Consent behind the counter: aspiring citizens and labour control under precarious (im)migration schemes

‘Managed migration’ schemes promote mobility of labour across international borders, diversifying worksites and introducing new systems of enacting labour consent. This article examines how Canadian franchisees are recruiting Filipino migrants to staff their restaurants, facilitating employers’ access to new, flexible subjects. These workers covet their employment as pathways to Canadian citizenship. Some are unaware, however, that they are recruited under a precarious immigration scheme, one that neither directly denies nor facilitates access to legal incorporation. Instead, migrants are (transnationally) encouraged to compete in the worksite for employer-nominated citizenship, a highly productive system for engendering consent. This draws attention to new challenges ‘managed migration’ schemes pose for resisting downward pressures on work and employment conditions.     

International marriage and the state in South Korea: focusing on governmental policy

With globalization, the number of individuals traveling, working or studying abroad is rising globally, and so is the number of international marriages. However, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of ‘mail-order brides’ through matchmaking since the 1970s in the Western world and since the 1990s in several Asian countries. The so-called ‘mail-order bride’ phenomenon has become an important route for international migration, especially for gendered migration. Since official relations with China began in August 1992, the number of Korean Chinese women who came into Korea for marriage with native Korean men is about 100,000 between 1990 and 2005. The number of Japanese women who married Korean men is approximately 17,000, while the numbers of Filipino women who married Korean men is about 6000. Recently, the nationalities of these foreign wives of Korean men have expanded to include women from Vietnam, Russia, and Uzbekistan. In 2005, among a total of 250,000 foreign spouses in Korea, 160,000 of them were women. The Korean state had contributed to initiate these international marriages by importing Korean Chinese women for their unmarried rural citizens. As international marriages have become a social issue, the state tries to cope with these new issues through changing the laws and policies. Utilizing several government statistics, a nationwide questionnaire survey of nearly 1000 foreign brides with various nationalities, which was conducted in May and June 2005, and some interviewed data of foreign wives and government personnel, this paper analyzes (1) patterns and trends of marriage migration to Korea; (2) the issues and problems of foreign brides, such as their status and citizenship, economic situation, access to social security and ‘fake marriages’ issues; and (3) recent changes in governmental policies towards them. Special focus will be on what factors influenced the recent governmental action and how the ideology that ‘A married daughter is no longer a daughter ()’ is still reflected in recent policies even in today's more progressive society.     

弱关系、强关系:墨西哥移民中的网络原则

移民过程一般是通过亲属网络和社会网络来策划安排的,原来居住于同一社区的移民在目的地的扩散与集聚,基本遵循五条有关移民网络及其动力学的相关原则:第一,网络是多区域性的。第二,移民们在移入目的地找到工作的工作地点构成了移民在当地的落脚点。第三,通向新的目的地的途径常常是通过"弱关系的力量"而得到的。第四,紧密网络和松散的、弱关系的或熟人的网络均构成其成员的"社会资本"。第五,移民在工作地点和工作类型的地理扩散与集聚受紧密关系网络成员(特别是近亲属)招工的影响。     

Leaving Europe,Aspiring Access: Racial Capital and Its Spatial Discontents among the Euro-Maghrebi Minority

Abstract

This article explores the emigration of tertiary-educated EU citizens with North African heritage to Dubai. Longitudinal ethnographic data suggests that leaving Europe was a mobility strategy for dealing with a sense of ‘racial stuckedness’ at home, a status concern undergirding their stagnant socio-economic position. By ‘transnationalizing’ Bourdieu’s seminal conceptual tool kit of the ‘forms of capital’, it contrasts the conversion yields of timely achieved educational credentials, marked by racial friction at home but significantly higher returns after transgressing into more favorable status zones overseas. This differently structured outcome suggests the analytical productivity of an altogether distinct value form, ‘racial capital.’     

How Migration Experience Affects the Acceptance and Active Support of Refugees? Philanthropy and Paid Work of Hungarian Migrants in the German Immigrant Service

Abstract

The paper examines migration experience and migrant solidarity within a differential migration system. The paper unfolds how Hungarians living in Germany have become involved in refugee support (either in form of voluntary or paid work), and how their engagement relates to their own experience of migration. Concerning applied methods the paper is based on a quantitative online survey and qualitative interviews.     

