Literature on the social construction of skilled migration has demonstrated how the selective admission of 'skilled migrants' by host states produces unequal outcomes, admitting some as 'skilled' while excluding others with seemingly similar qualifications. This study examines the other side of this construction and its connection with inequality: how the state's inclusion of individuals with differing skill levels into the same 'skilled migrants' category generates stratification. It focuses on Japan, where international students with varying levels of Japanese language proficiency have been admitted as 'skilled migrants' after graduation under recent policy changes. Drawing on interviews with foreign graduates working in Japan, the study argues that the state's expansion of the 'skilled migrants' category produces a form of stratification characterized by multi-layered inequality, comprising three domains: labour markets, legal rights and (in)formal status. Furthermore, the study finds that these domains are interconnected. While different skill profiles directly shape labour market inequality, this inequality in turn affects legal rights stratification through bureaucratic practices that allocate different periods of residence based on applicants' economic potential. Additionally, labour market inequality connects with (in)formal status stratification through the state's issuance of skilled migration visas to those performing work that falls outside state-defined 'skilled' (mostly white-collar) work, an unintended policy outcome largely driven by employers' misuse of visa applications amid labour shortages in low-wage sectors. Multi-layered inequality thus highlights the interlocked nature of multiple domains of inequality, compounding disadvantages for those with lower skill profiles and implying divergent trajectories of integration among 'skilled migrants'.
Migration is a highly complex and uncertain process that has the potential to have large impacts on societies around the world. One key driver of this complexity and uncertainty is the autonomous agency of the actors involved, particularly the decision-making processes of potential migrants. Most theories and models rely on simplistic decision rules or a decision-making process that assumes rational agents. However, a considerable body of research in psychology and behavioural economics raises doubts about such assumptions. To inform the description of migration decision processes, we elicited and compared non-parametric utility functions for both finance and international migration decisions. This allowed us to directly test, using individual-level experimental data, whether the aspects of prospect theory that are commonly found in utility functions elicited within a financial context are also present for migration decisions. Across both financial and migration-related contexts, we found that participants were generally loss-averse and their utility functions were concave in the domain of gains. However, findings for convexity in the domain of losses were mixed. This evidence of loss aversion, risk aversion, and diminished sensitivity further from the reference point suggests that migration decision-making is more consistent with the key tenets of prospect theory than with expected utility.
China's ageing rural population presents a significant challenge to the country's development. This article uses data from the 2013, 2015 and 2018 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to examine how pension receipt of the elderly parents in rural China affects the labour mobility of their adult children. The estimation results from a fuzzy regression discontinuity design indicate that the pension receipt increases the labour mobility of adult children. The effects are more pronounced when the elderly parents have better health, have more living children and are both alive. Mechanism analysis indicates that pension receipt reduces regular financial transfers from adult children, but does not affect grandparental childcare for the adult children. This article reveals how a public pension programme affects the labour mobility of the younger generation and offers valuable insights for other developing countries facing similar challenges with an ageing population.
Renewed interest in rural areas during the COVID-19 pandemic generated a sense of optimism concerning the fate of declining rural areas, with the notion of a 'rural revival' evident in both popular and academic discourse. While many studies have explored urban-rural migration during the pandemic, few have done so from the specific perspective of declining rural areas. This paper responds to this gap, combining analysis of pre-pandemic population development trends with an exploration of pandemic-era internal migration patterns in Nordic rural areas. The paper uses sequence analysis to identify the most typical population development trajectories of Nordic rural municipalities in the two decades preceding the pandemic. Following this, a measure of 'excess migration' is used to explore which types of rural municipalities were the most likely to experience higher-than-expected inflows of internal migrants following the onset of the pandemic. The analysis highlights considerable diversity in the population development trajectories of Nordic rural municipalities-while population decline was the most common experience, it was by no means the only one, with many rural populations stable, and even growing. Further, the paper finds that, while most rural municipalities experienced higher-than-expected inflows in the pandemic era, the greatest deviations from expectations were evident in municipalities with the least favourable pre-pandemic population development trajectories. Further monitoring of migrant flows, along with more detailed analysis of flows among different groups, will be important next steps in clarifying the extent to which these short-term disruptions have any longer-term bearing on demographic decline in Nordic rural areas.
