This study examines the relationship between income inequality and net migration in Africa over the past two decades. Inequality is gauged by the share of income accruing to the top decile of the income distribution. Net migration rates from 54 countries between 2001 and 2021 are matched to inequality, controlling for origin country unemployment, income per capita, as well as foreign direct investment and economic uncertainty in a fixed-effects panel model. The results indicate that greater inequality is associated with higher net migration rates, as opposed to foreign investment and uncertainty, which are found to be negatively associated with net migration. When replicating the experiment for the different regions—East, Middle, North, South and West Africa—, these results hold in all cases except in West Africa, where the coefficients are not found to be statistically significant. Overall, the analysis suggests that over the past two decades, increasingly unequal income distributions in Africa were associated with higher proportions of people entering than leaving African countries, while economic uncertainty, foreign investment, and unemployment tended to have the opposite effect in most African regions.
Abstract Opposition to political candidates who represent ethnic minority interests in Western societies has included calls for undemocratic penalties. Majority groups in democratic societies value democracy in principle, but such support is malleable. We argue that diverse societies lack consensus on who constitutes the “demos”, the imagined political community. When there is a mismatch between a citizen’s understanding of the demos and an officeholder’s background and/or agenda, citizens may be open to imposing undemocratic penalties by reclassifying the offender as a demos-outsider and/or the punishing action as democratic. We tested our expectations with three survey experiments in the US and Switzerland that varied the candidate’s background (majority v. immigrant minority) and agenda (advocating for an age quota v. ethnic diversity quota). Results confirm that citizens do not behave as principled democrats but rather use their understanding of the demos to support or reject undemocratic penalties against minority politicians and policies. Their vision of the demos also determines whether they perceive the candidate as a demos-outsider (not “true” American/Swiss) and his banning as democratic. Interestingly, support for undemocratic penalties is on average higher in Switzerland than in the US, and slight nuances in the empirical results point to certain contextual contingencies of our results. Overall, our cross-country results suggest that people’s understanding of democracy is not based on firm institutional and procedural criteria, but on distinct visions about who belongs, and who does not.
Abstract This article explores the opportunities and challenges of Migration Museums as sites of knowledge-production and representation. Building upon contemporary debates that connect migration studies with research on race and ethnicity, I first provide an overview of which museums exist worldwide that are explicitly framed as ‘museums of migration’, meaning that their mission and permanent expositions concern migration (be it emigration or immigration), and that receive some kind of public funding or support. After tracing the emergence of 15 museums that respond to these criteria, I look at how these institutes understand and narrate migration and migrants, and how such narrations have changed over time. I employ a global blackness framework as a tool to reflect on the entanglements of race, racism, colonialism and migration, and on the existing absences in the representation of migration narratives. One pattern that emerges is that most migration museums worldwide have so far mainly centered the experiences of white European migrants, leaving other migration narratives and experiences untold. Yet a second pattern testifies to a shift in focus over the past decades, with museums acknowledging that many communities have been traditionally invisibilized, and increasingly taking some remedial actions to incorporate the lived experiences of indigenous, racialized and migranticized populations in their permanent exhibitions.
Abstract Drawing on a mixed-methods analysis of 97 migration information campaigns implemented across Europe between 2019 and 2026 and more than thirty interviews with migration governance practitioners, policymakers, and international organization staff, this article reconceptualizes migration information campaigns as bureaucratic performances. Rather than informing migrants, campaigns operate as visible governance outputs through which states, international organizations, and implementing agencies stage action, secure legitimacy, and reproduce migration governance systems. The analysis shows that migration information campaigns have become routinized instruments of migration governance whose design is structured around risk framing and strategic ambiguity, and whose primary audiences are often institutional rather than migrant populations. Across governance contexts, campaigns perform distinct functions: signaling cooperation in countries of origin, demonstrating compliance in transit settings, and projecting responsiveness in destination countries. The article argues that migration information campaigns persist not because they influence migration decisions, but because they are institutionally useful. Their value lies in producing visibility, legitimacy, and auditable evidence of action in contexts where governing migration outcomes is difficult. In doing so, the article challenges dominant evaluative approaches in migration studies by showing that policy instruments may endure even when they are widely acknowledged to have uncertain or limited behavioural effects. Migration information campaigns, it concludes, are not failed interventions; they are successful performances of governance.
