Introduction to the special theme: theorizing transnational labour markets

In this introduction to the special themed section, ‘Theorizing transnational labour markets: economic‐sociological approaches’, I introduce the reader to the topic and give an overview of the four contributions. The terms ‘global labour market’ and ‘transnational labour market’ are broadly used to account for contemporary social phenomena as diverse as the ever‐closer integration of China or India, with their huge labour forces, into the world economy, the off‐shoring of specific operations of MNCs to countries with cheap labour, or cross‐border labour migration. In most of these cases, the existence of global or transnational labour markets is taken for granted by the media, consulting agencies and other economic actors. However, scholars in labour market research and cross‐border migration alike have largely ignored the categories of global or transnational labour markets. Thus far, it remains unclear what these terms really mean and how we should address them theoretically. The aim of this themed section, therefore, is to view cross‐border labour migration through an economic‐sociological lens and thus bring into dialogue migration and labour market scholarship. By introducing a transnational perspective into labour market research, we hope to make a useful contribution towards theorizing on cross‐border labour markets and thereby overcome the methodological nationalism that seems to have crept into this area of scholarship.     

In between leaving and being left behind: mediating the mobilities and immobilities of Indonesian non‐migrants

In this article, I consider how and why some non‐migrants partially inhabit migrant subjectivities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Central Java, Indonesia, I describe the experiences of those who embarked on pre‐departure migration processes, but failed to leave the country. Men were often victims of fraud; women typically ran away from the confines of training centres. When redirected away from the border spaces of airports and recruitment centres, they typically identify themselves and are perceived by kin and neighbours as ‘former’ transnational migrants. I analyse how migration infrastructure – intersecting institutions, agents and technologies – produces such subjectivities in‐between conventional migrant and non‐migrant categories. These positions in between leaving and staying illuminate the infrastructural conditions that enable, constrain and mediate transnational mobilities. These cases of non‐departure show the expansive social and spatial effects of migration infrastructure beyond the facilitation of transnational movement. Such less considered (im)mobilities of non‐migrants point to the diverse ways in which migration institutions and agents mediate the circulation of persons between and within national borders.     

Suspending,settling, sponsoring: the intimate chronomobilities of young Asian migrants in Australia

In this article, I develop the concept of ‘intimate chronomobilities’ to understand some of the intersections between the temporalities of intimate relationships and of migration in the lives of young and ‘middling’ transnational migrants from Asia to Australia. Drawing on in‐depth interview data, I reveal how romantic partnerships are highly significant to experiences of transnational mobility, and how such experiences take place in the context of a governance regime in Australia in which migration has become increasingly transient, transitionary and transitory, and in which sponsored partner and spouse visas can secure migration futures. The analysis explores how the lived and imagined timelines and timings of intimate partnerships play highly significant roles in defining and structuring migrants' mobilities, and reveals how intimate chronomobilities of ‘suspending, settling and sponsoring’ are understood by migrants through lived experiences of sequence, synchronicity and tempo.     

The linear imagination,stalled: changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys

In this article, I engage with a growing interest in questions of time in the study of migration to consider how changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys play an important role in shaping multilocal migration imaginaries. I draw on two ethnographic cases with migrant care workers from the Philippines, of different generations and at different points of their migration journeys, to examine how initially held linear imaginaries of migration become confounded and stuck over time. Snapshots of migrant lives at these different points of the journey – ‘(pre)‐departures’, ‘stepping stones’, ‘settling’ – reveal how migrants’ temporal horizons shift as a consequence of changing state and political‐economic conditions, as well as migrants’ own dynamic subjective and affective engagements. New uncertainties, possibilities and dilemmas unfold and initial linear imaginaries give way instead to those that are open‐ended and asynchronous. A temporal perspective reveals that mobilities are not marked by a beginning and an end but rather involve ongoing, multiple and provisional journeys across locales and over time and the life course.     

