The Double Pincer of Migration: Revisiting the Migration and Development Nexus through a Spatial Lens.

The paper examines contemporary conceptualisations of the migration and development nexus, using a spatial lens. It challenges mainstream conceptualisations based on static and bounded understandings of space and place; it incorporates Marxist and postcolonial understandings of migration and development; and it politicises the way in which this nexus can be conceptualised. The "double pincer of migration" is a metaphor that captures the "freedom" to follow capital, the "selection" performed by regulatory mechanisms that prevent such freedom from fully realising itself, and the agency of migrants treading the pincer, who, while being caught up by the structural forces shaping the double pincer, render it fluid and selectively enabling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]