Despite legal equality in voting rights, public discourse persistently reinscribes migrant women’s political engagement through the idiom of “deficit,” casting their participation as lacking, insufficient, or anomalously disengaged. This paper focuses on a precarious community, migrant women employed in private domestic work in Asian countries, and examines their participation in elections in their home country, Indonesia. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews conducted in Indonesian with migrant women in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, we demonstrate that migrant women, many of whom come from rural areas are indeed politically mobilised. They vote, canvass for candidates, volunteer on election-monitoring committees, and engage in political campaigning on social media. Others make conscious decisions not to participate or are prevented from doing so by various constraints. To shed new light on how migrant women exercise political agency under precarious circumstances, we develop a new typology of transnational political participation: Resilience, Rebound, Remoteness, and Resistance. Furthermore, we argue that the employment conditions prevailing within private household domestic service impose material constraints that significantly limit—and at times actively preclude—migrant women’s ability to participate politically. Finally, by centering the relationship between emigrants and their homeland, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of transnational political participation within South–South migration corridors and advances broader discussions of migrant women’s political agency.
How and why do sending states in the Global South protect their skilled migrants despite their conventional status as ‘rule-takers’ in the interstate bargaining process? International relations (IR) and migration scholarship have framed sending states as ‘powerless’, lacking structural agency in interstate bargaining vis-à-vis strong host states. Yet, cross-regional research on sending states’ foreign policy logic and how they secure leverage to protect skilled migrants, particularly nurses remains scarce. Using a single case study of the Philippine state—one of the world’s largest contemporary exporters of nurses—we argue that, despite weak structural positioning, sending states increasingly deploy foreign policy pivoting as a cooperative migration diplomacy strategy. They do so by cross-regionally exploiting the sectoral migration interdependence vulnerabilities of Global North host states (i.e., labor shortages, ageing populations, post-COVID health system stress) and by instrumentalizing bilateral labor migration agreements (BLMAs) to redirect nursing migration from precarious Global South host destinations—particularly the Gulf—toward European host states with stronger codified labor and mobility rights. We develop our argument through three post-2020 cases: the Philippine-United Kingdom MOU (2021), the Philippine-Finland Joint Declaration of Intent (2025), and the Philippine- (Vienna) Austria MOU (2023). Methodologically, we combine semi-structured interviews with nurses, process tracing, two decades of field research observations, and secondary analysis of government publications, policy documents, and newspapers to show how the Philippine state instrumentalized the COVID-19 critical juncture to renegotiate the language of ethical recruitment, mutual skills recognition, and family integration in its BLMA architecture. Rather than viewing sending states as weak foreign policy actors, we show how they leverage their globally recognized nursing skills and protect migrant nurses from precarious Global South conditions (i.e., restricted citizenship access, limited rights to organize, weak social protections). Ultimately, the study advances debates on sending state agencies, cooperative migration diplomacy, and migration interdependence by showing how BLMAs operate as foreign policy signaling instruments through which Global South sending states pursue—though do not necessarily realize—rights-based protections for skilled migrants.
There is a widespread assumption in many Western European countries that certain immigrant groups and their descendants are reluctant to identify with the host nation. A substantial body of research has documented how factors such as religiosity, perceived discrimination and inter-ethnic contact may serve as determinants of national identification, broadly defined as the emotional and cognitive bond between self and nation. By contrast, we know less about whether restrictiveness in the immigrant policy context - e.g. the extent to which policies limit immigrants’ rights, opportunities, and access to resources - also shapes these bonds. To address this gap in existing knowledge, this study draws on unique comparative survey data collected in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 2018 covering young adults with a minority background (both Muslims and non-Muslims) as well as a majority control group. Comparing three Scandinavian countries that differ substantially in the restrictiveness of their immigrant policy environments - yet share many structural and cultural characteristics - allows us to examine whether national policy conditions are linked to gaps in national identification between minority and majority groups. The comparative analyses reveal a striking pattern: the restrictiveness of a country’s policy environment does not appear to influence national identification gaps. Thus, Sweden - often portrayed as the least restrictive of the three countries - does not exhibit larger identification gaps than the two other countries. Moreover, the differences between Denmark and Norway are remarkably small.
