Search Results (12)

This article lies at the intersection of migration studies and disability studies and aims to contribute to redressing the considerable gap in knowledge regarding disabled voluntary migrants. These two areas, migration and disability, respectively, have rarely been considered together, a significant gap given the situation faced by disabled migrants and crosscutting issues confronting disabled people and migrants. Dynamics of exclusion are viewed as a shared experience of migrants, disabled people and disabled migrants. This paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with voluntary EU migrants to the UK, disabled British people and disabled EU migrants, which are supplemented by key informant interviews. All were conducted in 2019 in the north of England. The findings highlight that when migration and disability are considered concurrently, barriers multiply and result in a nuanced disadvantage and experiences of social marginalisation. Migrant and disability experience translates into social vulnerability and is a contributing cause of exclusion in relation to social expectations and mainstream services. This paper concludes that there is an urgent need to change the narrative and perception that migrant and disabled people are less worthy of attention and bring their needs to the fore. Full article

The issue of Vietnamese nationals consistently having some of the highest numbers of referrals into the UK’s National Referral Mechanism (NRM) is increasingly apparent. However, this did not gather nationwide attention until the Essex tragedy of October 2019 which saw 39 Vietnamese nationals found lifeless in a lorry after they were brought into the country by a criminal network of human traffickers and smugglers. This paper seeks to understand the circumstances of these Vietnamese victims of human trafficking to the Britain by reviewing the situation in both countries—Vietnam and the UK. Three instances of Vietnamese nationals trafficked to the UK have been chosen as case studies. Through semi-structured interviews, issues regarding how voluntary migration led these vulnerable people into slavery will be explored and this will be analysed alongside a review of literature in the field. This paper reveals the complexity of the matter, which is primarily derived from the multinational nature of trafficking and the different attitudes and approaches of the various countries involved, as well as the difficulty facing the authorities when combating this particular crime involving this specific group of vulnerable people, especially in terms of victim support. The ultimate goal of this paper is to offer authorities and practitioners in both countries a fresh review of the challenges in supporting these victims, and to redirect their focus on the obstacles to addressing Vietnamese trafficking. These obstacles include the prevalence of—often illicit—labour-exporting companies in Vietnam, instances of initial voluntary engagement in labour migration relationships which later become coercive, and the failure of the UK and Vietnam to agree what constitutes a genuine trafficking victim. Full article

Reflecting the focus of this Special Issue on “Rule of Law and Human Mobility in the Age of the Global Compacts,” this article contributes to the discussion on the threats to the rule of law posed by immigration detention through the lens of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). In GCM’s Objective 13, states committed to use immigration detention only as a measure of last resort, work towards alternatives and draw from eight sets of actions to realise this commitment. Given the attention the GCM attracts, its nonbinding character and the voluntary nature of its review can be used by states as justification for their inadequate implementation of binding human rights obligations and insufficient reporting on implementation to the supervising bodies. While acknowledging these challenges to the rule of law, this article explores the ways the GCM can actually foster the rule of law in the area of immigration detention. To strengthen the rule of law principles of legality, legal certainty, prohibition of arbitrariness, access to justice and the right to an effective remedy, Objective 13 needs to support a binding human rights regime by preventing arbitrary detention and its implementation at the domestic level. The article discusses the interplay between Objective 13 on the one hand, and, on the other, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families and Convention on the Rights of the Child at three levels—the detention provisions, the support provided to states for the implementation of these provisions and the monitoring of states’ implementation—and it proposes means to strengthen the synergies between the two frameworks. Full article

Recent studies have shown that air quality is an important amenity for population relocation in China. However, much of Chinese internal migration occurs due to non-discretionary reasons, such as government policies, family considerations, and military personnel reassignments. As such, estimates of the impact of environmental amenities on migration that do not control for migration reasons may be biased. Using the 2015 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, this paper estimates the impact of ambient air pollution on voluntary migration to other provinces for work. We find that more polluted days (air quality index (AQI) > 150) at the original residence leads to a significant increase in labor out-migration to a province with better air quality, providing evidence of the current migration trend leading to declining populations in China’s megacities. Our findings indicate that environmental migration is more favored among households that are less educated, are older, work overtime, and have lower income, suggesting that environmental migration may result from environmental health inequalities in socially disadvantaged families. Full article

This paper discusses the impact of immigration policies on the ways young undocumented Sikh migrants in Paris negotiate their masculinity. The current criminalization of labor migration from the global South in Europe is disrupting long established patterns of upward mobility through international migration, that entailed remitting money home, getting married and reuniting with one’s family in the host country and moving up the socio-professional ladder from low-paid jobs to self employment. Instead, the life of an increasing number of Sikh migrants in France and elsewhere is marked by irregular status and socio-economic vulnerability. In this context, undocumented Sikh migrants try to assert their gender identity in multiple ways, characterized by homosociality, the importance of manual labor, specific forms of male sociability marked by the cultivation of their body, while remaining firmly grounded in a Sikh/Panjabi religious universe through seva (voluntary service) and gurdwara attendance. Full article