Culturally tailored workers for specialised destinations: producing Filipino migrant subjects for export

This multi-sited, mixed-methods study in Canada and the Philippines examines how migrant workers are manufactured and deployed to a range of global destinations by the Filipino migration apparatus. Building on scholarship examining how the Filipino state markets, selects and prepares Filipino (labour) migrants from and to the Philippines, I show that beyond seeking to produce a temporary migrant workforce with a ‘comparative advantage’ (including traits like ‘docile’, ‘hardworking’, ‘English-speaking’ and ‘loyal’), the state alongside recruiters and other actors in the migration industry also seek to produce workers with cultural knowledge of norms in receiving destinations. This is another dimension through which the Philippines aims to establish its ‘superiority’ in the international market for temporary labour. This study has implications for how we think about transnational labour brokering under highly saturated conditions, and the role of culture and other mediating factors in configuring ‘ideal’ worker constructions and flows.     

Segmented pathways of educational mobility: English language schools,working holidays,and divergent prospects among South Korea's global youth

Using participant‐observation and 58 in‐depth participant interviews, this study examines South Korean youth who undertake overseas English language acquisition across the Philippines, United States, New Zealand, and Australia. This research introduces a concept I call ‘segmented pathways of educational mobility’, which describes the multi‐dimensional and complex levels of stratification within regional educational mobility flows that reinforce existing class inequalities for many migrants. However, segmented pathways also reveal that while resource‐constrained youth understand that their migration choices are more limited, they seek to accrue alternative cultural resources across varied destinations to gain the experiences and credentials necessary to advance in the South Korean labour market. Despite increased opportunities for English study abroad via market liberalization, this research contends that it also produces more levels of stratification within and among youth migrants.     

Bus stops,triple wins and two steps: nurse migration in and out of Asia

The migration pathways in which nurses engage are increasingly heterogeneous. In this article, I contrast three types of nurse migration pathway from three country pairs – Vietnam to Germany ‘triple win’ bi‐lateral migration (direct migration); India to Canada two‐step study‐work (multistage) pathway; and ‘bus stop’ multinational migration from the Philippines to Singapore and onwards to other sites. Each pathway is not exclusive to the country pair selected; rather, this occupational and pathway specific analysis permits a comparison of the structures and processes involved – the different kinds of hierarchies that underpin mobility; the migration and border‐control infrastructure that channels mobility; and the differential incorporation of multi‐nationally mobile lives and their gendered/racialized implications. The migration trajectories analysed in this article reveal how multinational and multistage migrations are produced (through state and non‐state intermediaries and policy structures), and how they are productive of new subjectivities and imaginaries (shaped by what is possible and desirable).     

Theorizing transnational labour markets: a research heuristic based on the new economic sociology

In this article, I suggest that transnational labour markets are characterized by their multi‐layered embeddedness, not only in national but also in transnational institutional settings. Hence, the national institutional factors formerly at the centre of sociological labour market theories insufficiently explain the newly emerging transnational labour markets. To account for the full complexity and institutional context of the latter, I propose an inductive theoretical approach to transnational labour markets and develop a research heuristic to instruct empirical studies about particular transnational labour markets and inductive theory building. This heuristic draws on analytical categories as developed by the new economic sociology of markets. The empirical example of the transnational labour market that matches eastern European workers to jobs in the German meat industry serves to illustrate how one can use this heuristic, which reveals some preliminary features of transnational labour markets compared with national ones, as well as some research gaps to be addressed by future studies.     

Post‐return experiences and transnational belonging of return migrants: a Dutch—Moroccan case study

In this article we explore the links between return migration, belonging and transnationalism among migrants who returned from the Netherlands to northeast Morocco. While transnationalism is commonly discussed from the perspective of a receiving country, this study shows that transnationalism also plays a vital role in reconstructing post‐return belonging. Return migration is not simply a matter of ‘going home’, as feelings of belonging need to be renegotiated upon return. While returnees generally feel a strong need to maintain various transnational practices, the meanings they attach to these practices depend on motivations for return, gender and age. For former (male) labour migrants, transnational practices are essential for establishing post‐return belonging, whereas such practices are less important for their spouses. Those who returned as children generally feel uprooted, notwithstanding the transnational practices they maintain. The amount of agency migrants are able to exert in the return decision‐making process is a key factor in determining the extent to which returnees can create a post‐return transnational sense of home.     