Refugees’ return decisions are shaped by past trauma, present conditions, and future aspirations. This study examines how pre-flight reasons and exile circumstances influence return intentions and timing among South Sudanese refugees. Using UNHCR’s 2019 Regional Intention Survey for 6,547 households across six asylum countries, the analysis develops an integrated framework linking pre-displacement experiences, host-country contexts, and individual vulnerabilities. Multinomial and binary logit models reveal that displacement drivers create durable path dependencies: refugees fleeing generalised violence show higher return propensity, while those experiencing targeted persecution face persistent barriers even amid improved security. Drought-displaced refugees remain undecided. Host-country policies significantly shape outcomes: progressive regimes like Uganda reduce the likelihood of return by facilitating local integration, while restrictive environments like Ethiopia act as push factors. Exile duration introduces non-linear dynamics, with return intentions peaking at 4–6 years before declining as exile capital accumulates. Heterogeneity emerges by pre-flight occupation, gender, and legal status. Agricultural workers demonstrate strong short-term return intentions, whereas professionals delay or forgo return. Legal documentation reduces return intentions by enhancing integration prospects.
How do repressive threats in countries of origin influence migrants’ political participation after migration to new countries? While migrating to new countries is often assumed to provide opportunities for political voice, this study reveals a more complex picture. Drawing on survey data from Ukrainian, Polish, and Argentinian migrants in Western democracies, we examine how repressive threats in their home countries continue to shape political engagement across borders. We distinguish between experienced threats (negative consequences of protest participation at home) and perceived threats (awareness of repression at home). We find that repressive threats generally increase migrants’ diasporic political participation in host countries. However, the mechanisms diverge over time. While the mobilizing effect of experienced threats fades as migrants settle, the effect of perceived threats significantly increases. Furthermore, a list experiment reveals that migrants factor arrest risk into their thinking about home-country protest significantly more than non-migrants who remain there; and this effect is driven specifically by perceived threats. Overall, the findings show that repressive threats at home remain crucial to the political calculus of migrants. Rather than escaping repressive threats, migrants carry them, which in turn shape their political engagement.
This article examines how racialized youth activists in Italy and Germany position themselves as political actors capable of redefining the meaning of political belonging. Their practices not only reshape their own modes of participation but also compel broader society to reconsider what political belonging and social cohesion entail. At the core of their activism lies an implicit, and at times explicit, question: What does it mean to constitute a political community in a post-migrant Europe? As the illusion of a national cultural and ethnic homogenization fades, the issue of how to re-construct the social cohesion necessary for collective life becomes increasingly urgent. Drawing on a four-year ethnographic study, this article explores how the normative foundations of political belonging in the context of racialized youth activism illuminate emerging forms of collective identity and political agency. Through an analysis of the material, ideological, and emotional dimensions of the activists’ sense of belonging, the article demonstrates how activists’ situated knowledge and embodied practices function as critical interventions in dominant narratives of social cohesion, offering a nuanced account that resists reductive interpretations of their political engagement.
This article interrogates dominant media narratives that frame migrantized people as victims, threats, or exemplary contributors, arguing that such representational regimes reduce the complexity of lived migration and constrain migrantized self-agency. Drawing on empirical material from the transnational research project Life Strategies of Young Migrants in Ageing Societies (LYMAS), the study examines participatory filmmaking (PF) as a methodological and epistemic intervention in migration research and visual representation. Based on participatory filmmaking workshops conducted in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Switzerland, the article analyzes three participant-produced short films that engage themes of ecological practice, collective reflection, and culinary memory. The findings demonstrate how PF facilitates alternative narrative configurations that foreground relationality, process, and everyday practices of belonging, thereby challenging crisis-oriented and instrumentalized portrayals of migration. Rather than presenting PF as a corrective or emancipatory solution, the article conceptualizes it as a reflexive research practice that renders power relations in representation visible and negotiable. The study contributes to debates on media representation, visual methodologies, and migration studies by demonstrating the potential of participatory filmmaking to expand the representational vocabularies through which migration is understood.
