Both black and symbolically white: The ‘Bajan-Brit’ return migrant as post-colonial hybrid

The research presented in this article centres on an under-researched demographic group of young return migrants, namely, second-generation Barbadians, or ‘Bajan-Brits’, who have decided to ‘return’ to the birthplace of their parents. Based on 51 in-depth interviews, the essay examines the experiences of second-generation return migrants from an interpretative perspective framed within post-colonial discourse. The article first considers the Bajan-Brits and issues of race in the UK before their decision to migrate. It is then demonstrated that on ‘return’, in certain respects, these young, black English migrants occupy a liminal position of cultural, racial and economic privilege, based on their ‘symbolic’ or ‘token’ whiteness within the post-colonial context of Barbados. But this very hybridity and inbetweeness means that they also face difficulties and associated feelings of social alienation and discrimination. The ambivalent status of this transnational group of migrants serves to challenge traditional notions of Barbadian racial identity.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

Growing old in a transnational social field: belonging,mobility and identity among Italian migrants

This article focuses on ageing in transnationalism. Drawing on the experiences of Italians in the UK as a paradigmatic example of settled European migrants, it explores the lived experiences of this group of older migrants. Using Levitt and Glick Schiller's framework, it concentrates first on migrants' ways of being and then on their ways of belonging. The article argues that a transnational lens is necessary to understand the experiences of older migrants and that a focus on older people needs to be incorporated into studies of transnationalism. Through a discussion of their narratives and experiences, the article offers a long view on the migration process and brings attention to the significance of gender, time and the life course to understand both migrants' transnationalism and their integration.     

Structural assimilation in young first-, second- and third-generation migrants in Flanders

Assimilation theory assumes that differences between migrants and non-migrants disappear over generations. We report on a Flemish survey study conducted with young first- (G1), second- (G2) and third- (G3) generation migrants (n?=?1,587). The results showed that G1 and G2 had lower chances of being in educational tracks preparing for higher education than non-migrants. Further, G1 and G3 migrants with a background in the oldest fifteen members of the European Union (EU15) and G1 and G2 adolescents of non-EU15 migrants ran a higher risk of being delayed in their educational trajectories. All three generations of non-EU15 migrants had lower expectations of finding a job than non-migrants. Whereas socio-economic status could explain almost all of the differences for EU15 migrants, it could not for non-EU15 migrants. This leads to the hypothesis that visible differences and distinctive names lead to assumptions about ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations that are associated with discrimination.     

Kiyang-yang,a West-African Postwar Idiom of Distress

In 1984, a healing cult for young barren women in southern Guinea Bissau developed into a movement, Kiyang-yang, that shook society to its foundations and had national repercussions. “Idiom of distress” is used here as a heuristic tool to understand how Kiyang-yang was able to link war and post-war-related traumatic stress and suffering on both individual and group levels. An individual experience born from a traumatic origin may be generalized into an idiom that diverse sectors of society could embrace for a range of related reasons. We argue that, for an idiom to be understood and appropriated by others, there has to be resonance at the level of symbolic language and shared experiences as well as at the level of the culturally mediated contingent emotions it communicates. We also argue that through its symbolic references to structural causes of suffering, an idiom of distress entails a danger for those in power. It can continue to exist only if its etiology is not exposed or the social suffering it articulates is not eliminated. We finally argue that idioms of distress are not to be understood as discrete diagnostic categories or as monodimensional expressions of “trauma” that can be addressed.     

‘Wasting mbeng’: Adventure and Trust Amongst sub-Saharan Migrants in Morocco

This article examines how irregular migrants from Central and Western Africa stranded in Morocco forged tenuous but essential relationships in the face of hostile and violent border politics constraining their mobility and resulting in systematic infringement of their rights. I examine the basis of trust amongst migrants in Morocco, who called themselves ‘adventurers’ on a quest for the ‘objective’ (e.g. ‘finding their lives’, usually through getting into Europe). Although most of them had embarked on individual journeys, they regularly needed to cooperate in order to face arduous living conditions and attempt crossing the border into Spain. The article demonstrates how trust was entangled not only with hostile migration politics but with regular moral conundrums as migrants needed to manage a balance between collaborating with other migrants and reaching their own ‘objective’.     

