Transnational Migration and the Gender Politics of Scale: Indonesian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia

Recent research has begun to explore the dynamics of transnational migration from a feminist perspective, and studies of migrant domestic workers have played a prominent role in pushing forward this work. Emerging simultaneously, but largely separately, are explicit debates within geography about the politics of scale, the social construction of scale, and the gender dimensions of scale. This article develops an analysis of the gender politics of the production of scale, specifically, the ‘transnationalisation’ of Indonesian activist approaches to overseas migrant domestic workers' issues. Based on fieldwork in an Indonesian community in West Java that has recently become a sending area for migrants to Saudi Arabia and interviews with activists representing Indonesian migrant women, the article examines the various gender‐specific ways in which migrant women's rights activists construct and deploy the scales of the body, the nation and the transnational. It argues that activist approaches to migrant domestic workers' rights and the ways in which activists mobilise migrant women's narratives represent sophisticated feminist theoretical approaches to scale. By identifying and exploring the scale theory embedded in activist strategies, the analysis highlights the imbrication of feminist theory with practice, and underscores activists' agency in producing the meanings of specific scales. In so doing, the article is aimed more broadly at elaborating the ambivalent relationship between feminist activism/theory and transnationalism.     

Diaspora strategies in the sending states of Southeast Asia: Rights,skills and questions of value

Over the past decade there has been a surge of academic and policy interest in the contributions of transnational migrants in furthering national development objectives in their ‘home’ countries. These approaches tend to be bifurcated into two distinct categories: (1) ‘diaspora strategies’ that target the participation in national development objectives of sought‐after elite, high‐skilled migrants and (2) migration‐as‐development strategies, which focus on facilitating and channeling the economic and social remittances of nonelite, low‐skilled migrants. Although these broad categorizations have never been entirely adequate in capturing the complexity of international migration flows, a conceptual division between them persists, with very real consequences for state policies in migrant‐sending countries in Southeast Asia. This paper explores the separation between diaspora strategies and migration‐as‐development frameworks through a focus on rights and skills, and questions of relative labour value. I argue that while diaspora strategies and migration‐as‐development frameworks cannot simply be merged, the academic separation between them should be challenged and more in‐depth theoretical engagement should be encouraged. I further suggest that migration policy makers should strive to evaluate their migration policies to address the increasing complexities of contemporary migration.     

Gender,class, and paradoxical mobilities of Thai marriage migrants in Austria

In this paper, we investigate whether marriage‐related migration promotes socioeconomic mobility and how class belonging and educational background affects Thai women's migration experience and socioeconomic mobility. Drawing on qualitative interviews, supported by a questionnaire survey with Thai women living in Austria and who are in a relationship with a Western male citizen, we seek to dismantle simplistic notions about hypergamy and question common assumption about marrying up or down in migration contexts. We compare socioeconomic indicators such as formal education, occupation, and income before and after the migration and analyse migrants’ experiences in Austria. The results show a complex picture of upward and downward socioeconomic mobilities. Two distinct scenarios of paradoxical mobilities have been identified. On the one hand, some migrants feel empowered (when experiencing economic downward mobility) as they enjoy the freedom of living in Austria, while on the other hand, those migrants experiencing upward mobility feel a loss of their personal autonomy.     

Determinants and characteristics of female migration: a case study of Salem City in Tamil Nadu,India

A random sample of 521 male and 481 female migrants surveyed in Salem city in Tamil Nadu, India, during 1980-1981 was analyzed on the basis of a classification related to reasons (association, marriage, distress, and voluntary) for migration. Women were found to outnumber males in associational migration, both in rural to urban and urban to urban streams. They also formed almost all the marriage migrants. They were more numerous in distress migration as well. There were, however, comparatively few women among voluntary migrants. The incidence of illiteracy among migrant women was generally high, except for voluntary migrants who had completed high school. The share of working women was not negligible, but in most cases present work status was achieved after migrating.     