Permanent migrants and temporary citizens: multinational Chinese mobilities in the Americas

In this article, I examine the multinational mobility and citizenship practices of ethnic Chinese who moved to Chile after living in another Latin American country. Despite being permanent residents or Chilean citizens, some hope to return to a previous country of residence in Latin America. Based on 18 semi‐structured interviews conducted between October 2016 and August 2018, their experiences illuminate two aspects of multinational migrations. First, unlike pre‐planned serial migrations of global elites or ‘step‐wise’ migrant workers, these multinational mobilities are nonlinear and open‐ended, due to their contingence on volatile and racialized political economies. Second, unlike transnational migrants who typically maintain links to ‘origin’ countries, they seldom visit China or Taiwan, and instead visit other countries in the Americas, due to business, familial, and affective ties. I discuss the main factors shaping the contingent nature of their mobilities and attachments to Chile, which influences the multiple onward pathways possible in their futures.     

Labour Mobility in East Africa: An Analysis of the East African Community's Common Market and the Free Movement of Workers

This article advocates an institutional perspective in analysing labour mobility, since rules governing cross‐border labour markets are an embodiment of access and participation rights, and can determine the formalisation or informalisation of work and the protection and benefits accrued by migrant workers. It examines the East African Community's Common Market Protocol of July 2010, which seeks to promote the ‘free movement of workers’ within the Community. It argues that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in implementing the Protocol and provides recommendations for addressing them.     

Privileged Japanese transnational families in Hawaii as lifestyle migrants

This study of privileged Japanese families in Hawaii revisits the claim that East Asian transnational families relocate overseas either to improve their well‐being or to enhance their status through their children's international education. Existing scholarship has focused mainly on the second pattern of status‐seeking migration, conceptualized as ‘education migration’. By employing Benson and O'Reilly's concept of ‘lifestyle migration’, I consider the less widely studied case of migration strategies designed to increase well‐being. The central difference between the two types of migrants lies in the way that migrant women construct their gendered identity through their transnational split‐household arrangement – a freer self (lifestyle migrants) or a sacrificial self (education migrants). In conclusion, I call for further research on this neglected topic and propose an important dimension to facilitate lifestyle migration, gender.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

Between two families: the social meaning of remittances for Vietnamese marriage migrants in Singapore

Scholars who have applied transnational perspectives to studies of migration and remittances have called for a move beyond the developmentalist approach to accommodate an expanded understanding of the social meanings of remittances. Researchers working in Asia have begun to view the remittances of money, gifts and services that labour migrants send to their families as transnational ‘acts of recognition’, as an enactment of gendered roles and identities, and as a component of the social practices that create the ties that bind migrants to their ‘home’ countries. In this article, we depart from the more common focus on remittance behaviour among labour migrants and turn instead to examine how, as marriage migrants, Vietnamese women generate and confer meaning on the remittances they send. First, from the women's viewpoint, we discuss the extent to which expectations vested in being able to generate remittances for the natal family by marrying a Singaporean man not only translate into motivation for marriage migration but also shape the parameters of the marriage. Second, we show how sending remittances are significant to the women as ‘acts of recognition’ in the construction of gendered identities as filial daughters, and, through the ‘connecting’ and ‘disconnecting’ power of remittances, in the reimagining of the transnational family. Third, we discuss the strategies that women devise in negotiating between the conflicting demands and expectations of their natal and marital families and in securing their ‘place’ between two families. We base our findings on an analysis of interviews and ethnographic work with Vietnamese women and their Singaporean husbands through commercial matchmaking agencies.     

The Sonoran Desert’s Domestic Bracero Programme: Institutional Actors and the Creation of Labour Migration Streams

This paper traces the journeys of male migrants to Empalme, Sonora, Mexico to uncover the development of the often overlooked domestic bracero programme that operated in conjunction with its well‐known international equivalent. Drawing on interviews and observations with ex‐braceros who met at a park near the Mexico‐US border, I examine their experiences and participation in Mexico’s domestic bracero program, an unintended and unexplored consequence of its international counterpart. The study shows how regulation and control were constantly reinvented at every step of the selection process by state actors and their affiliates in Mexico. The paper reveals how the oversupply of labour and modernization of agriculture in Sonora resulted in the development of a migration industry where local municipal leaders, coyotes, the state, and Mexican agribusiness capitalized from men’s displacement. The migration industry during the bracero selection process controlled who gained access to the United States labour market by capturing migrant labour en route to the United States in the process fueling a thriving cotton industry in the otherwise stagnant Sonoran Desert economy. The study concludes by taking the lessons from the historic domestic bracero programme to show one instance in which internal and international labour markets were closely interwoven. In the end, I call for more research that examines the relationship between markets on both sides of the border that uncovers how networks are not only structured by personal ties but also by state and market relations.     

