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Recent Southern European migration is characterised by important flows of higher-skilled young persons. The balance between the risk of a new brain drain and brain waste and the opportunity of brain gain depends on how the young migrants integrate into the labour market of destination, the new abilities they acquire and the possibilities of re-integrating into the labour market of origin, in case of return migration. In this paper we discuss the contribution of international youth mobility to the development of human capital. We focus on the individual gain in origin countries/regions generated by circulation and return and concentrate on total human capital. Our results – based on 120 in-depth interviews conducted in Italy and Spain, in both core (Rome and Madrid) and peripheral (Apennines and Andalusia) areas, with young students and lower- and higher-skilled workers – show that both Italians and Spaniards have acquired soft skills and these informal and tacit competences are considered to be as important as formal and explicit ones. For young Italians, brain circulation predominates and the human capital gained during migration results in better employability and earnings; for young Spaniards, circulation and return are more difficult in spite of their enriched human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In critical social research the concept of employability is associated with the neoliberal imperative that every individual should become a self-responsible, self-improving and enterprising subject in the increasingly precarious labour markets. Despite the prominence of employability in policies governing young people's intra-European migration, few studies examine migrants' subjectivities in this context. Building on narrative data, this article adds to our understanding on how neoliberal subject formations function as an instrument for governing young EU migrants' lives in conditions of precarious labour. Central to this understanding, it develops the concept of passion to depict young migrants' quest for obtaining work with opportunities for self-development and self-realisation. This concept contributes to the study of highly qualified intra-EU migration by allowing critical analysis of meanings given to mobility in relation to work; by highlighting dynamics of (self-)precarisation in this context; and by advancing debates on social-structural inequality among EU migrants pursuing their quest for passion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends understandings of circular migration among young migrants (aged 16–35) by focusing on the two key concepts of human capital and life satisfaction. Drawing on a large-scale quantitative primary data set, the YMOBILITY survey, key skills and competencies that facilitate circular migration are identified. It is widely assumed that achieving higher levels of subjective well-being is a primary motivational factor behind migratory decisions. However, there is little conclusive evidence to suggest that migration and mobility lead to increased levels of happiness. We argue that tacit competencies, defined as skills, ideas and experiences that people have but are not codified, are especially valued by circular migrants as facilitators of multiple migratory processes and are of importance to levels of life-satisfaction among young circular migrants. In order to assess circular migration as a life-strategy, the relationship between human capital outcomes and levels of life satisfaction among circular migrants is examined. Our analysis identifies important disparities in human capital and life satisfaction outcomes according to socio-economic and geographic background. It offers insight into the significance of life-course effects on the levels of life-satisfaction among young circular migrants and suggests new theoretical approaches to the study of contemporary migration in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty-five years after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the memory of the conflict still constitutes a contested arena in which ethnonational movements build narratives of belonging and to legitimize their political projects of nation-building. This article draws on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the municipality of Gradiška, a Bosnian town administratively located in Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb-aligned entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The article discusses the role that different strategies of denial carried out by RS institutions play in the relationship young adults have with the past and constructing their individual and collective identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main rights of European citizens is freedom of movement, enabling them to live, work and study in the EU member states. However, it is only minority of Europeans who aspires to use their European passports and cross the national borders. In this paper we focus precisely on those who declare the wish to move to another EU member state. We point to Janus-faced character of mobility aspirations, distinguishing between feeling free to move versus feeling forced to move. We argue that this distinction sheds light on a new social division. Based on the Eurobarometer data (85.1OVR) we illustrate how the two groups, 'free to move' and 'forced to move', are equipped with different resources. In particular, feeling forced to move correlates with financial deprivation on an individual level and residence in a poorer, smaller country with higher levels of youth unemployment. In addition, our results suggest that aspirations for European mobility are linked with the sense of youth marginalization in their nation states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Japanese ‘youth’ in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties who participated in temporary migration to Dalian, a northeastern Chinese city, at a turning point in their life course. They left economically stagnant Japan to work in the digital service outsourcing sector targeting the Japanese market, by providing remote customer service in their native language. While the workers enjoy some perks of corporate employment and skilled migrant status, migration reduces their salaries to levels comparable to Japanese minimum wages, and the constantly shifting nature of immigration control and offshore outsourcing renders their presence fundamentally precarious. Based on semi-structured interviews, I argue that geographical mobility affords a temporary refuge from the normative expectations of a settled adult life, but in this liminal time-space, classed and gendered life course norms continue to frame the migrants’ interpretation of their presents and futures. My findings show that the remote service workers simultaneously engage in multiple temporalities of suspended life back home, increasing stasis in the present and anticipated futures through imagined migration. The analysis illustrates that cross-border mobility produces freedom from the constraints of expected life transitions, but also potential entrapment through new modes of exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Labour Mobility' has become one of the buzz-words in current political discourses regarding solutions to unemployment, especially in crisis-shaken countries. Young people in particular are expected to compete on a European Labour Market, to learn languages and to gain experiences abroad and to keep moving wherever the job offers take them. In this article we present results from a representative online survey (n: 177) and in-depth interviews with 42 young Catalans living in London. We comment on the profiles of the young people, their reasons for moving to London, their living conditions and evaluation of their stay abroad and their plans for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]