Disparities in the distribution of protection responsibilities are not just unequal but also highly inequitable. Such inequities can be expected to negatively impact both the scope and the quality of protection that states are willing to provide. The paper empirically demonstrates through the analysis of Europe’s responses to forced displacement from former Yugoslavia to Ukraine, that European states have struggled to effectively address the highly inequitable distribution of refugee responsibilities. EU policy makers find it easier to develop symbolic solidarity measures than to establish more substantive policy responses, i.e. they struggle to adopt the kind of cooperation that the public goods literature suggests is necessary to overcome collective action problems. This is due to the fact that substantive refugee solidarity initiatives, such as quota-based relocation, which are promising from an equity perspective pose fundamental challenges to both national sovereignty and the individual autonomy of protection seekers. How future EU policies will seek to address such solidarity dilemmas that lie at the heart of international refugee responsibility sharing efforts will tell us much about its commitment to effective refugee protection.
Reliable migration and integration statistics are a prerequisite for evidence-based policy, yet gaps and inconsistencies beset national and comparative datasets. These limitations are magnified for people displaced from Ukraine across Europe, where fragmented legal and administrative arrangements under temporary protection hinder even basic measurement of population stocks and integration trajectories. This commentary synthesises insights from the project. It provides a comparative scan of the Nordic countries to examine how rights regimes and registration practices shape the production, availability, and comparability of data on Ukrainian refugees. We shift attention from outcomes to a methodological problem: can researchers and policymakers identify the relevant population, follow it over time, and construct comparable denominators for core indicators such as employment and return? Although the Nordic region is known for high-quality administrative registers, we show that divergent inclusion rules, delayed registration, and non-harmonised data releases have produced substantial uncertainty for both research and policy. We outline the risks of uncritical cross-national comparisons based on heterogeneous data sources and definitions, and we argue for transparent reporting of uncertainty and margins of error in national analyses used to guide policy. The commentary concludes with lessons for current and future displacement situations to prevent misinterpretation of integration performance and to support knowledge- and research-based migration governance.
This study investigates how young Nigerians evaluate development and how such evaluations relate to migration intentions and destination preferences. Although economic hardship, unemployment, and other structural constraints are important drivers of migration aspirations, they do not fully explain why individuals imagine specific destinations as desirable. Drawing on the concept of developmental idealism, the study examines whether respondents’ perceptions of Nigeria’s developmental standing are associated with their intention to leave and whether perceived development shapes destination choice. The analysis uses original survey data collected through two complementary surveys of educated Nigerian youth. The pooled dataset contains 835 respondents, of whom 729 aged 15–35 constitute the analytic sample. The analysis combines binary models of migration intention with an alternative-specific conditional logit model of destination choice, allowing the study to examine both respondent-level migration intentions and destination-level developmental evaluations. Higher ratings of Nigeria’s development are negatively associated with migration intention in the logistic model (OR = 0.941, p = 0.047), although the corresponding probit estimate is borderline (AME = − 0.0059, p = 0.052). Among respondents who expressed an intention to leave, perceived destination development is strongly associated with destination choice: each one-point increase in a destination’s development rating is associated with approximately 20
The COVID-19 pandemic generated an unprecedented labor market shock that disproportionately affected face-to-face service sectors central to immigrant employment. This study examines whether the pandemic reaffirmed or revealed limits to the narrative of immigrant resilience that emerged from research on the Great Recession. Focusing on the U.S. restaurant industry (a large, low-wage, nontraded sector with high immigrant representation), we analyze differential employment trajectories of foreign-born and U.S.-born workers across contraction and recovery phases. We integrate three data sources: 2000–2022 CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement data to establish long-term occupational trends; longitudinal CPS Basic Monthly data to estimate worker transitions during the pandemic; and an original nationwide survey of restaurant owners and hiring managers conducted in Summer 2021 with retrospective staffing information for January 2020 and January 2021. CPS transition results indicate that foreign-born workers experienced sharper transitions into unemployment in certain occupational segments during the contraction phase. Employer survey results suggest that foreign-born workers became increasingly concentrated in lower-wage restaurant types during recovery. These findings suggest that the national scope and mobility-restricting nature of COVID-19 constrained traditional immigrant adjustment mechanisms. Rather than uniformly reinforcing immigrant resilience, the pandemic intensified intra-industry segmentation and revealed how crisis characteristics condition immigrant labor market incorporation.
This article critically examines the entrepreneurial trajectories of Chinese–Australian wine exporters between 2015 and 2025, a decade marked by volatility in Australia–China relations. Drawing on four in-depth qualitative case studies, it explores how transnational migrant entrepreneurs navigated shifting geoeconomic conditions shaped by trade liberalization, diplomatic rupture, and partial recovery. The study introduces geoeconomic embeddedness and its specific form, bilateral embeddedness, to capture how interstate relations condition migrant entrepreneurial opportunity and risk. These cases show that while favorable bilateral conditions initially supported proactive market embedding and commercial success, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted established operating channels, and the 2020 tariff rupture created a distinct condition of dis-embedding by restricting previously viable China-facing market access and prompting divergent responses. Focusing on this bounded sectoral niche, this article complicates prevailing accounts of Chinese diasporic advantage within sectors organised around home-country market access. The cases suggest that these migrant entrepreneurs’ perceived entrepreneurial advantage is a contingent resource, which can both facilitate market access and amplify vulnerability as its value and associated exposure vary with the political-economic conditions of the bilateral corridor. By extending the mixed embeddedness framework to incorporate macro-relational dynamics, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of transnational migrant entrepreneurship as it emerges, evolves, and contracts within the context of shifting geoeconomic and bilateral tensions.
