No abstract

No abstract

Migrants’ aspirations are a meaningful and under-appreciated research subject. My paper investigates their development and implications over the life course, building on an archive of life stories of immigrant domestic workers in Italy. It dissects the biographical bases of aspirations as ways of cultivating open representations of the future; hence, as a window on migrants’ potential to shape the future itself, given their assets, the external structure of opportunities and the relational fields in which they are embedded. Migrants’ views and desires about the future, as individuals and members of families and broader communities, evolve in parallel with their biographies. Over time, they face “reality checks” which may make them elusive, opening up to unintended social consequences. Immigrant domestic workers in Italy are a case in point. What these interviewees reportedly aspired then, while leaving home, may significantly differ from what they do aspire now; a gap which is telling of their often limited scope to negotiate a way across local and transnational life milieus. I reconceptualise this gap in aspirations, and in their accomplishment, in terms of “contents”, “references” and “horizons”. How and why migrant aspirations are transformed over time, and how different kinds of aspirations impinge on their life trajectories, are questions that generate fruitful insights for migration studies.

The notions of diversity and superdiversity are of promising relevance to social work with immigrant clients. They enable a nuanced appreciation of the complex and varied sources of inequality to which such clients are exposed. However, these categories are sometimes employed in overly principled or prescriptive tones, and their distinctive contribution is relatively under-debated. How can diversity and superdiversity be used to make sense of migrants' disadvantages as welfare clients, and what do they add to the pre-existing social work perspectives? This paper revisits three major issues from within the literature on social work with immigrants: (1) the shifting ways of framing these clients; (2) the relevance of diversity and superdiversity in the self-representations and organizational arrangements of service providers; (3) the methodological underpinnings, and ensuing dilemmas, of helping relationships with immigrant clients. Overall, social work emerges as an exemplary field to assess the conceptual transition from diversity towards superdiversity.

No abstract

The notion of social remittances has gained a central position, discursively at least, in the literature on the effects of emigration on home societies. In this editorial we briefly review the strengths and limitations that this concept has displayed, since its early coinage in transnational migration studies. More of-ten than not, social remittances have been treated in the literature in a peripheral vein, ancillary to different foci of research. This Migration Letters special issue aims to move the debate on the theme beyond this unsatisfactory state of things. More specifically, we argue for four lines of research on social remittances to be further developed: the tensions between individualization and home-society based obligations and pressures, which shape the development and circulation of social remittances; the need to explore the embeddedness of economic remittances within a broader range of socio-cultural remittances (rather than vice versa); the interfaces between the categories of social remittances and social capital; the complex ways in which physical and social distance between senders and recipients affects the circulation of social remittances, as well as their impact on migrants' communities of origin.

This article revisits migrants' informal social support by exploring their exchanges of material and immaterial resources with the family members left behind. The latter are typically constructed as net beneficiaries of migrants' struggles for a livelihood abroad, and even as a potential constraint on their self-realization. Building on a qualitative study of Ecuadorian domestic workers in Italy, the author explores -instead -whether left-behind kin are also, potentially, a source of social support for them. In fact, transnational family relationships can facilitate the circulation of welfarerelevant resources from both sides. While migrants are expected to transnationally share the benefits of better life conditions abroad, 'what' they left behind contributes to their personal wellbeing in three respects: reverse remittances, emotional support and the provision of a locus for cultivating nostalgia, attachment and social status. The mixed influence of home-related family ties and obligations is assessed against the backdrop of migrants' life course and patterns of integration. Overall, their interdependence with left-behinds is a source of benefits, and costs, which should not go unnoticed.

No abstract