Blog post by Giuliana Sanò, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

My Identities article, ‘Producing labour stratification: how migration policies affect the working, living and housing conditions of migrant farmworkers’, examines the  relationship between migration and labour stratification in the city of Vittoria, located in south-eastern Sicily. This agricultural district provides a valuable case study of the evolving patterns of (e)migration in Italy.

Historically marked by emigration, Vittoria underwent a significant transformation in the 1960s, rapidly becoming a destination for workers from Tunisia. At that time, Italy had not yet developed a comprehensive immigration policy, as its primary focus was to curb domestic emigration, particularly from the south. Consequently, Tunisian male workers who arrived in the late 1960s provided predominantly family-run local businesses with a crucial labour force, replacing local workers.

The exponential growth in profits within the local agricultural sector, described as the ‘miracle of the green gold’ by local economic figures, was largely attributed to the expansion of greenhouse farming. Unlike other agricultural districts in Italy, Vittoria's cultivation of vegetables under plastic and polyethylene covers enabled year-round production, mitigating seasonal risks. However, the crucial role of migrant labour in this sector's success is often overlooked in economic narratives.

Blog post by Ester Gallo, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
 
My Identities article, ‘Utility workers: religion and the migratory stratification of foreign nurses across generations’, explores the role of Catholic institutions in shaping Indian nurses’ mobility pathways to Italy. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the global demand for nurses, and in many parts of the Global North (such as Europe, UK, Canada or the US) the provision of healthcare relies on the recruitment of  staff educated in the Global South. India represents one of the most important sources for this international recruitment of qualified nurses, who tend to be women from poorer groups.
​
The international mobility of migrant nurses raises numerous challenges. When countries invest in the training of healthcare workers ‘for export’ – often at the expense of educational quality, workers’ rights and retention – this can make it difficult for their own country to address healthcare needs due to nurse shortages. In receiving countries, foreign-born nurses are often hired through temporary contracts; mass emergency recruitment coexists with periods of unemployment, resulting in precarious working conditions.

Blog post by Roberta Altin, University of Trieste, Italy
​
How do memories, histories and representations of past migrations influence current migration processes in a border region? How do migration processes shape a borderscape, and how are memories interwoven across different historical layers?
​
Migration studies have grown significantly over the last two decades, leading to specialization in specific areas. While academic interest in migration has increased since the so-called 'migration crisis', the connection between migration studies and memory studies, especially regarding how perceptions of the past impact immigrant integration, is rare.

It is useful to view migration alongside integration contexts such as cities. My Identities article, ‘Displaced memories in the Trieste border area: a never-ending historical entanglement’, focuses on the Trieste border area, known for its cultural diversity due to the historical presence of different languages and migrations, and intertwined socio-cultural dynamics. Time plays a key role, and public spaces, materials and oral memory sources are also examined. 

Blog post by Saime Özçürümez, Baskent University, Türkiye and Pınar Sönmez, Bilkent University, Türkiye
 
Scholars working on highly skilled migrants (HSMs) portray them as privileged cosmopolitans who can move effortlessly across borders due to high competition for attracting talent. However, little is known about how HSMs narrate their everyday experiences while reflecting on their sense of belonging. How do the HSMs reconcile national attachments with a global outlook? How do they navigate the complex socio-political landscapes of their host countries?
 
Our Identities article, ‘Patriotic cosmopolitans in Budapest: narratives of belonging among highly skilled migrants’, challenges the dominant framing and research on HSMs as essentially economic actors. We focus on their experience of international mobility and examine how they think through their identity and sense of belonging in complex socio-political settings. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s assertion that one can identify as both a cosmopolitan and remain loyal to country of origin, we conceptualize cosmopolitanism and patriotism as intertwined spatial and emotional attachments constituting the foundations of HSMs’ sense of belonging. 

