Introduction

This is the age of mobility (Papademetriou, 2007: 27). Contemporary mobility takes many forms (Adey, 2010); it includes the movement of people, things and ideas, and it also includes the infrastructure that makes movement possible. However, movement alone is not mobility. Tim Cresswell (2010: 19) says that mobility has three important and interconnected aspects. The first is physical movement: for example, a person moving from a rural area to an urban area, or between countries. The second is how that physical movement is embodied and experienced. The third is how that physical movement is represented; as an example, is it represented as a threat or as an opportunity? Adey (2010: 34–9) sums this up in a pithy statement: mobility is movement with meaning.

The advent of the ‘new mobilities’ turn in the social sciences and humanities has focused our attention on the centrality of mobility to contemporary life (Sheller and Urry, 2006). In this chapter, we are particularly concerned with the mobility of people, which we categorise in two ways. The first is travel: moving from one place to another and, often, returning, where the stay away is for a short period of time. This broad definition incorporates a wide range of movement, including tourism and business travel. We are particularly interested in travel that crosses international borders. The second is migration. Like travel, this term is difficult to define, and includes internal and international migration, for temporary or permanent time periods, and with a range of different motivations. In this chapter, we are concerned with international migration, and we follow the United Nations’ (UN’s) definition of migration as movement for the purposes of settlement, for at least three months (United Nations Statistics Division, 2017). In this way, we distinguish between international travel and international migration on the basis of settlement intention and length of time. These definitions are, of course, partial and incomplete since the boundaries between a traveller and a migrant remain blurred. This is clearly shown by the diversity of mobile people listed by Sheller and Urry (2006: 207): ‘asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forces’.