This study examines multidimensional segregation by race, income, and partisanship among Asian Americans, whose ethnic subgroups differ in migration history, socioeconomic position, and political alignment. Using voter registration records for 33 million voters in New York and California, including 2.55 million Asian American voters, we estimate individual-level spatial isolation with a k-nearest neighbours approach. On average, Asian Americans show lower racial isolation than Black and Hispanic voters, while their income and partisan isolation are closer to those of White voters. At the subgroup level, Chinese and Vietnamese Americans show high racial isolation, while Chinese Americans show intermediate income and partisan isolation. Japanese Americans show low racial and income isolation but higher partisan isolation. Indian Americans show the highest income isolation, whereas Vietnamese Americans show low partisan isolation. These findings show that Asian American residential patterns vary across subgroups and suggest that partisanship may represent an additional dimension shaping everyday residential experiences.
Research on counterurbanization has often emphasized macrolevel structural changes, such as urban expansion and population redistribution, while overlooking the selective nature of migration in relation to individuals' life-course transitions. Yet, migration between urban and rural areas constitutes a key spatial process mediating major life changes. Drawing on a life-course perspective, this study examines generational differences in migration determinants and spatial preferences among young and older migrants who relocated from Seoul, South Korea, to rural areas. At the individual level, binary logistic regression identifies factors associated with migration; at the regional level, rural typologies-Creative-Innovation Area, Eco-Welfare Rural Residential Area, and Remote Agricultural-Based Area-derived through fuzzy clustering (Fuzzy C-Means) are incorporated into a multilevel logistic model. The results show that young adults' rural migration is closely associated with life-course transitions related to family formation and employment conditions, with particularly high mobility observed among non-employed and career-interrupted women. In contrast, older adults' migration reflects active-aging motivations, particularly retirement timing and health status. Regionally, Creative-Innovation Areas attract younger migrants, while Eco-Welfare and Remote Agricultural-Based Areas appeal to older migrants. These findings demonstrate that rural areas function as multilayered socio-spatial arenas that mediate generational life transitions.
Along clandestine journeys, migrants occupy a whole variety of temporary and informal dwellings or 'makeshift camps', where they may rest, wait, gather resources and make further attempts at crossing the borders and reaching destinations. Makeshift camps have proliferated across cities and border-zones around Europe, becoming widely recognised as crucial geographies of contemporary migration, as nodes for migrant strategy and mobilities, solidarities and smuggling, temporary social and political orderings as well as all kinds of violence to which residents are exposed. Yet these spaces are also understood as inherently fleeting and mobile, characterised by constant police evictions and destruction, the abandonment or departure of their residents, the relocation and vanishing of structures formerly occupied - all of which make them difficult to study. Drawing upon extensive multi-sited ethnographic research across a variety of makeshift camps (past and present) in the border city of Biha & cacute;, Bosnia-Herzegovina, this paper considers methodological questions of how to examine migrants' informal dwellings en route whose upheaval and ephemerality has emerged, not as an aberration, but as a constant thread over the last several years. Within a context of acute transience, shape-shifting and disappearance, this paper offers methodological reflections on rendering visible the fleeting and subversive geographies of makeshift camps while maintaining a steadfast commitment to not expose the strategies and hiding places of residents in ways that would compromise their safety, privacy or success along their clandestine journeys.
The geographies of modern families are increasingly stretched by migration and mobility, raising crucial questions for population geography about the maintenance of intergenerational bonds. This study investigates the frequency of social contact between Polish grandparents and their grandchildren (both minor and adult), explicitly analyzing how these dynamics are contingent upon spatial context. Drawing on a 2019-2020 survey of grandparents (N = 1,000) and integrating insights from social presence and media niche theories, we employ ordered logit regression to compare face-to-face and ICT-mediated contact across three distinct spatial categories of grandchildren: local (within 25 km), domestically distant (elsewhere in Poland), and transnational (abroad). Findings reveal that geographical distance and the presence of national borders fundamentally shape contact patterns. Results support a mixed, context-dependent model: remote communication serves a compensatory function for transnational grandchildren, substituting for a lack of physical co-presence. Conversely, it provides a cumulative function for local grandchildren, supplementing frequent in-person contact. Domestically distant grandchildren represent an intermediary group. This research contributes to spatial demography by demonstrating how technology and geography intersect to reshape intergenerational solidarity within an ageing population context marked by high rates of mobility and migration.
