With about 2.7 million nationals residing elsewhere in the European Economic Area, Poland was the second largest country of origin of all intra-European migrants in 2018. After the country’s accession to the European Union in 2004, some Polish migrants have brought abroad their families, while others continue living alone and commuting to visit their families in Poland. Based on a sample of 1153 survey respondents in three European contexts—Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—this article investigates from a comparative perspective how Polish migrants’ family reunification status is related to their integration on the labour market. Results show that only in the Scandinavian labour markets, and not in the British, is migrants’ economic integration decisive for family reunification. This article argues that in contexts which offer broader employment opportunities for family migrants, who tend to be women, such as in the UK between 2004 and 2016, the lead migrant’s labour market integration may not be crucial for family reunification. The findings may be of special interest for migration policymakers in the Scandinavian countries working towards greater gender equality outcomes among its immigrant populations.

Inclusive Cities, a university led knowledge exchange initiative works in collaboration with six UK city administrations facilitating the development of their strategic and practical approach to the inclusion of newcomers in the city. The paper places this case study into the context of the UK’s centralized asylum reception and resettlement policy framework, contrasting it with the increasing recognition of the importance of the local level in integration and inclusion policy and the intersections between these differing modes of governance and competencies.The paper explores emerging learning from the programme in relation to the leadership role of local government, its ability to act as a place shaper in relation to inclusion and integration and it role in convening partners through horizontal, place-based, networks as well as the ways in which this case study can contribute to wider learning on the role of knowledge exchange in facilitating social change and policy framing at the city level and learning on the multi-level governance of reception and integration. The paper explores how mutual knowledge exchange may create space for a broadening out of the policy framing in relation to reception – in particular how a ‘newcomer’ frame may support increased innovation at the local level.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century and after two turning point events – 09-11 terrorist attacks and the ‘Arab spring’ – both migration control and democracy promotion became central issues within EU foreign policy, in particular to what concern its relations with the southern Mediterranean neighbourhood. However, although many authors allude to the relation between these two policy dimensions, little is known about their linkage. On the one hand, the debate about EU external migration policies narratives has revolved mainly around the migration-security and migration-development nexus. On the other, whereas the developmental paradigm has dominated the root-causes approach little attention has been given to its political dimension. This article aims to overcome these limitations through exploring these other nexus: the one between these policies and the democratization of southern Mediterranean countries. To investigate this nexus I follow a Narrative Policy Analysis approach - the most suitable for investigating issues of high complexity, uncertainty and polarization, which seems to be precisely the case of EU external migration policies. Hence, drawing on longitudinal and interpretative content analysis of EU official documents covering the period between 1995 and 2018, this study seeks to expose the main narratives casted by the EU on the issue and to identify if there has been consistence or change in the stories and arguments over time and in particular, before and after the ‘Arab spring’. Ultimately, the goal was to confirm the presence of this nexus by exposing its complexity and trying to understand its configuration. This is considered as an important step towards further disentangling the logics and impacts of the externalization of EU migration policies towards its Southern Mediterranean neighbourhood.

Water scarcity and management of this problem are increasingly acknowledged in development policies as well as in adaptation and migration discourse. In South Mediterranean countries, insufficient water supplies in oases are the biggest limitation on yields of sufficient quantity and quality and increase in arable land, in short, the development of agriculture. Insufficient income from agriculture, when it is the main source of revenue, can push people to migrate. However, migration does not have to be the measure of last resort. Proper adaption to this limitation, including proactive migration, can reduce forced movements from this region in the future. The main aim of this paper is to identify and analyse household strategies, including migration, to cope with and adapt to the impact of environmental changes and limitations on agricultural development in the South Mediterranean. This paper is based on field research carried out in the El Faouar oasis area in Tunisia using a mixed-method approach. The results show that the inhabitants of El Faouar must cope with unforeseen crop destruction limiting their daily expenses by selling livestock or, in years of drought, migrating to look for additional sources of income. The results also show that local households try to increase their resistance to climate change, environmental limitations, and permanent migration by developing their agricultural capacity, provided they have additional resources from such endeavours as work outside El Faouar or remittances. Moreover, migration has become part of a wider process of socio-economic transformation in which people leave in order to cope with or adapt to environmental changes.

The current migratory dynamics in the Mediterranean are characterized by large numbers of displaced people, refugees, and other vulnerable groups. In addition, the Mediterranean attracts more privileged individuals who are migrating for lifestyle reasons to find a better life abroad. But, while political and economic crises are at the roots of many movements across the Mediterranean, the question is whether these are also leading to the “displacement” of the privileged. In addressing this question, the article links privileged lifestyle migration to a perspective on mobile citizenship, focusing on German retirees who have found a new home on the Turkish coast. It builds on various stages of field research, including a recent field trip in May 2018. The article shows how lifestyle migrants engage and entangle emigrant and other sites of citizenship when navigating residential security and when expressing their way of local belonging in times of turmoil, and how their decision to stay in Turkey is paradoxically enabled by their option to return. The article’s focus on privileged migration thus also reveals the role of return as a neglected aspect in the study of (emigrant) citizenship.

