Alphabetical order
1. Ang, S. (2026). ‘Seeing the world from my parents’ shoulders’: Temporary middle-class Asian migrants, privilege, woes and boundary work. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2026.2630304
This paper examines how class shapes the experiences and migration trajectories of Asian international graduates on temporary visas. It argues that middle-class privilege is unstable and relational, rather than fixed. The paper highlights continuities between Asian and global middle classes, including reliance on family resources to navigate insecurity and aspirations for stable employment. It also explores how graduates engage in “boundary work” that transforms and diversifies meanings of middle-classness. By focusing on temporary migrant graduates, the paper contributes to debates on migration and class, showing how privilege, precarity and identity are negotiated in everyday migrant life.
2. Butler, R., Ang, S., & Ho, C. (2026). Class and migration: Interrogating class across borders. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2026.2630302
This introductory article argues for centring class within migration studies to better understand the unequal and contradictory experiences of migrants in an era of growing global inequality and mobility. It highlights how class shapes social mobility, exploitation and status, while also intersecting with race and ethnicity to produce new forms of inequality and privilege. The article further examines how family wealth and asset accumulation influence migration opportunities and trajectories. Focusing on settler-colonial Australia, the special issue advances debates in both migration and class studies by showing how class inequalities and privileges are reproduced, transferred and contested across borders.
3. Ford, M., Hasbiyalloh, B., & Palmer, W. (2026). Unintended consequences: The impact of policy change on Indonesia’s commercial fishing sector. Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 62(1), 83–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2025.2565147
This article analyses Indonesia’s fishing sector, focusing on its geography, capital distribution, labour dynamics and governing policies. Drawing on previously uncollated statistical data and insights from interviews with key informants, it assesses the impact of the Minapolitan and Blue Economy concepts and the Moratorium, Transshipment and Measured Fishing Catch policies, which have governed the sector since 2009. As the article demonstrates, some of these policies have had little impact while others have had quite serious consequences. The Moratorium and Transshipment policies, for example, led to disruptions in foreign investment, displacement among local fishers and layoffs in associated industries such as seafood processing. As the sector continues to grapple with uncertainty, investors and workers alike struggle to adapt amid successive regulatory changes.
The Galli’s series of papers (No. 4 - 6) develop a method for identifying unaccompanied minors in the administrative data from the US immigration court and examine the determinants of their access to counsel and case outcomes.
4. Galli, C., & Padilla, T. (2026). The Justice Gap for Unaccompanied Children in US Immigration Court: Rurality, Resources, and Client Characteristics as Determinants of Access to Counsel. Law & Social Inquiry, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2026.10145
Despite their status as a formally protected group in US immigration law, unaccompanied minors are not guaranteed legal representation. Facing removal proceedings in immigration court alone places children at high risk of deportation back to danger and deprivation in their home countries. Limited funding exists for migrant-serving legal aid organizations, and indigent children’s demand for free legal services far outpaces the available supply. This article examines access to counsel among unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings in US immigration court using a newly compiled administrative dataset comprising nearly four hundred thousand cases. We contribute to access-to-justice scholarship on the “justice gap”—the difference between the number of people experiencing civil legal problems who could benefit from legal assistance and those who receive it. Past research on immigrant adults and the broader civil legal realm has focused on geographic factors and resource availability as determinants of access to counsel. We find that these are also important determinants of access to counsel among immigrant children. In addition, we show that client characteristics—namely, gender, age, nationality, and Indigeneity—that potentially shape the viability of the case in immigration court, and, thereby, attorneys’ client selection practices, also act as determinants of access to counsel.
