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.     

Regulating migration to Australia and back to the Philippines: Applying a ‘diaspora strategies’ framework

This paper examines circular labour migration between Australia and the Philippines by bringing Australian immigration policies and Philippine diaspora strategies under the same analytical framework. An extensive Philippine bureaucracy regulates migrants at each stage of the circular migration cycle, and as a sending state it has an interest in migrants staying temporarily in host countries such as Australia. The requirement to return home at the end of an overseas work contract compels migrants to remain attached to the sending state, their homeland, and return subsequently. However, Australia is allowing a route for temporary migrants to apply for permanent residency while in the host country. This has implications for sending states that rely on migrant ties to the homeland. The paper argues that analysing the intersections between the themes of migration, development and diaspora strategies reveals the multiple meanings of temporariness during migration and in migration studies. It questions whether associating temporariness with precariousness and marginalization is an accurate representation of the complex conditions underpinning circular labour migration.     

Far beyond the Gulf: the implications of warfare for Asian labour migration

The implications of the Gulf War are assessed for the countries in Asia that send labor migrants to the Middle East. "This paper seeks to examine the effects of...the loss of remittances (and related issues, including return migration), primarily in terms of the long-term implications of the War for the future of contract labour migration in the Asian region...."     

全球化背景下的日本移民动态研究

本文以日本外务省的移民统计数据为基础,对1990年代以来日本海外移民在世界和中国的分布及其结构变化情况进行了分析。探讨了日本移民的数量变化、人口结构、迁移类型、迁移方式、地区分布及其变化趋势,并考察了其在中国的分布及构成特点。日本移民主要流向北美、亚洲太平洋地区,尤以洛杉矶、纽约、上海、曼谷等城市分布最为集中。在中国的日本移民近年增长迅速,主要分布在上海、北京、香港、广州、深圳等大城市,并以男性移民为主。本文分析了这些日本移民的分布动向,并对今后中国大城市的移民问题进行了讨论。     

新型城镇化背景下流动特征与农民工回流意愿的关系

使用2016年中国流动人口动态监测调查数据,借助描述性分析和多分类Logistic回归模型分析方法,探讨新型城镇化背景下农民工回流意愿的现状与特点、流动特征与回流意愿的关系。研究发现,农民工的回流意愿很弱,有回流意愿并打算近期回流的农民工比例较低,回流地域以原居地为主、户籍地的乡镇和区县政府所在地为辅。模型结果显示,流动特征显著影响农民工的回流意愿：跨省流动者“打算回流”的概率大于省内流动者;流动时间短和非举家流动者“打算回流”“近期回流”“回原居地”的概率分别大于流动时间长和举家流动者;有留守子女者“打算回流”“近期回流”的概率大于没有留守子女者。最后,建议政府实施以“异地市民化”为主、“回流式市民化”为辅的市民化策略;继续深化制度改革,为农民工流动扫清制度壁垒和提供均等化公共服务;促进中西部和东北部地区的经济社会发展,出台鼓励农民工回乡创业和就业的优惠政策等方式来推进以农民工市民化为重点的新型城镇化发展。     

The Web-based Recruitment of Female Foreign Domestic Workers in Asia

In the last three decades, there has been an increased "feminisation" of international migration within the Asian region. In part, the increased mobility of women migrant workers within Asia has resulted from the increased bureaucratic regulation of labour migration. This commodification of the migratory process, however, has placed women in significantly more vulnerable positions vis-´-vis their male counterparts. Comparatively little research, however, has examined the critical role of private recruitment agencies, and especially the use of the Internet, within the migratory process. In this paper, I examine the Web-based recruitment strategies of private recruitment agencies in Asia. Based on a qualitative analysis of 25 recruitment-related Web sites, I suggest that the commercialisation of migration serves an important "socialisation" process that contributes to the vulnerability and exploitation of female foreign domestic workers.     

Emerging Asias: Transnational Forces,Developmental States,and “Asian Values”

Discussions of East Asian developmental states and Asian values discourse have been deformed by national-territorial frameworks that limit scholars' ability to highlight transnational phenomena. Such limits can be overcome by adopting a “Pacificist” perspective, one that highlights the transnational collaborative efforts of Pacific ruling class members, from both Asia and the United States. Such a Pacificist approach has the virtue of highlighting phenomena of transnational class formation that help account for the emergence of both developmental states in East Asia and Asian values discourse, and it also suggested the importance of attending to other kinds of emerging actors in Asian development politics, such as labor and democracy movements.     

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.     

