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Published online: 5 May 2022 International migration is arguably an important challenge and opportunity for the world today. In these two first decades of the 21st century, we are witnessing important changes in the direction of flows, the motivations of people on the move and the complex patterns of human migration. In addition, 2020 has brought an extraordinary and unexpected pandemic crisis, that has temporarily brought international migration to a standstill while further exacerbating inequalities and vulnerabilities of migrants and their families. This special issue finds its origins in the inaugural conference of the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration programme at Ryerson University in Toronto which took place in February 2020, while the COVID-19 epidemic was being felt in China but was still believed to remain a regional and short-lived challenge. As we developed our writing, COVID-19 turned into a global pandemic pushing us also to rethink some of our considerations and arguments. The first set of papers aims to unsettle the main migration policy narratives and to critically engage with dominant views of international migration governance. The second set of papers focuses on the new complex realities of temporary migration, investigating critically policies and practices in different world regions, and how they compound vulnerabilities for migrants while failing to offer a sustainable way forward.

Published online: 4 April 2022 This paper seeks to relate the scholarly analysis of nationalism – and of the ways in which nation-states relate to minorities and migrants – with the actual socio-political context within which such analysis takes place. Looking back into the theories of nationalism as they have developed since World War II, the focus of nationalism theorists has shifted from the effort to explain why nations emerged and when they emerged, looking at the wider processes of industrialisation and print capitalism; to the effort to analyse nationalism from the ground up through the lived experiences of citizens; to, more recently, the effort to explain why and how nationalism persists and whether and how it evolves in more plural or more exclusionary ways. I am arguing in this paper that it is important to adopt a self-reflexive approach so as not only to link our understanding of nations and nationalism in their contemporary socio-economic and political context, but that we also need to adopt such self-reflexivity in relation to our own work and ask: why do we focus on a particular perspective or evolution? How does this relate to our wider context and positionality as scholars? In this paper, I am proposing a periodisation of nationalism studies from the post-WW II period to this day, arguing that the focus of nationalism theories was guided interactively by the wider socio-economic developments of each period. I conclude with a critical reflection on nationalism in a (post-)pandemic world.

Published online: 14 March 2022 Temporariness has become an increasingly salient feature in international migration that presents itself as fragmented, non-linear, including different intermediate stops and multiple returns and new departures. This special issue proposes a new analytical framework that brings together the role of policies defining migrants as temporary and the role of migrant’s own agency in perceiving their migration project as temporary or permanent. The proposed analytical framework covers both low- and high-skilled, legal and irregular migratory flows, and different visa and citizenship regimes. This introduction starts by discussing the relationship between migration and time pointing to its multiple facets. The second section discusses temporary migration as a policy category looking at how it is regulated in more or less flexible regimes, including categories of temporary migrants that are not usually included in temporary migration debates, notably international students or working holiday makers. Section three turns to the lived experiences of migrants and the ways in which they conceptualise their migration (or their migration plans) as temporary or more long term, emphasising how these views can be also changing over time and through the actual migration experience. The final section brings the two strands together and presents the contents of this special issue.

Immigrants and refugees have contributed significant growth in the Canadian economy over the last three decades. Despite clear advantages of a smooth transition into the labour force, many newcomers experience multiple barriers impeding their pathways to sustainable livelihoods. Further, significant increases in refugee resettlement and asylum claims in Canada since 2015 resulted in a growing number of refugee newcomers entering the labour market, often facing additional challenges of precarious legal status while seeking employment. To interrogate the settlement landscape, this chapter examines newcomers’ employment-related needs, experiences, and aspirations through a case study of migrants and refugees in Greater Toronto. Using narrative-biographic interviews, the chapter presents an ethnographic approach to examine how individual migrants navigate labour market policies and settlement dynamics during their initial years. A biographical approach allowed us to focus on the interplay of migrant agency, precarity, and adaption to both long-standing labour market dynamics as well as new barriers and enablers brought on by the shifting sands of Canada’s pandemic affected economy. The chapter highlights how emotions, decisions, and actions are inter-related and coalesce with broader structural conditions within a network of actors – individuals, networks, and institutions – to shape the labour market experiences of recently arrived immigrants and refugees.