This article explores the different memorial strategies of the civil society associations and the public authorities in Mali through various practices and discourses of the International Migrant Day around the stinging reality of migrants’ shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Against the backdrop of the progressive externalization of European borders, the Libyan coast has become a hecatomb for young Malian migrant ‘adventurers’. In 2015, around 360 young people from the region of Kayes, in the Southwest of Mali, lost their lives. Under the pressure of civil society associations, the government of Mali decreed days of National Mourning in memory of the shipwrecked. Simultaneously the transnational network Afrique-Europe-Interact in collaboration with representatives of the city of Kita, organized a politically ritualized ceremony to carry out sacrifices honoring the deaths. Based on an ethnography of this mourning ceremony, the article shows how civil society actors denounce the appropriation of the tragic events by a state that “expels” its citizens incapable to develop and the European Union that “kills” by externalizing borders. A short media analysis of the government’s celebration serves as a contrast to the civil society engagement. Through these competing memorial strategies, the article presents the antagonistic but overlapping positionings between the public authorities with their northern partners condemning irregular migration, and the bereaved populations and the civil society considering migration as a normal strategy for a better life and cultural heritage. Our analysis reveals that the celebration of the International Migrants Day and the National Day of Mourning have led to the construction of alternative discourses on ‘irregular’ migration that call to account externalization and neoliberal policies and the risk-taking attitude of migrants in migratory tragedies embedded in very localized mourning practices.

The phenomenon of families separated across continents is a result of migratory flows in a globalised world. Transnational families occur because one or both parents migrate internationally requiring children to be raised in transnational child-raising arrangements, with the help of caregivers. This study examines the health and the emotional well-being of Nigerian migrant parents living in Ireland and the Netherlands, using comparative analyses based on a survey of close to 300 migrant parents in each host country. Half of the sample in each country is living in transnational families the other half are not. This paper adds to the existing literature on transnational families by including control groups (migrants who are not separated from their children) and comparing migrant parents from the same origin country who live in different host countries, allowing us to identify the significance of migratory context and legal regimes in shaping the emotional well-being and health of parents.The results indicate that the factors that drive the health and emotional well-being of migrant parents are not solely related to their separation from their children but rather to other mediating variables such as legal status, socio-economic status, and the normative contexts. While Nigerian child fostering norms ease the influence of separation in both contexts, separate analyses of the Irish and the Netherlands sample show the more pronounced consequences of the mediating factors in the Irish sample, highlighting the differences in the migratory trajectories of Nigerian parents in Ireland and the Netherlands.

This is a rejoinder to the responses made to my paper ‘Against “immigrant integration”: For an end to neocolonial knowledge production’, which was based on my book Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Here, I aim to push the boundaries of our discussion a bit further by arguing that the point is not to come up with better concepts of ‘immigrant integration’. Rather, it is to recognize that any such concern with, and for, ‘integration’ is already an imposition, and that, perhaps, the thing conventionally called ‘migration studies’ should be seen as, itself, an imposition.

In this paper, based on qualitative research on the North African second-generation in Paris and the Turkish second-generation in Berlin, we discuss ethnic minorities’ attachment to place and how living in highly diverse cities shape their perceptions and experiences of marginalization and belonging. Even though France and Germany have different state-level approaches to citizenship and belonging, the experiences of marginalization and exclusion of the second generation in the city are rather similar. In both societies, ethnic and religious minorities such as the North African or Turkish second-generation are excluded from mainstream society. This exclusion is experienced on the local level. Thereby the geography of Berlin and Paris impacts ethnic second-generation populations’ feeling of belonging to the communities in which they live, as well as how they understand their experiences of racism and exclusion. This research has implications for understanding the multivariate experiences of middle-class second-generation ethnic populations across Europe.

This article compares the attitudes of white Swedes towards interracial marriages with someone of non-white migrant origin and a non-white transnational adoptee. The analysis is based on a postal survey and follow-up interviews conducted in Malmö, Sweden. Survey results show that transnational adoptees are not preferred as marriage partners by white Swedes to the same extent as white Swedes. Moreover, the differences in attitudes towards marriages with migrants and non-white adoptees are not statistically significant. Interviewees utilized the notion of cultural differences to explain the attitudes towards intermarriages with migrants. However, this was highly contested when talking about the attitudes towards non-white transnational adoptees. These results show how race and visible differences play a role in attitudes toward interracial marriages in Sweden.