5. Galli, C., & Padilla, T. (2025). Deporting children: Case outcomes for unaccompanied minors facing removal proceedings in U.S. immigration court. Social Forces. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf124
Using an originally compiled dataset of over 200,000 cases of unaccompanied minors decided in US immigration court between 2009 and 2023, this paper asks: what determines whether immigrant children are ordered deported? Past work has examined adults’ cases, focusing on adjudicator characteristics and legal representation as determinants of case outcomes. We add to newer scholarship that has shifted focus to the role of immigrant characteristics in shaping case outcomes. After accounting for legal representation, where, when, and by whom cases are decided, we find that sociodemographic characteristics, which we consider proxies for stigmatized and racialized identities, are key determinants of case outcomes among immigrant children. Concretely, we find that racialized Latino unaccompanied minors face far higher odds of deportation than all other origin groups. Indigenous language speakers are more likely to be ordered deported than Spanish-speaking children. Conversely, English speakers are less likely to be ordered deported than Spanish speakers. Teenage boys are more likely to be ordered deported, suggesting adultification and similar outcomes to male adults in what scholars have called the gendered racial removal program. This research builds on intersectional understandings of immigration enforcement, showing how race, gender, age, language, and Indigeneity contribute to explaining who is subject to deportation from the United States.
6. Galli, C., & Padilla, T. (2025). New Data on Unaccompanied Minors in US Immigration Court (2009–2023). International Migration Review, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183251316528
Lack of data transparency and administrative data quality issues have hindered our understanding of the treatment of unaccompanied minors in the United States to date. This Dispatch from the Field provides new statistics on nearly a half million unaccompanied minors navigating removal proceedings in US immigration courts nationwide between 2009 and 2023 (through March), including population demographics, geographic location of cases, representation rates, and case outcomes. We extrapolated these statistics, even the most basic of which have not been available to the public since 2017, by using a novel approach that we developed to identify unaccompanied minors in administrative data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review. During the study period, only 51% of unaccompanied children were represented by an immigration attorney at any time during their removal proceedings. There are significant geographic and demographic disparities in representation rates. Representation for unaccompanied minors declined almost every year during the first Trump presidency. Nearly half of children's cases (49%) ended in deportation order. More children were ordered deported under the first Trump administration (70% of completed cases) than under either the Obama (51%) or Biden (31%) administrations. Children who were not represented by an attorney were far more likely to be ordered deported.
7. Ipsen, A., & Collins, J. (2026). The vulnerability fix: How U.S. immigration policies institutionalize worker precarity. Critical Sociology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205261453898
This article draws together political economic theories of labor market precarity and theories about the role of difference in structuring labor market inequality to develop the concept of vulnerability fix. We argue that employers and the state have co-constructed a complicated set of programs and policies that have institutionalized unfreedom for a significant subsection of the workforce. At the bottom of the labor market, they have created categories of workers for whom the rules are different. By mobilizing these differences, employers are able to exert greater control over workers, hold down wages, and limit workers’ ability to organize. We refer to this strategy as a vulnerability fix. Focusing on unauthorized labor, guestworker visa programs, and refugee labor, we analyze how employers and the state draw on racial, ethnic, and legal hierarchies to attenuate the rights of some workers and how this also creates precarity for those who labor alongside them.
8. Kwon, H. E. (2026). Homing in perpetual foreignness: non-citizens as ‘hosts’ of global mega event in Dubai. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(10), 2615–2633. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2026.2628463
This research explores temporary migrants’ practices of homing in public space against the backdrop of perpetual foreignness. Drawing on 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, this paper examines how migrants foster a sense of ‘home’ despite their guestworker status. I focus on the ways some migrants – often from middle-class backgrounds, with greater room to manoeuvre in their daily lives – navigate shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion at a global mega event, by assuming roles as volunteer ‘hosts’ alongside Emirati volunteers to present Dubai to a global audience. Through their daily interactions with other migrants, nationals, and tourists, I analyse the homing practices through which they negotiate belonging, while also encountering the boundaries that delimit it inside and outside the event grounds. Such global spectacles function as exceptional spaces, providing a liminal opening from restrictive state policies and revealing the complex narratives of migrants’ (non)belonging. By situating migrants’ homing within this exceptional public space, this paper illuminates the layered ways by which temporary migrants negotiate their roles as both ‘guests’ and ‘hosts’ in stratified urban contexts.