Mothering urban space,governing migrant women: the construction of intersectional positions in area-based interventions in Berlin

In this paper, we investigate new ways of governing migrant populations in Germany brought forth by social policies on the local level of inner-city neighborhoods. In recent years, numerous initiatives on the local level have constituted the ‘migrant neighborhood’ as a site of governmental attention. One initiative that policymakers consider particularly innovative is the neighborhood mothers program in Berlin, a program that instructs migrant women as agents of neighborhood improvement and encourages them to establish peer-to-peer relations to other migrant women in order to pass on social norms. In the paper, we combine governmentality and intersectionality theory to critically examine the modes of behavior change promoted by the neighborhood mothers program and the political rationalities that are used to justify the governing of (and through) migrant women. We draw particular attention to the spatial dimensions of the neighborhood mothers program, to the ways in which it targets domestic and intimate spaces as sites of inspection and intervention and appoints migrant women as ‘door openers’ for entry of the state into the regulation of families and communities.     

Making migration meaningful: Achievements through separation in Mongolia

Mongolia has experienced two decades since the demise of the Soviet Union and has implemented strategies to strengthen its economy and its democratic practices. Transitions from being a nomadic society to a Soviet satellite state and onwards to liberal democracy have greatly impacted family life. The article focuses on changing patterns of mobility in the Mongolian ‘age of the market’ and its effects on population groups. Internal and international migration has continually risen as individuals and families have moved to places of opportunity. Connections are believed to be maintained during periods of absence by migrant family members, as both men and women are culturally permitted to be separate from their families. Migration is understood to contribute to prosperity, and separations contribute to generate growth and hishig (good fortune) for the good of the family. However, such mobility is also a way to escape family patriarchy and conformity, and can contribute to loss, hardship, and uncertainty for family members left behind. Further, mobility provides opportunities and a means to escape the stigma of ‘laziness’ culturally associated with poverty and immobility. Postsocialist separation has inadvertently contributed to the breakdown of the institutions of marriage and family – institutions that were supported by separations in the pastoral economy.     

中国人口迁移流动的时间过程及其空间效应研究：回顾与展望

对人口迁移流动时间过程及其空间效应研究的国内外研究进展进行了全面系统的回顾和评述,揭示了中国迄今这方面工作在研究内容、数据来源和理论框架等方面的不足,在此基础上展望了中国人口迁移流动时间过程及其空间效应研究的未来发展,认为今后中国人口迁移流动研究的一个重要方向是在获取迁移流动人口流迁过程历时数据的基础上,分阶段系统考察人口迁移流动各具体环节及相关就业、住房、家庭等特征的时空变化及其机制,填补在人口迁移流动时间过程研究上的缺漏,并把对各单个流迁阶段的研究结果整合为对整体流迁过程的新的规律性认识。这将拓展和深化人口迁移流动空间格局及其形成机制的研究,推进人口迁移流动时空过程及其演变规律相关理论的发展。     

Back and forth with hopes and fears: Sri Lankan men's narratives on gender and mobility in transnational livelihoods

Although in the past Sri Lanka has had a higher number of women migrant workers, recent statistics show that the gap between the percentages of female and male migrants is decreasing. Since 2007, male migrants have outnumbered female migrants. The article explores how Sri Lankan men have responded to the increased economic needs of their families and lack of proper income-generating activities within the country by engaging in transnational livelihoods, as well as how their roles and identities are contested and negotiated through labour migration. The study is based on men's narratives on their reasons for migration and their experiences of transnational labour migration. The concepts of hope and life course are used to analyse the intertwined relationships of gender and mobility in transnational livelihoods. The author identifies that men's mobility is motivated by their hopes of fulfilling traditional gender norms as providers and protectors of their families in combination with their new identity as successful men. Further, the study provides evidence that men's mobility is not only gendered but also a repeated act during their life course. The study contributes to strengthen research on mobility and gender by adding men's perspectives on transnational labour migration.     

