Crafting identity is integral to the struggle of aspiring migrants to access the territory, labor market, and citizenship of desired destinations. Such practices are at times classified as âfraud.â Migration scholars should approach this state-centered category with caution. Such framing naturalizes the state's monopolistic claim to the truth of individual identities. It obscures the complex moral terrain migrants navigate. We propose âunauthorized identity craftâ (UIC) as an alternative concept. UIC shifts our attention from migrantsâ deception to their agency in the absence of state authorization â their learned craft to navigate, and at times subvert, restrictive mobility regimes. Drawing on long-term, multisited ethnographic research with Korean Chinese and West African migrants, we show that UIC is sustained by a complex web of relations, connecting documents, organizations, and people â state and non-state actors alike. The effectiveness of UIC depends on migrantsâ intricate and intensive labor to create, maintain, and reshape this relational matrix. Our emphasis on UIC's relationality enables us to examine how migrants and other actors involved classify their relationships and the various forms of exchange that sustain them. Mismatches in these framings give rise to contestation and negotiation â important elements of the craft migrants must perform. Our relational perspective further helps explain UIC's temporal dynamic. For some migrants, UIC remains ephemeral, a form of strategic masking; for others, it generates lasting entanglements, moral dilemmas, and enduring identity shifts. We show that UIC's long-term ramifications are shaped by the breadth, density, durability, and consequentiality of the relational matrix that sustains UIC.
Workplace Arrangement and Language Acquisition of Immigrants
Flexible workplace arrangements (FWA), particularly working from home and working without fixed workplaces, have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. However, their implications for the social integration of immigrant workers remain underexplored. This study investigates whether and how FWA relate immigrant workersâ social integration, focusing on their proficiency in the destination language, a key indicator of social integration outcomes. Using data from the 2016 and 2021 Population Census conducted by the Census and Statistics Department of Hong Kong SAR, we compare immigrant workers under three workplace arrangements: on-site, working without a fixed workplace, and working from home. Our findings reveal a strong and positive relationship between work without a fixed workplace and immigrantsâ proficiency in Cantonese, the local language of Hong Kong. This relationship is consistent across immigrants with varying durations of stay and those who migrated before or after adulthood. Instrumental variable regressions, causal mediation analysis and placebo tests further suggest that this relationship is likely causal. This study represents the first work to extend the understanding of FWA beyond economic performance to social integration outcomes, opening avenues for future research on the broader societal impacts of evolving work arrangements in the post-pandemic era and offering fresh insights for migration integration and skill management policies.
Becoming an Informed Citizen â the Relationship Between Naturalization Regimes, Language, and Political Knowledge Among Naturalized Citizens
Political knowledge is a crucial component of democratic participation. For immigrants in particular, political knowledge plays a key role in political integration. This article investigates how institutional contexts, in the form of naturalization regimes, shape differences in political knowledge among naturalized citizens. Using Germany as a case study, this analysis focuses on two major immigrant groups that were subject to different naturalization regimes, namely individuals of Turkish and Soviet origin. Drawing on data from the 2017 Immigrant German Election Study, mediation analyses reveal a knowledge gap across these groups. However, this gap does not appear to be influenced by individual proficiency in the German language. Naturalized Turkish immigrants demonstrate greater political knowledge than naturalized immigrants of Soviet origin. These results underscore that naturalization regimes do more than grant legal status but also shape the political integration of immigrant citizens.
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Red tape and racialized legal status: how Bostonâs migrant health safety net unraveled
Academic literature on forced displacement has been criticized for disproportionately focusing on the Global North, despite the significant concentration of refugees and internally displaced people in the Global South. This creates a substantial gap between where refugees are located and where research is produced. This study investigates this bias by analyzing 12,700 publications on forced migration from 1990 to 2022. Using a methodology that combines hand-coding with generative AI text processing, we examine publication and citation patterns based on the country of analysis and author affiliation. Our findings show that (1) most research focuses on the Global North, (2) most authors are based in the Global North, (3) Global North authors dominate publications on the Global South, and (4) Global North authors receive more citations, even when studying the same country as Global South researchers. These results prove a persistent regional bias favoring the Global North in forced migration research.
Correction to: When does a refugee stop being a ârefugeeâ? The social construction of refugeehood after cessation
The study offers a systematic review of scientific literature on âreturn migrationâ performing computational text mining and topic modelling. On a sample of 3000 studies indexed in Scopus and published between 1960 and 2020, we present a textual analysis and a clusters' analysis of titles, keywords, abstracts and publications' metadata. Results show a rapid growth in research since the 1970s, mirroring the evolution of migration events and the pace of theoretical advancements. The research landscape appears dominated by receiving highâincome countries' perspective. Throughout the entire period, topics related to culture, ethnicity and political identity have been prominent. A progressive shift in the economic paradigm has been identified, with labourârelated keywords leaving room for more subjective aspects of wellâbeing. Growing attention has been paid to different forms of migrants' capital and vulnerabilities, along with a declining interest in demographic implications of return, especially with respect to African and European internal and international migrations.
Correction to âThe Relationship Between Preâ and PostâMigration SelfâEmployment: Evidence From Italy and Spainâ
Overstayersâtravellers entering a country with a valid visa but staying beyond the initially authorised periodâare a blind spot of migration research. Past studies claim that overstaying is indeed the main gateway to irregular migration in Europe, but few estimates exist. This paper explores three new methods to estimate the inflows of overstayers. We concentrate on the Schengen area as destination, given its relevance in global migration flows, and on nonâEuropean countries as origins, since for travellers from these countries commercial flights are the most likely transportation mode to Europe. Our methods rely on aggregate information on incoming and departing passengers from all airports in the Schengen Area, and on Facebook users' mobility data. In the first method, we compute ânet air travel flowsâ as the difference between incoming and outgoing passengers; we then deduce net regular migration (using data from Eurostat and the QuantMig project) from ânet air travel flowsâ to obtain âunaccounted net flowsâ, which we hold to equate approximately to newly incoming overstayers with shortâstay visas for 2019. In the second method, building on the first estimate, we employ the logic of gravity models to project estimates for later years. In the third method, we build on the intuitions of the first method but use net migration figures from data on Facebook users' crossâborder movements. Substantively, the results of the different methods converge, indicating around 450,000 new overstayers who entered the whole of the Schengen Area in 2019 with shortâstay visas. Analyses for the following years obtained with the second and third method match and are in line with changes in travel policies during the COVIDâ19 pandemic (2020 and 2021), suggesting a significant reduction in the number of overstayers for those years and an uptick for the years 2022â2023. By uncovering the size and scope of the overstaying population we shed light on a highly contested issue in the public debate and ultimately contribute to raise awareness on the constructed nature of the âregularâ versus âirregularâ framing of migration.