This study examines the migration intentions of young people in Egypt before and after the 2011 revolution, driven by three sets of factors: (1) individual demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, (2) household characteristics, and (3) community characteristics and political and civic participation. Logistic regression models are applied to study the determinants of intentions to live, study, or work abroad among young Egyptians (defined as individuals aged 18 to 29), using data from the Survey of Young People in Egypt (SYPE) conducted in 2009 (N = 8488) and in 2014 (N = 5885). The surveys are nationally representative, covering all governorates in Egypt. The analysis indicates that respondents’ age, gender, marital status, and employment status play a significant role in shaping migration intentions. After the 2011 revolution, the effects are dependent upon economic and institutional conditions. The employment status affects the migration intention of young people in 2009; but the effects become insignificant in 2014. Moreover, respondents who have participated in political and voluntary activities are more likely to express migration intentions. Pollution levels in the community are also positively correlated with the intention to migrate. The results indicate that those who expressed migration intentions are a selective group in terms of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Our findings have policy relevance because knowledge and understanding of migration intentions and their determinants can be used to assess and develop scenarios about future migration. Full article

The advent of modern technology in agriculture has increased the efficiency of our food production but also poses pressures on the sustainability of our planet. The Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been developed to safeguard traditional agricultural systems of global importance, which harnesses the harmonious relationship between people and nature. First launched in the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 to address the sustainable development of family agriculture and traditional farming practices for developing countries, it now has 59 sites located in 22 different countries as of March 2020. Despite almost two decades of its implementation, FAO has not set any requirements nor given guidance on monitoring of the conservation of GIAHS, but leaves it to the discretion of each GIAHS site to conduct voluntary self-evaluation. This study is a comprehensive review of all 11 GIAHS application proposals in Japan, which aims to (1) conduct characteristic analysis to identify elements and perspectives related to the GIAHS selection criteria, (2) understand the motivations and socioeconomic conditions, including challenges and opportunities related to the GIAHS application, so as to (3) propose a set of indicators and perspectives to address these challenges and opportunities for improving the application, monitoring, and management of the GIAHS. The study finds that motivations for applying to GIAHS designation are primarily driven by push factors of abandonment of traditional farming practices and farmlands and underuse of farming resources resulting from Japan’s decreasing and aging rural population, as well as the pull factor of biodiversity conservation. The importance of continuing traditional farming practices, cultural heritage, and involvement of various stakeholders are emphasized against the background of an aging farming population, rural-urban migration, youth exodus, poor maintenance of farmlands, and transferring traditional and local knowledge. By identifying the drivers of change and understanding the current socioeconomic conditions of the agricultural heritage systems in Japan as portrayed in the GIAHS application proposals, the study has clarified the strengths and challenges of the sustainability of these systems. Based on the analysis, the study proposes a comprehensive set of indicators to be considered when developing the GIAHS proposals and for updating the action plan for monitoring and managing the GIAHS sites. It is expected that the findings and recommended indicators will contribute not only in the improvement of the information integrity of future GIAHS proposals, but also as reference for the development and monitoring of GIAHS conservation action plans. Full article

Millions of people impacted by climate change actually want to remain in place; these aspirations and respective capabilities need more attention in migration research and climate adaptation policies. Residents at risk may voluntarily stay put, as opposed to being involuntarily trapped, and understanding such subjectivity is empirically challenging. This comment elaborates on “voluntary non-migration” to call attention to a neglected population within the ongoing discourses on climate-induced migration, social equality and human rights. A roadmap for action outlines specific research and policy goals. Full article

Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period. Full article

While conformity pressures people to assimilate in a community, an individual occasionally migrates among communities when the individual feels discomfort. These two factors cause segregation and cultural diversity within communities in the society. By embedding a migration dynamic into Kuran and Sandholm’s model (2008) of preference evolution, we build an agent-based model to see how the variance of preferences in the entire society quantitatively changes over time. We find from the Monte-Carlo simulations that, while preferences assimilate within a community, self-selected migrations enlarge the diversity of preferences over communities in the society. We further study how the arrival rate of migration opportunities and the degree of conformity pressures affect the variance of preferences. Full article

Given that increasing migration has been addressed as a major consequence of climate change, a growing number of scholars suggest that the planned relocation of people or Government Resettlement Projects (GRPs) should be included in climate change adaptation. This paper reviews the status of climate change and environmentally induced migration in China, and then presents an empirical case study in Shangnan County in northwest China, where a specific GRP called the ‘Massive Southern Shaanxi Migration Program’ (MSSMP) has been initiated in response to climate change-related impacts. The results showed that the MSSMP helped local residents to adapt better climate change by reducing exposures to risk, enabling mobility, providing financial incentives, raising living standards, and improving emotional status. Furthermore, the MSSMP added additional benefits for migrants compared with traditional GRPs by respecting voluntary participation, preparing for future risks, and reducing social isolation via a short relocation distance. However, GRPs could also be seen as a maladaptation to climate change because they disproportionately increase the burden on the most vulnerable community members, such as those who are financially disadvantaged, new migrants, and people who are left behind. The paper further suggests that the GRPs should be designed by involving multiple adaptation strategies as supplements for GRPs, and broadening the political schemes to consider the special needs of vulnerable groups. This study contributes to an understanding of the roles of GRPs in sustainable climate change adaptation, thereby facilitating the design, organization, and implication of future similar programs. Full article

People have long migrated for many reasons, often with a combination of forced and voluntary reasons combining to push them away from current situations and to pull them towards new situations. Bangladesh is one example where environmental changes have long been amongst the multitude of reasons for migrating, with contemporary climate change suggested as a major impetus towards more migration. This paper examines local expert perceptions of migration as a climate change adaptation strategy for Bangladeshis. Seventeen in-depth interviews were conducted with local experts in Bangladesh and Assam (India) on environmental change and migration to understand the perspectives of those with formal education and expert-related jobs who come from the areas being directly affected by Bangladeshi migration. Findings show that local experts consider that migration is used and will be used for climate change adaptation in Bangladesh, but migration is not solely for climate change adaptation, instead interweaving with all other factors influencing migration-related decisions. Full article