We checked 8 migration studies journals on Friday, March 28, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period March 21 to March 27, we retrieved 26 new paper(s) in 8 journal(s).

Comparative Migration Studies

Please come back! How and why European governments try to reattract emigrated citizens
Cecilia Bruzelius, Lea Reiss
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Many EU Member States have adopted emigrant return policies (ERPs) meant to encourage and assist emigrated citizens’ migration back to their country of origin. Despite the significance of this trend, there is a notable lack of comparative research on the nature of ERPs and explanations for their introduction. This article offers a comprehensive analysis of ERPs across all EU countries that have introduced such policies in the past two decades (2004–2023) – including 17 countries and 81 policies. We examine policy instruments, target groups, policy justifications, and the political contexts associated with the introduction of ERPs. Our analysis reveals that ERPs are largely symbolic in substance – although the use of more costly economic tools increased towards the end of the analysed period –, primarily targeting the young and highly skilled, and justified predominantly in relation to the economy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ERPs are often introduced for political reasons: while many of these policies are likely to be ineffective in shaping migration, they have been adopted in contexts where emigration and/or related issues were salient to showcase action on a highly complex policy issue. The study covers new empirical ground regarding how and why EU Member States govern migration within a free movement space and the understudied politics of emigration and return.

Ethnic and Racial Studies

The power of sponsorship: power and moral action in private refugee resettlement
Emily Regan Wills, Patti Tamara Lenard
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Being “resettlement-minded”: intersectional dimensions of refugee resettlement strategies and refusals in Jordan
Sarah Nandi, Oroub El_Abed, Megan Bradley, Hamzah Qardan
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Brothers in grief: the hidden toll of gun violence on black boys and their schools
Erica S. Lawson
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Back to Black: racial reclassification and political identity formation in Brazil
Edward Telles
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Afterword: reflecting on influences
Steven Vertovec
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International Migration

Ageing of returnees to Morocco: Residential strategies under constraint?
Jordan Pinel
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The end of a person's active life is often a key moment in the emergence of new life projects involving, in particular, important issues linked to the choice of the place of residence or even the adoption of poly‐residence practices. It is within this framework that many retired Moroccan immigrants in France choosing to return to Morocco as a residential choice for retirement are to be found in this particular situation. One option is a return migration to Morocco. However, the alternative to a move to Morocco often turns into Moroccans leading transnational lives which, in view of the ageing process, can be a questionable practice. Thus, this article analyses the different residential and mobility strategies implemented by ageing Moroccan immigrants. Have these retirees taken ageing into consideration in their residential strategies? The article is based on a survey conducted between 2017 and 2019 in the Souss‐Massa region (Morocco) among 20 Moroccan retirees either returning permanently to Morocco or in regular circulation between France and Morocco. The article shows that the ageing of these ‘returning’ migrants raises several challenges of a financial, health and social isolation nature and that their care practices are transnational. Ageing sometimes implies changes in their initial residential and migratory projects. This could involve, for example, a wish to be reunited with the family, adapting their residential requirements and considering new mobility. However, we will also see that those without dual nationality and in precarious situations find their migration projects and residential choices restrained, particularly by difficulties in accessing certain social rights.
Pondering the non‐return of ageing migrants in the Finnish–Russian everyday transnational context
Olga Davydova‐Minguet, Pirjo PöllĂ€nen
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In the Finnish–Russian migratory context, return migration does not exist as such. In this article, we examine the non‐return migration of Russian‐speaking elderly migrants through the lens of the transnational everyday. The transnational everyday of Russians in Finland has, until recently, enabled their back‐and‐forth trips from Finland to Russia. The combination of Finnish and Russian migratory regimes, welfare policies, closeness of places of birth and dwelling, as well as the constantly changing and tightening geopolitical situation can be seen as explanations for the almost non‐existent return migration. This article also questions the concept of the ‘host’ and the ‘home’ society and explains that, in everyday transnational reality, which is lived ‘in between’ the ‘host’ and the ‘home’ concepts do not meet the lived experience of immigrants. The article is based on our long‐term ethnographic work on immigration in the Finnish province North Karelia since the beginning of the 2000s. We have used ethnographic data (interviews, observations, ethnographic and autoethnographic notes) accumulated during our long‐term studies in the Finnish–Russian border area. We are committed to a transnational multisited methodology. Additionally, our view is situated in border and everyday ethnography and in narrative ethnography. As a result of the study, we conclude that the contemporary geopolitical situation with the closure of the border in 2023 forces elderly Russian‐speaking immigrants to become immobile, or at least diminish their travels to Russia. The everyday transnational ties of Russian speakers in Finland are now possible only in virtual forms or through laborious and expensive back‐and‐forth trips through Estonia, Norway, Turkey or some other third countries. This situation has tied elderly Russian speakers even more closely to Finnish society and its welfare system. The closure of the border has affected social ties of ageing Russian immigrants in different ways: Some are keen to keep up social relations despite political disagreement, but some social relations have, however, severed.
Rethinking migration through the lens of social class
Anne Catherine Wagner
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Do we need more or less focus on “class” in migration research?
Marta Bivand Erdal
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What migrant narratives can tell us about the role of class in migration (and about class in general)
Maja Cederberg
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International Migration Review