Thinking Lampedusa: border construction,the spectacle of bare life and the productivity of migrants

This article interrogates the relationship between the Italian island of Lampedusa and trans-Mediterranean migration. It explores how the construction of Lampedusa as a border zone has been implicated in the rise and fall in numbers of migrants reaching the island's shores over the last two decades. It proceeds to consider the appropriateness of interpreting death and detention on Lampedusa in terms of ‘bare life’. While acknowledging how Giorgio Agamben's formulation of bare life has been problematized in relation to irregular migration and taking into account the frequent acts of migrants' political agency on the island itself, it is argued that the transformation of Lampedusa by the media and political establishment into a spectacle of bare life is not only instrumental to the functioning of migration management at Europe's southern border but is also constitutive of the subordinate position of migrants in Italian society and its labour market.     

Precarious legality: regularizing Central American migrants in Mexico

Regularization programmes for undocumented migrants are generally viewed as a form of transition from “illegality” to a secure legal status. Yet, as we argue in this article, in many countries, such as Mexico, this transition is often incomplete and reversible. This article discusses regularization programmes for undocumented migrants in Mexico before and after the introduction of the 2011 Migration Law and illustrates that the status migrants obtain is precarious, that is insecure and conditional upon their ability to meet requirements for status renewal. Focusing on Central Americans in Mexico, we suggest that many migrants have been unable to obtain or renew their status after new procedures were put in place in 2011. Coining the legality granted through Mexico’s regularization process “precarious legality”, we attribute it to the contradiction between Mexico’s stated respect for migrants’ human rights and the de facto commitment to immigration control.     

Science,Knowledge and Belief. On Local Understandings of Weather and Climate Change in Amazonia

This article explores different modes of understanding such atmospheric phenomena that in English are described as ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ applying Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis. In consequence, focus is not on the physical phenomena as such but on ontological differences as reflected in expressions and practices pertaining to indigenous Matsigenka people and migrants from the Andean highlands to the tropical lowlands, centring on their respective interaction both with each other and, more generally, with the social, natural and supernatural dimensions of the environment. Adhering to ideals of modernity and modern science, the Andean migrants employ the climate change discourse as an indication upon social advancement to promote and legitimize their superiority over the allegedly backward and irrational Matsigenka to whom the climate discourse makes little sense. The climate change discourse thus serves here as a means of environmental colonialism in order to turn Matsigenka people into proper citizens.     

Challengers in the migrant field: pro-migrant Irish NGO responses to the Immigration,Residence and Protection Bill

This article examines the dynamics through which the migrant field in Ireland is governed, and, through analysing NGO contention over the Immigration, Residence and Protection (IRP) Bill, explores the role they play in the field. The article argues that NGOs both influence and are institutionally channelled by state discourse surrounding migrants. The IRP Bill was designed to regulate non-EU citizens in Ireland, and codified the discretionary powers of the Irish state over migrants. While NGOs offered an influential critique of this process, in doing so they reproduced the dominant representation of migrants in Ireland as problems to be separated out and managed by elite experts. In explaining why this was so, I draw on Bourdieu's argument that those within a field of practice articulate their identities and goals through the dominant language of that field.     

Homing pigeons as a model for avian navigation?

The findings on the navigational mechanisms of homing pigeons and the available data on those of wild birds, in particular migrants, are compared. There are important parallels in the use of the magnetic field and the sun for directional orientation. Also the findings on the navigational ‘map’, its preferred use by experienced birds and the strategy of using route information to acquire the necessary knowledge to establish the ‘map’, obtained in pigeons studies, can probably be generalized to wild birds and migrants in their home region. It seems that birds share a common navigational system. Special development of migratory birds, however, is the innate migration program that enables young first‐time migrants to reach their still unknown wintering area.     