Through an inter-subjective lens, this open access book investigates the initial labour market integration experiences of these migrants, refugees or asylum seekers, who are characterised by different biographies and migration/asylum trajectories. The book gives voice to the migrants and seeks to highlight their own experiences and understandings of the labour market integration process, in the first years of immigration. It adopts a critical, qualitative perspective but does not remain ethnographic. The book rather refers the migrants’ own voice and experience to their own expert knowledge of the policy and socio-economic context that is navigated. Each chapter brings into dialogue the migrant’s intersubjective experiences with the relevant policies and practices, as well as with the relevant stakeholders, whether local government, national services, civil society or migrant organisations. The book concludes with relevant critical insights as to how labour market integration is lived on the ground and on what migrants ‘do’ with labour market policies rather than on what labour market policies ‘do’ to or for migrants. 1. Labour Market Integration as an Interactive Process (Anna Triandafyllidou, Irina Isaakyan, and Simone Baglioni) -- 2. Female Migrants’ Experiences of Labour Market ‘Integration’ in Denmark (Anna Triandafyllidou, Irina Isaakyan, and Simone Baglioni) -- 3. Examining Non-EU Migrants and Refugees’ Agency When Navigating the British Labour Markets (Francesca Calo and Simone Baglioni) -- 4. Switzerland and the Two Faces of Integration (Maria M. Mexi) -- 5. Precarity, Opportunity, and Adaptation: Recently Arrived Immigrant and Refugee Experiences Navigating the Canadian Labour Market (Claire Ellis and Anna Triandafyllidou) -- 6. Italy: The Promised Land? Journeys of Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers Towards Labour Market Integration (Mattia Collini) -- 7. Resistance Is Useless! (And So Are Resilience and Reworking): Migrants in the Finnish Labour Market (Quivine Ndomo and Nathan Lillie) -- 8. Migration to the Czech Republic: Personal Stories About Running from and Running Towards (Olga Gheorghiev and Dino Numerato ) -- 9. A Long Journey of Integration (Irina Isaakyan, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Simone Baglioni)

Avenirs Immigrants met au jour de nouvelles perspectives sur les défis et les opportunités que l’immigration peut poser pour les communautés canadiennes, qu’elles soient petites, moyennes ou régionales. Le projet est présenté en partenariat avec le Service du développement économique de la Ville de Hamilton, la Ville de Moncton, le Halifax Partnership, le Leeds-Grenville Local Immigration Partnership et Embauches Immigrants – Magnet, avec l’appui d’Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada (IRCC).

This chapter presents the analytical framework of this volume, arguing that an interpretive-biographical methodology for analysing labour market integration can highlight the many ways in which migrants exercise agency both materially in shaping their lives but also cognitively and emotionally in making sense of what is happening to them, taking decisions and following specific courses of action. The chapter introduces the notion of turning points and epiphanies as a new approach to labour market integration that goes beyond ticking boxes of who has a job. It also looks into the employment trajectories of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. After elaborating on the interpretive biographical methodology and its tools, this chapter briefly outlines the contents of this volume.

This chapter summarizes the interaction between integration and agency by comparing migrants’ encounters with labour markets through which their agency challenges existing discourses. The chapter investigates the complex relationship between policy discourse, gender, and class in the production of migrant agency across different countries. The gendered experiences of low labour in Denmark centre around the crucial moments of retraining for migrant women, through which they reconsider their adjustment to the labour market as ‘devoid integration’. The EU discourses of integration are further disrupted by humanitarian migrants in Scotland and Switzerland, whose encounters with the non-recognition of qualifications and inadequate social welfare contradict the ‘migrant-welcoming’ national facades. The Canadian grand discourse of ‘smooth transition’ is opposed by the analysis of aspirations that clash with outcomes such as the labour market entrance. In this connection, we can see the Italian ‘borderline’ space of the informal market, within which many legal economic migrants navigate a complex web of existing laws and informal opportunities. The comparison is amplified by a visually ‘successful’ portrait of entrepreneurial integration, which is nevertheless perceived by skilled migrants in Finland as a less desirable option. The quality of migrants’ agency thus becomes contested if they seek to progress in the labour market. An essential element in this contestation is the transnational migrants’ disagreement with official discourses of ethnic solidarity and national citizenship in the Czech Republic. The comparative analysis of these lived experiences leads toward a new understanding of ‘agency’ and ‘resilience’ in labour market integration.

The rise of digital labour platform work has drawn researchers to study how migrants are impacted by greater technology dependence in the workforce, and whether platform work might accelerate migrants’ entry into precarious, low-income, contingent work. Emerging data in Canada indicate that that the proportion of gig workers is considerably higher amongst immigrants, especially recent immigrants compared to Canadian-born populations; yet, the demographics and typologies of migrants that choose to undertake platform work have been understudied. This study looks at platform work as part of the wider process of labour market integration of newly arrived migrants in Canada. Acknowledging that labour market integration is a non-linear process that involves several stop-and-go phases, we look at platform work as part of this process and question whether it is a ‘stepping-stone’ or a trap into volatile, precarious work. The study is qualitative and exploratory, based on 24 semi-structured interviews with recent migrants in Canada who have engaged in platform work. Our findings suggest that platform work can serve as a useful first step to gain footing in a new country, as platforms have low barriers of entry, require little social or material capital, and offer flexible forms of employment that can be combined either with studying or looking for another position or with working in a different full-time job. It gives migrants a subjective feeling of control over their lives and security albeit when we delve deeper, they also realize it can be a dead end. The article concludes with some critical reflections on how platform work in the greater gig economy can shape migrant integration in the host country labour market.