How does family emigration influence attitudes towards democracy in the Middle East and North Africa? Drawing on 63 interviews with migrants’ families in Jordan and Tunisia, I argue that ‘democratic benchmarking’ plays an important role in influencing the nature and content of political remittances. Families of migrants make comparisons between political systems in their own country and their relatives’ emigration destination, which may reflect either positively or negatively on the political system under which they are governed. Comparing migrant families who have relatives in more democratically-governed countries with those who have relatives in more autocratically-governed Gulf monarchies, I find a positive effect of the former on support for key democratic principles including the rule of law and electoral competition. This effect is driven by positive comparisons that migrants’ families make between domestic and emigration destination political systems. While there is no corresponding pro-autocratic effect of positive comparison with Gulf political systems, families with emigrants in authoritarian countries rate their own country’s political system as relatively more democratic and are less likely to favour political change. The findings suggest that migration to relatively more democratically-governed countries can increase support for democratic political reform, while migration to comparatively more autocratically-governed countries can have the opposite effect.
In this article, our aim is to advance critical discussion about the analytical utility of the concept of “visible minorities” across demographic and socio-political contexts in which “non-whites” have a small numerical presence. Our analysis is based on 22 in-depth interviews and 10 go-alongs with migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East/North Africa, whose presence in the Czech city of Brno represents a relatively new phenomenon. To explore how immigrants make sense of their (super)visibility, we engage in a meaning-centered cultural sociological analysis, bringing together theories of visibility, ethnoracial Othering, and symbolic boundaries. Through this comparative study, we advance the discussion on the use of the concept of visible minorities in three ways: (1) by exploring its analytical utility in the context of Czechia, a new immigrant destination with a legacy of ethnic nationalism and a relatively high degree of ethnoracial homogeneity; (2) by decentering established scholarly perspectives and foregrounding how immigrants themselves perceive their position as visible minorities in the public space, and (3) by developing a cultural-sociological reformulation of the concept, treating “visibility” not as an inherent trait but as a relational condition that becomes salient only when outward markers of ethnoracial identity intersect with symbolic boundaries of belonging in a specific socio-cultural context.
This paper examines how food insecurity shapes migration aspirations and their orientation toward irregular migration in the Middle East and North Africa. Using micro-data from the seventh wave of the Arab Barometer, we construct an experiential index of food insecurity and distinguish between overall migration aspirations and willingness to consider irregular migration among prospective migrants. Probit and sample-selection probit estimates show that food insecurity is positively associated with the probability of considering emigration and, conditional on having considered emigration, with willingness to migrate without the required papers. These findings suggest that food insecurity is related not only to the formation of migration aspirations, but also to the orientation of these aspirations toward irregular pathways among prospective migrants. The results remain robust across subsamples, alternative measures of food-insecurity intensity, and instrumental-variable probit specifications using Covid-related assistance as instruments for food insecurity. These findings suggest that development and humanitarian aid aimed at reducing food insecurity can play a critical role in mitigating irregular migration pressures and should be integrated into broader migration and development strategies.
How religion shapes migrants’ integration is often analysed either through institutional participation or as a marker of cultural distance. Yet in secularising contexts where national belonging remains racially coded, religion can operate as a resource for belonging and as a site of boundary making. Drawing on interviews with twenty first-generation migrants in Ireland – ten Polish Catholics and ten Thai Buddhists – this article examines the functions of religion in migrants’ everyday cultural integration and how these functions become racialised. Guided by a model of five sources of religious effects (identity marking, content, resources, signalling, and discrimination triggers), the analysis shows that religion works as (i) a cultural anchor supporting continuity and transnational belonging, and (ii) a catalyst enabling engagement with Irish cultural institutions, relationships, and moral norms. For Polish Catholics, shared affiliation with the dominant church provides ‘religious proximity’ that can ease inclusion, especially in localities, while also generating tensions around liberalising Irish Catholicism and expectations of respectability. For Thai Buddhists, minority religious positioning intersects with racialisation and misrecognition, yet the pragmatic and portable character of their practices fosters striking religious flexibility, enabling intercultural participation even when institutional access is limited. Across both groups, migrants’ narratives suggest that cultural integration is domain-specific and power-laden: racialised norms of Irishness determine which religious performances ‘count’ as belonging. The article contributes a relational account of religion and race in migrant integration, arguing for research that treats religious change, racialisation, and acculturation as mutually constitutive processes rather than separate explanatory variables.
