The transition to retirement marks an appropriate juncture for older migrants to relocate to countries of origin if so desired. As recent survey data from France demonstrate, most older immigrants are well integrated and prefer to live out their old age in the host country. This paper examines return decisions at retirement in the case of older men living in migrant worker hostel accommodation, who seem on fi rst inspection to be far from integrated in France. Despite this lack of integration, they tend not to return defi nitively to places of origin at retirement. Instead, their preference is for regular back-and-forth trips. In order to make sense of these mobility decisions, several theories of migration are presented and evaluated against qualitative data from interviews conducted in several hostels in the Paris region in spring and summer 2008. While no one theory adequately accounts for all the phenomena observed, the evaluation shows that at various points in the data there is support for several theories. The added value of each theory becomes most apparent when levels of analysis are kept distinct: at the household level as regards remittances; at the kinshipvillage level as regards reintegration in the home context; at the meso-level of ethnic communities in terms of migrants' transnational ties; and at the macro-level of social systems concerning inclusion in healthcare and administrative organisations.
UK governments have frequently set up commissions to produce reports on complex policy problems, especially following 'crisis' focusing events. Such commissions are ad hoc, limited in duration, and engage external actors in providing policy advice and expertise to governments. This problem-solving, or instrumental function, is prominent in the literature: commissions are valued as a means of producing useful knowledge to inform policy responses. However, we believe that the problem-solving rationale does
The emerging literature on deathscapes has thus far neglected the diversity of mortuary practices resulting from the inherently spatial phenomenon of migration and the increased capacity for transnational activities linking migrant communities with places of origin. Against this sedentarist bias, this article proposes that the end of life is a critical juncture in the settlement process for emerging diasporic communities. On the one hand, practices such as posthumous repatriation may serve to reinforce shared perceptions of temporary presence in host countries. On the other hand, death may be the occasion to lay what are perhaps the deepest foundations for home-making in diaspora, through funeral rituals and memorialisation. However, these latter claims to space in adopted homelands may also be the object of legal and political contestation, as demonstrated through an analysis of disputes in the UK over open-air Hindu funeral pyres and planning permission for an Islamic cemetery. What is at stake is the legitimate symbolic re-inscription of space. As such, diasporic deathscapes are an exemplary site of contestation and negotiation between migrant place-making practices and the domesticating urges of governmental subjects.
Crises may provide windows of opportunity for policy analysis, since policymakers are likely to be interested in knowledge which helps them solve their urgent problems. But what if there are deep divisions in policy-oriented research on the nature and very existence of the crisis?This article analyses the migrant integration 'crisis' after 2000 in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Italy. The findings demonstrate that what counts as expertise may constantly be contested and produced at times of crisis. The notion of '(de)constructing expertise' is introduced to describe conflict-ridden patterns of knowledge utilisation, where different knowledge claims and experts compete for recognition.
Transnational ageing presents fundamental challenges to nationally bounded welfare states, which historically have tended to be organised according to a logic of solidarity among nationals and permanent residents of a given state territory. Nonetheless, the Dutch and French governments have taken steps to break this link between solidarity and territorially bounded consumption of welfare, by providing lifelong income security for older migrants who return to countries of origin on a permanent or semi-permanent basis. This article asks what motivated policymakers to initially develop these novel policy tools for transnational ageing which contradict the territorial logic of the welfare state. Based on interviews with key stakeholders and available official documents, we find that in both France and the Netherlands, policymakers’ initial motivations can be characterised as rather benign, if not beneficent: to facilitate return for those who are willing but unable to afford it. However, two types of obstacle have impeded the delivery of such policies. Non-discrimination clauses and free movement rights in EU law may make it difficult to implement policies for specific categories of older migrants. Electoral realpolitik may also lead policymakers to shelve policies which benefit older migrants, in a European context where public opinion on immigration is less and less favourable. Nonetheless, opposition may be neutralised by the budgetary advantages of these schemes, since older returnees do not consume public services such as healthcare.
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