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International mobility has radically changed during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Among all types of families, transnational families might have particularly suffered in 2020 during lockdowns that restricted international visits to family members. This paper focuses on the life satisfaction of skilled migrants living in Switzerland before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on those who live longdistance transnational relationships with other family members. We investigate the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on self‐reported life satisfaction using the Swiss Migration‐Mobility Survey (MMS). We apply panel analyses using random effects over three waves of the MMS. We found that the COVID‐19 crisis negatively affected recently arrived migrants' well‐being in Switzerland in 2020. However, migrants in transnational arrangements with children abroad show higher levels of life satisfaction in 2020, in comparison with migrant non‐transnational families. When interacted with gender, this improvement of life satisfaction concerns mostly men, while women in transnational partnerships report a significantly lower level of life satisfaction in 2020.

This paper discusses the construction of personal geographies of (im)mobility among Romanian older migrants in Switzerland and those who moved back to Romania after having lived in Switzerland. The analysis draws on 32 biographical narrative inter- views with Romanian migrants aged 57 and older. This is a heterogeneous population consisting of former political refugees, family migrants, and return migrants. The paper reconstructs the strategies refugees used to maintain ties to their homeland during the communist regime, when it was difficult to physically return home, and during the first attempts to re-establish concrete ties after the fall of the dictatorship. Since then older Romanians have developed a variety of personal geographies of (im) mobility: cutting ties to Romania, tourism, back-and-forth trips, attempted, and con- crete return. The paper's contributions derive from applying a life course perspective to the study of migration, focusing on little studied groups and on concrete return behaviour and not just intentions.