International Journal of Migration and Border Studies (4 papers in press)

Regular Issues

• Contemporary Visual Artists from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania: Up/Rooted in Mobile Careers and Impacts on Feelings towards Home(land)  
  by Emma Duester 
  Abstract: This paper explores the changing and continuous patterns of geographic mobilities and homes across contemporary visual artists' careers. It exposes the impacts of mobile careers on feelings towards mobile work and home(land). This longitudinal study draws upon two sets of interviews with 15 visual artists from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia at the emerging stage in their careers in 2013 and at the established stage in their careers in 2021. This longitudinal study highlights the adverse career challenges for Eastern European visual artists, including having to leave their homeland and having to work across Europe to progress and maintain their careers. While the established career stage is often associated with fulfilment and satisfaction, this study finds that it can become laden with ambivalent feelings towards this mobile career. This new knowledge can be used to consider policymaking around career sustainability and to ensure artists well-being.
  Keywords: artists; mobile careers; home; transnational practices; longitudinal research; Europe; Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJMRM.2024.10065462
   
  
• Border mobility, state power, and war: refugees’ experiences of crossing the Turkish-Syrian border  
  by Özge Biner 
  Abstract: Since the armed conflict in Syria, the Turkish state has reinforced its authority over the mobility of people with the goal of conditioning and benefiting from cross-border mobility. Depending on the transnational dynamics and the political economy of the war, the Turkish state has adopted different strategies, technologies, and protocols to govern cross-border movements. These processes have generated performative encounters and fluid relations among state agents, non-state armed actors, smugglers, and border crossers. For those who cross the border, these encounters determine their subject position vis-a-vis state power. Based on six years of ethnographic inquiry conducted on the Turkish-Syrian border (2016-2022), I explore the political meaning of cross-border mobility by focusing on the experiences of Syrian refugees and analysing the logics and practices of human mobility governance and its relationship to the spatial concentration of state power across the border.
  Keywords: human mobility; human smuggling; border crossing experiences; Syrian refugees; Syrian war; Turkey; border.
  
  

Special Issue on: Border Control and Migrants Rights

• Governmental practices of regularisation: assessment of eligibility criteria in Canadas 1973 Adjustment of Status Program  
  by David Moffette 
  Abstract: In the contested politics of mobility, programs to regularise undocumented immigrants act simultaneously as progressive tools for social inclusion, and as bordering devices organised around states’ assessment of desirability. This article studies these dynamics during the most significant regularisation program in Canada’s history, the 1973 Adjustment of Status Program. Drawing on an analysis of institutional archival material, parliamentary debates, and news articles from that era, the article explores the logics and practices of governmental actors involved in designing, promoting, and implementing the program, paying close attention to criteria of inclusion and exclusion. It shows how, constrained by a short timeline and the pressure of advocacy groups, government officials repeatedly opted to ease the assessment of eligibility criteria. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that a politics of regularisation is fundamentally a politics of negotiation, and draws lessons that could inform contemporary programs.
  Keywords: immigration; regularisation; amnesty; undocumented; adjustment of status program; Canada; desirability.
  
  
• The role of stability in the reception of refugees in Zambia  
  by Nicholas Maple 
  Abstract: Despite the utility of securitisation theory in developing understandings of state behaviour towards refugee movement, a small body of work has questioned some of the broader assumptions that underpin it. This paper builds on these critiques, by interrogating the assumption that states frame all movement of refugees (cross-border and within the territory of the host state) as entirely negative. Using the case study of Zambia, the paper shows how the reality is more complex, with several contradictions existing at the heart of responses to refugee movement. The paper proposes the connected concept of stability to better understand the relationship between refugee movement and refugee reception policies. This is because the problem of refugees can be understood conceptually as one of instability. Stopping all refugee movement is rarely the overarching aim of a reception policy on the continent. Rather, viewed through a stability lens, reception policies are focused on managing movement.
  Keywords: refugees; Southern Africa; mobility; security; Zambia.