This paper exploits the staggered rollout of the Broadband China Policy as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the impact of digital infrastructure expansion on rural-to-urban migration in China. Using data from the 2012 and 2018 waves of the China Family Panel Studies, we provide robust evidence that improvements in digital infrastructure significantly increase the probability of rural residents migrating to urban areas by 4.7%, corresponding to an approximately 18% increase relative to the migration rate in the sample. Mechanism analysis indicates that digital infrastructure facilitates migration mainly by reducing information frictions, strengthening social networks, and easing liquidity constraints. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that (i) the effects are stronger among individuals with lower educational attainment, middle-aged and older cohorts, and women; (ii) migration is primarily promoted within counties and across counties or cities within the same province, while no significant effect is found for interprovincial migration; and (iii) migration induced by digital infrastructure expansion is concentrated in mid- and low-skill occupations rather than high-skill professional jobs.
Much has been written about the important role of social support networks (SSNs) for the well-being of older adults, encompassing their social, emotional and practical needs. Less is known about what happens to the SSNs of older people when they migrate, and even fewer studies have examined the impact of different forms of capital on these networks. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and participant observation with 22 older Vietnamese migrants in Australia (2020-21), this paper explores the influence of different forms of social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital on their SSNs. Data analysis comprised egocentric social network analysis of the connections between older migrants (egos), members of their SSNs (nodes) and their social ties (edges), alongside thematic analysis of their lived experiences using NVivo 12 systematic coding. Findings reveal close connections between various forms of capital and the creation, maintenance and disruption of four types of SSNs: local (physical proximate), distant (geographically distant), local virtual (geographically close but online) and distant virtual (geographically distant and online). The conclusion highlights the importance of developing policies that consider the interconnections between different forms of capital and types of SSNs to deepen our understanding of 'ageing in place' and 'ageing in networks'.
Talent migration across urban hierarchy has emerged as a critical policy concern in China and the world. Based on the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (2017-2018), this study investigates the spatial patterns of talent migration across urban hierarchy and examines the effect of housing pressure on cross-hierarchical mobility. The results show that talent migration exhibits an upward pattern across the urban hierarchy, with skilled workers moving towards higher-tier cities. Migration flows are concentrated within urban agglomeration areas and are largely intra-provincial, with a tendency to converge on provincial capitals and regional centre cities. Third, housing pressure exerts an inverted U-shaped effect on cross-hierarchical talent migration, indicating that moderate housing costs stimulate upward mobility while excessive pressure suppresses it. Moreover, highly educated and skilled migrants are disproportionately sensitive to housing pressure, reflecting their stronger propensity to pursue homeownership. These findings suggest the need for regionally differentiated policies that simultaneously address housing affordability and invest in human capital to facilitate talent mobility.
This paper develops a spatial formulation of the Jensen-Shannon divergence to measure multigroup compositional dissimilarity between each municipality and its surrounding context. Building on information theory, the index compares local group distributions with neighbourhood-lagged compositions defined through two distance-based systems: a Gaussian kernel and a Max-Min sequence of connectivity thresholds. The measure is symmetric, bounded and decomposable into group-specific contributions, allowing identification of both the magnitude of local divergence and the groups responsible for it. Using data on the 10 largest foreign citizenships across 7887 Italian municipalities in 2024, the analysis reveals that significant local divergence is concentrated in a limited subset of municipalities and exhibits a clear multiscalar structure. South-Asian and selected North-African groups consistently account for the highest contributions, while many Eastern-European groups show patterns of local alignment with surrounding areas. The Gaussian kernel produces smooth spatial gradients, whereas the Max-Min system highlights breakpoints in connectivity and reveals stepwise evolutions in local mismatch. A Monte Carlo spatial randomisation test confirms that the observed patterns deviate systematically from space-composition independence. Overall, the spatial Jensen-Shannon framework provides a flexible diagnostic tool for identifying enclave-like configurations and assessing multiscalar socio-spatial contrasts with potential relevance for integration policies.