This paper examines how remittance dependence relates to public support for the abolition of presidential term limits in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), a region where electoral turnovers are rare and incumbents often manipulate restrictions on the permitted length of stay in office to prolong their rule. It is theorized that citizens who depend heavily on migrant remittances are more likely to support the removal of said limits. This preference is driven by the desire to protect their assets amid actual or anticipated conflict and instability. Using Afrobarometer data, the analysis confirms that remittance-dependent individuals are significantly more likely to back the removal of presidential term limits compared to those less dependent hereon. Consistent with expectations, this relationship becomes stronger among those who fear conflict or have prior experience with it. Falsification tests additionally corroborate the theorized mechanism’s validity. Migrant remittances, frequently hailed as a force for democratization, are associated with diminished prospects of political alternation and with stronger risk-averse preferences against disruption of status quo among those dependent on them. Provided, as such, is evidence of a nuanced relationship existing between remittances and compliance with democratic norms in origin countries in SSA.
Abstract Surveys of ethnic and migrant minorities are key sources of data and information on these populations. How such surveys define, identify, and operationalize these target populations is consequential for the findings and inferences resulting from their analysis. This article systematically identifies and assesses the diverse approaches used in these surveys to define and operationalize the studied ethnic and migrant minorities. Through a comprehensive analysis of survey-level metadata from the Ethnic and Migrant Minorities Survey Registry, covering 1,840 national and subnational surveys conducted between 2000 and 2021 across 34 European countries, we examine the survey questions used to classify the target groups, as well as the broader categorizations that they reveal. The paper highlights common practices and emerging trends in defining and operationalizing ethnic and migrant minority populations. The findings also inform future decision-making by survey researchers on how to define and measure ethnic/origin-related concepts.
In the political as well as the academic debate, it often appears as if regularisation or return are the only instruments that states use to address the presence of irregular migrants. Yet in reality, states possess a repertoire of responses to irregularity and select from this repertoire in a situation- and group-specific manner. This article systematically maps out the range of policy responses to the presence of irregular migrants on state territories, categorised as acceptance, toleration and rejection, as well as the rationales policy actors use to justify these responses. Our typology thus helps to move beyond the restrictive-liberal dichotomy, suggesting to explore instead under which circumstances and for which categories states adopt more inclusionary vs. more exclusionary policy approaches.
Whilst migration has been characterised as a quest for mobility, our research in South Africa has shown how young people in situations of forced migration experience multiple forms of immobility both physical and social as different legal, political, economic and social barriers restrict both their ability to be mobile within physical urban spaces and their social mobility within South African society. This article, based on focus group discussions with young people aged 15–25 in the city of eThekwini-Durban, analyses these multiple forms of immobility which create situations of ontological insecurity whereby these young people cannot project themselves into a stable or positive future adult life. Using Ahmed’s notion of “being stopped”, we show how this “stoppedness” leads to fundamental ontological insecurities amongst these young people as they are unable to develop their life plans in the same way as their South African peers. We also examine their strategies for coping with and resisting this ontological insecurity and stoppedness.
Over the 21st century, there has been a resurgence of low-wage temporary labour migration across higher-income countries, particularly in Europe. The restriction of migrants’ rights has often accompanied such migration. This has led many academics to question the idea that temporary migration represents a ‘triple win’. Specifically, migrants are seen to suffer due to the rights restrictions placed on them by host countries. This article compares temporary agricultural labour migration to Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom. We identify the different ways and degrees to which migrants’ rights have been compromised under largely bilateral (Poland), largely regional (Germany) and largely global (UK) migrant recruitment regimes. Through the comparative analysis, ‘better practices’ are identified from across the three case-study countries, and a list of 34 rights-based indicators is proposed and assessed. The paper is intended to advance the knowledge of, and debate around, what constitutes migrants’ core rights and point towards how temporary migration policies can become more (rather than less) worker-friendly in future.