Potential age differences in the migratory behaviour of a nocturnal songbird migrant during autumn and spring

In migratory songbirds, older individuals are thought to be more efficient migrants than younger individuals. Age‐specific differences in migratory efficiency have been reported mainly in respect of arrival timing, energy stores, rate of energy accumulation, departure behaviour, and departure direction. Yet, these traits were rarely assessed simultaneously in a single species. We further lack information whether age‐specific differences in behavioural traits present in autumn still manifest to the same degree in spring. Here we used the northern wheatear Oenanthe oenanthe, a long‐distance nocturnal songbird migrant, and investigated age‐specific differences in energy stores at capture (autumn: 1059 birds/spring: 803 birds), rate of energy accumulation (168/147), nocturnal departure timing (126/105), and departure direction (94/77) for both seasons. We found that in autumn, young northern wheatears departed significantly later in the night than older birds. This difference was not observed in spring. The resulting advance in nocturnal departure timing by young birds from autumn to spring may be due to learning based on experience gained during autumn, and/or to selective disappearance of those young individuals showing late departure times during autumn. We found no age‐specific difference in any of the other migratory traits investigated. To get a better understanding of age effects in songbird migrants, we need to study the potential adjustments of migratory behaviour within the individual over its life time. By individually tracking songbirds throughout their lifetime, we could start estimating whether a certain migratory decision (fuelling, departure, orientation) translates into higher (or lower) fitness, and whether individuals adjust their migratory behaviour based on learning from ‘wrong decisions’.     

Possessed and dispossessed youth: Spirit possession of school children in Northwest Madagascar

Spirit possession is a common experience shared by many women in northwest Madagascar. In the town of Ambanja, possession by volatile and dangerous Njarinintsy spirits is an affliction which strikes young, adolescent schoolgirls. When Njarinintsy is contrasted with tromba, another well-known class of spirits found in this region, it becomes clear that Njarinintsy possession is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its victims form a discrete and unusual group. These girls are, in essence, young migrants, who have moved alone to town in order to attend school. Close examination of their experiences reveals that these young girls must cope, on their own, with the conflicts and contradictions that plague the shift from rural to town life, and from youth to adulthood. Such problems are further complicated by those associated with educational policy in Madagascar. These children, more than any other members of this community, suffer from the contradictions of a fragmented world. Possession provides them with a means through which to express the chaos inherent in their daily lives.     

Gift Remitting and Alliance Building in Zambian Modernity: Old Answers to Modern Problems

This article highlights the strategic nature of remittances in Zambian migration. Zambian migrants usually give only small gifts to their home-based relatives, not the large sums of money or goods used for investment that is documented in the literature on remitting elsewhere. In a case like Zambia, where so little surplus cash exists and the diversion of cash or other resources can have great material costs for the giver, why do Zambian migrants continue to remit? I argue that gift remitting develops strategic alliances that translate into insurance policies for the future, enabling Zambian migrants to "hedge their bets" in a volatile and rapidly changing socioeconomic terrain. This article focuses attention on the broad experiences and contexts of remitting and how the unpredictability of modern life may foster a renewed need for building alliances. I draw on fieldwork conducted from 1994-2001 with the Gwembe Tonga people of Zambia's Southern Province and recent ethnographic literature from Zambia. [Keywords: migration, gift, economy, intergenerational relations, Africa]     

Community Life and Discourses among Fiji Islanders in Kantō, Japan

This article examines how Fiji Islanders of diverse ethnic backgrounds living in Japan's Kantō area reflect on and constitute community life in the diaspora. While they occasionally refer to the ‘community’ and speak about its social value, get-togethers of significant numbers occur infrequently. Ultimately, a Fijian-centred community is virtually absent in the everyday lives of Japan-based Fiji Islanders. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Tokyo Metropolis and its neighbouring prefectures, this contribution suggests that for Fiji Islanders in Kantō, talking about ‘community’ serves two particular purposes: on the one hand community discourses create an emotional bond, both among the migrants and between the migrants and their place of origin. At the same time, discourses on the relevance of the community without undergoing efforts to maintain it, serve as strategies of navigating self and belonging in a critical and reflexive way. As migrants’ social lives are complex and shaped by numerous economic, spatial, and individual disjunctures, Kantō Fiji Islanders contextually configure and extend their social relations with regard to their socio-cultural heritage, their place of residence in Japan, their gaikokujin (foreigner) status, and their life-work cycles.     