Pakistani labour migration and masculinity: industrial working life,the body and transnationalism

In this article, I examine the narratives of migrant Pakistani men in their fifties and sixties, who became chronically ill over the course of their working lives in London. The men's life histories show that the body, and in particular the labouring body, needs more sustained attention in migration studies. Their narratives tell of how the physical toll of industrial labour resulted in chronic ill health, unemployment and various forms of ‘redundant masculinities’. Moreover, the impoverishment that frequently followed from ill health ate away at local social status and transnational relationships. I argue that the existing work on transnationalism has normalized the experiences of an entrepreneurial migrant elite and obscured those of migrants who are bound to one place by force of circumstance. Chronic ill health is not merely the experience of a minority who fall between the cracks of epidemiological studies on ‘healthy migrants’, as some have recently suggested, but rather, common to industrial labour migration.     

‘Equally at home on Beacon Hill and Hill 16’? Transnational identities among Irish‐born return migrants from the United States

In this article, I examine the transnational identities that return migrants create upon resettlement in their country of origin. Specifically, I draw on interviews with Republic of Ireland‐born return migrants from the United States between the years 1996 and 2006. The analysis shows that return migrants – like other migrant groups – maintain and establish translocal identities and practices that straddle ‘here’ (Ireland) and ‘there’ (United States) upon return. However, the article goes further, asking why returnees develop such border‐spanning social fields. Some recent scholarship suggests that some migrants develop transnational identities as an adaptive response to a hostile receiving society. The analysis here shows a similar process at play for certain return migrants in the post‐return environment. Doubtless, for some returnees, a transnational identity is a natural outgrowth of having spent several years in the United States. Yet for others, one can better explain this transnational identity as a coping strategy to buffer resettlement anxieties and disappointments.     

Not Always ‘Left-Behind’: Indonesian Adolescent Women Negotiating Transnational Mobility,Filial Piety and Care

In contrast to current research focusing on how migrant parents provide care for their ‘left-behind’ children, this article highlights how Indonesian adolescent women also migrate (or stay) in order to provide care for their families. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted mainly between 2014 and 2015 in Central Javanese migrant-origin villages, this article discusses how opportunities for transnational labour migration affect young unmarried women’s roles as ‘dutiful daughters’ in diverse ways. By analysing how the (im)mobilities of three young women are mutually shaped by diverse expectations to care for their families, I highlight that care is always relational, showing that the distinction between care-givers and care-receivers is less evident than currently assumed in migration studies. Closer examination of how young persons mutually negotiate mobility and parent–child care expectations brings into focus the new forms of agency, power and vulnerability that they encounter in migration and migrant-origin contexts.     

Intimate circuits: modernity,migration and marriage among post‐Soviet women in Turkey

The study of migration too often ignores the ways that labour migrants' emotional entanglements and complicated personal relationships factor into their experiences of being people on the move. In examining post‐Soviet migrant women's relationships with Turkish men and the ways these are regulated in Turkey, in this article I consider how intimate practices of marriage and performances of ‘love’ have emerged as key aspects of transnational mobility. These intimate practices both enable long‐term transnational circuits between post‐Soviet homelands and Turkey, and attest to the way global capitalism is redefining personal lives.     

Service outsourcing and labour mobility in a digital age: transnational linkages between Japan and Dalian,China

In this article, I examine the transnational mobility of digital workers and the control of their labour across multiple production sites. The digitalization of work has progressively allowed businesses to outsource IT‐enabled service jobs to cheaper production sites offshore. The growth of the ‘offshore outsourcing' of white‐collar service jobs in East Asia has produced the mobility of cheap digital labour from Japan to Dalian in northeast China. They work at call centres and other Japanese‐speaking workplaces in the lower echelons of the city's IT sector, typically earning salaries in Chinese yuan at, or even below, the average Japanese minimum wage. Based on ethnographic findings, I argue that in the global digital economy, digital services are rendered exploitable through their transnational mobility and that this form of labour migration has developed because of the partial, fluid and contingent nature of the transnational links between the two locations. I analyse how the neoliberal logic of exception underpins the creation of IT parks in China and the casualization of labour in Japan to enable new forms of transnational labour control and capital accumulation.