This article examines how second-generation Turkish-German “return” migrants navigate life in their parents’ homeland and construct various transnational reorientations due to the mismatches between their return expectations and the post-return realities of living in Turkey. Based on the life-story narratives of 71 participants, the findings show that the second generation’s return often results in multiple challenges and, in some cases, profound disillusionment. In response to the realization that the return does not provide a complete sense of homecoming, they start engaging in practices of “reverse transnationalism,” reorienting them toward Germany, where they were born and raised. These practices include visits to Germany, pursuing careers where they can use the German language, building social networks with other German-speakers, and integrating aspects of the German mentality and lifestyle into their professional, social, and family lives. Some contemplate a “re-return” to Germany, but this depends on citizenship. Others re-evaluate the attractions of both countries in a more complex form of what we term reflexive transnationalism . The article concludes that both physical and symbolic acts of reverse and reflexive transnationalism help second-generation returnees to adapt to the challenges posed by the social, economic, and political realities of their ancestral homeland.
This article examines the transformation of relations between Rohingya refugees and host communities in southeastern Bangladesh, documenting a shift from early hospitality to entrenched hostility under conditions of protracted displacement. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, including in-depth interviews and sustained observation, the study moves beyond refugee-center or host-burden frameworks to analyze displacement as a relational process. Anchored in the concept of ontological insecurity, the findings show that prolonged uncertainty destabilizes the moral and social certainties of both communities, generating reciprocal perceptions of abandonment, insecurity, and loss of dignity. Informal economic interdependence and gendered labor displacement intensify psychosocial distress, translating structural inequality into moral resentment and social withdrawal. Rather than fostering solidarity, shared precarity produces a condition of mutual victimhood in which suffering becomes comparative and competing, reinforcing stigma and dehumanization. The article argues that without institutional mechanisms capable of restoring recognition and ontological security for both refugees and hosts, displacement governance risks entrenching durable social fracture rather than enabling coexistence.
This article aims first to understand how and why refugees decide to leave or stay in their first country of asylum, and second to contribute to the theory of agentic analyses of migration. Our contribution adds to the growing body of research examining the impact of social class and associated capitals on the trajectories of forced migrants. Our analysis of the experiences of Syrians in Turkey and Lebanon demonstrates that social class is a critical factor in shaping their experiences in their first countries of asylum. We assert that social class has a significant impact on their future mobility and immobility decisions. By using a Bourdieusian conceptualisation of capitals, habitus and social space and relying on in-depth interviews, we analyse the types of capital that forced migrants possess, their convertibility and their chances of re-establishing their class status. We show that convertibility depends on the type of capital and its interaction with social space. The difference between pre- and post-displacement class status is a significant factor in determining decisions regarding onward mobility, along with the capacity for social reproduction. Our findings demonstrate that voluntary immobility may occur among those who have achieved similar livelihoods to their pre-displacement status and are content with their lives. Lower-income households that struggle to restore their livelihoods are more likely to engage in irregular migration or become trapped in involuntary immobility.
While a growing body of research examines the relationship between climate change and displacement in origin communities, less is known about the climate risks that displaced populations encounter in host areas. This study examines how climate risk (disaggregated into hazard exposure, vulnerability, and coping capacity) is reconfigured as refugees move from origin to host countries. We argue that the societal determinants of climate risk—in this analysis, the structural and institutional conditions of host and origin countries that mediate the consequences of hazard exposure—are at least as consequential as hazard exposure in shaping the climate risk environments in which displaced populations live. Drawing on the Climate-driven INFORM Risk Index and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Population Statistics from 2013 to 2022, we apply a migration corridor analysis globally and within Africa. We find a global rise in the number of refugees originating from high climate risk countries, and that 75 percent of global refugees reside in high or medium climate risk host countries. In Africa, displacement to neighboring or regional host countries shifts exposure to hazards but often not overall climate risk. as many refugees remain in countries characterized by high societal vulnerability and low coping capacity. Refugees who move intercontinentally typically face lower climate risks. Our findings demonstrate that cross-border displacement often reconfigures rather than alleviates climate risk, as the societal conditions that produce vulnerability prove far more persistent than patterns of hazard exposure.
Climate change is reshaping population movements within and between Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs), exposing critical gaps in how international migration is understood and governed in the Pacific. This study assesses key regional, subregional, and bilateral agreements in the Pacific to understand how they engage with climate mobility and to identify areas of neglect. It highlights a novel finding: while population movements between Pacific islands are a longstanding reality in the region, existing governance frameworks have so far rarely addressed climate-related South–South migration between PICTs. As a result, the needs of vulnerable receiving communities within PICTs have been largely overlooked in both research and policy. The paper further argues that this oversight reflects broader Global North biases in migration scholarship and governance that continue to shape orthodox understandings of climate-related mobility commonly framed through South to North migration paradigms. By centering South–South dynamics in the Pacific, a region often marginalized in global migration research, this study contributes to efforts to decenter dominant migration frameworks and calls for more inclusive approaches to climate-related migration scholarship and governance that reflect Pacific realities and the perspectives of affected communities.
