Who is deemed deathworthy, and how is this status produced? What discourses, affects, and histories enable the industrialization of premature Black death while rendering it largely invisible? Rooted in a decolonial queer feminist epistemological framework, this article examines how discursive and affective strategies in U.K. print media and immigration policies during the European “refugee crisis” (2013–2016) justified routine death-making at sea. Conceptualizing Blackness as a relational political and epistemological tool, the article reveals how media and state actors—drawing on racialized mythologies of young single Black men and appeals to imperial nostalgia—constructed these men as objects of panic, disgust, resentment, and fear. Applying collocation analysis and visualization techniques, the article theorizes “affective-racialized networks”—discursive formations that circulate and accumulate affective meanings across space and time, shaping public perception and legitimizing policies of deterrence, externalization, and active abandonment. These networks sustained the routinized deaths of Black migrant men at sea, reinforcing Europe’s imperial border regimes. By foregrounding the mutual constitution of race, affect, and temporality, this study expands migration scholarship’s engagement with race, demonstrating how racial logics operate beyond geopolitical and temporal boundaries through transnational circuits of meaning, power, and governance. The article argues that centering Blackness and affect is essential to understanding how racialization functions and how Black deaths are rendered normative within global bordering practices.

In recent years, the number of migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coasts has risen steadily. The arrival of small boats with migrants on board on the Spanish and Italian coasts has received a lot of media attention, and European Governments are investing more than in the past to stop unauthorized arrivals on their shores. Certain narratives from governments and officials of international organizations attribute these deaths to “smugglers” and the dangerous routes they take. However, this article provides evidence that the higher mortality rates are the result of changes in border controls following bilateral agreements between the European Union and Morocco after 2018. By analyzing data from official statistics, microdata, and data provided by NGOs up to 2024, it shows how the increase in the mortality rate of migrants in the Western Mediterranean is the result of changes in the management of sea rescues, the militarization and externalization of the border, and the way in which migrants attempting to cross the sea are taking more dangerous routes than in the past.

There are any number of arguments against the idea that it is possible to write the history of Habsburg Jews, or even to locate a common, coherent, Jewish experience in the Habsburg lands. These include the inherent disunity of the empire itself, the geographic dispersion of its Jewish population, and the multiplicity of legal jurisdictions under which Jews lived. This essay nevertheless makes the case for a Habsburg Jewish experience that surpassed differences in geography, legal jurisdiction, local culture. The Habsburg monarchy itself, in its quest for imperial expansion, administrative and legal reform, and social control, had much to do with this process. So, too, did the consolidation of an Ashkenazi rabbinic leadership that was both authoritative and distinctive to Central Europe, and the laying down of an intricate network of cross-regional family and communal ties, which themselves were partly a response to repressive state legislation. Jews in the Habsburg Empire moved about, reassembled and regrouped in ever new ways, while maintaining an overarching structure of human connection.

The right to protection from violence should be conferred upon all people regardless of their nationality. However, migrant women in Japan face exceptional risks, including that of domestic violence. This paper focuses on the vulnerability of Nepalese women, most often in Japan as dependents of their husbands, who are engaged as cooks in the ubiquitous Indo-Nepali restaurants. Shut out of the male-dominated support networks within the Nepalese community, they are forced to rely on Japanese state support in a time of crisis. Yet, despite the fact that most of these women are working and paying taxes in Japan, many are unable to effectively access the state support system, leaving them particularly at risk in times of calamity, as we are seeing now with COVID-19. This paper outlines their vulnerability and calls upon the state to recognize that these migrants are not free riders, but residents entitled to equal rights and protection under the law. At a time when we often hear about the national imperative to “Build Back Better” in the post-COVID-19 period, I hope that these vulnerable populations are included in such building.

Muslim migrants in Japan suffer from the lack of access to burial grounds when 99.9% of the nation is cremated. Muslims are usually met with opposition from the local community where cemetery construction is planned. Using ethnographic data, the study shows how Muslim associations inadvertently fail to respect the codes of Japanese rurality when seeking a cemetery in a community to which they do not have membership, leading to a conflict. This paper closes with policy prescriptions for the central government in ensuring the cultural rights of immigrant minorities in Japan.

