Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration - 1-2: The End of Migration, Aug 2024

In this article, I combine my observation of Indonesia’s desire to end labour outmigration with scholarly reflections on the end of migration studies. Challenging the orthodoxy that takes for granted sending countries’ support of migration as presumed in current optimism of the migration-development paradigm, I trace Indonesia’s successive development plans to demonstrate the treatment of migration as a less-preferred option for job creation, exploring how postcolonial trajectories entail the desire to keep development in situ and lead to persisting view of migration as deeply undesirable. The recent shift to governance works as a way to both discipline workers through required documentation and to allow the government to eschew accountability by advancing a discourse on protection. As the state sets out a future anticipation where those defined as unskilled no longer migrate, a question arises as to how we build a meaningful scholarship around migration as a non-priority and the process towards making a certain migrant category disappear? My critique of development planning turns the analytical lens back to the state, which I see as a way to go on with the study of migration in a more ethical, pro-migrant manner. Rejecting the trap of methodological nationalism, I offer an approach that seizes of the ‘postcolonial moment’ of migration.

Investigating the multi-layered mobility of Southeast Asian irregular farm workers in rural Taiwan, this article examines the formation of their mobility in a physical, geographical, occupational and socio-economic sense. Focusing on frequent movement in these four aspects, this article coins the term ‘fettered mobility’ for workers’ constant relocation in the villages’ informal farm labour market. In tandem with the focus of this Special Issue on the ongoing transformations of migration at the crossroad between the legal, social and economic obstacles dictated by nation states and the market, and new patterns of movement, this article shows how ‘fettered mobility’ is an unintentional result of the Taiwanese state’s mobility regime, which regulates foreign nationals’ mobility by categorizing a hierarchical legal status. Fettered mobility is facilitated by the translocal migrant community constituted by the co-ethnic link between migrant workers and migrant spouse farmers, and also by the inter-ethnic link between the migrant community on the one hand and Taiwanese farmers and unlicensed brokers on the other. When migration is reconfiguring at a global, regional and local scale, fettered mobility is an assemblage in which the state, market and individual amalgamate into a networked, mobile, irregular and precarious labour force in which unprotected migrant workers are vulnerable to the state’s power to repatriate. Repatriation is an omnipresent threat, and anyone who knows of a migrant worker’s fettered mobility can put an end to their migration. Presenting fettered mobility as an assemblage, this article enriches the ongoing debate on the relationship between mobility and immobility and underlines its conditionality and instability.

For the French in London, as for other citizens of the European Union, the Brexit process resulted in the end of free movement for EU citizens relocating to the United Kingdom and affected the rights of those already living there. This article traces how Brexit shaped the spatial choices of middle-class French citizens whose status in London changed as they became international migrants with diminished rights in the United Kingdom. This case study, based on longitudinal ethnographic research between 2014 and 2022, sheds light on how relative privilege operates in migration processes and draws attention to the diversity of experience among middle-class migrants when new bordering arrangements are enacted.

This article addresses how transient international refugees create new digital reconstructions of home-making when physically and mentally shuttling between two or more places of residence. Worldwide crises force millions of international refugees to adapt to new ways of constant remigration between their temporary places of residence and their home country. Instead of settling in a new place of residence, many international refugees often have difficulties feeling at home where they do not want to be. This article focuses on current refugees from Ukraine in Europe who shuttle between their homeland and their host country. The actual process of the refugees’ constant balancing between physically and mentally leaving and arriving at their home and host countries is coined ‘shuttle refuge’ in this article. It emphasizes the loss of a permanent home during refuge and portrays the necessity of digital reconstructions of home-making with friends and family via communication media due to the unavailability of a constant physical home. After addressing the legal circumstances that currently contribute to the ongoing state of temporariness, this article illustrates practices and effects of the shuttle refugee through a group interview with six recent Ukrainian refugees in Germany at the beginning of the year 2023 to shed light on the interviewees’ adaption to a new cultural environment and their efforts in digital home-making practices with their families and friends.

Review of: Transnational Student Return Migration and Megacities in China: Practices of Cityzenship, Zhe Wang (2023)

Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 155 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-81992-082-2, h/bk, EUR 39.99

ISBN 978-9-81992-083-9, e-book, EUR 32.09