9. Kwon, H. E. (2026). Privileged pariahs: agency of Korean expatriate mothers in the UAE. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(3), 750–769. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2533324
This article examines the scope conditions under which migrant women endure a reduction of agency in a sojourn context. Based on 33 in-depth interviews with mothers of Korean expatriate families in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), this paper explores migrant women’s fluctuating experiences of power across three spheres of life – family, ethnic community, and public space. Despite the privilege associated with their economic status, these women engage in complex negotiations of agency due to their identities as women, mothers, wives, and Korean. In this process, the Korean mothers bear narratives of sacrifice for their family members given the temporary stay of their migration, illustrating the disadvantages that even transnational elites face due to their intersectional identities. By exploring the Korean expatriate mothers’ everyday experiences in the UAE across the three spheres of life, this paper deepens our understanding of how temporality impacts migrant women’s agency.
10. Lata, L. N. (2026). Twin precarities in the platform economy: An interdisciplinary perspective. Geography Compass, 20, Article e70082. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70082
With the rise of neoliberal globalised markets and large-scale irregular migration, temporary migrant labour has become central to the economic growth of the global North within a changing global economy. However, the restructuring of national and regional economies has also brought about the informalisation of labour markets and the fragmentation of labour processes, with migrants being more exposed than other workers to the detrimental risks of wage squeezes and uncertainty associated with securing permanent jobs. Within this context, this review takes a critical look to explore the challenges migrant workers experience while using various digital labour platforms such as Uber, Uber Eats, DoorDash and Hungry Panda, to earn an income. After reviewing existing literature on migration, citizenship, precarious work and digital labour platforms, in this paper, I introduce the concept of ‘twin precarities’ to explore migrant workers' vulnerabilities arising from their non-citizenship status and their involvement in the platform economy, where they often experience algorithmic management but many of them are less familiar with how to navigate or strategically engage with the algorithm, partly due to limited technological skills, a challenge that is also common among non-migrant citizens. ‘Twin precarities’ is a new analytical frame for understanding the lived experience of migrant platform workers as well as for exploring the various and complex entanglements between precarious migrants' emancipatory practices enabled by digital labour platforms and the constraints created by these platforms.
11. Lata, L. N., Copolov, A., & Ray, A. (2026). Introduction: Platform labour in the Global South and Global North. Journal of Sociology, 62(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833261445204
This special issue of the Journal of Sociology explores the variegated nature of digital labour platforms and their operations across the Global South and Global North. In recent years, digital labour platforms have emerged as a significant technological wave, reshaping and reconfiguring the landscapes of labour and the broader economy. However, their emergence and expansion have not followed uniform trajectories across different parts of the world. Within this context, drawing on case studies from Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, France, Sweden and the UK, the contributors examine how platform work is shaped by shared ‘techno-social logics’ while remaining differentiated by local contexts, power relations and modes of contestation.
12. Liu, T., Lata, L. N., & Liu, Y. (2026). Compressed Time, Mobile Labour: Sociotemporal Regimes of Chinese-run Platforms in Australia. Journal of Sociology, 62(2), 277-297. https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833261445206
This article examines how Chinese digital platforms export tight temporal governance, characterised by algorithmic urgency, work intensification, and short-term monetisation, into Global North labour markets. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025), it analyses two Chinese-owned platforms operating in Australia: Bigo Live, a livestreaming platform, and HungryPanda, a food delivery platform serving Asian diasporic communities. Rather than treating Australia as a uniformly protected labour regime, the article approaches it as a typical Global North dualised core–periphery system, where stable working conditions are concentrated within a protected core while peripheral workers face increasing time insecurity, despite a broader discourse of fairness and protection that is not consistently realised in practise. Within this context, Chinese platforms extend domestic labour practises across borders and amplify pre-existing forms of time insecurity, along with racialised understandings of international labour, through platformised governance, algorithmic incentives, and migration precarity.
13. McCallum, D. G., & Atterberry, A. (2026). Defining the contours of black motility. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2026.2654968
This introductory article advances a Black motility perspective to deepen scholarly understandings of racialised mobility in a global context. Building on motility theory, we conceptualise mobility not simply as movement but as a socially structured capacity shaped by unequal access to resources, competencies, and opportunities. We argue that existing analyses of Black mobility remain overly constrained by Euro-American frameworks and often reproduce reductive narratives that position Blackness primarily through immobility, constraint, or forced displacement. In response, this Special Issue foregrounds the agency, creativity, and strategic navigation that characterise Black engagements with space across diverse contexts, including East Asia and the Caribbean. By bringing the ‘mobility turn’ into conversation with Black geographies, we propose Black motility as an analytical lens that captures both the structural limitations imposed by global racial hierarchies and the dynamic ways Black individuals and communities rework, resist, and reimagine these constraints. In doing so, we decentre dominant epistemologies of race and movement, highlighting how Blackness is continuously rearticulated across different socio-political and cultural settings. The contributions to this Special Issue collectively demonstrate that Black mobility is not only shaped by restriction but also by possibility, innovation, and the pursuit of alternative spatial futures. This introduction outlines the conceptual foundations of Black motility and situates the included articles within a broader agenda for rethinking mobility, race, and inequality in contemporary scholarship.