Though not among the most famous of the Baroque’s architects and builders, the Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders, who were heavily involved in the creation of a sacred landscape of churches and monasteries in the wider Lake Constance area, have attracted scholarly attention since the nineteenth century. This article attempts to recontextualize these builders by taking them out of the usual framework proposed by art historians who, not least due to a chance discovery of an important source in the mid-twentieth century, tended to interpret the remote alpine valley of the Bregenzerwald as some kind of “rustic Florence.” Instead, this article rereads these builders in the context of the more mundane social and political realities of the Bregenzerwald. It suggests that in order to better understand this fascinating group of builders and craftsmen, it may be helpful to avoid reconstructing their sociopolitical history from their artistic achievement (How were they able to accomplish this?), and instead to reverse this approach to uncover the sociopolitical structures in which they lived (Who were they before they accomplished this?).

Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that participated in the Western-led international refugee regime and acted as a transit zone for refugees hoping to reach the Western Bloc. Those transiting were mainly, but not exclusively, escapees from various countries in the Soviet bloc. A few refugee groups also settled in Yugoslavia against the backdrop of shifts in international constellations, tense relationships with neighboring countries, and transnational mobilizations. This article will first investigate the dichotomy between transit and the few instances of refugees integrating into socialist Yugoslavia. Next, it will investigate the ease of the resettlement process by exploring how the length of time spent in the country was influenced by hierarchies among different refugee groups based on ethnic origin, political allegiances, class, and which opportunities for resettlement were available to whom. Finally, it will reflect on how the changing role of temporary refuge or permanent haven that Yugoslavia ascribed to itself was constructed and challenged by the host society, potential countries of resettlement, and the refugees themselves.

Brazilians in the United States voted overwhelmingly for right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro in 2022. What role did religion play? Based on exit polling, focus groups, and observation of local Brazilian churches, this article explores how Christianity drives support for right-wing populism among Brazilian migrants to the Boston area. Christians, and especially evangelicals, are significantly more likely to vote for Bolsonaro, and the priests and pastors of Brazilian migrant churches are particularly willing to discuss parties and candidates. Yet neither clergy endorsements nor political conversations at church explain this religious effect. I argue that indirect influence within congregations, which reinforces a conservative worldview in non-overtly political ways, helps explain why most observant evangelicals favor Bolsonaro. Migrants potentially influence the voting behavior of friends and family in Brazil, including via transnational religious communities, so their political attitudes can help bolster authoritarian populism in the homeland, as also seen in India and Turkey.

Whenever a person intends to cross a border, citizenship de facto determines—more than any other status—whether that person can enter the territory of another state. Yet, despite its ubiquity and centrality within global mobility infrastructures, the exact mechanisms through which citizenship shapes human movement on the planetary scale remain surprisingly ambiguous. This Article examines the multifaceted ways in which citizenship operates as an organizing principle within the complex of rules and norms governing transnational human mobility, including how the increasing acceptance of dual nationality status and the emergence of citizenship-by-investment schemes reverberate throughout the legal infrastructure and create new pathways for elite mobility. Using citizenship as an exploratory lens, the Article thereby seeks to theoretically complement and nuance existing scholarship in migration and mobility studies, arguing that physical space remains the dominant structure for human mobility. As we show, legal infrastructures reconfigure access to human mobility in ways that simultaneously fragment and compress physical space as it pertains to transnational movement.

The aim of this Article is to present a general and nonexhaustive overview of the legal infrastructures that configure cross-border movement in Latin America. It draws on the mobility approach, regime interaction, and—legal—infrastructural studies, which, together, provide a tentative analytical framework for the legal infrastructuring processes that we observe around border regulation in Latin America, an, arguably, understudied but core mobility hotspot. We present—in the form of several vignettes—different outcomes of infrastucturing processes which either enable or impede cross border mobility. This approach reveals the dynamic nature of law surrounding mobility and its apparent contradictions and unintended consequences. It concludes that the shift to an infrastructural account of the law can help us gain a more holistic and, therefore, more realistic understanding of how the law works over time, how it infrastructures crossborder mobility beyond and sometimes against states’ intentions and expectations, and how people on the move have more agency than the snapshot image of—forced—migration law conveys.

