Migration Studies 

About: Migration Studies is an academic journal published by Oxford University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Immigration & Refugee. It has an ISSN identifier of 2049-5838. Over the lifetime, 359 publications have been published receiving 5369 citations.

The effect of income and immigration policies on international migration

Abstract: This article makes two contributions to the literature on the determinants of international migration flows. First, we compile a new dataset on annual bilateral migration flows covering 15 OECD destination countries and 120 sending countries for the period 1980–2006. The dataset also contains data on time-varying immigration policies that regulate the entry of immigrants in our destination countries over this period. Second, we present an empirical model of migration choice across multiple destinations that allows for unobserved individual heterogeneity and derive a structural estimating equation. Our estimates show that international migration flows are highly responsive to income per capita at destination. This elasticity is twice as high for within-European Union (EU) migration, reflecting the higher degree of labor mobility within the EU. We also find that tightening of laws regulating immigrant entry reduce rapidly and significantly their flow.

Beyond the insider-outsider divide in migration research

Abstract: This article engages critically with the insider–outsider divide in research with migrants and advocates a more nuanced and dynamic approach to positionality. In migration research, the insider–outsider divide typically assumes a specific form: an insider researcher is a member of the migrant group under study, whereas an outsider researcher is a member of the majority population in the country of settlement. This divide is a discursive reality that researchers must relate to, regardless of its analytical merits. Our analysis builds on the authors’ experiences in twelve different fieldwork situations, where research was often conducted from hybrid positions that did not fit the archetypal insider–outsider divide. First, we discuss the relational construction of insider–outsider divides in migration research, focusing on the interplay between researcher characteristics and particular social contexts. Second, we address the specific characteristics or markers through which researchers are interpreted and positioned. These markers differ in terms of their visibility to informants, and in the extent to which researchers can modify them or communicate them selectively. Third, we examine how these characteristics are actively managed in fieldwork settings. Fourth, we identify five types of ‘third positions’ in migration research, positions that deviate from the archetypal insider–outsider divide: explicit third party, honorary insider, insider by proxy, hybrid insider-outsider, and apparent insider. The article explores some of the advantages and challenges inherent in different positions and argues that strategic and reflexive management of positionality should be included in ethical considerations about the research process.

From Lifestyle Migration to Lifestyle in Migration: Categories, concepts and ways of thinking

Abstract: This article argues that analytical concepts used in migration (and other) research are most effectively employed empirically when their methodological underpinnings, and the nature of their development, are fully understood. Inductively-designed conceptual frameworks developed through long-term qualitative research are useful ways of (re)thinking migration that can free researchers from the constraints of externally-imposed frameworks, categories and conceptualisations. In order to make this argument, we use the concept of lifestyle migration and consider closely the ways in which this term was developed, not to capture a discrete or homogenous category of migrants, but rather as an analytical tool and an alternative way of thinking about migration. Drawing impetus from a close examination of a specific attempt to operationalise lifestyle migration in quantitative research, we are led to consider the political and governance implications of using (migration) labels, and the overlaps and synergies between types of migration understood as practices informed by meanings and understandings. Here, we specifically explore, on the one hand, how economic factors intersect with lifestyle in migration and, on the other hand, the role of lifestyle as imagination, aspiration and way of living in other migration processes not necessarily labelled lifestyle migration.

What happens post-deportation? The experience of deported Afghans

Abstract: Deportation, understood as the physical removal of someone against their will from the territory of one state to that of another, has moved to the forefront of academic and policy agendas. Although there is a growing literature on legislation and policy, there is very little in-depth data on what happens post-deportation. In this article, we examine possible post-deportation outcomes. We argue that, whatever reasons existed for people to migrate in the first place, deportation adds to these and creates at least three additional reasons that make adjustment, integration, or reintegration difficult, if not impossible. These include the impossibility of repaying debts incurred by migration, the existence of transnational and local ties, the shame of failure, and the perceptions of ‘contamination’. We draw on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data gathered in Europe and Afghanistan to argue that many deported Afghans at- tempt and succeed in re-migrating.

Troubling freedom: migration, debt, and modern slavery

Abstract: This article is concerned with the role of debt in contemporary practices of mobility. It explores how the phenomenon of debt-financed migration disturbs the trafficking/ smuggling, illegal/legal, and forced/voluntary dyads that are widely used to make sense of migration and troubles the liberal construction of ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ as oppositional categories. The research literature reveals that while debt can lock migrants into highly asymmetrical, personalistic, and often violent relations of power and dependency sometimes for several years, it is also a means by which many seek to extend and secure their future freedoms. Financing migration through debt can be an active choice without also being a ‘voluntary’ or ‘autonomous’ choice, and migrants’ decisions to take on debts that will imply heavy restrictions on their freedom are taken in the context of migration and other policies that severely constrain their alternatives. Vulnerability to abuse and exploitation is also politically constructed, and even migrant-debtors whose movement is state sanctioned often lack protections both as workers and as debtors. Indeed, large numbers of migrants are excluded from the rights and freedoms that in theory constitute the opposite of slavery. As argued in the conclusion, this illustrates the contemporary relevance of Losurdo’s historical account of the fundamentally illiberal realities of self-conceived liberal societies. There remain ‘exclusion clauses’ in the social contract that supposedly affords universal equality and freedom, clauses that are of enormous consequence for many groups of migrants, and that also deleteriously affect those citizens who are poor and/or otherwise marginalized.