Comparative Migration Studies最新文献

Ethiopia is one of the major origins for international migrants to the Middle East in Africa regardless of the risks and the abuses that migrants face. The study aims to analyse the determinants of international migration of Ethiopians to the Middle East and its impact on the income of households staying behind particularly in the Dessie Zuria district of the Amhara region in Ethiopia. Data were randomly collected from 346 households and analysed using descriptive statistics, logit regression, and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) models. The logit regression analysis indicates that bigger family size, network with migrants/returnees, and the presence of peer/family pressure influence the probability of international migration positively. On the contrary, being a male household head, ownership of larger farmland and livestock, and participation in additional non-farm activities determine international migration negatively. The findings from the PSM model revealed that international migration increased the annual income of migrant-sending households by 13,079.51 ETB per year over non-migrant sending households. However, the benefits enjoyed by the families staying behind have been at the expense of migrants, whose income is hard-earned and they often take a risky route to reach the destination regions. The findings call for an integrated policy approach to control population pressure that depletes the key financial and physical assets of households in the origin and thus forces individuals to look for alternative livelihood strategies such as migration. Location-specific policy interventions are needed to create non-farm and alternative livelihoods, improve agricultural productivity, and access information to reduce exaggerated and misleading information about the destination areas.

This special issue of Comparative Migration Studies on the occasion of the IMISCOE 2021 Conference with the theme "Crossing borders, connecting cultures" features five invited contributions by several conference speakers as well as an article by the host university.

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between development and outgoing international student mobility (ISM) for the years 2003-2018 using data from UNESCO. Starting from migration transition theory, we expect that development and outgoing migration follows an inverted U-shape due to changes in capabilities and aspirations of populations. As predicted, we find that outgoing ISM also follows this pattern. Probing deeper into this finding, we investigated whether students from countries of different levels of development favor different destination countries, focusing on destination countries' academic ranking, GDP per capita, and linguistic and colonial ties. We find that these destination country characteristics indeed have different effects for students from origin countries with different stages of development, and that these effects cannot simply be reduced to a dichotomy between developed/developing countries. Together, the findings highlight the nonlinearity of ISM processes. In turn this opens up new avenues of research regarding the diversity of international student populations.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, people have been worried about COVID-19. As one of the risk groups, persons aged 65 and older are especially vulnerable. Additionally, minorities and migrants are hit harder by the pandemic than natives. Using data from the TransAge survey, a study including over 3000 older persons (65+) living in Switzerland and Italy, we show that the levels of worry about the pandemic are significantly higher among Italian international migrants living in Switzerland than among Swiss natives. We are not able to fully explain the difference using sociodemographic variables, the COVID-19 situation at the time of the interview, and international migrants' transnationalism behavior. Nevertheless, transnationalism explains a large part of the difference in worry between the two groups and our study sheds light on the importance of two specific transnational aspects, having Swiss nationality and voting behavior, for the prevention of elevated levels of worry of international migrants.

The study of international migration and responses to it has experienced rapid growth in the last three decades: an institutionalisation of migration studies. This paper identifies and specifies infrastructural and semantic elements of institutionalisation by establishing a global Directory of Migration Research Institutions identifying 282 institutes focused on migration research that were operative between 1945 and 2020. We observe a clear geographical concentration in the Americas and Europe and find that most institutes are in countries with higher economic development (GDP) and net immigration (not emigration). Using this evidence, we suggest that the institutionalisation of migration studies is driven by concerns and ideas produced in high-income 'destination' countries. We thus show that uneven knowledge production in migration studies is not only caused by exclusive categories, language, or journal policies, but also by a structural problem at an earlier stage: because of fewer resources invested in the creation of institutionalised academic knowledge structures, lower income countries have fewer possibilities to shape the semantic features of the field of migration studies, by which we mean the identification of subjects of interest, concepts, narratives, and priorities.