable autonomy these civil actors achieved resulted in two seemingly opposite effects. On the one hand, they developed a wealth of expertise in ensuring the quality of return, thereby transforming the national government’s goals of managing migration into humanitarian ones. On the other hand, in recent developments their autonomy paradoxically became instrumental to migration management, not so much by changing their practices or values, but by changing their functioning within the wider field of migration policies. The article concludes by proposing the metaphor of ‘immunisation’ as an apt way of describing civil actors’ practical and functionally role in migration management.     

Inventing a city: cultural citizenship in ‘Słubfurt’

This article is an in-depth exploration of local efforts to build a transnational sense of cultural citizenship in the border cities of Frankfurt(Oder), Germany and S?ubice, Poland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2006, this article focuses on the various strategies and activities of ‘S?ubfurt’, a community-based NGO with the goal of redefining S?ubice and Frankfurt(Oder) as a unified social space. In pursuing this goal, S?ubfurt engages with European Union-wide social and political dynamics aimed at enhancing international cooperation and integration by de-emphasizing national borders and promoting a transnational sense of ‘European’ identity. This article therefore addresses the interplay between local cultural politics and the tactics and techniques of supranational forms of governmentality, and examines attempts to establish new symbols, events, practices and traditions that support the development of a cross-border community identity and cultural citizenship within the two cities.     

‘Felons are also our family’: citizenship and solidarity in the undocumented youth movement in the United States

The undocumented youth movement began in the United States in the mid-2000s. Drawing on qualitative research with undocumented young organisers in California, this article explores how relationships between undocumented youth, the wider undocumented population, and legal citizens have been understood in narratives of citizenship in the movement over time. It is argued that, paradoxically, the movement’s retreat from prioritising a pathway to legal citizenship for the most ‘eligible’, made visible historic and contemporary ties to the United States and its peoples that are obscured in hegemonic narratives of contemporary citizenship. In becoming more inclusive of the wider undocumented population, positions of solidarity with marginalised US citizens have also emerged. In the context of attacks on some racialised and other marginalised social groups during Trump’s presidency, such solidarity is even more vital.     

Genderacing immigrant subjects: ‘anchor babies’ and the politics of birthright citizenship

Birthright citizenship is often a subject of important national debates on immigration. From a historical perspective, the influx of Mexican and Chinese immigrants to the United Stated has elicited politically charged efforts to deny the right of US citizenship to their children. Based on a review of popular discursive frames concerning the politics of birthright citizenship, this essay identifies and critiques the arguments from both ends of the political spectrum. We conclude that, by and large, the substance of their legal and philosophical arguments is old, hackneyed responses from decades ago. However, on many symbolic levels, the current rhetoric is quite uncharacteristically caustic, with a focus on racialized and gendered discourses among nationalist groups. We seek to explain why this is the case. Framed as ‘genderacing immigrant subjects’, this essay examines the politics of naming (or nomenclature) through the construction of the racially gendered referent in public discourse, thereby ascribing socially resonant meanings that naturalize a call for draconian policy measures in order to socially engineer the national body.     

The ‘nuclear family paradigm’ as a marker of rights and belonging in transnational families

This article examines the legal regulation of transnational families in the context of family reunion. In defining the legal categories of ‘family’ and ‘child’ the law bases its understanding of the family and family life on the image of the nuclear family, which is perceived as a fundamental and natural unit of society. This understanding of the family, the ‘nuclear family paradigm’, has important implications for transnational belonging. This article focuses on these implications in the context of family reunification. In the case of a married minor child, the ‘nuclear paradigm’ is used to legitimate a line of legal reasoning that takes into account neither human rights norms nor the social reality of relatedness. Yet in certain other cases of family reunion, namely in the case of (suspected) marriages of convenience, the social reality of the relationship is a decisive factor determining the right to family reunion. The argument presented in this article is that through the ‘nuclear family paradigm’, the conceptual framework of private law concerning recognition is smuggled into public law and treated as universal while at the same time the legal reasoning on family reunion remains quite capable of examining de facto family life in order to refuse the rights that would otherwise follow from recognition of a marriage.     

International migration and the rise of the ‘civil’ nation

Scholars largely agree that immigration policies in Western Europe have switched to a liberal, civic model. Labelled as ‘civic turn’, ‘civic integration’ or ‘liberal convergence’, this model is not identically applied across countries, since national institutions, traditions and identifications still matter. Even so, the main focus is on processes which allow or prevent migrants to be incorporated into nations usually taken for granted in their meanings. Moving from policies to discourses, this article aims to interrogate what kind of nation is behind these policies as a way to further scrutinise the ‘civic turn’. Exploring how the term ‘civility’ and its adjectivisations are discursively deployed in Italian parliamentary debates on immigration and integration issues, the article points to two opposite narratives of nation. While one mobilises civility in order to rewrite the nation in terms of a common, inclusive, civic ‘we’, the other uses civility to reaffirm the conflation between national identity and the identity of the ethno-cultural majority. These findings suggest the importance of exploring the ‘civic turn’ not only across countries, but also across political parties within the same country to capture the ways in which a liberal, civic convergence in political discourses might hide divergent national boundary mechanisms.     