Telework has become a lasting feature of the U.S. labor market, expanding workers' freedom to live farther from their workplaces. At the same time, climate hazards such as hurricanes, droughts, and floods are growing in severity and frequency, shaping where people feel safe and comfortable living. While both trends are reshaping population movements, it remains unclear how they interact. This paper investigates how climate risk moderates the relationship between telework and interstate migration in the United States. Using a panel of census tracts from 2013 to 2023 that combines American Community Survey data on telework and migration with hazard risk scores from FEMA's National Risk Index, we estimate interaction models between telework prevalence and hazard exposure. We find that telework is generally associated with increased in-migration into areas facing higher levels of episodic or amenity-correlated climate risk. Results using the composite hazard risk score show a positive and statistically significant interaction between telework and climate risks, including riverine flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, cold waves, and droughts. In contrast, persistent climatic conditions such as extreme heat exhibit a negative interaction with telework, while winter weather shows no consistent effect. These patterns are strongest for interstate moves and in larger population tracts, indicating that telework most strongly reshapes long-distance destination choice where infrastructure and amenities allow households to manage environmental risk rather than avoiding risk altogether. Overall, telework alters how climate risk enters migration decisions, with implications for population redistribution, adaptation planning, and the future geography of work.
Social networks within Southern Africa's rural communities are often highly interconnected through kin relations. Research has demonstrated that historically older people age in place within kin networks, typically in multi-generational households, which are integral to their ageing experiences, such as through intergenerational contracts obliging younger generations to look after their older relatives. However, recent social policy favours aiding individuals experiencing poverty, including older people, with social cash transfers (SCTs) such as old age pensions. This paper explores the social and spatial impacts of pension payments on older people's care networks. In-depth participatory research undertaken in one rural community in Lesotho reveals the myriad interconnected and relational flows of cash transfers. We argue that SCT pension payments transform the position of older people within their social networks and transform interdependent communities spatially through their wider dispersal. The paper thus shows how the flow of pensions is changing socio-spatial care relations and re-positioning older people as economic contributors in their communities.
This paper explores how new Chinese migrants negotiate Chineseness through their engagement with Chinese voluntary associations (CVAs) in host societies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with new migrants involved in CVAs in Singapore, I conceptualize CVAs as affective spaces that generate (dis)orienting effects, shaping new migrants' negotiation of Chineseness in a context of 'togetherness-in-difference'. Specifically, CVAs function as 'convivial spaces' where new migrants rely on a primordial form of Chineseness to gain familiarity, connectivity, and a sense of orientation in a new settlement. At the same time, CVAs serve as contact zones infused with disorienting encounters with local Singaporean Chinese, producing variegated understandings of Chineseness. By highlighting the affective spatialities of CVAs, this paper advances a geographical approach to understanding Chineseness and contributes to the existing literature on migrant (dis)orientation.
In Poland, migration governance has lately been shaped by large-scale Ukrainian immigration: initially, through pre-war migration, and subsequently through forced displacement following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. This paper examines the evolution of migrant integration efforts at both the national and sub-national levels in Poland. While existing scholarship has largely emphasised the 'local turn'-that is, the growing role of municipalities in migrant integration-this study highlights the often-overlooked regional level within a multi-level governance framework. Drawing on a mixed-method approach and focusing on two regions (Lodz and Silesia), it analyses how humanitarian responses to refugee inflows evolved into broader integration policies. It shows that once refugee inflows stabilised, sub-national authorities' expectations regarding responsibility for integration policy shifted back towards national authorities. This dynamic illustrates a 'vicious circle' of migrant integration policymaking, marked by shifts from centralised governance to decoupling, and then back again. The uneven pace and divergent strategies across Polish regions reveal how weak coordination generates inconsistencies in migrant support, potentially undermining their effective integration.
