International Migration最新文献

By tracing the development of South Korea's legal-passport regimes within the historical and geopolitical settings, this paper examines how exit restrictions have been securitised through their interplay with inter-Korean dynamics and state relations. The demarcation of the 38th parallel between the two Koreas not only reshaped geographical accessibility in the region by transforming what was once internal migration to emigration, but also the regulatory mechanism for containment within the Korean peninsula. The securitisation of departure was institutionalised and operationalised through administrative discretion, exercised under authoritarian governance and legitimised by delegated legislation, thereby hollowing out the constitutional essence of the right to freedom of movement. As a space of contested jurisdiction, departure served as a critical site of state power, a foundation of state identity and a battleground between law and politics.

Assisted Return (AR) programmes have grown in number and size over the past decade and there is an increasing body of evidence on these programmes. However, the existing evidence has not yet been systematically synthesised. Recognising the controversy over the programmes, this article reviews the current evidence regarding the effectiveness and effects of AR programmes that aim to facilitate sustainable reintegration of return migrants. Reviewing 46 sources, the findings highlight the different programme modalities, contextual factors and individual and group factors that influence sustainable reintegration. Overall, the available evidence suggests that despite short-term relief from AR programmes, there is overall scant and—where it exists—often highly contextual and relatively weak evidence of longer-term effects on sustainable reintegration. The review is limited by conceptual, methodological and geographic heterogeneity in the available studies. The article concludes by suggesting practical implications and highlighting potential for future research on support for sustainable reintegration.

This article examines how labour migration is governed and politicised in Croatia, a post-socialist EU member state undergoing a rapid transition from emigration to immigration. Drawing on policy analysis, party manifestos, and media sources, it traces Croatia's shift toward liberalised recruitment of third-country nationals amidst labour shortages and demographic decline. At the same time, migration has become increasingly politicised, particularly during the 2024 national elections. The article introduces the concept of segmented migration governance to capture this dual logic: while policy frameworks have liberalised to meet market needs, institutional oversight remains weak, integration underdeveloped, and political narratives fragmented. Technocratic depoliticisation by the ruling centre-right coexists with cultural threat narratives from far-right actors, generating a stratified political field. By situating Croatia within broader debates on migration governance, populism, and post-socialist transitions, the article highlights the need to better understand how labour migration regimes are shaped by institutional legacies, elite strategies, and regional political economies. The analysis concludes by recommending stronger oversight of recruitment agencies, enhanced labour protections, and more inclusive integration policies to ensure the long-term sustainability and legitimacy of Croatia's migration model.

Overstayers—travellers entering a country with a valid visa but staying beyond the initially authorised period—are a blind spot of migration research. Past studies claim that overstaying is indeed the main gateway to irregular migration in Europe, but few estimates exist. This paper explores three new methods to estimate the inflows of overstayers. We concentrate on the Schengen area as destination, given its relevance in global migration flows, and on non-European countries as origins, since for travellers from these countries commercial flights are the most likely transportation mode to Europe. Our methods rely on aggregate information on incoming and departing passengers from all airports in the Schengen Area, and on Facebook users' mobility data. In the first method, we compute ‘net air travel flows’ as the difference between incoming and outgoing passengers; we then deduce net regular migration (using data from Eurostat and the QuantMig project) from ‘net air travel flows’ to obtain ‘unaccounted net flows’, which we hold to equate approximately to newly incoming overstayers with short-stay visas for 2019. In the second method, building on the first estimate, we employ the logic of gravity models to project estimates for later years. In the third method, we build on the intuitions of the first method but use net migration figures from data on Facebook users' cross-border movements. Substantively, the results of the different methods converge, indicating around 450,000 new overstayers who entered the whole of the Schengen Area in 2019 with short-stay visas. Analyses for the following years obtained with the second and third method match and are in line with changes in travel policies during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 and 2021), suggesting a significant reduction in the number of overstayers for those years and an uptick for the years 2022–2023. By uncovering the size and scope of the overstaying population we shed light on a highly contested issue in the public debate and ultimately contribute to raise awareness on the constructed nature of the ‘regular’ versus ‘irregular’ framing of migration.

The former Soviet Union's restrictions on citizens' foreign travel or emigration were notoriously draconian. Yet what replaced them in the fifteen independent states of the post-Soviet region has not been well analysed. Outside the Baltic republics, the monolithic and prohibitive policies of the Soviet past have given way to a patchwork of restrictions with more complex motivations reflecting the diversity of contemporary Eurasian states. However, while many more people in the region can travel abroad when they wish, exit remains a privilege, rather than an enforceable right. Post-Soviet states' exit policies increasingly resemble those in other primarily authoritarian contexts around the world, albeit somewhat marked by Eurasian regimes' high levels of both coercive capacity and informality and the weakness of labour and the left. We conclude that the USSR's fixation on preventing exit was historically exceptional as a policy on foreign travel, rather than paradigmatic, and severely limited the regime's own migration policy options. In a paradox, the relaxation of blanket prohibitions has only increased the post-Soviet state's freedom to tailor restrictions on exit to its interests far more effectively than the USSR ever could.