This paper argues in favour of a radical de-centring of our understanding of international migration governance that privileges the viewpoints of origin and transit countries, non-state actors and includes both urban and rural perspectives. Building on the contributions to this Special Issue, I propose a plural understanding of governance and elaborate on the different dimensions along which we can de-centre our understanding of the governance of international migration (and of the related political and policy discourses). The paper starts by discussing the 21st century context within which migration governance is inscribed and proposes a working definition of de-centring and pluralizing our understanding of migration governance. I then introduce the multiple ways in which we can think of this de-centring: along a geopolitical approach that gives primacy to the role that countries play in migration processes; along a spatial approach (views from the city vs views from rural areas); or with reference to the actors involved (state, civil society, private sector, migrants and their households). The paper concludes by discussing the importance of such radical de-centring for our thinking and speaking about migration.

Published: 07 October 2020 Cultural diplomacy as discourse and practice looms large today in both cultural policy studies and international relations. In effect, the term cultural diplomacy is widely used, so much so that it has become a floating signifier, commonly deployed by foreign policy establishments and the arts and culture sector alike (Isar 2010). Cultural diplomacy has become an ambivalent concept with blurred boundaries. A more traditional definition of cultural diplomacy sees it as a soft power tool through which states and/or international organizations pursue foreign policy objectives. Cultural diplomacy in this perspective would be limited to the processes that occur when formal diplomats, operating at the service and in the name of their governments, use cultural resources to help advance national interests. But in recent years, an expanded and more self-reflexive definition has prevailed which conceives it as a policy area in its own right, which promotes quality of life, the arts, joint capacity building, economic growth and social cohesion by engaging citizens and civil society actors, across borders, both as producers and consumers of cultural activities. This expanded definition of cultural diplomacy uses exchanges of cultural goods and services, cooperation and networking among museums, cultural foundations and ministries, artists and curators from different countries and continents, to promote better and closer relations and extend their overall societal and political influence. Even in this extended form though, cultural diplomacy activities may also be used to advance specific geopolitical interests or to buttress trade policy (Ang et al. 2015). Earlier, the two definitions and the processes related to them were seen as distinct by analysts. The former was defined as cultural diplomacy and the latter as international cultural relations, which remain based on flows of cultural exchange but take place naturally and organically, without government intervention. As the distinction has become blurred both in policy and scholarship, the attention of researchers has remained directed mainly at exchanges between countries and at cultural programmes and overall cultural activities taking place between and among nation states. This form of ‘methodological nationalism’ has led to two major lacunae, both of which merit further debate and research. The first of these is that there is very little direct analysis of the motivations, values and efforts of civil society actors. The second is the relative absence of research on how cities are now practicing international cultural relations and diplomacy among themselves―and they are often doing this via the agency of civil society actors. With a view to addressing these interconnected gaps, a workshop was organized by the guest editors at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, on 21 May 2019. This was a point of departure. This special issue now brings together the contributions made to that discussion and that have been further developed by eight authors.

Published online: 05 October 2020 Building on the literature on global cities and on the worlding of cities, the articles in this special issue chart how cities outside Europe and North America try to reinvent and rescale themselves using culture. They suggest that the fabric of urban cultural policy is embedded in multi-scalar power dynamics. First, the contributions in this special issue reveal the importance of circulating standards across borders in structuring narratives about urban history, heritage and identity, in conjunction with local actors’ interests. Second, the diffusion of hegemonic cultural policy models such as the “creative city” leads to logics of exclusion, gentrification, and has been met with resistance, which suggest that these models can be to the detriment of local residents, despite the progressive values they are often claim to promote. Third, this special issue points to the need to rethink the politics of cultural policy mobility and offers conceptual tools such as vernacularization to make sense of the ways in which urban elites navigate, negotiate and take advantage of circulating cultural policy models.