14. McKenzie, L., Harris, A., & Baldassar, L. (2026). Precarity on the move: the relative economic precarity of mobile youth moving to Australia. Journal of Youth Studies, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2026.2677031
Analyses of precarity often focus on how insecure employment, careers, finances, and geographies influence people’s lives for the worse, with young people understood as especially precarious in their economic stability and transitions to adulthood. This article analyses accounts of precarity amongst middling transnationally mobile youth, drawing from 24 semi-structured interviews incoming to Australia, and longitudinal survey data. We show that experiences of economic precarity are impacted by their access to work, government support, ability to access or sustain visas, and access to support from family and partners. By drawing on migration scholars’ observations that transnational mobility can be privileged and precarious, and youth scholars’ discussions of how different backgrounds—and ‘welfare mixes’ of state, labour market, and family support—inform precarity, we contribute a fluid and contested notion of mobile youth’s economic precarity. Using Antonucci’s (2018) framework of welfare mixes, we propose that precarity is mutable: emerging differently across contexts, interacting with family and partners, and being governed by visa, financial, employment, and migration-related policies and circumstances.
15. Miaci, E., Calabretta, A., & Cela, E. (2025). Balancing motherhood and work in migration: the experiences of Albanian women in Italy. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2601344
This study explores the complex dynamics of work–family reconciliation among Albanian migrant mothers in Italy. Drawing on qualitative research involving 30 semi-structured interviews, it examines how these women navigate their dual roles as workers and caregivers within a socio-institutional context that places a heavy caregiving burden on women. The findings identify four configurations of work–family balance: full-time mothers, balancing mothers, struggling mothers, and forced mothers. These categories reveal how structural barriers – such as limited access to welfare services, gendered labour market segregation, and the absence of extended family networks – intersect with individual agency and cultural norms. While some women successfully integrate into the workforce with strong social support, others face insurmountable obstacles, leading to economic dependence and social isolation. The study highlights the intersectional nature of migrant motherhood, emphasising the role of migration status, gender norms, and socioeconomic conditions in shaping women’s experiences. By providing an in-depth analysis of the Albanian community, this research contributes to broader discussions on migration, gender, and labour market integration in Southern Europe. It calls for policy interventions to enhance migrant women’s access to employment and childcare resources, ensuring greater social and economic inclusion.
16. Moralli, M. (2026). The right to the discourse: Grassroots artistic production as a space for reconstructing aesthetic structures on migration in the city of Marseille. City, Culture and Society, 35, Article 100708. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2026.100708
The contribution investigates the role of grassroots urban artistic practices in countering the narrative distortions characterising migration discourses. It integrates recent scholarship in migration studies with insights from two influential feminist and decolonial intellectuals: bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa. Drawing upon this theoretical frame, the article presents some key findings that emerged from a three-year fieldwork in Marseille on arts as a space of resistance to counter current regimes of visibility. The first concerns a critical reflection on the process of essentialisation surrounding the category of “migrant artist”. The second reflects on how mobility practices shape artists’ cultural production. The third focuses on arts as discursive political spaces inspiring the transformation of migration imaginaries. The contribution concludes with the elaboration of the concept of the “right to the discourse”, which, inspired by the notion of the “right to the city”, refers to the right to reappropriate discourses on migration, exile, and memory to create counter-hegemonic imaginative and aesthetic structures.