What Drives Immigrant Inequalities in Career Growth in the Age of Mass Migration?
Dirk Witteveen, Mobarak Hossain
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This article examines the association between modernization and career growth of American men and European immigrants, focusing on heterogeneity along ancestry, ethnicity, and early-career class position. Analyses rely on datasets built with individual-level linked historical Censuses (1901–1940), which longitudinally map socio-economic indices of full occupational careers of late-nineteenth-century population birth cohorts (1884–1891). Modernization is measured by time-variant and metropolitan area-specific indicators of key industries, employment chances, domestic migration, and urbanicity. Contradicting modernization theory and the logic of industrialism, results demonstrate that macroeconomic opportunity structures do not explain differences in career growth curves of first- and second-generation immigrants in comparison to White men with US-born parents. Instead, we argue that structural ethnic cleavages, in combination with early-career class allocation, account for most of the observed immigrant variation in intragenerational mobility. We also find that the career growth curves of second-generation immigrants from Ireland, the Nordic countries, and Russia, in particular, far exceed those of multi-generational American men, but only if they started their careers in the working-class rather than the agricultural sector.

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Migrant family ties and mixed unions: the impact of selecting native partners on conflicts with parents
Annegret Gawron
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The citizenship-integration nexus from below: migrants’ understanding of citizenship acquisition as a pathway to integration in Italy and Spain
Claudia Finotelli, MariaCaterina La Barbera, Stefania Yapo
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‘Without family, I do not have a life’: transnational family dynamics of unaccompanied refugee adolescents
K. Winkens, A.E. Zijlstra, W.J. Post, M. Smit
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Migration industries bringing physicians to Sweden: Polish and Iraqi cases
Selma Hedlund
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Journal of Race Ethnicity and Politics