Blog post by Ruxandra Ana, University of Łódź, Poland

​My Identities article, ‘Modes of embodiment: exercising agency through Afro-Cuban dance’, was inspired by a conversation with Alvaro, a Berlin-based dancer and dance instructor and one of my research participants after the opening of the exhibition O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies, hosted in 2023 by the House of World Cultures in Berlin. One of the installations in the exhibition, Table of Goods by Portuguese visual artist Grada Kilomba, consisted of a pyramid of soil surrounded by candles, indented with notches filled with coffee, sugar and cocoa, to symbolize the violence that facilitates modern pleasures, and serving as a metaphor for trauma and the colonial wound.

Alvaro spoke enthusiastically about this particular installation, which resonated with our on-going conversations about the fetishization of Black and Brown bodies as part of broader processes of commodification of Cuban music and dance on the island and in European contexts. Our talks inevitably touched upon the experience of racial discrimination in Berlin and the German desire and occasional positive valorization of Blackness, almost unequivocally connotated negatively in Cuba, and Alvaro was not an isolated example.

Blog post by Amir Aziz, University of California, Berkeley
 
Situated in the scenic port area, the downtown neighbourhood Noailles is frequently touted as the heart of multicultural diversity in the French Mediterranean city of Marseille. Since the 1990s, Noailles has been subjected to waves of urban renewal programmes, such as the Euroméditerranée project, that sought to revitalize Marseille’s downtown by building new offices, hotels and tourist amenities. This construction of expensive projects has threatened to drive out longtime Noailles residents and shopowners, many of whom are of Muslim and northern/western African origin.

In October 2018, locals protested the decision to tear down Place Jean-Jaurès, a public square affectionately called La Plaine (‘The Plains’) that hosted free local activities and markets. The city deployed riot police to quell protests and guard the construction zone, erecting a costly 2.5-metre concrete wall to prohibit access. Yet, commercial redevelopment has not led to concrete living improvements for locals.

Blog post by Marcus Nicolson, Institute for Minority Rights, Italy

Scotland has been described as having a progressive politics towards immigration and migrant integration, which is closely tied to the civic brand of nationalism that has been promoted by the Scottish government in the 21st century.

But what effects do these narratives have on young adult migrants who have made Scotland their home, and how do they relate to these narratives when negotiating their own identities? These are the key questions which are explored in my Identities article, ‘Transnational identities and agency: navigating everyday life as a young adult migrant in Glasgow, UK'.

Blog post by Chiara Martini, University of Milan, Italy
​
For anyone who has spent time in Athens in recent years – especially those involved in migration research or work – Victoria Square is a place they have undoubtedly passed through and become familiar with. Victoria Square, located in central Athens, offers a unique lens through which to understand the complexities of migration and social stratification in contemporary Europe.

​In my Identities article, ‘Victoria Square, Athens: migratory movements and social stratifications in the centre of the Greek capital’, I explore how this seemingly ordinary space reflects larger migration dynamics, showcasing the intersection of diverse communities, solidarity efforts and social tensions in urban environments

Blog post by Alyssa Marie Kvalvaag, Nord University, Norway

When questions around migration appear in a European context, the concept ‘integration’ often follows. Despite being a well-established concept within migration policies and studies, many scholars have highlighted that integration is characterized by ambiguities and multiple, often unclear, meanings (e.g., Grillo 2011; Kutor, Arku, and Bandauko 2023; Vertovec 2020).

In my Identities article, ‘Contesting integration discourses: migrant organizations and epistemic resistance in northern Norway’, I explore how leaders of migrant organizations use and contest integration discourses by drawing on their experiential ways of knowing and doing. Migrant organizations are understood as organizations created by migrants and run (primarily) for migrants. I argue that leaders of migrant organizations use integration discourses to ‘do’ multiple things, at times subverting common ways of knowing about integration and carving out new spaces of possibilities in thinking about what integration is and may be. 

