This article aims to explore how intimacy is constructed and experienced among couples formed through transnational and arranged marriages, between Morocco and Italy. The analysis, conducted with a qualitative approach, begins by retracing the process of couple formation and the role that kinship plays in facilitating this transition in migrants' life courses. I then consider how love and intimacy are intertwined with the wider effort of family settlement in the Italian context. The investigation is developed in dialogue with the literature on the detraditionalization of intimacy, on one side, and transnational marriages, on the other. I argue that these couples achieve intimacy by pursuingcopious relationshipsresulting from their ability to navigate among family extension and nuclearization, independence and reciprocal commitment, kin expectations and self-determination.

The aim of this article is to consider how migration and fertility constitute interrelated events among Moroccan women in Italy. Through a qualitative approach, I analyse the evolution of their life courses, exploring how these women, with their partners, manage to have children in migration. This viewpoint is particularly relevant considering the Italian context, which has historically been characterized by low fertility rates. I argue that the interweaving of migration and fertility these women deploy between Morocco and Italy stems from a transnational mobilization of reproductive resources, namely an array of relations, practices and values that make marriage, childbearing and the raising of offspring sustainable and attractive in migration. Through this frame, I reconstruct the ways these women manage their fertility, distinguishing between expected and unexpected children. Finally, I describe the process through which they achieve multi-child families (4–6 children).

AbstractCostica Dumbrava’s proposal for abandoning ius sanguinis is timely and bold. My intuition is to reject his suggestion that children’s citizenship might be disconnected from that of their parents, but to join his advocacy for a radical rethinking of the ius sanguinis principle with a view towards eliminating it once and for all. These are rather contrasting stances in relation to the same principle. My contribution aims to resolve the apparent contradiction.

This introductory chapter outlines the volume’s main contents, identifying some key ideas that contribute to recent debates on migration, minorities and national categorization as well as the shifting meanings associated with the politics of kinship in this scenario. Specifically, we present and discuss two main fields of reflection: on one hand, the strain of national efforts to classify and govern internal differences and, on the other, dimensions of belonging on the basis of kinship, intimacy and ancestry. We conclude by introducing the individual chapters. Our aim is to sketch an intersectional perspective that grants equal attention to both the logics of national governmentality in the sphere of migration and minorities, and the myriad ways individuals and collectivities end up tangling with overwritten identity categories through practices and politics of identity and belonging, intimacy and relatedness. In this investigation, we focus our analysis on the boundary within understood as less an established line of demarcation or given classification and more an ongoing process of identity construction and social exclusion that takes place among the various actors, levels and spaces that make up the national fabric, itself shown to be intrinsically ambivalent, contradictory and subject to constant redefinition.

With this conclusive chapter, the multiple strands of analysis developed across the various chapters are rearticulated in an effort to frame some key remarks and notes for a research agenda on nation, kinship and migration. Focusing on the connection between national boundaries and identity, the analysis stresses the need to more systematically consider how and when categories of nationality may be effectively imposed among migrants and minorities as criteria of exclusion despite their incoherent and controversial character. At the same time, the chapter addresses the highly complex relationship between kinship and nation. This point highlights in particular the way national metaphors draw on the sphere of loyalty and recognition represented by kinship to accrue meaning and forge collective imaginaries. It therefore reveals how, in contemporary contexts, mobility engages the state-kinship relationship in an ever more pressing way, thereby invoking processes of classifying and certifying nation-state belonging. Lastly, exploring the nexus between nation, mobility and kinship, migrant agency is considered not as a simple act of resistance but rather as a complex articulation that emerges at the intersection of the state, the law, identity and intimacy.

Italian society is undergoing significant demographic changes: on one hand, the widespread decrease in birth rates and extended life expectancies lead to a substantial aging of the population; on the other hand, rising immigration rates constitute an important factor behind the renewal and growth of young population segments. According to conventional disciplinary divisions, such changes are the established domain of demography; however, it mainly draws on ethno-national categories to investigate them. In reference to the Italian context, this article specifically highlights the way national demography employs forecasts and value judgments derived from a qualitative and selective definition of population to address the marked increase in children born to foreign parents. By examining the reproductive behaviours of migrants in Italy, the article thus offers a wide-ranging reflection on the social boundaries that shape the formation of an �other� generation.

The notion of social remittances has gained a central position, discursively at least, in the literature on the effects of emigration on home societies. In this editorial we briefly review the strengths and limitations that this concept has displayed, since its early coinage in transnational migration studies. More often than not, social remittances have been treated in the literature in a peripheral vein, ancillary to different foci of research. This Migration Letters special issue aims to move the debate on the theme beyond this unsatisfactory state of things. More specifically, we argue for four lines of research on social remittances to be further developed: the tensions between individualization and home-society based obligations and pressures, which shape the development and circulation of social remittances; the need to explore the embeddedness of economic remittances within a broader range of socio-cultural remittances (rather than vice versa); the interfaces between the categories of social remittances and social capital; the complex ways in which physical and social distance between senders and recipients affects the circulation of social remittances, as well as their impact on migrants' communities of origin.