Gender and Migration Policies in Southeast and East Asia: Legal Protection and Sociocultural Empowerment of Unskilled Migrant Women

This paper is concerned with how existing migration policies affect individual migrant women's choices, in particular, with the advancement, or consolidation, of a migrants' rights perspective. The focus is thereby on those migrants classified as unskilled, who constitute the largest and most vulnerable category among migrants. The analysis of migration policies has conventionally been approached from a state/government‐centred viewpoint that sees states as the key actors. This paper, however, emphasises a larger number of actors ‐ governmental and non‐governmental ‐ as well as the power relations among them to argue that protection through “legal regulation” in the absence of actual implementation is an incomplete solution to alleviate unfair labour conditions that migrants in general, and migrant women specifically, experience. Measures designed to “protect” migrants must be accompanied by measures that empower them, a role that has largely been taken on by existing migrant worker non‐governmental organisations (NGOs). Focussing on intra‐Asian migration flows in which Southeast Asia is the main labour sender and East Asia the receiver of Southeast Asian migrants, the paper explores the nexus between law and civic activism in the specific subject area of international labour migration and its gender implications.     

Questions of migration and belonging: understandings of migration under neoliberalism in Ecuador

This paper explores alternative understandings and experiences of migration under neoliberalism in Ecuador. Through the case study, the study examines migrants' multiple motivations for mobility and their ambivalence toward the process. Insights from the transnational migration literature were drawn in order to think through the implications of an increasingly contradictory context of economic modernization and its impact upon the sense of possibilities and belonging of migrants. In-depth interviews with urban-destined migrants in Ecuador were drawn to argue that mobility produces ambivalent development subjects. This argument is developed in three sections. First, the paper centers on the epistemological and theoretical basis for the relevance of migrant narratives in extending theorizations of migration. Second, in-depth interviews with migrants to Quito are drawn to explore migrants' sense of belonging and regional affiliation, identity formation through migration, and experiences of alienation and disruption in their lives. Lastly, this paper concludes with a retheorization of the role of migration places in the migrant identity construction.     

区域协调发展背景下流动人口回流的空间意愿及其政策含义

人口空间分布格局的改变既是区域协调发展战略实施的结果,也是推进区域协调发展的重要手段之一。本文以流动人口的回流空间意愿作为切入点,采用全国性大规模抽样问卷调查数据,对流动人口回流的空间意愿、群体差异和影响因素进行研究,并探讨其对区域协调发展和新型城镇化的政策含义。研究发现,流动人口的回流意愿薄弱;对具有回流意愿的流动人口来说,回流空间的路径选择以返回原居地为主、乡镇中心和县城为辅。模型结果显示,流动人口回流空间选择不仅是其人力资本和流动经历正向选择的结果,也显著地受到流出地住房和流入地的就业收入和养老保险等因素的影响,而流出地的家庭需求和空间成本则无显著影响。在此背景下,政策制定者不能高估人口回流对人口流动空间格局和人口均衡发展的调整作用,也不能高估回流劳动力对流出地城镇化和城乡协调发展的促进作用,而应加强流出地城镇自我可持续发展的能力,吸引人口主动回流,以推进区域协调发展和新型城镇化战略的落实。     

Managing migration in the Greater Mekong Subregion: Regulation,extra‐legal relation and extortion

One major aim of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) integration programme, supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), is to foster regional ‘community’ for sharing resources, people and financial flows. This ‘community’ is the target of both economic growth and poverty reduction. The emphasis on ‘community’ in the ADB's mushrooming quantity of documents raises important questions about what kinds of people are included, in what roles and with what kinds of support and protection. This paper explores these questions in relation to the political economy of regulating ethnic migrants from Myanmar working in Thailand. This paper argues that extra‐legal relations between migrants and state/para‐state agents constitute a crucial part of regulation. In transferring the regulation of migration to the national scale, the ADB inadvertently reinforces national differences between Thais and cross‐border people. Additionally, the complicated and fluctuating implementation of national regulations in both countries leaves migrants subject to violence and extortion from state and quasi‐state agents in Thailand. This paper shows that the dynamics of global capitalism require ‘deportable labour’ supplied by ethnic migrants who are included in the GMS community as the most invisible, vulnerable and exploited members.     