Blog post by Sara Amadasi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

In our Identities article, ‘Keeping two cultures together’: the binary construction of belonging in narratives of professionals on children’s cultural identity’, we investigated how the sense of belonging and cultural identity of children with a migration background[1] are socially constructed by Italian professionals who work at schools and in social services with young people. We also investigated whether narratives told by interviewees are affected by the gender of the children they are referring to.
​
Our article is based on interviews conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project, ‘Child-Up: Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a Way of Upgrading Policies of Participation’. This project investigated the opportunities of children with a migration background to actively exercise their agency to change their social and cultural conditions. While the project involved several groups of people, our Identities article analyzed interviews conducted with teachers, educators, social workers and mediators in three cities in northern Italy.

Blog post by Andrea Calabretta, University of Padua, Italy; Francesco Della Puppa, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy; and Giulia Storato, University of Padua, Italy
​
‘It is this fact of locomotion, as I have said, that defines the very nature of society’: this is what sociologist Robert Park[1] said exactly a century ago, seeing mobility as the characteristic and founding feature of humanity. It is no coincidence that the book in which he makes these considerations is titled ‘the City’ and brings together a set of essays on urban life. If people move naturally, at some point they also need to come to the – provisional – end of their journeys. To stop, at least for a moment, and to take root.
 
How then do migrants settle in cities and territories that are already inhabited? How do they develop relationships with the previous inhabitants? And with the future migrants, who will arrive after them?

​These questions have permeated the sociology of migration and urban sociology for over a hundred years. Our Identities article, ‘The migratory crossroads of Alte Ceccato: an emblematic case of migratory stratification’, attempts to analyze these questions from a new perspective. While migration studies have kept the ‘camera’ fixed on migrants and their complex movements, we focus on a specific place – the hamlet of Alte Ceccato in Italy – in order to observe the stratification and interaction between different ages of migration.

Blog post by Aino Korvensyrjä, University of Helsinki

In the first week of May 2018, there was some moral panic in the German media. National and regional media reported on a ‘mob’ of 150–200 black Africans violently stopping deportation and attacking the enforcement patrol in a reception centre for asylum seekers in Ellwangen, Baden-Württemberg. After the 2015 ‘Summer of Migration’, when popular sympathies for refugee-migrants had peaked in Germany, such narratives of dangerous black and brown refugee-migrant men were a standard feature in the German media and public debate. This continuous panic created public acceptance of deportations of asylum seekers and the increasingly ruthless control policies at external EU borders.
 
My Identities article, ‘Criminalizing black solidarity: Dublin deportations, raids, and racial statecraft in southern Germany’, looks beyond the media and policy debate on ‘Ellwangen’. It examines how the police and courts managed local conflicts over deportation during an intense campaign to increase so-called Dublin deportations. These are deportations to the first country of entry in Europe. For the authorities, a fingerprint registered into the EURODAC database by another European country is enough to begin the deportation proceedings. West Africans were then a key target group of Dublin deportations, and Italy was the main country of destination. The article draws attention to a series of police raids targeting West African migrants living in southern German asylum camps in 2018, including the above-mentioned raid in Ellwangen. In all cases, police accused West African men of rioting against deportation enforcement to Italy, and local courts prosecuted numerous individuals. My article explores how the police and local courts thus suppressed anti-deportation protests and how their practices produced race.

Blog post by Anne-Iris Romens, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy, and Francesca Vianello, University of Padua, Italy

In the context of the hardening of the political discourse, skilled migrations are presented as one of the few remaining acceptable ways of entering European countries. A recent example is the parliamentary debate in France regarding the adoption of the increasingly restrictive law on immigration, which further limits access to residence permits and social rights.
 
Despite this rhetoric, the knowledge and skills of migrants are rarely valued in the job market. Migrants are mainly forced to accept jobs which enjoy little social recognition. Migrant women, in particular, tend to be confined to low-pay jobs in the care sector, including when they hold university degrees.
 
