Migration Studies Commons^™

No. 70: International Migrants And Refugees In Cape Town’S Informal Economy, Godfrey Tawodzera, Abel Chikanda, Jonathan Crush, Robertson Tengeh

Southern African Migration Programme

This report is the most comprehensive study yet of the contribution of migrant and refugee entrepreneurs to Cape Town’s local economy. The survey of over 500 entrepreneurs engaged in trade, services and manufacturing in different areas of the city dispels some of the more prevalent myths that often attach to the activities of migrants. The vast majority are not “illegal foreigners”, but have a legal right to be in South Africa and to run a business. Most are highly motivated individuals who enter the informal economy to earn revenue to support themselves, their families, and because they have a strong …

Microbuses And Mobile Homemaking In Exile: Sudanese Visiting Strategies In Cairo, Anita Fábos

Sustainability and Social Justice

Paying home visits to mark social events and maintain networks is an established cultural pattern in Arab countries.Northern Sudanese displaced in Cairo in the 1990s made significant efforts to continue visiting each other in their temporary homes, despite having to travel long distances to members of their widely scattered networks.The deterioration of the legal and political status of Sudanese living in Egypt during the 1990s contributed to longer-term uncertainty for those who sought safety and security in Cairo.In this article, I argue that this long-term uncertainty constitutes a protracted refugee situation, and that Sudanese visiting practices constituted a mobile homemaking …

Entrepreneurship And Inclusive Growth In South Africa, Zimbabwe And Mozambique (Migration Policy Series No. 68), Jonathan Crush, Caroline Skinner, Abel Chikanda

International Migration Research Centre

While increasing attention is being paid to the drivers and forms of entrepreneurship in informal economies, much less of this policy and research focus is directed at understanding the links between mobility and informality. This report examines the current state of knowledge about this relationship with particular reference to three countries (Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe) and four cities (Cape Town, Harare, Johannesburg and Maputo), identifying major themes, knowledge gaps, research questions and policy implications. In many African cities, informal enterprises are operated by internal and international migrants. The extent and nature of mobile entrepreneurship and the opportunities and challenges …

Making Homes In Limbo? A Conceptual Framework, Cathrine Brun, Anita Fábos

Sustainability and Social Justice

This article aims to conceptualize home and homemaking for people in protracted displacement.The article serves three purposes: To present an overview of the area of inquiry; to develop an analytical framework for understanding home and homemaking for forced migrants in protracted displacement; and to introduce the special issue.It explores how protracted displacement has been defined-from policy definitions to people's experiences of protractedness, including "waiting" and "the permanence of temporariness." The article identifies the ambivalence embedded in experiences and practices of homemaking in long-term displacement, demonstrating how static notions of home and displacement might be unsettled.It achieves this through examining relationships …

Taking Back Migrants: A Theoretical Investigation On The Low Propensity Of Entrepreneurship In Ofw-Dependent Households, Carlo Anton G. Arguelles

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

In light of different Philippine economic issues, it can be said that this country is evolving and is constant at the same time. This evolution and consistency are present in the opportunity-seeking behavior of Filipino households. One aspect of change is the higher engagement of households in entrepreneurship as reported by GEM (2014a). Data on entrepreneurship presents the Philippines with an early-stage entrepreneurship (TEA) rate of 18.4%. GEM (2014b) stated that this rate is higher than the average start up rates of Asia and Oceania (13%); which implies that Filipino households, relative to their counterparts in these regions, are more …

Visualising Migrant Voices: Co-Creative Documentary And The Politics Of Listening, Darcy Alexandra

Doctoral

This ethnography of media production explores the challenges of literally and figuratively visualising voice. The labour of a shared production and the distribution of the audio-visual documentary essays unfolded within a field of diverse, and at times, conflicting interests. For this reason, judicious attention to what I name ‘encounters’ of ‘political listening’ (Bickford 1996; Dreher 2009) provides one framework for theorising the challenges of researching with marginalised subjects and stories, and the contradictions of developing shared practices within proprietary contexts. These encounters reveal moments of listening and being heard, struggles over ‘veracity’ and ‘evidence,’ and the power relations inherent in …

Displacing The Displaced: Challenging The International Framework For Palestinian Refugees In Light Of The Syria Crisis, Jasmin Fritzsche