17. Somaiah, B. C. (2026). (Im)migrant emotive maternal temporalities & cultural splicing in Coorg mothering. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(6), 1536–1555. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2594856
Drawing links between (im)migrant maternal emotions and temporalities within intra-Asian migration contexts, this paper considers new Indian (im)migrant Kodavathee mothering across three cultural domains. Firstly: feminised, emotive exigencies of mothering; secondly rationalised temporalities of mothering in modernity; and thirdly emotive temporalities viz-a-viz the relational. Just as the detraditionalisation thesis has been critiqued for its a-temporal and binary aspects, studies of mothering in migration too must consider the unique emotions and temporalities embodied within contemporary immigrant mothering in superdiverse Asian contexts beyond here-there, and now-then. Drawing on broader qualitative interviews with 33 (im)migrant Kodavathees in urban India and Singapore, but centring the voices of 14 interlocutors, (im)migrant ‘emotive maternal temporalities’ across affective rural-urban space–time continuums is proposed. Extending Smitha Radhakrishnan’s ‘cultural streamlining’ ([2011]. Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), i.e. the gendered cultivation of appropriate cultural distinction within the family by global Indians, this paper secondarily argues that ‘cultural splicing’ occurs at the interstices of temporal-emotional and ethnicised, (im)migrant mothering to be ‘appropriately Coorg’. Kodavathee (Coorg women’s) reproductive domestic scapes (Nava [2006]. “Domestic Cosmopolitanism and Structures of Feeling: The Specificity of London.” In The Situated Politics of Belonging, edited by N. Yuval-Davis, K. Kannabiran, and U. Vieten, 42–53. London: Sage) are maintained away from the land of the ancestors via strategic and sensitive balancing of contingent (im)migrant timelines and mothering-for-ethnicity practices.
18. Yi, S. (2026). Temporal acrobatics: the intersection of temporary migration, care work, and, corporeality. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(10), 2673–2694. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2026.2628469
Most migrant care workers in South Korea are Joseonjok migrants, ethnic Koreans from Northeastern China. Korean Chinese migrants have an ambiguous identity, with a shared Korean ethnicity but a different social culture and citizenship. The ambiguity necessitates sophisticated immigration control technologies, especially given the official desire of the South Korean state to incorporate Korean Chinese populations selectively. The visa pathways between temporary Working Visit Status (H-2 visa) and long-term Overseas Korean Status (F-4 visa) provide an apt site for observing temporal techniques of bordering and in/exclusion. Using migrant care work in South Korea as a case study, the paper interrogates the relationship between control and time norms in three timescales, namely the temporality of immigration control, the control of time in a gendered work regime, and migrants’ lifecycle expectations. The visa pathways to long-term status open for migrant care workers when they demonstrate three disciplinary traits, quality, docility, and invisibility, which are considered desirable by the immigration authorities. However, demonstrating such traits requires migrants to acrobatically maneuver their timescales to mediate contradictions.
19. Yi, S., & Paul, A. M. (2026). Temporariness as fact of life: the lived experience of temporary migration in the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(10), 2557–2574. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2026.2628456
This Special Issue examines the lived experiences of temporary migrants across major destination regions. It challenges the idea that permanence is always the goal, showing that many migrants live in prolonged temporary status and still build a sense of home and belonging. The articles show that temporary migrants are diverse, that temporary status profoundly shapes their everyday life, that migrants' symbolic capital shapes their temporary experiences, and that migration policies are both rigid and shifting. Despite these constraints, this collection shows that temporary migrants are not passive; they find ways to exercise agency within a system built on precarity and exclusion.
20. You, T., & Li, H. (2026). Chain migration hub: interconnected migration flows in China’s southwest borderlands amid BRI-driven industrialization in a neijuan era. Asian Ethnicity, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2026.2632139
This study develops the concept of a “chain migration hub” through an examination of three interconnected migration flows in Ruili, Yunnan, on China’s southwest border. It analyzes the relocation of industrial capital from coastal China, the movement of Myanmar immigrant labor, and the arrival of rural Chinese men seeking foreign spouses. The article argues that domestic socioeconomic pressures associated with “neijuan” and the Belt and Road Initiative’s borderland industrialization strategy have jointly transformed Ruili into a hub where heterogeneous migration flows intersect and mutually reinforce one another. Ruili thus reveals the changing relationship between development, mobility, labor, and intimacy in China’s borderlands.