Migration and Society

We write this editorial in mid-February 2023 as the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine fast approaches. The war has so far led to over eight million people fleeing Ukraine to seek refuge across neighboring countries,¹ an unprecedented situation in Europe since the end of WWII. While the hospitality and solidarity extended to Ukrainian refugees was widely commended from the onset, commentators, including the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Tendayi Achiume, have widely denounced and critiqued the racist and orientalist double standards and “racial tiering” inherent in popular and political responses to displacement from Ukraine (OHCHR 2022; Bayoumi 2022; Jackson Sow 2022; Ray 2022). Ukrainian refugees were welcomed with open borders and “open arms” while racialized third nationals fleeing from the same conflict, including 76,000 students from diverse African countries studying in Ukraine, were forcibly prevented from crossing the same borders, as an extension of institutionalized discriminatory policies which continue to frame migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East through the lens of hostility and suspicion (Zaru 2022; Banerjee 2023). Indeed, while Ukrainians have been welcomed across Europe, often explicitly because they have been racialized as white and Christian, people fleeing other conflicts, including wars in which European governments have played an active part, notably Afghanistan, have been met with soldiers and push-backs, in violation of international and regional rights frameworks, including the European Convention on Human Rights, in some cases at the very same borders, notably those of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania (see Sanderson 2022).

This special issue sheds light on transnational migrants’ engagement with informal urban economies worldwide. Building on anthropological literature on migration and economy, it proposes “transnational street business” as a new concept for grasping transnational dynamics in the informal urban economy. Through ethnographic case studies from different regions, the special issue illuminates how the concept of “transnational street business” serves to analytically capture the urban street's multitude of economically entangled and interdependent transnational social alliances, hierarchies, friendships, and networks. The concept encompasses the materiality of the street and the goods that are exchanged and transacted in trade relations. It also highlights the skills for competition that are needed for orientation in legal and political landscapes that cut across the formal and informal divides that migrants are faced with when setting out to create a livelihood abroad.

Migrants risk their lives when venturing out on hazardous journeys to escape unbearable situations in their countries of origin. Some, unfortunately, lose their lives en route. When such tragedies happen, a border-crossing social network of brokers, fellow travelers, family members, and friends of the deceased engage in a “transnational business of death” involving exchanges of money, things, information, and rumors. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Somali women and men from 2013 to 2016, this article explores how the death of one Somali woman was dealt with on a particular street in Athens, Greece. The article argues that an informal economy arises as a reaction to the lack of legal, formal support from the Greek nation-state when it comes to dealing with the deaths of loved ones among undocumented migrants.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires, this article explores the social infrastructure created by Senegalese migrants, which channels newcomers into the cities’ prolific economy of street vending. The article focuses on the often invisible social infrastructure that emerges when people either do not have access to, or are excluded from, formal infrastructures created by the state, city governments, or NGOs. The article highlights how established migrants shape newly arrived migrants’ navigation and access to opportunities in the city to help reproduce life along a migration trajectory that fulfils social expectations in Senegal. However, this process also involves friction and new social alliances, especially when certain roles and expectations become contested.

African migrants working in street trading business in Durban, South Africa often face xenophobia and must navigate policies regulating the informal economy. However, they sustain livelihoods in urban markets through building friendships while maintaining transnational connections back home. Based on qualitative research conducted in 2019 and 2021 with thirty street traders from Senegal, The Gambia, Nigeria, and Malawi at the Workshop Flea Market in Durban, the article interrogates the way in which friendship and conviviality emerge in informal market spaces. Building on AbdouMaliq Simone's concept of “people as infrastructure,” we show how migrant street traders in the Workshop Market invest in the urban collective, while locally and transnationally connected through economic and affective exchanges.

Based on fieldwork among pimps and sex workers in Eastern Romania, this article explores the personal skills that pimps deem necessary in order to be successful in the transnational street business of pimping in other EU countries. The article introduces the concepts of “reading desires” and “instillation of love,” which enable the pimps to “access” the desires of others. Through these concepts, I argue that the pimps have increased social capacities in distinct social arenas. These skills are not necessarily useful in other arenas of their lives, but in their preparation for entering the transnational street economy abroad, these skills are crucial.

This article examines the role that third sector organizations (TSOs) play in supporting refugees’ access to the labor market in England. TSO practices are conceptualized through the notion of “bottom-up” solidarity. Data gathered through interviews with refugees and representatives from charities, social enterprises, and public authorities are used to identify how TSO actors enact bottom-up solidarity and, in turn, facilitate integration of refugees into the labor market. The findings show how labor market transition is built on the transformation of the wider circumstances faced by refugees. Data also demonstrates how the creation of direct employment opportunities, coupled with intermediation and trust brokerage, and alongside episodic and extended coaching, is key to enacting “bottom-up” solidarity.