Who do migrant associations represent? The role of ‘ethnic deservingness’ and legal capital in migrants’ rights claims in Turkey

Considering that established migrant associations often play an active role in migrants’ rights advocacy, the relationship between them and the growing numbers of irregular migrants needs careful scrutiny. Looking at the encounters between irregular Bulgarian Turkish migrants and associations established by their co-ethnics who hold Turkish citizenship in Turkey, our ethnographic evidence shows that co-ethnic migrant associations mobilise the legal frame of ‘ethnic deservingness’ with the intention of welcoming co-ethnics to the Turkish homeland. In the absence of other formal organisations for rights advocacy, associations’ appeals to this frame emerge as a civic resource for the irregular newcomers in their permanent residency claims. At the same time, the same frame hides unequal power relations within co-ethnic communities, that is, newcomers’ peripheral positions within associations and the economic costs of filing claims via associations. This situation creates a representational gap in the associational context between its active members with higher legal capital and irregular newcomers with lower legal capital. Tackling the problem of representation determined by the legal hierarchy, this study questions whether migrant associations should still be considered important political actors when undocumented/irregular migrants outnumber regulars—especially with regard to the immediate political/legal actions they require.     

‘The endless winter’: transnational mobilities of skilled snow sport workers

This article takes up Newman and Falcous’ (2012) challenge to move sport migration studies beyond the career-based travels of the sporting elite and to ‘cultivate new accounts of the affects of global sport mobility on the experiences’ of a wide range of people involved in sporting cultures and industries (48). Working at the intersection of sport migration and lifestyle mobilities scholarship, this paper focuses on the seasonal migration experiences of passionate skiers and snowboarders who have dedicated many years to working in ski resorts as instructors, terrain park-crew, and managers. Drawing primarily upon in-depth interviews with six long-term snow sport workers, the author examines the opportunities, constraints and negotiations of those following the winter between the hemispheres for work and leisure, as well as those who have transitioned out of this highly mobile career. She concludes by examining how snow sport participants’ transnational experiences influence their emotional connections to place and understandings of ‘home’ well after their careers in the snow sport industry have come to an end.     

Italian Americans in the ‘Bocce Belt’: ‘Old World’ memories and ‘New World’ identities

This essay examines the development of an ethnically and racially segregated resort landscape in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York in the twentieth century. Focusing on the history of Italian American resorts clustered primarily in Greene County, New York, it demonstrates that ethnicity continued to shape the social and cultural lives of many European immigrant New Yorkers and their families well after World War II. Ethnic resorts provided vacationers with an insulated recreational environment in which group identity and transatlantic ties – both real and imagined – could be fostered and sustained. However, the flexibility of these ethnic identities and the pervasive discrimination against African Americans at ethnic resorts in the 1940s and 1950s reveals the extent to which European Americans had largely internalized a sense of white ethnic identity by the postwar decades. The history of ethnic resorts in the Catskills sheds light on the process by which generations of European Americans in New York City negotiated these multiple ethnic, national, and racial identities.     

Refugees,migrants, neither,both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

The use of the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ to differentiate between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of their claims to international protection has featured strongly during Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and has been used to justify policies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with 215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our paper challenges this ‘categorical fetishism’, arguing that the dominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time and space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic literature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move. However, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or privilege ‘refugees’ over ‘migrants’ arguing that this reinforces rather than challenges the dichotomy’s faulty foundations. Rather those concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and exclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding, that is to say, the process by which categories are constructed, the purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to denaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and discriminate.     

Black-boxing political intersectionality: on ‘othering’ that deprives individuals of their citizenship

The case of the Aegean Macedonian refugees, survivors from the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), is particularly powerful in ‘demonstrating’ that one must address the ways in which the categories of difference on the one hand and identity and inclusion on the other hand, condition the very mode of ‘othering’ specific to certain histories of subjugation that are consubstantial with the hierarchical and differential value social identities have within our contemporary European society. Through the case-narrative of L, I analyze the practice of ‘othering’ as deployed by Greek laws within the parameters of ethnicity and the social ontology of collectivity. The analysis shows that citizenship, as one element of the nationalist project, intersects with ethnicity and forced migration bringing about ‘by genus’ repatriation.     

How cities shape refugee centres: ‘deservingness’ and ‘good aid’ in a Sicilian town

While scholars have devoted increasing attention to the dynamics at play within refugee centres, analyses have often been driven by the ‘exceptionality’ of these institutions, overlooking the ways in which what happens inside the centres is largely connected to what goes on outside of them. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a Sicilian refugee centre and the surrounding town, this paper investigates the extent to which economic, historical and political configurations inform how local actors conceptualise aid and how they interact with refugees on a daily basis. Overall, the study found that both centre workers and the general population mobilise moral arguments that can only be understood in light of dynamics that are external to the centre itself. These findings ultimately point to the extent to which state-level dysfunctions influence popular images of what a ‘deserving’ refugee might look like as well as local understandings of the ‘right way’ of providing help.     