Being Deathworthy: The UK Government and Media’s Industrialization of Black Death at Sea
Helidah Ogude-Chambert
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Who is deemed deathworthy, and how is this status produced? What discourses, affects, and histories enable the industrialization of premature Black death while rendering it largely invisible? Rooted in a decolonial queer feminist epistemological framework, this article examines how discursive and affective strategies in U.K. print media and immigration policies during the European “refugee crisis” (2013–2016) justified routine death-making at sea. Conceptualizing Blackness as a relational political and epistemological tool, the article reveals how media and state actors—drawing on racialized mythologies of young single Black men and appeals to imperial nostalgia—constructed these men as objects of panic, disgust, resentment, and fear. Applying collocation analysis and visualization techniques, the article theorizes “affective-racialized networks”—discursive formations that circulate and accumulate affective meanings across space and time, shaping public perception and legitimizing policies of deterrence, externalization, and active abandonment. These networks sustained the routinized deaths of Black migrant men at sea, reinforcing Europe’s imperial border regimes. By foregrounding the mutual constitution of race, affect, and temporality, this study expands migration scholarship’s engagement with race, demonstrating how racial logics operate beyond geopolitical and temporal boundaries through transnational circuits of meaning, power, and governance. The article argues that centering Blackness and affect is essential to understanding how racialization functions and how Black deaths are rendered normative within global bordering practices.
“It Feels Like White Supremacy Losing Control”: Gleaning Local Perspectives on “Anti-Woke” Legislation
Taylor Carroll
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Since 2021, 18 states in the USA have restricted education on race and structural inequality. Conservative coalitions frame these restrictions as a war on “woke” ideologies. Through interviews with youth and educators in locales (Florida; Georgia; and York, Pennsylvania) that restrict education on race and structural inequality, I investigate the following: What discourses do students and educators use to describe bills that restrict race-related studies? What, if anything, do their discourses suggest about the perceived political implications of these restrictions? In this study, I argue that gleaning students’ and educators’ views on “anti-woke” legislation sheds light on the perceived political consequences of these bills for American democracy. I find that students and educators perceive restrictions on race-related studies as epistemic injustices that divest society of the knowledge to identify, problematize, and redress the structural conditions that (re)produce racial subordination. For participants, the health of democracy is contingent on addressing racial disempowerment. Hence, they suggest that restrictions on race-related studies encumber democracy precisely because these policies impose epistemologies of racial ignorance that impede racial redress and allow systems of racial inequality to fester.
Necropolitics at the Southern European Border: Deaths and Missing Migrants on the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic Coasts
Òscar Prieto-Flores
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In recent years, the number of migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coasts has risen steadily. The arrival of small boats with migrants on board on the Spanish and Italian coasts has received a lot of media attention, and European Governments are investing more than in the past to stop unauthorized arrivals on their shores. Certain narratives from governments and officials of international organizations attribute these deaths to “smugglers” and the dangerous routes they take. However, this article provides evidence that the higher mortality rates are the result of changes in border controls following bilateral agreements between the European Union and Morocco after 2018. By analyzing data from official statistics, microdata, and data provided by NGOs up to 2024, it shows how the increase in the mortality rate of migrants in the Western Mediterranean is the result of changes in the management of sea rescues, the militarization and externalization of the border, and the way in which migrants attempting to cross the sea are taking more dangerous routes than in the past.
Altruism, Ethnic Identity, and the Limits of Shared Hardship
Ana Bracic
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Are people more inclined to help strangers when they’ve experienced similar hardships? People who have experienced displacement could be tremendous allies to the newly displaced, but they are relatively understudied. This study explores how people who have experienced wartime displacement respond to refugees fleeing new violence. I prime Serbs who experienced wartime displacement with either (1) their experience of displacement or (2) their ethnic identity. I then measure their altruism toward Syrian refugees traveling the Balkan route. Compared to participants who were reminded of their ethnic identity, participants who were reminded of their displacement were no more generous toward displaced Syrians. In fact, participants who experienced displacement, as well as wartime violence, were more generous toward the refugees when they were reminded of their ethnic identity. These results suggest that shared hardship alone may not necessarily enhance refugee inclusion. The results further suggest that interventions may benefit from calling out the differences between hosts and refugees—in this case, on the dimension of ethnicity. These findings caution humanitarians to construct their interventions with care.
Demographic Shifts and Public Attitudes Toward the January 6th Attack
Gabriel R. Sanchez, Michael Rocca, Mercedes Herrera
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This paper examines the impact of demographic change on political perceptions, specifically attitudes toward the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Utilizing data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we explore how changes in county-level nonwhite populations influence whether individuals label the event as a protest or an insurrection. Our findings reveal a curvilinear relationship: respondents in counties with moderate increases in nonwhite populations are more likely to view the event as an insurrection, while those in counties with substantial increases tend to see it as a protest. This pattern holds across racial groups but is primarily driven by respondents who did not vote for President Trump. The study shows the broader implications of demographic shifts on political stability and social cohesion, highlighting how changes in racial and ethnic composition shape interpretations of major political events. These insights are crucial for understanding voter behavior and political messaging in the 2024 presidential election.
Does Racial Civic Pride Differentially Shape White and Non-White Views on Voter Fraud? Evidence from the 2020 Election
John Kuk, Nazita Lajevardi, Kelsey Osborne-Garth
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Widespread claims of voter fraud following the 2020 election were leveraged in an attempt to overturn the result. While many studies have focused on White Americans’ acceptance of these claims, few have examined the responses of Americans of color. This study explores how racial civic pride influences attitudes toward voter fraud claims among different racial groups. We turn to the 2020 CMPS and find that for Black, Latino, and Asian Americans, increased racial civic pride correlates with reduced belief in voter fraud. In contrast, White Americans with higher racial civic pride are more likely to believe such claims. This divergence is evident across all partisan groups. For non-White Americans, racial civic pride is tied to historical struggles for voting rights and racial justice, with voter fraud allegations threatening these values. Conversely, for White Americans, high racial civic pride is linked to preserving their dominance and status. Finally, we find that voter fraud beliefs are not without consequence: they diminish trust in electoral democracy, result in greater support for restrictive electoral policies, and increase support for future violence. Together, these results highlight the differential influence of race and racial civic pride on Americans’ democratic beliefs.