Faculty Journal Articles

In 1948 approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced for the first time. As of 2014, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) counts over 5 million Palestine refugees. Many of those refugees no longer reside in their first country of asylum but have been repeatedly displaced following expulsions, political unrest and conflicts in host countries. In 2011, fighting broke out in Syria, creating over three million refugees fleeing mainly to surrounding Arab countries such as Lebanon and Jordan. Alongside Syrian citizens affected by the conflict is a population of about half a million …

Syrian Refugees In Egypt: Challenges Of A Politically Changing Environment, Maysa Ayoub, Shaden Khallaf

Faculty Journal Articles

The conflict in Syria, now in its fourth year, has produced 2.9 million refugees that are being absorbed by other countries in the region. The number of Syrians registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Egypt was 138,245 as of July 7, 2014 (UNHCR, n.d.). However, the actual number of Syrians in Egypt was higher, as the above figure represented only those who were registered with UNHCR. The Egyptian government estimated the total number of Syrians in the country at 300,000 in 2014 (Akram et al, 2014). This study seeks to understand the challenges faced by …

Threatening Others : Nicaraguans And The Formation Of National Identities In Costa Rica, Carlos Sandoval-Garcia

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.”
Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica explores the representation of the Nicaraguan “other” in the Costa Rican imagery. It also seeks to address more generally why the sense of national belonging constitutes a crucial identification in contemporary societies. Interdisciplinary and based on extensive fieldwork, it looks critically at the “exceptionalism” that Costa Ricans take for granted and view as …

When Caring Hurts: The Work Of Strained Relationships In Transnational Families, Valerie Francisco

Faculty Publications, Sociology

The normative conception of care work is described through qualities of nurturance, love and warmth in the intimate relationships of family members. However, the work of caring for family draws from a range of affects, from warmhearted to reticent. Applied to studies of transnational families, scholars have shown that children of migrants demonstrate resentment and indignation towards their parents abroad because of their absence. Based on the definition of care work as nurturance, transnational children narrate the emotional distance to their migrant parents with cynicism. Yet, children left behind still attend to the necessary work needed to keep their families …

No. 29: Zimbabwe’S Return Migrants – Before & After Challenges, David Mandiyanike

Southern African Migration Programme

Various countries in the developing world have implemented policies and incentives to encourage the participation of their respective diasporas in development. The ‘best case’ countries include the Philippines, India, Mexico, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Morocco, Kenya and Ghana, and there seems to be a positive correlation between reforms meant to facilitate diaspora participation and the level of actual participation. The reforms and policies not only contribute to the diaspora maintaining social and psychological links with their home countries but also serve as vehicles for promoting remittances and investments. However, diaspora participation in the (re)development of the country of origin can never be …

Coming To America: The Business Of Trafficked Workers, Valerie Francisco, Robyn Rodriguez

Faculty Publications, Sociology

The expansion of the United States’ current guest worker program is one policy measure that both political parties have agreed on in the immigration debate yet there continues to be a paucity of research on the experiences of migrants, many of whom are Asian, who enter the U.S. through the existing program. This paper examines the experiences of Asian guest workers with a focus on guest workers from the Philippines. Filipino migrants are an especially good case study for examining the United States’ guest worker program because the Philippines was amongst the top 5 countries supplying workers to the U.S. …

Issue 07: The Need For Local Reintegration Policy/Programs In Rural Mexico, Meredith Giel

International Migration Research Centre

Since 2007, a growing number of Mexican immigrants in the United States have been returning to Mexico. For the first time since the 1960s, net migration in Mexico is zero, implying that just as many Mexicans are returning to Mexico as are going to the United States. There are a number of factors contributing to this return migration by Mexican nationals. This current situation presents the Mexican government with new priorities and responsibilities. Upon return, many of these unskilled workers face barriers preventing proper reintegration back into Mexican society, including a lack of support networks, potential language and cultural barriers …

Labour Market Outcomes And Egypt’S Migration Potential, Mona Amer, Philippe Fargues

Faculty Journal Articles

Will the radical political changes Egypt has gone through since early 2011 have an impact on emigration from the country? This all depends on young Egyptian adults, who are the potential migrants of tomorrow. In order to understand the consequences of the Egyptian revolution on migration, a questionnaire survey was conducted amongst Egyptian youth in 2013. The objective of this paper is to analyse the Egyptian labour market together with Egyptian migration to see whether changing conditions in the labour market, in particular after the revolution of 25 January 2011, may affect migration. This study is divided into three parts. …