These examples illustrate the ambiguity of the concept of ‘skills’. The notion works as a social marker according to which some bodies are marked as skilled, and others as unskilled, with class, racialization and gender having a significant impact. In this field, recruiters have a key role in defining whose abilities are to be compensated and whose are to be hidden.

Blog post by Ioana Vrabiescu, Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands
​
In my Identities article, ‘Detention is morally exhausting’: melancholia of detention centres in France’, I invite the reader to reflect on two main issues: the perceived role of the law and the legal system and how these perceptions are translated into the organization of migration control. The perception of the law as fundamental to the state practices allows people to continue working alongside the migration control apparatus despite their beliefs that the law is not perfect. The tension in this context lies in the interplay between the perceived fundamental role of the law in the functioning of the state and individual beliefs about a deficient legal system. Despite these beliefs, individuals continue to work in the migration control apparatus based on their understanding of the law's fundamental importance. Within the migration control apparatus, I chose migrant detention centres as those sites that best reflect these ethical frictions, resulting in an atmosphere of melancholia.

Blog post by Katerina Rozakou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece
​
During my research in Greece, which forms the basis of my Identities article, ‘Ambivalent feelings: ‘filotimo’ in the Greek migration regime’, I explored ambivalent feelings that police officers demonstrate in their encounters with migrants in various sites of migration governance. Between autumn 2014 and summer 2016 I did fieldwork with state and non-state actors involved in migration in registration, pre-removal migrant detention, and open reception centres in Athens and Lesvos.

Police officers in Greece are notorious for their anti-migrant and racist attitudes, and migration governance sites are infamous for their poor conditions as numerous reports by human rights organizations illustrate (Amnesty International 2014, European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 2017, Greek Ombudsman 2019). At the same time, often police officers exhibit care towards migrants, providing them with medicine, food and other goods. This care is not a matter of individual exceptions in the dominant xenophobic police feelings but related to the culturally significant sentiment of ‘filotimo’ (love of honour) that police officers evoke. The ‘goodness’ and the acts of care that police officers exhibited towards migrants them as more than mere individual exceptions in an overall culture of neglect and dehumanization (though at times this may be the case). As I claim, this care very often coexisted with violence and xenophobia, and it resonated with nativist claims to morality and moral superiority that were contrasted to the demoralization of the state the police officers embodied.

Blog post by Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol, UK and Ioana Vrabiescu, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

Blog post based on Identities' Special Issue, Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe. 

​The European Union presents itself as a global champion of human rights, yet its external borders are marked by hostility, surveillance and death. There is also an intricate network of borders within Europe that marginalizes and excludes migrants and asylum seekers. The vast majority of those excluded at the border and within Europe are people of colour. Two contemporary developments shape the context of our Identities Special Issue, Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe – the global social movement for Black Lives and the COVID-19 pandemic. They have shaped conversations on structural racism and crisis-driven migration management and exposed the intersectionality of emotions and policies. For example, the invocation of national protection measures in the context of COVID-19 allowed European states to enforce border security under the guise of health protection, emphasizing the emerging pattern of governing migration through crisis management.

Blog post by Sebastien Bachelet, University of Manchester, UK and Mariangela Palladino, Keele University, UK

Overcrowded boats capsizing in the Mediterranean Sea feature regularly in the news. Yet, the discrepancy in the coverage and rescue efforts deployed for the boat carrying 750 people seeking safety which sank off the Greek coast, and the fate of the Titan submersible, is a stark reminder that vividly illustrates how some lives are more grievable than others.
 
Talks of a migration ‘crisis’ moreover overlook the responsibilities and effects of European states’ hostile migration policies and violent bordering regimes. Public debates seldom scrutinize the political construction of migrants as illegal and undesirable, nor do they provide sufficient insights into people’s lives beyond abstract labels, especially south of the Mediterranean Sea, where European politicians propose to build asylum-processing centres. 
​  
In this blog post, drawing on our Identities article, ‘Être vraiment vrai’: truth, in/visibility and migration in Morocco’, we focus on migration, creative processes and advocacy in Morocco, to demonstrate how narratives of migration that challenge expectations and demands for authentic and truthful migrants’ accounts can disrupt dominant and harmful forms of representation. 