This research examines the ways the hostile environment in the UK utilises domestic violence as a deterrent measure, weaponising this endemic form of interpersonal violence against migrant women. I argue that the state’s own processes of accountability and responsibility for domestic violence fatalities, and the active exclusion of migrant women from state-provided services that are key in intervening in cases of domestic violence, are sufficient for domestic violence against migrant women to be constituted as state violence. I frame this in the context of what an ontological security approach can offer to our understanding of the multiplicity of encounters and experiences that migrant women have with a state apparatus that is designed to offer both security and accountability to address the particularly gendered insecurity of domestic violence. The active exclusion of migrant women from these monitoring mechanisms embeds both an affective and a very real empirical insecurity in the lives of migrant women. This ontological insecurity is both inside and outside of state, making ontological security for some while unmaking it for others.

The various global refugee and migration events of the last few years underscore the need for advancing anticipatory strategies in migration policy. The struggle to manage large inflows (or outflows) highlights the demand for proactive measures based on a sense of the future. Anticipatory methods, ranging from predictive models to foresight techniques, emerge as valuable tools for policymakers. These methods, now bolstered by advancements in technology and leveraging nontraditional data sources, can offer a pathway to develop more precise, responsive, and forward-thinking policies.

This paper seeks to map out the rapidly evolving domain of anticipatory methods in the realm of migration policy, capturing the trend toward integrating quantitative and qualitative methodologies and harnessing novel tools and data. It introduces a new taxonomy designed to organize these methods into three core categories: Experience-based, Exploration-based, and Expertise-based. This classification aims to guide policymakers in selecting the most suitable methods for specific contexts or questions, thereby enhancing migration policies.

This study uses stable and radiogenic isotopic data from Chalcolithic (c. 3000–1900 bc) humans and animals recovered from the Rego da Murta dolmens (Alvaiázere, Portugal) to understand dietary and mobility patterns in the populations using these monuments. The results suggest diets based primarily on C3 plants and terrestrial animals, with some possible variation in protein intake by age or status. Analyses of 87Sr/86Sr values identify two individuals out of ten from Rego da Murta I and four individuals out of fifteen from Rego da Murta II as migrants. These data were compared to other Chalcolithic burials in south-western Portugal: while diets were found to be similar across the region, the very high 87Sr/86Sr values recorded for two migrant humans match no known settlement in the broader region. A recent mapping study of 87Sr/86Sr values in Portugal suggests their origins may lie to the north/north-east of the dolmens.

Neurology faces prolonged wait times in Canada, with delays worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. As neurological disease prevalence rises, ensuring adequate access to care is essential. This study analyzes the distribution and migration patterns of neurologists in Canada from 1971 to 2022, using data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Neurology remains male-dominated (female-to-male ratio of 0.6), and only Ontario and British Columbia have per capita neurologist levels comparable to high-income countries. Despite stabilized migration to the USA since 2003, regional disparities persist, underscoring the need for strategies to improve retention, integrate foreign-trained professionals and enhance access across Canada.

The influx of foreign capital into cities in developing countries creates new labor demands, triggering significant internal migration as workers move for opportunities. But this mobilization creates a management problem for local governments. How do local officials manage competing interests in developing their labor market while preventing governance problems from excessive demand on public resources? Using the highly institutionalized case of China, I argue that local governments encourage long-term migration of “desirable” migrants by integrating them into social services while keeping others out. Variation in locally invested FDI skill dependence drives variation in inclusivity towards internal migrants. Policies that facilitate the integration of internal migrants into local urban welfare systems correlate with investment in firms with greater dependence on high-skilled workers, especially when investment flows to firms established more than one year previously. These trends are strongest in eastern municipalities where market forces play a larger role in local development policies.