This article analyzes Multilingual Dictionary - Living Together in a Refugee Camp, a co-research project documenting words and expressions created, invented, and circulated among migrant communities in the Moria and Mavrovouni camps on Lesvos Island between 2018 and 2022. As a living archive, the dictionary captures the embodied vocabularies of survival and resistance shaped by displacement and confinement. Situated at the intersection of sovereign-imposed order and emergent constitutive disorder, the article draws on the concepts of heterotopia and assemblage to examine how the camp operates as both a space of exclusion and a site of political agency. It argues that disorder, expressed through non-linear, improvised, and accented language, functions as a generative force within the heterotopic space of the camp, enabling the formation of counter-knowledge and autonomous migrant subjectivities. By situating the dictionary within the broader history of anti-camp movements, the article explores how practices of minor historiography, accent, and reassembly challenge dominant regimes of categorization, producing alternative ways of living, knowing, and resisting within the camp's dispositifs.
Adult children's geographic proximity to aging parents is a fundamental component of the spatial opportunity structure for intergenerational solidarity. Using nine waves of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2006-2022), this study employs a dynamic panel event study design to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of family relocation following a parent's first diagnosis of chronic illness. We analyze how distinct care trajectories of cancer, cerebrovascular disease, and cardiovascular disease, alongside the gender of adult children, shape these spatial adjustments. The results indicate that health shocks serve as a driver for spatial convergence, suggesting that formal care through the universal Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) complements rather than crowds out family support. However, relocation patterns exhibit significant heterogeneity by disease type. Acute circulatory conditions (cerebrovascular and cardiovascular diseases) prompt an immediate but short-term spatial response, whereas cancer leads to a delayed and sustained restructuring process. Furthermore, we find a shifting 'geography of care' in Korea: contrary to traditional male-centered norms, daughters have emerged as the primary agents of sustained spatial support. These findings highlight the spatial labor families undertake to compensate for the lack of formal support within the modern welfare system.
Young people are living with their parents for longer. Little is known about how this behaviour, along with the divergent socio-economic outcomes it entails, affects young adults' homeownership. Using UKHLS data adjusted for panel attrition, this study compares first-time homeownership transitions between young adults living with parents (home-stayers) and those who have left home to live independently in the private rental sector (home-leavers), while accounting for the mediating effects of socio-economic outcomes via the KHB modelling framework. The results reveal that, although home-stayers experience higher unemployment, lower income, and residence in more affordable areas, these factors do not significantly affect transitions to homeownership. Instead, their higher likelihood of having savings and more favourable financial situations is associated with an increased probability of homeownership, while lower rates of partnership formation are associated with a substantial reduction. Once partnership formation is accounted for, the difference in homeownership transitions between the two groups disappears.
In the current socio-political landscape of Central Europe, the 'postmigration' condition is marked by tensions between the structural recognition of migration and intensifying communicative polarisation, politically mobilised by nativist movements. This article argues that the analytical paradigms of both 'integration' and, more recently, 'inclusion' used in population geography and migration studies, are inadequate for capturing the complex, conflictual dynamics of these societies. Although 'inclusion' ostensibly aims to promote social cohesion, like 'integration' it often operates as a top-down governance strategy that reinforces entrenched power relations, reproduces colonial hierarchies, and frames migrants as passive subjects marked by deficit. Drawing on the socio-spatial contexts of Germany and Austria, we propose a conceptual shift towards a tripartite framework of agency, belonging, and resilience. Synthesising de Haas's aspirations-capabilities model, Katz's topography of resistance, and Bork-H & uuml;ffer et al.'s dialectics of space and agency, we reconceptualise differently positioned populations in postmigrant societies as political subjects actively navigating uneven power geometries. We distinguish between acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance, showing how diverse population groups - from the multi-generational 'postmigrant generation' to newly arrived refugees - mobilise practices of survival, negotiation, creation, and transformation to modify and 'make' space. We argue that polarisation should not be understood as an external shock, but as a communicative intensification and political mobilisation of ongoing negotiations over plurality - albeit with tangible consequences for differently positioned populations. Addressing these consequences requires moving beyond a passive logic of inclusion toward engagement with the active spatial politics of refusal and 'worlding'. In doing so, the article contributes to a postmigrant population geography that foregrounds the active spatial politics through which differently positioned groups negotiate, contest, and remake plural societies.