Blog post by Emiliana De Blasio, LUISS University, Italy, Marco Palillo, University of  Bradford, UK and Donatella Selva, University of Florence, Italy

Over the last decade, the Mediterranean Sea has become one of the deadliest migration routes for asylum seekers and migrants wanting to reach Europe from Libya. In response to the high numbers of deaths associated with perilous journeys and dangerous smuggling strategies, numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been operating in the Mediterranean Sea to provide search and rescue (SAR) operations to migrant vessels in distress at sea.

Over the years, the new centrality of NGOs’ humanitarian efforts in the Mediterranean Sea in the Italian public and media discourse has led to significant tensions with right-wing parties. Most notably, Matteo Salvini’s League and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy have repeatedly criticised NGOs involved in SAR operations for facilitating irregular migration flows and defying Italian border control policies. Since its inauguration in October 2022, the newly installed government led by Giorgia Meloni has engaged in a series of clashes with NGOs running SAR operations in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the government’s hard-line stance on ‘illegal’ migration. In particular, Meloni’s government has promoted a new migration policy that introduces further restrictions on the capacity for NGO vessels to conduct multiple rescues in the same mission. 

Blog post by Melanie Griffiths, University of Birmingham, UK
 
Political rhetoric around migration is often febrile. This has been especially evident in the UK in the last few years, with frequent talk of ‘crisis’ and ‘invasion’. Indeed, a government source in June 2023 described the small boats crossing the Channel as a ‘ticking time bomb’ threatening the UK’s social and economic security. Such discourse reflects an emotional turmoil of outrage and indignation, fear and panic, mistrust and repulsion.
 
Alongside such splenetic rhetoric, however, the political response to irregular migration is also one of callous indifference and disregard. We see this lack of care demonstrated in the UK’s massive asylum backlog, with 170,000 asylum seekers now awaiting an initial decision. It is also reflected in the UK government’s plans to warehouse asylum seekers on boats and in military barracks, and to automatically banish new arrivals to Rwanda.
 
These contradictory emotional displays act as a spectacle distracting from government failures to manage the immigration system effectively, but they have real-world impacts. This includes seriously and detrimentally affecting those navigating the immigration system, as well as wider societal impacts, with evidence of growing xenophobia and racially-motivated offences.

Blog post by Annavittoria Sarli, University of Birmingham, UK
 
Policy and media discourses in Italy refer to migration-related issues mostly in the language of emergencies, deviancy or alleged cultural threats. The everyday presence of ethnic minorities as a permanent constituent of society is rarely acknowledged. Such public discourse perpetuates a kind of socio-cultural immaturity, making it difficult for the population to accept growing diversity.
 
‘Italianness’, moreover, tends to be conceived as monoracial and monocultural. This idea of national identity drives an imagined net division between a monolithic national ‘us’ and ‘the others’ foreigners, who comprise both first generation migrants and their Italy-born descendants. It is an imaginary enshrined in the Italian law on citizenship, introduced in 1992 and never updated since then. Mainly based on jus sanguinis, it poses obstacles for migrant immediate decedents (MIDs) to become citizens of the country where they spent most of their lives. 

Blog post by Hamdullah Baycar, University of Exeter, UK

‘It kind of makes me feel like Batman or Superman. You can say the things you want to say with your own voice and your own style’, said Malcolm Bidali, a Kenyan security guard employed in Qatar, regarding his activism about labour conditions on social media. His activism led to his detention in 2021. The incident gained significant public attention, and 240 Qatar Foundation students, alums, faculty and staff signed a petition asking for his release.
​
Two days after the petition, even Qatar's state-owned media, Al Jazeera, was involved in the debate and ran with the headline, ‘Concerns over Qatar's arrest of a Kenyan security guard’. Thus, the digital sphere, which initially caused his detention, ultimately became the tool that freed him. Although Bidali's case cannot be considered representative of the entire Gulf region and is not directly related to the UAE, it does demonstrate the power of social media and the digital sphere, even in supposedly autocratic states.

