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Pandemics refract sociopolitical tensions within societies and highlight how national belonging hinges on informal performances as much as legal status. While return migration has become a common practice and institutionalized strategy of state development, little scholarly work has probed how domestic populations view returnees and their claims to national membership. Using a large-scale, pre-registered online survey experiment deploying a give-or-take Dictator Game, this paper leverages the dynamics of COVID-19 to explore how Chinese nationals envision and treat returnees. First, our results illustrate that the Chinese population imagines returnees as a group of elites with substantial social and financial capital, even though returnees are a socio-economically diverse population. Next, by applying information priming, we demonstrate that Chinese nationals discriminated against overseas returnees during the pandemic and that this behavior was not primarily driven by fears of viral contagion. Finally, using mediation analysis, we show that participants’ differential behavior towards returnees can largely be explained by participants’ perceptions of returnees’ class status and adherence to key markers of national membership. Ultimately, this paper broadens our understanding of the informal dynamics of national membership and intergroup relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at one of the most dynamically evolving migration processes in contemporary Europe – labour migrants in Poland. Poland, until very recently a typical emigration country started receiving large numbers of migrants only after 2014. This process, however, cannot be explained in supply terms only. In fact, it was also a strong structural demand for foreign workers that played at least an equally important role. This newly established migration system has been tested during the pandemic along with policy adjustments and economic changes. We claim that despite the very fact that the 'essential workers' rhetoric was almost absent in the Polish public discourse, foreign workers played a significant role in securing the continuous operation of many sectors of the economy. The paper shows that the role of migration in Poland has changed along with the transition from a net-sending to a net-receiving country, but still it worked as a safety valve during the pandemic. We argue it was possible because of liberal rules regarding international movement and work abroad. By focusing on the role of exogenous shocks and by considering the very specific migration system in Poland, this paper contributes to the growing literature on the labour market-immigration nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dentists, managing highly prevalent oral disease are in demand across the world and hence potentially highly mobile. Both the United Kingdom and Australia, continue to be favourable destinations for migrant dentists. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the professional integration of migrant dentists in the UK and Australia, and health system responses, while explicating implications for future health workforce governance. In doing so, the paper adopts a system-thinking approach to analyse interactions between the migration system and other societal systems. This is the first multi-country study to analyse the professional integration of migrant dentists through the lens of health workforce and migration governance. The study draws on semi-structured qualitative interviews with migrant dentists in both countries, together with national systems registration and examination data and relevant policies, together with data from government and global datasets. Both countries are high-income countries with a relatively large dentist-to-population ratio maintained through reliance on migrant dentists. The health systems and migration governance have responded by increasing the number of local graduates with limited success in the UK, potentially due to organisational demands, and the multifactorial complex mutual influences between higher education systems, labour market, feedback loops and dentist migration systems creating a nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the slow violence of the state towards those seeking asylum, alongside resistance to it, through a critical discussion of the role of arts-based practice, care-full practice and the potential for a new politics of hope. It reflects on a series of creative online workshops led by two arts-based refugee organisations based in London, Stories & Supper and Phosphoros Theatre, during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK in 2020 and 2021. Exploring these workshops and their legacies against the backdrop of precarity, uncertainty and slow violence, the article considers some of the ways in which these workshops – and their focus on play, creativity and care – enabled practices of resistance, solidarity and radical hope to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of skilled migrants moving from the Global North to the Global South has been increasing in recent decades. This paper develops and employs a capital-mobility framework to analyze empirical evidence about the new international migration of skilled U.S. migrants to the Pearl River Delta Region of China. Guided by the literature on im/mobility and capital, this paper asks the following questions: What affects skilled U.S. migrants' mobility to and from China? How do they experience the dynamics of voluntary and involuntary immobility in China? Drawing on 58 semi-structured interviews, we found that the level of capital accumulation and its transferability and convertibility influenced migrants' mobility and immobility. In addition, the global outbreak of Covid-19 facilitated mobility for some while hindered mobility for others. This study discusses the differences between North-to-South and South-to-North skilled migration and conceptualizes im/mobility as a continuum experienced by skilled migrants during their migratory trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to the current and possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the (im)mobility trajectories of international students (IS) and the global higher education landscape. From the perspective of migration infrastructure, this paper specifically focuses on the immobility experiences amongst Chinese international students (CIS) who planned to enrol overseas in 2020 but instead chose to take online courses in China due to the COVID-19. It asks how online courses are both facilitated and constrained by a set of institutional and technological infrastructural forces. Particularly it also explores how some CIS exercise agency to mobilise their infrastructural surroundings and overcome certain infrastructural deficiencies they encounter, with the aim of improving studying/living quality while inhabiting immobilities in a transnational context. As such, this paper challenges the oppositional nature of mobility and immobility, arguing that immobility is not the 'flip side' to mobility or an outcome by default, and that being immobile can be affirming and empowering. Essentially, the paper brings this infrastructurally sensitive theoretical approach into international student mobility (ISM) studies, shifting the focus from examining how infrastructures move people to how they enable people to stay, and to how they are lived and reconstructed at an everyday level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the Covid-19 induced migration disruption in India as a lens to interrogate what this acute moment reveals about the precarity of India's migrant workers and their experiences of work in ordinary times. Interviews with interstate migrants from north India employed in the Tiruppur region in the southern state of Tamil Nadu present their narratives of being stuck at work when lockdown began, their subsequent struggles to get home, and finally their plans to return to Tamil Nadu later in 2020. Migrant accounts of migration disruption shed light on (1) the local labour control regime at destination that routinely keeps interstate migrants locked into highly exploitative work environments, and that was intensified during lockdown, and (2) the ways in which this labour regime thrives on the spatio-temporal separation of productive and reproductive spheres in migrants' linked lives. The Covid-19 disruption also reveals how this labour regime flexibly adapted to produce the simultaneous disposability and unfreedom of circular migrant workers. Drawing on critical literature on labour control regimes, and on the separation of productive and reproductive labour under contemporary capitalism, we show how the Covid-19 pandemic disruption was anything but a transformative moment for India's vast circular migrant workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]