This open access book discusses the socio-political context of the COVID-19 crisis and questions the management of the pandemic emergency with special reference to how this affected the governance of migration and asylum. The book offers critical insights on the impact of the pandemic on migrant workers in different world regions including North America, Europe, and Asia. Part 1. Pandemic Borders, Belonging and Exclusion. -- 1. Introduction: Spaces of Solidarity and Spaces of Exception: Migration at the times of COVID-19 (Anna Triandafyllidou). -- 2. Who is Essential (Migrant) Worker and Why (Audrey Macklin). -- 3. Territorial and Digital Borders and Migrant Vulnerability under a Pandemic Crisis (Petra Molnar). -- 4. Vulnerability and Resilience in the Covid19 Crisis: Race, Gender, and Belonging (Eileen Boris). -- 5. Sanctuary, Cities and COVID-19: Montreal in Comparative Perspective (Mireille Paquet).- Part 2. Pandemics and ‘Essential’ Migrants. -- 6. Migrant Nurses and Doctors and the Pandemic: Insights from Canada (Margaret Walton Roberts). -- 7. Voluntary and Forced Return Migration under a Pandemic Crisis (Zeynep Sahin Mençutek). -- 8. Essential Farmworkers and Pandemic Crisis: Insights from Southern Europe (Letizia Palumbo and Alessandra Corrado). -- 9. Mobilities Interrupted, Delayed, Suspended: International Student Migrants and the Pandemic (Parvati Raghuram and Gunjan Sondhi). -- 10. Return Migration from the Gulf Region to India Amidst COVID-19 (S. Irudaya Rajan and H. Arrokiaraj). -- 11. Migrant Domestic and Care Workers: Challenges in Europe, US and Latin America under Covid19 (Sabrina Marchetti and Anna Rosinska). -- 12. Internal Migration and the COVID-19 Pandemic in India (S. Irudaya Rajan and R. B. Bhagat)

This chapter starts by introducing the policy and political context of the Covid-19 crisis, surveying some of the changes it brought to immigration policies in different countries: border closures for non-citizens; disruption for temporary migrants; and special arrangements for essential (migrant) workers like doctors and nurses or farmworkers to ensure emergency wards are staffed and the food processing chain is not disrupted. The chapter critically reviews these changes and discusses the main analytical and policy questions which the book addresses. It investigates how the pandemic forces us to rethink notions like membership, citizenship, belonging, but also solidarity, community, essential services or ‘essential’ workers. Migrants expose tensions and contradictions within these concepts and values. Citizens (who may carry the virus) cannot be banned from return to the homeland as they travel internationally or domestically; by contrast, temporary migrants or asylum seekers may be locked in their dormitories because of an outbreak in their midst to prevent spread and protect the citizens. This chapter shows that the specific tensions of the global pandemic for migration are linked to the more long-term tensions of globalisation, migration, and the nation-state, suggesting that the pandemic is but a magnifying lens. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book’s contents.

Published online: 16 November 2022 This contribution studies comparatively three Southern European countries (Italy, Spain, and Greece) and three Southeastern European countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bulgaria). Looking beyond historical path-dependencies, we investigate recent developments in terms of state-religion relations. Starting with a thick description of the historical legacies and post-1989 developments, we focus on issues of the last decade, such as the rise of populism and nationalism, the path to EU accession for Bosnia and Albania, the economic and Eurozone crisis of the 2010s, and the refugee emergency of 2015. Our aim is to assess how these have shaped state-religion relations and to categorise the six countries within the typology proposed in the introductory contribution to this collection. Our findings suggest that moderate secularism and liberal neutralism prevail in all six countries. There are, however, important variations in terms of the relevance of majoritarian nationalism in some of them, as the state defines the prevailing religion and has strong historical and institutional ties with that religion. The contribution elaborates on these specificities and concludes with some questions on the importance of the notion of dominant vs qualifying norms and on the role of current challenges in shaping further state-religion relations.

Published online: 17 May 2022 Canada boasts some of the most highly educated migrants in the world, but it is well recognised that these migrants face many labour market barriers to gainful employment despite their experience and qualification. Administrative data indicate that the proportion of gig workers is considerably higher among migrants, yet little is known about the various perceived and desired pathways of migrants who choose to pursue platform work. In this inductive, qualitative study, we interviewed 35 platform workers in Canada regarding why and how they turned to such forms of work and how it fits their overall plans for integrating into the Canadian labour market. Adopting a grounded theory approach, we found six pathways into platform work ranging from those who feel in control of the situation as a means to an end, to those who feel trapped in it, unable to find alternatives. We question how these pathways relate to macro factors (e.g. immigration status, professional status), meso factors (e.g. education and skills, networks) or micro factors (e.g. stage in life cycle, aspirations). In our analysis, we consider the critical insights offered by scholars on racial and platform capitalism in understanding the factors impacting migrants’ pathways into platform work in Canada. Our findings suggest that these structural inequalities are further perpetuated within platform work, even though in theory Canada's immigration system is merit-based with emphasis on high human capital. Migrants’ engagement in platform work is a piece of a larger puzzle of segmented labour markets.