The experimental governing of mobility and trade on the China‐Laos frontier: The Tai Lue case

This paper discusses the governing of subjects and objects' mobility in the context of trans‐border rice and corn trade on the China‐Laos frontier. It traces the attempts by a group of ethnic Tai Lue traders from China to assert themselves as ‘flexible subjects’ and economically triumphant actors on the Upper Mekong market in the era of economic regionalization. It illustrates how, between 2005 and mid‐2006, the traders' economic success relied on a variety of ‘border strategies’. ‘Border strategies’ include a gender‐balanced organization of trade, the instrumental deployment of trans‐border ethnicity, the appropriation of a Han style of business, the opportunistic reliance on the Chinese administration's ‘regime of graduated mobility’, and the enactment of a ‘war‐machine’ against Lao state agents. Yet, in late 2006, a new wave of state authoritarianism, enmeshed in corporate accumulation processes, inhibited the traders' success. The paper suggests that, unlike what some defenders of globalization and transnational theories maintain, in the age of economic regionalization, the alleged flexibility and increased mobility of subjects and objects across the borders of the Greater Mekong Subregion remain conditional on an unpredictable mechanism of loosening and tightening. This is part of a long‐applied governing pattern of ‘experimentation under hierarchy’ on the Sino‐Lao frontier.     

What motivates single women to migrate from northern Ghana to Accra?

In recent decades there has been a large migration stream of single women from the north to Accra in Ghana. Existing studies have focused on young migrant women’s livelihood strategies in their place of destination. However, once-married women – divorced and widowed women and neglected wives – also migrate, and their motivations for migration are less known. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, the authors investigate the effects of gender norms, age, marital status, socio-economic status, and position in households on women’s decisions to migrate. The results revealed that migrant women from resource-poor households, regardless of age, marital status and position in households, commonly cited a gain in autonomy as an important motivation for their migration. From a differentiated perspective, young unmarried women aspired to prepare themselves for often expensive religious marriage ceremonies, whereas once-married women invest in their children’s education and build their own housing. By paying attention to the effects of gender norms, age, marital status, socio-economic status, and position in households on women’s decisions to migrate, the study illuminates the contradictory ways in which their migration practices are both shaped by and shape gender ideologies in parts of contemporary northern Ghana.     

Modelling the spatial dynamics of Mainland China-born migrants in Australia

Over the past two decades, migration from Mainland China (MC) to Australia has become increasingly significant. In contrast to previous migrant waves, post-2000 MC-born migrants in Australia are more likely to be highly skilled and/or financially independent, and often migrate under skilled, business and investment visa programs. Though scholarship has explored various facets of MC-born migrants’ settlement in Australian cities, the spatial dynamics of settlement, and change over time associated with these shifts in socio-economic profile, have remained unexplored. This paper draws on three census periods, and employs a local indicator of spatial autocorrelation together with a geographically weighted regression. We conclude that the settlement patterns of MC-born migrants in Australia do not follow the ‘straight-line’ assumptions of spatial assimilation theory, nor are they tied explicitly to socio-economic factors in the majority of capital cities. Instead, the settlement patterns of MC-born migrants vary by city: Sydney and Melbourne display the most spatially segmented settlement patterns; while Adelaide and Perth exhibit increasing levels of concentration as the number of MC-born migrants grows. Results indicate that while MC-born migrants are somewhat likely to cluster at the early stage of group formation, within-group spatial patterns are articulated by social attributes as the group grows in size and significance in a metropolitan context.     

新型城镇化背景下中国流动人口研究:议题与展望

研究通过4个议题（户籍与人口流动,循环流动、定居意愿及家庭策略,社会网络和移民社区,迁移、流动性和移民的日常生活）,回顾了近年来乡城人口迁移的研究。指出：户籍政策对移民在城市中的生计带来的影响将减弱,移民的住房及在城市的居住模式和居住空间、社会交往、生活方式、移民身份建构及生活空间的重构等将会成为新的关注点。新文化地理学中关于移民“微观化”“生活化”的研究应受到更多的重视。换言之,如何理解移民在个体层面的诉求和移民的日常生活,将会是未来流动性研究的重点。如何立足于国内移民地理研究的基础与发展机遇,批判性地与西方移民研究搭建对话空间和平台,结合当前中国崛起过程中所呈现的前所未有的全球化与城镇化契机,为世界移民研究积累和贡献“中国知识”,将成为未来这一领域学者研究的方向。     

State‐led talent return migration programme and the doubly neglected ‘Malaysian diaspora’: Whose diaspora,what citizenship,whose development?