FROM A CENTRED TO A DECENTRED TROPICALITY: FRANCOPHONE COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHY IN MONSOON ASIA

This paper discusses four key phases in the study of the tropical milieu of monsoon Asia by French geographers and colonial actors over the last 150 years. First, it sees how the natural milieu initially occupied a central and determining place in French colonial and scientific assessments of Indochina, and how the notion of monsoon Asia appeared within the framework of an academic geography (and formatively in the two regional theses produced by Charles Robequain and Pierre Gourou). It then shows how, after the Second World War, francophone geographers developed a “tropicalist” approach to monsoon Asia, one that was inextricably linked with the culturalist approach that was pioneered by Gourou, which later evolved into new, model‐building and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of tropical systems. It argues that these successive phases have marked a shift from a centred tropicality ‐ a system of knowledge anchored in French colonialism and centring on debate about the determinist influence of the natural milieu ‐ to a decentred tropicality that rejects environmental determinism, questions the ethnocentric character of tropical geography and integrates the study of tropical geography into the wider social sciences. The paper concludes with the suggestion that tropicality has had an epistemologically stronger and more institutionalised relationship with francophone geography than was the case in anglophone geography.     

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.     

Refugees in the IT Sector: Young Syrians’ Economic Subjectivities and Familial Lives in Jordan

This article explores refugee economic subjectivity in the context of restrictive asylum policies and disrupted transnational family lives. Drawing on fieldwork with young Syrian refugees pursuing IT training in Jordan, I focus on the “coding boot camp,” an emerging educational format in the field of refugee professional training. I thus explore how Syrian youths approach humanitarian policies in which, in the absence of full social and economic rights for refugees, the question of livelihoods is addressed through the paradigms of self‐reliance, creativity, and innovation. Reframing the refugee from a “protected” to a “productive” subject, and offering individual solutions to a structural economic impasse, these policies produce tensions between individual responsibilities and more‐than‐individual relations and identifications—with families, religious identities, and national communities—that remain unresolved. The findings contribute to geographical scholarship on economic subjectivity, familial relations, and the migrant and refugee condition, while shedding light on some of the effects of the encounter between technology‐centred, neoliberal approaches to humanitarianism and restrictive migration regimes in responses to the Syrian displacement.     

Governing through mobilities and the expansion of spatial capability of Vietnamese marriage migrant activist women in South Korea

This paper revisits the debate on marriage migration by highlighting the role of governing power and individual response in the process of migration decision‐making and post‐settlement of Vietnamese marriage migrant activist women in South Korea. It contributes to current marriage migration debates by employing the lens of ‘governmobility’ and ‘spatial capability’. The research looks at how female migrant activists maneuver coercion, resistance, and activism, both governed by nation‐state politics, but also actively deciding their fate amidst pressures of the global marriage market. Based on in‐depth interviews with 21 Vietnamese marriage migrant women who have worked in mentoring, counselling and translating for other Vietnamese migrants, our findings demonstrate that marriage migrants are positioned in between two nation‐states whose perspectival focus is on relieving the tensions of their own domestic job and marital markets. At the same time, these women have broken free from the inertia of socio‐familial status quo and state intervention to become self‐governing agents of mobility in various stages of their migration and adaptation. Fueled on by their position as activists, the marriage migrants then expand their spatial capability to place‐making—shifting the notion of freedom from simply taking part in mobility to reshaping their locale.     

Inhabiting the Imaginary: Factory Women at Home on Batam Island, Indonesia

Batam Island, Indonesia, located a short ferry ride away from Singapore, is a place where tourism and industry have been developed simultaneously and a border area where “developed” and “developing” nations meet. Government officials, investing international corporations and the “factory women” who work in the island's industrial estates arrive in Batam ‐ native to none of them ‐ with their own preconceptions and goals. When challenges not foreseen through master planning arise, the authorities cling ever more tightly to their physical and structural development model: the nearby city‐state of Singapore. Conversely, the factory workers who travel intranationally to work in this export processing zone (EPZ) find their objectives contested in the face of the Master Plan, corporate agendas and ethnic fusions characterising this transnational capitalist space. Entering into the homes of three groups of women migrants living and working in Batam, the relationship between the private realm that they inhabit and the social contexts in which they participate publicly is investigated. Some of the choices that women make at and about home are identified, and their ability to “micro‐resist” these external structures is explored. At home, the dynamic relationship between the Batam development project and the women's own hopes and visions of the place ‐ sometimes parallel and sometimes incongruous ‐ are revealed. As they experience life on Batam, their “social imaginaries” of it are shaped into various new realities, and their homes, removed from the confines of the factory floor, thus become spaces of release from these tensions.     

AMENITY MIGRATION IN THE U.S. SIERRA NEVADA*

ABSTRACT. Since 1960 California's Sierra Nevada counties have ranked among the regions with the strongest relative population growth in the state. Reassessment of peripheral areas has been the main force driving population and settlement growth in the central Sierra Nevada of California and Nevada, termed “amenity migration” or “counterurbanization.” This study analyzes the impacts of amenity migrants—“urban refugees”—on socioeconomic conditions in high‐mountain regions. We define these regions as the “High Sierra,” comprising zones at elevations more than 1,800 meters above sea level. People who migrate to the High Sierra tend to be white and well educated, with considerable household earnings. Unlike the population in the foothills, these migrants are not senior citizens. Their demand for periodic or permanent residences has caused housing prices to increase enormously. As a result, a majority of homes are now priced well beyond the reach of local salaries, which may lead to potential conflict between locals and newcomers. The massive settlement expansion in high‐mountain areas requires a new approach to land‐use planning, one that takes functional regions into account. Therefore, it is expedient to reassess existing jurisdictional boundaries.     