Labour Market Outcomes And Egypt’S Migration Potential, Mona Amer, Philippe Fargues

Faculty Journal Articles

Will the radical political changes Egypt has gone through since early 2011 have an impact on emigration from the country? This all depends on young Egyptian adults, who are the potential migrants of tomorrow. In order to understand the consequences of the Egyptian revolution on migration, a questionnaire survey was conducted amongst Egyptian youth in 2013. The objective of this paper is to analyse the Egyptian labour market together with Egyptian migration to see whether changing conditions in the labour market, in particular after the revolution of 25 January 2011, may affect migration. This study is divided into three parts. …

"Nature Is Pushing One Way And People Are Pushing The Other": A Political Ecology Of Forest Transitions In Western Montgomery County, Pa, Megan Elizabeth Maccaroni

Environment and Sustainability Honors Papers

Forests in Southeastern Pennsylvania have been shaped by a number of anthropocentric factors over the past century, with many areas experiencing a recent trend towards forest recovery. Studies on forest dynamics have shown that most developed regions exhibit a forest transition, which begins when land is cleared for natural resource extraction (e.g., agriculture, forestry) during an early development stage. Then as a population grows and food production needs are met, rural peoples begin to migrate to the city, and a feeling of scarcity of trees develops that may lead to changes in land management attitudes, and many formerly deforested areas …

Issue 06: The Migrant Farmworker Health Journey: Identifying Issues And Considering Change Across Borders, Janet Mclaughlin, Jenna Hennebry, Donald C. Cole, Gabriel Williams

International Migration Research Centre

There are currently about 300 000 temporary foreign workers employed in Canada every year, roughly 20 000 of whom work as migrant farm workers (MFWs) in the province of Ontario. MFWs travel primarily from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean and typically work on a seasonal basis, with just over 15 000 workers annually coming to Ontario under Canada’s long-standing Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), and many under the Stream for Lower Skilled Occupations (SLSO). All workers are eligible (with some variability) for provincial health insurance in Ontario (OHIP) and workers’ compensation (WSIB), and are covered by provincial health and …

Issue 05: Backgrounder On Immigration Policy Changes And Entry To Practice Routes For Internationally Educated Nurses (Iens) Entering Canada, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Keegan Williams, Jennifer Guo, Jenna Hennebry

International Migration Research Centre

Every year, about 17,500 internationally-educated nurses (IENs) immigrate to Canada from countries like the Philippines, India, and China. While many IENs would like to practice in Canada, new immigration policies and professional regulations at the federal and provincial level limits their ability to do so. In response, migrants are increasingly using two-step immigration routes to enter the profession (e.g., international student -> permanent economic immigrant) or pursuing alternative careers in health (e.g., Personal Support Worker). These outcomes have significant policy implications for labour force planning in nursing, ethical recruitment for international healthcare workers, the process of migrant workforce integration, and …

Immigration Policy Changes And Entry To Practice Routes For Internationally Educated Nurses (Iens), Margaret Walton-Roberts, Jennifer Guo, Keegan Williams, Jenna Hennebry

International Migration Research Centre

This knowledge synthesis report examines how migrant transition programs (status conversion from temporary to permanent) inform nursing labour force planning. This has significant policy relevance because immigration transition policies add complexity to a) labour force planning in the health sector (Pittman et al., 2007), b) ethical recruitment protocols for international health care workers, c) processes of migrant workforce integration (Blythe et al., 2009; Little & Buchan, 2007), and d) the assessment of structural processes that shape and reproduce migration as a form of gendered state developmentalist policy for sending regions (Valiani, 2012). Nursing offers a lens into how gender and …

Urban Informality And Migrant Entrepreneurship In Southern African Cities: 10–11 February 2014, Cape Town, South Africa, Jonathan Crush

International Migration Research Centre

• The informal sector is the big story in African cities. To respond effectively, data collection and monitoring tools need dramatic improvement.
• Informal trading largely happens outside official city planning. This absence of recognition may be unconscious but is not benign.
• Ethnic networking and business positioning are of crucial importance for migrant-run small businesses.
• Those working in the informal sector in South Africa generally operate under hostile conditions.
• Volumes of trade and duties paid by cross-border traders show that this sector is significant to SADC governments.
• There is a policy contradiction between the government’s promotion of business tourism and the increasingly …