This paper questions the assumptions of ‘diaspora’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘development’ underlying diaspora strategies targeting a specific pool of overseas Malaysian ‘talent’ migrants. I examine the Malaysian state's discursive attempts to construct a carefully contained economic ‘diaspora'—the ‘Malaysian diaspora'—through its talent return migration programme. In this process, there is a portion of the ‘Malaysian diaspora’, especially non‐bumiputeras (sons of soil), who are doubly neglected and excluded: first, from access to full and equal citizenship (which arguably contributed to their emigration in the first place); and second, from eligibility and recognition to participate in Malaysia's talent return migration programme. However, recent political activism calling for electoral reform and overseas voting rights challenges state‐constructed visions of the ‘diaspora’ and their expected roles in advancing ‘development’. This paper concludes by highlighting questions raised by the Malaysian case, linking these explicitly to how diaspora strategies—as they have been conceived, practised and contested—challenge the broader Migration and Development paradigm.     

Understanding Ethnic Residential Cluster Formation: new perspectives from South Australia’s migrant hostels

ABSTRACT

Throughout Australia’s history, successive governments have lamented the clustering of non-English-speaking migrants in ‘ethnic enclaves’ or ‘ghettos’. From the early Chinatowns of the 1800s till today, urban concentrations of ethnic groups have raised concerns and fears in local populations and authorities alike, despite decades of international research which suggests that ethnic residential clusters actually aid long-term assimilation and adjustment. Many of the ethnic residential clusters in contemporary Australia have been claimed to be a direct consequence of the migrant hostels and reception centres which operated between 1948 and the 1990s. This paper traces migrant settlement patterns in South Australia in rich detail, revealing the complexities of lived experiences that shape migrant settlement decisions. Against the background of public and scholarly debates over ‘ethnic enclaves’, and drawing on quantitative and qualitative historical research on the lived experiences of former hostel migrants, it analyses how migrant hostels and reception centres contributed to the settlement experiences of diverse migrants. We conclude that migrant hostels were just one among various factors that led to the growth and maintenance of ethnic residential clusters.     

‘I want to take risks,like my mother’: Memory,affect, and Vietnamese masculinities – the legacy of gendered variations in socio-economic mobility during Ðổi mới

Young Vietnamese men who witnessed their mother's changing economic and labour market situations through the early years of Ð?i m?i (the policy of economic liberalization in Vietnam after 1986) have developed conceptions of masculinity that are ambivalent to notions of male power and authority within what is often termed the ‘traditional’ neo-Confucian family. On the basis of the life narratives of a small group of men in their early twenties, the author suggests that the value young men place on their mother's work and familial influence during Ð?i m?i contrasts with the findings of much gender scholarship on women's social and economic (im) mobility in the 1990s in Vietnam and on young men's own masculinist narratives. Most gender-sensitive research in this area has suggested that Vietnamese women remained curtailed in the early 1990s by a resurgence of male-oriented kinship systems and patriarchal structures at household level. However, the author discusses the young men as being equivocal. While invoking broad Confucian tropes, these men remember their mothers as economically dynamic relative to their fathers. This led to the informants citing their mother's histories of economic risk-taking as exemplifying free-market capability. Further, the finding suggests that Vietnamese women's social and economic mobility in the 1990s strongly affected young men's contemporary ideas and practices related to masculinity.     

居住选择对流动人口城市居留意愿的影响——基于一项对福建省流动人口的调查

采用2015年福建省流动人口抽样调查数据,使用序次回归模型,系统分析由住房产权类型、居住区位、居住家庭化程度和住房支付能力衡量的居住选择如何影响流动人口的城市居留意愿。结果发现：当将长期居住意愿、户籍迁移意愿和永久定居意愿3部分指标的加和定义为城市居留意愿指标时,流动人口在城市居留意愿远低于预期,真正愿意将长期居住、户籍迁移、永久定居三者统一起来的流动人口不足二成。回归模型结果表明,居住选择的确对流动人口的城市居留意愿产生显著影响,在控制流动人口的个人、家庭特征和流动状况等变量后,拥有住房所有权、居住在中心城区、与家人一起居住和更高的住房支付能力的流动人口,更愿意在城市永久定居。