“It Is Better to Do Business in Africa than in Europe” – Socio-Economic Positionings among Business-Minded European Somalis Moving to Kenya

Abstract

Using the example of European Somalis moving to Kenya, this article argues that although these middle class return migrants share many similarities, they also differ in significant ways. Focusing on economically independent migrants, this paper will show that their move to Kenya is both return and onward migration at the same time. The transnational socio-economic positioning of Somali returnees in Kenya, this article demonstrates, rests on the importance of legal capital for enabling transnational mobility, which in turn is relevant for the convertibility of capital in the various local settings in which migrants settle.     

Stuck in Mobility? Interrupted Journeys of Migrants With Precarious Legal Status in Europe

Abstract

Due to lack of access to work and support services migrants with precarious legal status engage in onward mobility within EUrope and thus contest the migration regime that aims to control and limit their mobility. This article highlights the ambiguous nature of mobility from a critical mobilities perspective based on multi-sited ethnographic research and interviews with migrants in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. By focusing on their interrupted journeys, the article shows how migrants use mobility to secure basic needs and avoid migration control attempts and how this enhanced mobility aggravates emotional instability.     

Becoming and being urban in Hanoi: Rural-urban migration and relations in Viet Nam

The discourse of the rural-urban migrant is that of a sojourner in the city, a man or a woman who will almost inevitably return to his or her rural roots and re-engage with farming and village living. In this paper we ask whether rural-urban migrants can ‘become’ urban and shed their identification as temporary denizens of the city. We develop a conceptual framework that provides five entry points to explore this process of becoming urban, and then apply the framework drawing on the experiences of migrants to Viet Nam's capital, Hanoi. We argue that even when migrants do return to their homelands they do so with altered priorities and on different terms. The experience of migration was not infrequently transformative and life-changing. While migrants may not ‘become’ urban in the fullest sense, their homeland had become a space of familial origin and emotional identification, not a place where people necessarily sought to reside, work, raise their children and build their lives.     

‘Going away on foot’ once again: the revival of temporary labour migration from Russia's Dagestan

This article addresses temporary labour migration – known in Russian as otkhodnichestvo (going away on foot) – from the Russian republic of Dagestan. The discussion is situated within reviews of current work on migration in the former Soviet Union, push-pull factors determining migration behaviour in the North Caucasus, and the historical importance of otkhodnichestvo in imperial Russia and the USSR. The paper then turns to the results of a census conducted in summer 2006, which found that most migrants come from Dagestan's mountainous southwest, frequently obtain work at locations characterized by economic growth and high pay, and rely on ethnic or communal networks as a basis for choosing employment sector and destination when searching for work.     

Gender as catalyst for violence against Roma in contemporary Italy

ABSTRACT

Silvio Berlusconi's use of ethnicity and immigration as national security issues in his successful campaign for election to the Italian presidency in 2008 was by no means unique in contemporary Europe. What was surprising was the speed of his right-wing government's legislative restriction of migrants in the form of the so-called ‘security package’, first introduced just five weeks after the election. Woodcock explores the striking fact that this ‘security package’, and the intense wave of racist violence by Italians against Roma that it legitimized and encouraged, was proposed and justified in response to media reports of Italian babies being stolen by ‘Zingari’ from the ‘nomad camps’ and of Italian women being raped and beaten by Romanian men of ‘Zingari’ ethnicity. Gender and ethnicity are the twin constitutive discourses of modern European society, and racialized subjects are necessarily gendered. The stereotype of ‘dangerous black men sexually threatening white women’ has been mobilized in a vast range of European and colonial nationalist projects in order to justify the policing of both racialized masculine subjects and women as objects of the patriarchy. Similarly, the depiction of women as hysterical, sexually vulnerable objects in need of (white) masculine protection is an old story that the Italian media recognize as a fairy tale even as they reproduce the discourse. Woodcock explores what has not been mentioned thus far, namely, that gender stereotypes are vital to the mobilization of violent racism against the Roma in contemporary Italy, and how conservative gender binaries are strengthened and policed in a time of social crisis through the stereotyping of Roma as racial threat.