Spaces of Solidarity and Spaces of Exception: Migration and Membership During Pandemic Times

This chapter starts by introducing the policy and political context of the Covid-19 crisis, surveying some of the changes it brought to immigration policies in different countries: border closures for non-citizens; disruption for temporary migrants; and special arrangements for essential (migrant) workers like doctors and nurses or farmworkers to ensure emergency wards are staffed and the food processing chain is not disrupted. The chapter critically reviews these changes and discusses the main analytical and policy questions which the book addresses. It investigates how the pandemic forces us to rethink notions like membership, citizenship, belonging, but also solidarity, community, essential services or ‘essential’ workers. Migrants expose tensions and contradictions within these concepts and values. Citizens (who may carry the virus) cannot be banned from return to the homeland as they travel internationally or domestically; by contrast, temporary migrants or asylum seekers may be locked in their dormitories because of an outbreak in their midst to prevent spread and protect the citizens. This chapter shows that the specific tensions of the global pandemic for migration are linked to the more long-term tensions of globalisation, migration, and the nation-state, suggesting that the pandemic is but a magnifying lens. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book’s contents.

Temporary Migration and Family Violence: How Perpetrators Weaponise Borders

This paper explores the implications of domestic and family violence occurring across borders, specifically the utilisation of border crossings to exert control and enact violence. While gendered violence can and does occur in border-crossing journeys, this paper focuses more specifically on how domestic and family violence extends across national borders and how violence (or the threat of violence and deportation) can manifest across multiple countries when women are temporary visa holders. This paper illuminates the way in which migration systems play a significant role in temporary migrant experiences of domestic and family violence. Drawing on a study of 300 temporary migrants and their experiences of domestic and family violence, I argue that perpetrators effectively weaponise the migration system to threaten, coerce and control women in different ways, most often with impunity. I also argue that we cannot focus on perpetrators and the individual alone—that we need to build on the border criminology scholarship that highlights the need to focus on systemic harm in the context of domestic and family violence and identify how the migration regime contributes to gendered violence.

Public and Commercial Medical Insurance Enrollment Rates of Rural-to-Urban Migrants in China

Objectives: Large-scale rural-to-urban migration of China has provoked heated discussion about the health of migrants and whether they have equal access to the health resources. This article aimed to compare the public and commercial medical insurance enrollment rates between temporary, permanent migrants and urban natives.Methods: Average marginal effects (AME) of the weighted logistic regression models using 2017 China General Social Survey from 2,068 urban natives, 1,285 temporary migrants, and 1,295 permanent migrants.Results: After controlling for the demographic and socio-economic characteristics, our results show that while the temporary and permanent migrants have a similar public insurance enrollment rate compared with the urban natives, both temporary and permanent migrants have significantly lower commercial insurance enrollment rates (7.5 and 5.3%, respectively) compared with the urban natives.Conclusions: The results highlight significant institutional barriers preventing the temporary migrants from gaining access to public medical insurance and the adverse impact of disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds on the access of temporary migrants to both public and commercial insurance.

Migration and Remittances in South Africa

The chapter draws from two data sources to describe patterns and trends of internal migration and remittances in South Africa and explore what these mean for rural households. These are the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS 2008–17) and the South African Population Research Infrastructure Network (2000–17). NIDS data show that at a national level there are high levels of non-resident household membership. As much as 24 per cent of African rural households have a non-resident member. This reflects temporary migration, especially of young adults. SAPRIN shows that temporary migration rates remain persistent over time, while definitive migration shows a gradual decline in incidence after 2003. Some temporary migrants send remittances, mostly of money, but also clothes and food. The study shows amounts averaging R1,100 per month from female migrants and R1,500 per month from male migrants in 2017. These can play a crucial role in food security for the poorest rural households and in improving human capital in better-off rural households. What has not been explored here are costs to the household of temporary migration, which help to explain why more households do not send temporary migrants. These include financial costs, but the main two areas of concern are health and social connection.

From Temporary Migrants to National Inclusion?

This article explores ways in which textbook content can reflect national identity over time via a case study of Swedish textbooks. To this end, it analyzes and contextualizes descriptions of Finnish labor migrants in Sweden in seventy-four compulsory school textbooks. The Finnish labor group emigrated from Finland to Sweden mainly from the 1950s to the 1980s. Initially, the Swedish authorities saw them as temporary laborers, but as time went by, the authorities had to realize that they had become permanent residents. In 2000, Finns were defined as an official national minority, “Sweden-Finns,” and their status changed. This article examines representations of Finnish labor migrants in Swedish history, geography and social science textbooks published between 1954 and 2016, tracing their journey from temporary laborers to a permanent national minority.

Higher Degree Students (HDR) during COVID-19

The wellbeing of higher degree research (HDR) students, or postgraduate students during the COVID-19 pandemic has been of concern. In Australia, international students have queued for food parcels, while headlines report stark drops in international enrolments and the financial bottom line of universities. We undertook a pilot study using ethnographic interview methods to understand the lived experiences of current international and domestic HDR students at an Australian university in Melbourne, from June to August 2020 (n=26). In this paper, we discuss domestic and international students’ experiences during the pandemic. International HDR students faced similar challenges to domestic students, but experienced further stressors as temporary migrants. We discuss their experiences in relation to resilience, understood as a relational and collective quality. We suggest that institutions develop policies and programmes to address resilience and build students’ sense of belonging and connection, informed by how students cope with challenges such as COVID-19.

Exploring the Relationships Among Gratifications-Sought, Social Media Usage, and Social Support Among Chinese Temporary Migrants

Based on a uses and gratifications 2.0 approach, this study identified three social and psychological gratifications (i.e., entertainment, information seeking, socializing) and four affordance-related gratifications (i.e., immediate contacts, controllability, bandwagon, and being there) that motivated Chinese temporary migrants to use social media. Both types of gratifications were positively linked to social media usage among temporary migrants. Social media usage positively predicted social support, while different patterns of social media usage were related to different types of social support.