Rheoreaction type of early juveniles of sockeye salmon Oncorhynchus nerka in the Ozernaya River and Lake Kurilskoe

Rheoreaction of early juveniles of sockeye salmon Oncorhynchus nerka is experimentally investigated, including different spatial groups (denatant migrants, contranatant migrants, specimens living in bays and at closed river banks, juveniles from the coastal zone of the lake). Investigation is made in water of the river flowing from the lake and in water of the stream flowing into the lake. It is shown that the rheoreaction (the type of rheoreaction) is one of behavioral mechanisms performing feeding migration of early juveniles of sockeye salmon. Contranatant migrants that reached the feeding lake retain the positive type of rheoreaction, which favors the exit of juveniles from the zone of discharge exclusion and prevents the drift of juveniles to the river at night at poorer conditions for orientation. Juveniles placed into the water of the inflowing stream manifest a sharply negative rheoreaction type contributing to their rapid lakeward migration for feeding. In water of two steams (taking its beginning in the lake and flowing into it) such type of rheoreaction is observed which ensures migration of sockeye juveniles to their principal feeding water body-Lake Kurilskoe.     

Effects of large-scale climatic fluctuations on survival and production of young in a Neotropical migrant songbird, the yellow warbler Dendroica petechia

Migrant songbirds are vulnerable to changes in climatic conditions on both the breeding and wintering grounds. For North American Neotropical migrants, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), via its effects on global precipitation and temperature, modulates the productivity of their temperate and tropical terrestrial ecosystems used during the course of their annual cycle. We evaluated how a densely nesting population of yellow warblers Dendroica petechia in a riparian forest in southern Manitoba, Canada, responded to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) between 1992 and 2001. Standardized mist netting was used to estimate apparent annual survival of adults and production of young. Both adult survival and the production of young were positively correlated with the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). More specifically, values of both these demographic parameters were lowest during El Niño years and highest during La Niña years. These findings demonstrate the influence of climate on populations of Neotropical migrants in North America. The more frequent El Niños predicted to result from future global climate change could negatively affect populations of yellow warblers and other Neotropical migrants breeding in this region.     

Trends in migrant and ethnic minority voting in Australia: findings from the Australian election study

A review of the research literature on migrant voting in Australia shows that the “ethnic vote” has almost disappeared now that migrants tend to vote in a similar way to the rest of the population according to traditional class cleavages. In addition, it is argued that migrants in Australia predominantly reside in safe Labor seats that are represented by cabinet or shadow cabinet ministers. As such their group-based interests are often neglected by the major parties. Using findings from the ABS census and the 1993–2013 AES, this article re-examines whether there is a migrant vote, and if so, the extent to which migrant voting patterns have changed since the 1990s when the migrant and ethnic vote reached its peak. This study reveals patterns of migrant voting among certain birthplace subgroups that are more volatile than in previous decades but at the same time distinctive.     

Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway

Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in Oslo and Bergen, Norway, this article discusses irregular migrants’ experiences of existential displacement and the tactics they use to try to re-establish a sense of emplacement and belonging. More specifically, it argues that irregular migrants’ experiences of embodied unbelonging are a consequence of a violent form of governmentality that includes specific laws, healthcare structures, and migration management rationalities. The article makes this argument by tracing how these experiences translate into embodied effects that feature prominently in migrants’ narratives of suffering while living in a country that purports to provide welfare services to all. The narratives of their state of being-in-the-world are ways through which migrants both experience and express the violence and deprivation they face. I argue that these narratives are instances of structures of feeling (Williams 1973), which are shaped by modes of governmentality. The article shows that irregular migrants’ coping strategies centrally involve faith, religious communities and friends. Irregular migrants draw on these relationships to get by, access healthcare, and to resist the (health) effects of social deprivation and political violence. These relationships allow irregular migrants to find meaningful ways of being-in-the-world and rebuilding, to some extent, a sense of entitlement and belonging.

     

Movements,moments and moods. Generation as unity and strife in Peruvian migration

This article discusses the meaning and use of generation in migration studies. It argues that the term is useful to examine how migrants create linkages between their pre- and post-migration lives. The article draws on Mannheim's notions of ‘generational units’ and ‘fresh contact’ to scrutinize how Peruvians engage resources from their previous lives in Peru to achieve social mobility in the USA, Japan, Spain and Argentina. In particular, the article focuses on the role of education, ethnicity and conflict in Peruvians’ efforts to create support networks and form migrant institutions. It suggests that generational units grow out of migrants’ shared experience of mobilizing the same resource to establish fresh contact with their receiving society. The article concludes that while generational belonging can generate a strong sense of solidarity among some groups of migrants, this often happens at the cost of the unity and inclusion of the migrant community at large.