This article contends that an emerging 'mobilities paradigm' within the social sciences reproduces an analytical gaze that is predominantly fixated on the movement of people across national borders. This privileging of state borders and categories in many of the mobilities studies should alert us to the extent to which it brings novelty to our examination of human mobility in the world. By analysing the flow of migrant workers from rural China to Israel, this article demonstrates how new insights regarding the importance and meaning of crossing national borders can be generated by looking at mobilities through the eyes of those involved in them, allowing state categories and national borders to prefigure in the analysis to an extent and form that are relevant for migrants. The article depicts the mobility-ridden life of Tseng, who comes from a small village in Fujian province and who, after migrating internally in China several times, decides to go to Israel. Highlighting the importance of unequal capital accumulation in shaping human mobility, the article questions some taken-for-granted assumptions about the motivation and situation of those who exercise international mobility; it particularly upsets a prevalent association in migration studies between physical and socio-economic mobility.
This article proposes the term Departheid to capture the systemic oppression and spatial management of illegalized migrants in Western liberal states. As a concept, Departheid aims to move beyond the instrumentality of illegalizing migration in order to comprehend the tenacity with which oppressive measures are implemented even in the face of accumulating evidence for their futility in managing migration flows and the harm they cause to millions of people. The article highlights continuities between present oppressive migration regimes and past colonial configurations for controlling the mobility of what Hannah Arendt has called “subject races.” By drawing on similarities with Apartheid as a governing ideology based on racialization, segregation, and deportation, I argue that Departheid, too, is animated by a sense of moral superiority that is rooted in a fantasy of White supremacy.
Since the late 1990s, migration from Ecuador has diversified with migrants now targeting a range of new destinations. By highlighting the recent immigration of non-Jewish undocumented migrants from Ecuador to Israel, this article looks to discern not only a new trajectory but primarily a new type of migrant. Empirical findings point in the direction of an increased number of migrants who operate their migration largely from outside the realm of transnational networks. These migrants have no established connection in their destination and they thus also base their decision to migrate there upon very little information, which is usually obtained from an acquaintance who had been there. It appears that these migrants make their decision to migrate in an individual and hasty manner. Often they do not deliberate their migration plans with their close family and household. Nonetheless, once they have successfully operated their migration independently, they then regularly serve as pioneers who encourage and facilitate the migration of their relatives and friends.In an attempt to provide a sociological explanation to the motivational structure and the more individualist migration pattern of this new type of migrant, this article proposes the conceptualization of the migratory option as a disposition, inculcated mainly in large segments of the Ecuadorian low-middle class. A migratory disposition is being formulated as people try to make sense of migration-related transformations in both the physical and the social context in which they are embedded. These transformations impinge on people's economic and social perceptions of migration, encouraging them to credibly view the possibility to operate migration in an independent fashion. Concurrently, potential migrants increasingly consider transnational networks as structures characterized by high levels of connectivity and receptivity toward compatriots in migration destination. 168Kalir Potential migrants thus become audacious in their willingness to migrate alone and connect to the network once in destination. Ethnographic data demonstrate that in most cases this strategy of migrants has been proven effective.Focusing on this new type of migration can help explain the changing role of transnational networks in the decision-making process of potential migrants. It might also clarify the limited effect that restrictive migration policies, directed to curb the extension of established transnational networks, have had on the continuation of migration.
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