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。     

Migration and Development? The Gendered Costs of Migration on Mexico's Rural “Left Behind”

Governments, civil society, and policymakers assert the potential of international migration to foster development and alleviate poverty. Often such claims are rooted in macroscale geopolitical analyses of migration and development, which mask the localized, uneven, and embodied ways family members “left behind” bear the costs and subsidize the U.S./Mexico (inter)national integration project. Informed by feminist geopolitics, this article demonstrates how the left behind disproportionately bear the hidden costs of neoliberal restructuring and migration. We draw upon Mexican Migration Project (MMP) ethnosurvey data to frame the narratives of migrant family members left behind. Narratives were constructed through in‐depth interviews conducted in rural Veracruz. We conclude that in the absence of geographically specific examinations of the hidden costs associated with neoliberal development and migration it is possible that “migration for development” programs and policies may exacerbate inequities that will perpetuate migration and further weaken Mexican origin communities.     

A story of “communities”: boundaries,geographical composition and social coherence in a forest conservation project,Northern Cambodia

Explicit notions of “communities”, as key actors in conservation and development projects across the Global South, are common. Narratives about “indigenous people” or “forest-dependent communities” in forest conservation programmes prevail, portraying a picture of “communities” as homogeneous and harmonious entities. In this study, we unfold “communities” as a construct with an empirical example of a community-based forest protection project, Northern Cambodia. Based on qualitative interviews, field observations and document analysis, we examine the “community” construct in terms of establishment of boundaries, geographical composition and social coherence. We not only find that the establishment of forest “community” boundaries are dominated by powerful external actors rather than the “community members” themselves, but that the spatial composition of “communities” is complex, and affects the ability of local people to benefit from the project. We also find that the studied “communities” show low levels of social coherence and mainly consist of migrant farmers, as opposed to common policy narratives. Taking these inconsistencies into account, we discuss implications of constructing “communities” for the success of forest conservation projects, and argue in favour of more discursive and political analyses to better understand, acknowledge and adapt to existing and changing conditions in present and prospective project locations.     

A Prospective on Zelinsky's Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition

Wilbur Zelinsky's 1971 paper in Geographical Review entitled the “Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition” was both forward‐looking and offered innovative ideas regarding human geographic mobility. One of the most interesting aspects of the paper was a set of predictions for mobility in a “future superadvanced society”. Many of these predictions have now come to pass, including a general decline in international and internal migration and residential change, the increasing regulation of migration ‐ especially internally, and the possibility that the widespread adoption of information and communication technologies has impacted human geographic mobility. Hence, this essay looks at the mobility transition not as an obsolete frame of reference but as a prescient, pliable, and adaptable framework which not only informs the study of human geographic mobility today but also, perhaps, even into the future.     

Are Seafarers Migrants? ‐ Situating Seafarers in the Framework of Mobility and Transnationalism

Seafarers are a unique occupational group who are recruited, by international agencies and work under contract on board ships of different kinds: merchant cargo and container ships; deep sea fishing vessels; and cruise ships. Seafarers “travel” either globally or regionally over varying distances. This paper seeks to find a place for the movement of seafarers in the existing theoretical context of labour migration. They undertake a particular type of circulatory or ‘transversal’ labour migration, and have established a special form of social identity. Locating them within theoretical migration and transnational concepts will contribute a new perspective.     

The 2012 Olympic Learning Legacy Agenda – the intentionalities of mobility for a new London model

This paper investigates the emergence of a Learning Legacy Agenda (LLA) in the wake of the London 2012 Olympic Games as a governmental tool for the dissemination of urban development and infrastructure project delivery best practice. Focusing on the inception, coordination and implementation of the LLA we outline the intentionalities of mobility that underpin its formation and appropriation and suggest how this points to the emergence of a new “London model” of development and governance. Three intentionalities of knowledge capture, public duty and extra-local salience are unpacked to demonstrate the range of ways in which the bureaucratically initiated LLA banner has been used by various development actors and organisations to validate their existing practices. The case study of the LLA as an institutionalised governance apparatus is used to analyse the impact of specific forms of social relations on the ways in which “models” are produced, what their content consists of, how dominant agendas and narratives co-evolve with the priorities of an assemblage of actors and the processes of selective abstraction used to curate particular messages and forms of fixed and potentially mobile knowledge, yet dubious claims of “learning”.