Media coverage of migrant and refugee camps often concerns not everyday life in camps, but violence or a camp's outright destruction. These portrayals risk inscribing camps into public memory as sites of danger and criminality, or of vulnerability without agency. What methods of engaging with a camp's aftermath and its representation might enable more complex understandings of the reality of life in camps? We engage the camp as a site of inscription to reconsider the role of objects, structures, and writing left behind when a camp is destroyed or evacuated. Our proposed methodology of reading traces recognizes these objects and representations as testimonial inscriptions that counter erasure and that record frictions of (in)visibility and space, attesting to the camp as a site not of abjection, but of negotiation.

This article examines how migrants create value through food- and hospitality-related enterprises, focusing on the ways in which they exercise their agency in mobilizing various cultural resources and on how their organizational practices intersect with identity work. Drawing on empirical research conducted in São Paulo, Brazil, it explores how specific dishes, knowledge of food, recipes, craft skills, and migration histories are transformed into valued cultural resources in these kinds of enterprises. The article explores three themes: first, how foods become “pliable heritage” through migrants’ identity work; second, how migrants’ ongoing identity work shapes their activities and experiences in food and hospitality businesses; and third, how migrants’ individual identity work is entangled in collective interests and the activities of a wider set of (migrant) stakeholders.

This article puts forward the concept of immobile subjectivities to understand the ambivalence marking the condition of existential immobility in migration. I look at the experiences of two migrant women in Switzerland—a refugee and the partner of a mobile professional—who each face the predicaments of mobility and yet continue to aspire to a career in the face of uncertain and unstable work. The trajectories of migrants who, like these two women, are confronted with disruption in their professional lives converge in the effort of navigating the codes of mobility and personal career aspirations. By focusing on these trajectories, the article aims to challenge the distinction between migrant categories and advance our understanding of immobility as an increasingly human condition.

Framed in a project on conviviality and migration-led diversity in Santiago, Chile, this article presents visual narratives of neighborhood participation. Accounts of migrants’ public lives have turned to underlining mundane forms of conviviality and place-making. This visual essay shows how such dynamics can comprise a fertile terrain for public engagement in contexts of “crisis.” The account is based on a photovoice exercise developed by three long-established migrant women of different occupations, age, and nationalities during the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that shaped the personal/public interface of their lives. I propose that photovoice, by endowing agency and producing situated knowledge, can illuminate migrants’ local engagement, making visible (creatively, descriptively, and symbolically) the connection between the personal and the public while counteracting dominant problem-based representations of migrants.

This conversation between Michaela Benson and Manuela Boatcă focuses on the coloniality of citizenship. Where dominant understandings of citizenship link this to the emergence of the nation and its national political community, this conversation considers what we can learn about present-day global social inequalities from examining the development of citizenship through a close consideration of Manuela's work on this topic. It takes as its starting point those excluded from the rights of political membership through the development of national communities, to make visible how citizenship and the alleged equality achieved through citizenship rights were acquired at the expense of gendered and racialized “Others.” As the conversation unfolds, the enduring colonial entanglements in the present-day global migration and citizenship regime—the coloniality of citizenship—are revealed, and alongside these, new insights into the citizenship and border struggles within and between nation states.

This selection features five poems from Jessica Mookherjee's latest collection, Desire Lines (Broken Sleep Books, 2023). Premised on a fresh chronicling of wandering that puts people at its heart, in corners wrapped in dust and the smell of living, Mookherjee's poetry is both a testament and testimony to people, times, and places where memorialization flows in writing.

BECOMING MIDDLE CLASS: Young People's Migration between Urban Centers in Ethiopia Markus Roos Breines. 2022. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. 213 pages. ISBN: 978-981-16-3536-6 (hardback); ISBN: 978-981-16-3539-7 (paperback).

HYBRID POLITICAL ORDER AND THE POLITICS OF UNCERTAINTY: Refugee Governance in Lebanon Nora Stel. 2020. London: Routledge. 264 pages. ISBN 9781138352544 (hardback); ISBN 9780367518615 (paperback).

DEVELOPMENT, (DUAL) CITIZENSHIP AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN AFRICA: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia Robtel Neajai Pailey. 2021. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 276 pages. ISBN 9781108836548 (hardback); ISBN 9781108873871 (online).

MATERIAL CULTURE AND (FORCED) MIGRATION: Materializing the Transient Friedemann Yi-Neumann, Andrea Lauser, Antonie Fuhse, and Peter J. Bräunlein, eds. 2022. London: UCL Press. 367 pages. ISBN 9781800081628 (hardback); ISBN 9781800081611 (paperback).

POSTCOLONIALITY AND FORCED MIGRATION: Mobility, Control, Agency Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Sharla M. Fett, Lucy Mayblin, Nina Sahraoui, and Eva Magdalena Stambøl, eds. 2022. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. 246 pages. ISBN 978-1529218190 (hardback).

THE PRECARIOUS LIVES OF SYRIANS: Migration, Citizenship, and Temporary Protection in Turkey Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan, Kim Rygiel. 2021. Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press. 296 pages. ISBN 9780228008033 (hardback); ISBN 9780228008040 (paperback)

THE MIGRANT'S PARADOX: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain Suzanne M. Hall. 2021. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 232 pages. ISBN 9781517910495 (hardback); ISBN 9781517910501 (paperback).