Student migration and polymedia: mainland Chinese students’ communication media use in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Drawing on qualitative data obtained from mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong, this research uses polymedia theory to analyse the social implications of media use and interpersonal communication by migrant students. It looks at how migrant students use media to communicate with family members and friends in mainland China compared with Hong Kong locals. When communicating with family and friends, their media usage is intense, close and emotion-oriented, forming a warm and supportive virtual network that provides familiarity, a sense of belonging and emotional attachment. In contrast, their media usage to communicate with Hong Kong locals is limited, functional and study-oriented, and although it becomes a platform for practical help, it also demonstrates deep contradictions and conflicts with members of the host society.     

Encounters between the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘oppressor’: rethinking Paulo Freire in anti-racist feminist education in Sweden

With the aim of rethinking Paulo Freire’s theory and its practices in race/ethnicity and education, this article uses intersectionality to deepen our understanding of differences among the oppressed and break the opposition between the oppressed and oppressor. Based on an ethnographic study carried out at a feminist adult educational institution in Sweden, the author examines the positionality of migrant students and feminist teachers and how they react to othering in the educational process and in Swedish society. The author also argues for the importance of intersectionality as a way to help both the conscientization of the oppressed and the radical task of the liberatory teachers. It is crucial to untangle gendered and sexualized racism, especially in specific contexts where race and gender intersect to construct a binary between a ‘superior us’ and a ‘barbaric Other.’ Conscientization and intersectionality are particularly useful for probing the complicated processes of othering and combating different forms of oppression and racism in an era of globalization in Western countries.     

Homicide and ‘Englishness’: Criminal Justice and National Identity in Victorian England

One venue for the formation of national identity that has received comparatively little attention in recent years, is that of the courtroom. In particular, the treatment of serious crimes in Victorian England involved a good deal of reference to notions of Englishness. In the course of their routine work, Victorian criminal courts promulgated particular and generally coherent views as to how ‘an Englishman’, as opposed to a foreigner, was expected to behave. This article examines how the judicial treatment of three types of nineteenth‐century violence – the duel, knife‐fighting and the killing of an adulterous spouse or his or her lover – contributed to reshaping the contours of male English national identity.     

Social reproduction in Sicily’s agricultural sector: migration status and context of reception

This article illuminates the social reproductive experiences of migrants labouring in Sicily’s (Italy) greenhouses. Current global transformations in agricultural production are intersecting with longstanding local economic and social realities, as well as with the 2007 Global Financial Crisis and EU enlargement, to make migrants, male and female, indispensable to a sector resorting to intensified informality in pursuit of flexible and cheap workers. Understanding social reproductive experiences as configured by migrant status and context of reception, the article includes analysis of interview and observational data with two nationalities of migrants – Tunisians and Romanians – occupying different positions in Italy’s migration regime. The article concludes that the harsh context of reception posed by labour market conditions, alongside a familialistic Italian welfare regime, largely precludes opportunities for proximate social reproduction for Tunisians and Romanians. In response, migrants develop transnational resilience strategies resting on cross-border actions combining market-, family-, community and State-based practices, to navigate the social reproductive challenges encountered. Such strategies, however, are less feasible for irregular migrants whose socio-legal position exposes them to the most exploitative working arrangements, denies them access to State welfare and renders them immobile. Moreover, for some regular migrants, such transnational resilience strategies are not their strategies of choice.     

‘Presentable’: the body and neoliberal subjecthood in contemporary India

The opening up of the Indian economy through a series of neoliberal reforms since 1991 ushered in processes of globalization that have led to a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment in India. Economic growth, globalizing discourses, and new consumer choices have driven desires for new global-yet-Indian identities. An emerging consumer agency has allowed for the embodiment and performance of these identities at the site of the body, even as new spaces of consumption have necessitated new bodily dispositions and practices. In this paper, I focus on how access to new commodities and discourses has affected understandings of the modern Indian body. In particular, I concentrate on appearance and the notion of exercising consumer agency to be ‘presentable’ as a lens through which to examine broader aspects of the body in the creation of neoliberal subjects in India.     

Home and belonging: a comparative study of 1.5 and second-generation Egyptian ‘expatriates’ in Qatar and ‘immigrants’ in the U.S.

This article compares how two different migration models – legal permanence and legal temporary settlement – shape 1.5 and second-generation Egyptians’ feelings of belonging towards the host countries of the U.S. and Qatar. Relying on formal semi-structured interviews, I argue that the inability of Egyptians in Qatar to obtain Qatari citizenship contributes greatly to their lack of sense of belonging to Qatar. However, a central paradox appears when Egyptians in Qatar simultaneously discuss other factors, such as family and/or friends’ networks, comfort, safety, and country familiarity, which make them feel Qatar is home. Conversely, while Egyptian-Americans appear to be more confident with their host country relationship because of their experience in a country of immigrants, factors such as post-9/11 discrimination and U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East complicate their relationship with the U.S. Both groups reflect simultaneous feelings of home, belonging, discrimination, and/or exclusion in their respective ‘host’ countries but in different ways. These case studies demonstrate that different migration models do not necessarily lead to predicted understandings of home and belonging. This article thus argues for the need to reassess the assumptions we have of the relationship between citizenship and belonging.