Journal of Refugee Studies

‘Managing’ the paradox: refugee self-reliance and solving the problem of refugee policy discontinuity
Judith Kohlenberger, Charles Martin-Shields, Evan Easton-Calabria
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The refugee self-reliance agenda is marked by tensions and contradictions, echoing wider incoherence in the international refugee regime. We explore these through the philosophical concept of paradoxes. Paradoxes allow for multiple interests and narratives to be simultaneously ‘true’, leading to refugee policy outcomes that are often incoherent by omission instead of commission. To illustrate this, we draw on recent empirical studies to examine how increased access to digital technology can paradoxically lead to less access and agency in relation to health and financial services for refugees and less integration into host community life. We call these the paradox of information overload and the paradox of regulatory systems. We close with discussion of how paradoxes can a conceptual tool for policy makers and researchers to identify root causes of refugee policy incoherence, and how spaces of action can be created to ‘manage the paradox’.

Population Space and Place

Displacement in Activities Space? Identification of Activity‐Space‐Based Gentrification via Mobile Phone Data
Yang Xiao, Yanglinxi Zhang
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This study introduces the notion of ‘activity‐space‐based gentrification’, emphasising the displacement and exclusion of low‐income populations within activity spaces. Research on conventional gentrification primarily focuses on residential dimensions, neglecting the various forms of displacement risk encountered by individuals. Thus, we selected the waterfront areas of the ‘Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek’ in Shanghai as the focal point of our research and employed mobile phone data from China Unicom for the years 2017 and 2021 to demonstrate the phenomenon of activity‐space‐based gentrification. Our findings validate the occurrence of activity‐space‐based gentrification, evidenced by the improvement of spatial quality and subsequent increases in the socio‐economic status of the participants in the activity. The proposed methodology also confirms that ICT big data techniques are applicable to gentrification research, identifying activity‐based demographic shifts following urban redevelopment.
Metropolitan Migratory Trends in the Post‐Pandemic Context. Analysis of the Madrid Region Based on Mobile Phone Network Data
Carlos Marigil‐Alba, Gustavo Romanillos, Juan Carlos García‐Palomares, Raquel Sánchez‐Cauce
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This paper aims to enrich the current literature on the study of migratory movements in the context of COVID‐19 and the post‐pandemic period. While most of the studies on this topic measure migration using official registers, we propose a new methodology based on the leverage of mobile phone network data, taken from the Madrid region, as a case study. While the use of such data are common in other fields, such as transport and mobility planning, we demonstrate their usefulness in the study of migration. Analysing the case of Madrid, we find new evidence of the changes in migratory trends during COVID‐19, of increased immigration into rural and outer suburban areas and emigration from core urban areas. A geographical description of the new migration trends is provided on different scales (from the national to the metropolitan and municipal scale, including small urban transportation zones), and by socioeconomic group. In addition, we provide some ideas about these trends in the post‐pandemic context, as the evolution of migratory trends varies for different groups.
Dynamic Social Vulnerability Mapping Using Facebook Data
Sebastien Dujardin, Anna Amalia B. Vibar, Robert Paulus, Stefan Kienberger, Catherine Linard
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Assessing populations exposed to climate change impacts traditionally relies upon census data estimations. Yet, these only provide a static picture of risk since censuses are often undertaken and released over long periods and thus cannot be updated regularly. In this study, we investigate how to leverage multi‐temporal geolocated social media data from Meta‐Facebook and assess spatio‐temporal variations of population exposure and vulnerability to climate‐related risks. Building upon advanced spatial analytical methods, we address the selection bias of social media datasets and further analyse how population exposure varies daily, weekly, and seasonally during a 4‐month typhoon‐free period in the Philippines in 2021. Results show how changes in population density combined with varying levels of social vulnerability can increase the size of the population exposed to hazard events at specific periods and places, even in scenarios where population movements are constrained. When comparing daytime with nighttime exposure, less vulnerable areas presented a decrease in population density, while areas with higher social vulnerability showed a population increase. An opposite trend, however, was observed during the weekend and holiday periods, with an increase in population in less vulnerable areas. While limitations remain regarding the study period and the representativeness of social media data, our findings contribute to guiding disaster risk reduction strategies and support climate‐resilient pathways in complementarity with traditional data sources and field‐based practices.