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Research on transnational youth mobilities has shown the importance of visits to the 'home' country for young people's identities, sense of belonging and access to resources. Yet what transpires on these visits and how do young people agentically shape their experiences? This paper brings into dialogue scholarship on 'homeland' mobilities, trajectories and temporalities to shed light on how youth experience their attachments to a 'homeland' and reveal the mechanisms through which young people's lives are affected by 'home' visits. We use the temporal concept of pacing, recently developed in mobility studies, to analyze how young people experience 'home' visits at different moments in their lives. Drawing on 18 months of multi‐sited ethnographic fieldwork using mobile methods with Ghanaian‐background youth who live in Belgium, we show that visits to Ghana are experienced differently by youth throughout their life time in relation to how much control they exert over the pacing of their visits. Through their mobility and their practices before, during and after 'home' visits, young people craft affective experiences with people and places in Ghana and experience different paces of life across space and time. This ultimately shapes how young people imagine a future 'good life' that involves a transnational lifestyle and that has the 'right pace' by incorporating aspects of life from both Belgium and Ghana. A focus on pacing and trajectories contributes to acknowledging both temporal and spatial dimensions of transnational youth mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant-background youth travel often to their or their parents' country of origin, yet little is known about how such trips affect their personal growth. These trips have either been ignored or analysed through concepts of belonging or identity. By contrast, studies on international education and travel and tourism, which commonly focus on youth without migration background, highlight positive personal impacts of experiences abroad. This paper applies a personal growth lens to analyse how visits to the origin country impact Ghanaian-background youth living in Belgium. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Belgium and Ghana with 25 young people, we show how such trips stimulate self-confidence and aspirations. Self-confidence is strengthened through favourable treatment and access to luxurious spaces that make youth feel special. Young people develop educational and career aspirations after comparing opportunity structures they face in Belgium with their experiences in Ghana and engaging with Ghanaian role models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how physical mobility shapes migrant youth's changing relationships to their or their parents' country of origin. Increasing numbers of youth in the Global North have a migration background and are transnationally engaged in virtual, imaginative and material mobilities. Yet our knowledge of their physical mobility is lacking, having largely been based on retrospective accounts from the country of residence, resulting in depictions of static relationships to a monolithic country of origin. This study takes a processual approach, focusing on mobility trajectories and exploring the sensorial, embodied and emotional aspects of physical mobility as it unfolds. Drawing on 14 months of mobile ethnographic fieldwork with 20 Ghanaian-background young people (aged 15–25) living in Hamburg, Germany, we focus on visits to Ghana to explore how physical mobility changes relationships to the country of origin over time (across several visits) and space (between different places within one visit). We use Urry's typology of proximity to analyse the specific and changing constellations of people, places and moments that constitute visits and thus shape these relationships. We also reflect on the methodological implications of using three mobile methods: mobility trajectory mapping, following mobility in real-time, and before-and-after interviewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale research on migrant youth categorises youth along two lines: ethnicity and generation. Yet insights from smaller-scale qualitative studies indicate that it is important to experiment with categories based on mobility. While these studies have shown that young people's mobility affects their identities, educational resilience, sense of belonging and sense of self, findings have not led to new thinking about categories used in large-scale migrant youth research. Given this lacuna, we investigate young people's mobility, understood here as long or short trips to countries other than where they reside, based on a large-scale survey in three European countries (N = 2019). We find that travels are common amongst secondary school pupils of both migrant and non-migrant background and that youth with a migration background primarily travel to their or their parents' 'home' country. While lower socio-economic status is associated with less frequent travel for the general population, it is not linked to the frequency of travel of youth with a migration background. In today's globalised world, where there are important distinctions between those who can travel and those who cannot, our findings call for putting the mobility of young people at the heart of analytical categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant parents from the Global South who migrate to the Global North often leave their children in the origin country either by choice or as a result of stringent migration policies in migrant-receiving countries that make family migration impracticable. Small-scale, qualitative studies have indicated that these transnational parents experience emotional and health difficulties due to separation. Few studies have investigated these effects on a larger scale using quantitative data, and no previous studies compared their findings with a control group. The current paper used a survey that was conducted with 303 Ghanaian migrant parents living in the Netherlands to examine the effects of transnational family life on self-reported health and subjective well-being (as measured through satisfaction with life and emotional well-being). The study shows that migrant parents who are separated from their children display worse outcomes than their counterparts who live with their children in the destination country. Importantly, however, these differences were mediated by these parents' lower socio-economic and undocumented status. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When collecting migrants' life stories, researchers often report on the role of chance encounters in influencing the way migration trajectories have taken shape or how migrants have managed their lives in a new country. Aside from reporting on such encounters, however, there have been no explicit efforts to theorise chance or to make it central to in-depth analysis in migration studies. This paper aims to theorise the role of chance encounters in migrants' trajectories by drawing on insights from the psychology literature of chance encounters and life paths. Our analysis of the role of chance encounters, structured by the interplay between environmental and personal factors, suggests that how people deal with chance is an influential factor in the ways people migrate from the Global South to the Global North and manage their lives in transit. The paper makes use of evidence collected among 46 African migrants in Ukraine during 7 months of field research in 2011-2012 and reflects on the methodological implications in studying chance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on the transnational family highlight the emotional difficulties of migrant parents separated from their children through international migration. This article consists of a large-scale quantitative investigation into the insights of transnational family literature by examining the well-being of transnational parents compared with that of parents who live with their children in the destination country. Furthermore, through a survey of Angolan migrant parents in both the Netherlands and Portugal, we compare the contexts of two receiving country. Our study shows transnational parents are worse off than their non-transnational counterparts in terms of four measures of well-being - health, life satisfaction, happiness, and emotional well-being. Although studies on migrant well-being tend to focus exclusively on the characteristics of the receiving countries, our findings suggest that, to understand migrant parents' well-being, a transnational perspective should also consider the existence of children in the migrant sending country. Finally, comparing the same population in two countries revealed that the receiving country effects the way in which transnational parenting is associated with migrant well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate the daily work entailed in maintaining informal transnational childcare relationships between migrant parents and the children's kin or non-kin caregivers in the country of origin. By applying the concept of 'kin work', we seek to understand how work is performed within transnational care relationships. Using a simultaneous matched sample methodology that gives equal weight to data on both sides of the transnational relationship, a team of researchers collected ethnographic data from Ghanaian migrant parents in the Netherlands and from their children's caregivers in Ghana. This approach allowed us to investigate the day-to-day care work from two perspectives - namely the visible and the invisible actions of the people involved in creating the kinship relationships of care work. Discrepancies in perceptions were uncovered because we compared data obtained on both sides of the relationship. These findings contribute to our understanding of the ways in which long-distance practices facilitate the maintenance of kin relationships and how the inability to perform these can lead to tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND The ability of couples to migrate together or to reunify in the destination country is increasingly limited because family reunification laws are becoming more stringent, especially for those moving from the Global South to the North. However, little is known regarding migrants' reunification behavior. OBJECTIVE We examine the prevalence of couples living-apart-together-across-borders (LATAB), the duration of their separation, and under which conditions they remain transnational or reunify in the destination country. METHODS Using data from the MAFE-Ghana project, we focus on LATAB couples among Ghanaian migrants living in the Netherlands and the UK (n=291). Event history analyses are used to examine the probability of reunification. We consider characteristics of the migrant, the left-behind spouse, their relationship, and the receiving country context. RESULTS Couples remain separated for extended periods of time. Just over half of the couples in the Netherlands and the UK reunified: approximately half did not. Reunification is less likely in the Netherlands than the U.K. and is less likely since 2004, when reunification policies became stricter. Spouse's education is a significant factor in explaining reunification, but, surprisingly, legal status is not. Being able to maintain transnational ties through short return visits increases the likelihood of LATAB. CONCLUSIONS Findings reveal that LATAB relationships are a common, long-term arrangement among Ghanaian migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on transnational families argue that the subjective well-being of migrant parents is negatively affected by living separated from their children. Most studies employ qualitative methods without a control group and hence are not able to distinguish whether the effects found are associated with separation only or with other factors. This paper investigates the association between parental subjective well-being and parent–child separation by comparing migrant parents who have at least one child in their country of origin with those who live with all their children in the Netherlands. The paper further investigates whether the same associations are found between migrant groups from Angola and Nigeria. Results indicate that transnational parents indeed report lower subjective well-being, as measured by happiness, life satisfaction and mental health for both groups and additionally, self-assessed health for Angolans. However, legal status, socio-economic status and the quality of the parent–child relationship are found to be important mediators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Studies around the world have shown the interest of migrants to invest in houses in their countries of origin. Yet scholarly and political debates have mainly focused on the productivity of these investments, arguing that the money spent might have found more productive uses. We argue that this is too limited a view, as it fails to take into consideration two dimensions: Why do investments in houses take place, a question that is not only economic but also social and cultural in nature. Second, how do transnational investments in houses take place? This is important given that migrants are seldom able to construct their own homes, instead depending on actors in their country of origin. This paper shows the importance of unravelling the transnational relationships involved with migrant investments in houses in order to understand the meaning of these investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Risk pooling literature argues the need for geographic proximity to ensure the functioning of informal insurance arrangements. This paper investigates whether these arrangements exist between migrants and their network members back home and, if so, how they work in the absence of geographic proximity. Analysis of a simultaneous matched sample of migrants in the Netherlands and network members in Ghana reveals the existence of reverse remittances. These remittances show that there is risk pooling between migrants and network members. The paper elaborates on the institutional arrangements that make such a system possible. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]