During the last decade, we have witnessed two opposed social and political trends. On the one hand, there has been a comeback of nationalism. Examples abound from Trump’s “make America great again”, to Modi’s Hindu nationalism, to Bolsonaro’s Brazilian populist nationalism, to Orbán’s Hungary, and Le Pen’s or Salvini’s ‘patriotic’ overtones, only to name a few. These parties promote aggressive, nativist, and populist nationalism discourses which see the relations between nations and nation-states as a zero-sum game. They privilege erecting borders, both territorial and symbolic, against minorities, migrants or refugees, other nation-states and supra-national political formations like, in Europe, the European Union.

Irregular migration is a multifaceted, dynamic phenomenon that has attracted disproportionate media and political attention since the early 2000s. It has been at the forefront of the political debate in most of the European Union’s Member States since the outbreak of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015. Indeed, the political attention paid to irregular migration is disproportionate to its volume. Migrants are estimated to represent 3.3% of the world’s population (IOM, 2017, from UNDESA, 2017) with migrants in an irregular situation between 15% and 20% of them. This is approximately 1% of the global population, some 30–40 million individuals worldwide (UN OHCHR, 2014; ILO, 2015). In the USA, the undocumented population was estimated in 2015 to be 11 million (Rosenblum & Ruiz Soto, 2015); while in Europe it was estimated to be 1.9–3.8 million in 2008 (Kovacheva & Vogel, 2009); and between 2.9 and 3.8 million in 2018 (Pew Research Centre, 2019). This chapter starts with defining the variants of irregular status and the paths through which a migrant may become irregular, with a view to showing that this status is a continuum rather than a clear-cut distinction. We explore the links between irregular migration and irregular/informal work and how flows and stocks relate to segmented labour market dynamics. The chapter considers the lived realities of the daily lives of irregular migrants before turning to the universal human rights that migrants with irregular status should enjoy and reasons for their limitation in practice. We conclude by critically surveying recent policy trends on enforcement and criminalisation, as well as the counter trend of semi-inclusion at particularly local and regional levels.

This paper examines how the pandemic emergency as a global challenge – the first of its kind since WWII – has activated what I call a ‘pandemic nationalism’ that was simultaneously both inclusionary and exclusionary. On one hand, the national community was re-defined in relation to their common fate (of facing the pandemic together because residing in the same territory) extending hence the boundaries of membership to temporary residents or those with precarious status. On the other hand, it became increasingly closed towards the exterior enhancing what has been labelled ‘vaccine nationalism’ and a sense of being in competition with other nations on a common, global public good (notably vaccines and cures addressing the virus). Closures and exclusions arose also internally against those minorities that were associated with the ‘external threat’ notably people of east Asian origin. At the face of these contradictory developments, the question arises whether we could consider the Covid-19 pandemic as a turning point that signals a new phase of development of nationalism. Such nationalism is meant to respond to the increasing challenges of globalisation by incorporating those who serve the community while Othering those who are perceived to threaten its well-being.

Since 2000, IOM has been producing its flagship world migration reports every two years. The World Migration Report 2022, the eleventh in the world migration report series, has been produced to contribute to increased understanding of migration and mobility throughout the world. This new edition presents key data. Editorial -- review and production team – Acknowledgements – Contributors – Photographs -- List of figures and tables -- List of appendices – Foreword -- Chapter 1 – Report overview: technological, geopolitical and environmental transformations shaping our migration and mobility futures -- Part I: Key data and information on migration and migrants -- Chapter 2 – Migration and migrants: A global overview -- Chapter 3 – Migration and migrants: Regional dimensions and developments -- Chapter 4 – Migration research and analysis: Recent United Nations contributions -- Part II: Complex and emerging migration issues -- Chapter 5 – The Great Disrupter: COVID-19’s impact on migration, mobility and migrants globally -- Chapter 6 – Peace and security as drivers of stability, development and safe migration -- Chapter 7 – International Migration as a stepladder of opportunity: What do the global data actually show? -- Chapter 8 – Disinformation about migration: an age-old issue with new tech dimensions -- Chapter 9 – Migration and the slow-onset impacts of climate change: Taking stock and taking action -- Chapter 10 – Human trafficking in migration pathways: trends, challenges and new forms of cooperation -- Chapter 11 – Artificial Intelligence, migration and mobility: implications for policy and practice -- Chapter 12 – Reflections on migrants’ contributions in an era of increasing disruption and disinformation – Appendices -- References