Blog post by William Shankley, University of Nottingham, UK

​Nearly twenty years have passed since the expansion of the European Union (EU) led to the significant movement of Polish citizens to the UK. Despite the UK's subsequent departure from the EU, Polish migration assumes a prominent place in the country's migrant diversity.
 
Belonging is a crucial aspect of migrants' lived experience in another country, and previous studies on Polish migrant belonging in the UK have primarily focused on the neighbourhood context as this is contested, resisted and reshaped. Additionally, the majority of existing research has predominantly concentrated on Polish migrants' belonging among those working in low-skilled industries, which was the dominant occupational position most Polish migrants entered into. Nonetheless, Polish migrants' entry into a range of workplaces after their migration offers an equally important site in which to examine their belonging. Furthermore, there has also been a lack of research into Polish migrants working in professional occupations and their belonging at work.

As a team of international scholars with Czech and US origins living in Czechia and Austria, the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ hit us in contrasting ways with regard to different regimes and their attitudes towards refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. While Czechia accepted just twelve refugees under the EU’s quota system, the Austrian public broadcasting station FM4 changed its jingle from ‘You're at home, baby’ to ‘Refugees, welcome’.

Seven years later, as we finalized work on our Identities article, ‘I always felt I have something I must do in my life’: meaning making in the political lives of refugee non-citizens’, the situation had somewhat reversed. In the spring of 2022, the streets of Prague were filled with Ukrainian flags, Czechia had accepted over 300,000 refugees in just a few months, and people became emotional regarding the war, while Austria, as a ‘neutral’ country and a non-member of NATO, was considerably more reserved. 

The arrival of large numbers of Ukranian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion to their country since February 2022 has been met with a wave of compassion and solidarity in most western European countries. However, critical voices have pointed out what has been perceived as hypocrisy, or a ‘double standard’, regarding attitudes towards refugees. Why are some of them welcomed with open arms, while others are being repressed at the border? While Ukrainians could fast-track their asylum claims and enjoy protection status with minimum requirements, people fleeing other conflicts in the Middle East and Africa were still getting stuck in lengthy bureaucratic processes and often becoming the object of resentment and discrimination in the host society. Is this so because of racial difference?
 
The increased arrivals of refugees in a short span of time reminded many in Europe of the peak of arrivals from Afghanistan and Syria in the mid-2010s. Public opinion in various western European societies of alleged unbridgeable cultural differences or difficulties towards ‘integration’ of the newly arrived did not apply to Ukrainian refugees. While Ukrainians, critical voices argued, were perceived in the mainstream public opinion as ethnically, culturally and racially close to western Europeans, other victims of armed conflict equally entitled to protection were still represented or perceived as ‘less deserving’ by social and political actors holding anti-immigration positions. This shows the extent to which the way migrants are portrayed in Europe is a highly contested matter that connects deeply to values, perceptions and anxieties permeating those societies.  

Earlier this year, Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced she was not proceeding with multiple recommendations made by Wendy Williams’ public inquiry into the Windrush Scandal. The inquiry examined the Home Office’s adverse actions against people from the Windrush generation who predominantly migrated to Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1973 (Gentleman 2019; Slaven 2022). Reports have detailed the profound effects on those directly impacted, revealing stories of individuals who were denied healthcare and welfare services, and in some cases were ripped away from their families; detained and even deported (Gentleman 2019; Williams 2020; Slaven 2022). The ensuing scandal thrust their treatment into the public consciousness and ignited a public uproar. Yet, as the scandal faded from media attention, we still have a limited understanding of the scandal’s broader impact on Britain's racialised communities, beyond those directly affected by the Home Office’s actions. ​