This paper examines whether the 2016 US presidential election altered international student mobility by transforming campaign rhetoric into a credible signal of future policy and social risk. Using country–year data on F-1 visa issuances and active international student enrollments, the analysis studies how international students from countries explicitly targeted during the campaign responded to the election outcome. Two-way fixed effects models and event study specifications are used to trace both average post-election effects and their dynamic evolution. The results indicate a sharp post-election reversal in new international student inflows among targeted countries. Event study estimates show that, prior to 2016, F-1 visa issuances from Muslim-majority and Arab World countries grew faster than those from a plausibly less-affected comparison group. This upward trajectory reverses in FY2017, with visa issuances falling and remaining persistently lower in subsequent years. In contrast, active international student enrollments exhibit substantially more muted responses, reflecting the stock nature of enrollment outcomes and the continued presence of cohorts admitted prior to the election. Together, these findings indicate that the election primarily affected entry decisions rather than inducing immediate exits among enrolled students.
In contemporary migration studies, online forums are common spaces where people exchange information and seek advice about international migration. This methods note introduces the Reddit community r/IWantOut as a data source for studying migration aspirations and presents a validated natural language processing (NLP) pipeline for analyzing it. The forum's community rules require posters to encode age, gender, origin, and intended destinations in a fixed title format, so users label their own migration aspirations in a semi-machine-readable form when they post. Using 156,313 submissions from 2009 to 2026 (58,892 after cleaning), we demonstrate three analytical approaches: (1) time-series analysis to identify temporal shifts in discourse volume, (2) dictionary- and rule-based extraction, together with Named Entity Recognition (NER), to recover origin–destination pairs and sociodemographic attributes from the structured titles, and (3) large language model (LLM)-based zero-shot classification, used only for classifying migration motivations. Validation against human-coded labels across three LLMs (GPT-4.1, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and DeepSeek-V3) showed that GPT-4.1 achieved the highest agreement (mean κ = 0.566), with substantial agreement on push factors, moderate agreement on pull and enabling factors, and fair agreement on constraining factors. Applying this approach to 56,242 international migration posts, we found that enabling factors (individual-level resources) appeared most frequently (77.3%), followed by constraining factors (49.3%), pull factors (37.2%), and push factors (23.6%). For each method, we provide practical guidance on implementation, data access, and validation, and reflect on methodological limitations and ethical considerations.
Who governs migrant precarity, and through what mechanisms is it sustained in contemporary labor migration regimes? This article conceptualizes intermediated exclusion as a governance logic through which accountability is displaced, producing migrant precarity. Drawing on a nationwide employer survey (n = 3,747) and qualitative evidence from labor brokers, local officials, and migrant workers in Taiwan, it identifies three modes of delegated governance: institutional outsourcing, household-level ambiguity, and hybrid flexibility. These arrangements shift responsibility away from the state, embedding precarity through wage opacity, dependence on brokers, and the policing of ‘runaway’ cases. The article shows that delegated governance not only fails to protect migrant workers, but also contributes to the organization of vulnerability through dispersed forms of authority. Beyond Taiwan, the findings suggest that migrant precarity is less an exception than a patterned outcome of how labor migration governance is enacted in practice.
This article develops and empirically tests a theory of migration under repression. It argues that migration aspirations are shaped by perceived freedom repression and that such perceptions can make exit more attractive when voice appears blocked, risky, or ineffective. The theoretical framework yields four hypotheses, which we test using Arab Barometer data from 2021 to 2024 covering about 34,000 respondents in 12 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. Empirically, we construct a Freedom Repression Index and examine how perceived repression shapes migration aspirations across different freedom dimensions and migration routes. Four findings stand out. First, perceived repression significantly increases migration aspirations, with substantive effects comparable to standard economic push factors. Second, the association is strongest for personal liberties, especially freedom of expression and freedom of religion, whereas restrictions on collective political rights such as protest are less strongly associated with migration aspirations. Third, repression shifts intentions toward irregular rather than regular migration routes. Fourth, this relationship is context-dependent; it is strongest in stable yet restrictive settings and weakens in conflict-affected contexts where insecurity dominates. By disaggregating freedom dimensions and distinguishing regular from irregular intentions, the article connects exit-voice theory to micro-level evidence and clarifies when, which, and how perceived repression shapes migration aspirations in the MENA region.
While migration studies have examined host-society attitudes toward immigrants, home-country views of emigrants remain underexplored. We address this gap using an online survey experiment in China that varies (i) the salience of national pride and (ii) the prospective emigrant's occupational status. Making national pride salient lowers support for — and increases negative emotional reactions toward — settlement-oriented emigration, especially for lower- and mid-skill profiles; effects for the high-status profile are smaller and statistically uncertain. Net of the prime, attitudes are also more negative toward higher-status profiles than toward the low-skill profile. We interpret these patterns within a social identity framework, drawing on Social Identity Theory, the “brain drain” literature, and Hirschman's exit–voice–loyalty model, while emphasizing a mechanism of identity salience consistent with Self-Categorization Theory. The study advances international migration scholarship by showing how national identity and occupational status shape home-country evaluations of settlement-oriented emigration and by foregrounding emotions as a mechanism linking identity salience to policy-relevant attitudes.
