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.

We present findings from historical microdata that suggest former rural elites effectively preserved their socio-economic advantages into the early People's Republic of China (PRC, circa 1949–1965) by exploiting urban–rural differences in government policies. In particular, former rural elites were three to four times more likely than poor peasants to move to a nearby town, and this urbanization was highly associated with socio-economic privileges in a rapidly developing economy, including both income and educational opportunities. We also find evidence that after 1949, former rural elites who did urbanize were more likely than their poor peasant counterparts to find industrial jobs.

The Japanese flying squid, Todarodes pacificus, is distributed mainly in the northwest Pacific and the Japan Sea. The present study was conducted for a better understanding of the mechanisms behind its migration routes. The ratios of strontium to calcium (Sr:Ca) in the statoliths can be associated with the water temperatures the squid experienced in the sea. Using specimens collected in the northern Japan Sea in summer and Lagrangian backward tracer experiments, a strong negative correlation was obtained between the Sr:Ca in the statoliths and the empirical water temperatures estimated through a regional ocean model. These backward tracer experiments were continuously conducted at depths of 6, 15, and 30 m. The greatest determination coefficient of the regression expression appeared for a nearshore tracer group of the experiment at a depth of 15 m. In addition, the regression expression provided reasonable lifetime empirical water temperature variations of the squids collected in the sea areas east of Tsushima Island and west of the Goto Islands in winter. The combination of Ca:Sr analytical chemistry and tracer experiments with the ocean dynamic model used in this study improved our understanding of the migration path of T. pacificus.

Migrants encounter multiple challenges, such as learning new languages and adapting to a new life. While digital technologies help them learn, limited research has been conducted on their digital skills development. In this article, we report on migrants’ digital skills development while learning language through culture using a web app developed by an EU-funded project that aimed to promote social cohesion through a two-way exchange of knowledge and skills. Forty-six migrant and 43 home community members in Finland, Spain, Türkiye, and the UK participated in intercultural and intergenerational pairs to engage with and co-create interactive digital cultural activities in multiple languages. Participants’ digital, linguistic and cultural gains were measured before and after the workshops. We report on participants’ digital skills, measured by a digital competence self-assessment tool developed based on DigComp, and interviews with the participants. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Qualitative data were analysed deductively using the categories of the DigComp framework. Findings indicate statistically significant improvement in migrants’ self-reported digital skills. Highest gains were in the competency area of digital content creation. Comparison of migrants’ digital skill development with that of home community members did not show any statistically significant differences, supporting our argument against the deficiency perspective towards migrant populations. Interview data suggested overall positive evaluations and highlighted the role of the web app instructions for content creation. We conclude with suggestions for further research and argue for inclusive pedagogies, emphasising how both community members learned from and with each other during the workshops.

The article studies how public policies of migrant ‘integration’ are enacted and made sense of in the street-level welfare state from the perspective of social work practitioners performing integration work and with a focus on language and language skills acquisition. It draws from twenty-seven semi-structured individual interviews and reflective discussions after service user meetings with eleven social workers and social advisors in migrant integration services conducted between 2018 and 2019 in the Helsinki capital region of Finland. Results infer ambiguous, yet persistent, ideals of monolingualism in which Finnish language skills acquisition plays a central role and linguistic diversity turns into individual lack of skills and capacities through service user responsibilisation. Yet practitioners refer to the unfeasible situations this creates for service users as well as to their own struggles as practitioners within the monolingual service system.

The preliminary reference procedure is a crucial tool for EU law enforcement. Yet, its usage varies greatly across the Member States. This paper deals with a notable case in which EU justice has not been mobilized: Greece. Until 2023, Greek judges had not made any preliminary references in the migration and asylum fields, despite significant migrant flows. This study investigates why Greece, with its critical migration challenges, became a zero-reference case.

Drawing on empirical and doctrinal research, this paper tests two main hypotheses. The first hypothesis, derived from the “judicial empowerment thesis,” suggests that Greek judges may have been hesitant to refer cases due to political or institutional factors. The second hypothesis, based on scholarship highlighting the role of lawyers and civil society in promoting EU litigation, predicts that the absence of references reflects a lack of activist lawyers, skills, or resources.

The findings challenge common assumptions, revealing that Greek judges are not inherently reluctant to refer cases. Instead, obstacles to access to justice and civil society’s attitudes help understand the absence of references. Going beyond judges, this paper explores how perceptions among migrant supporters, their legal consciousness, and traditional modes of action contribute to the lack of pressure for preliminary references.

This research contributes to understanding the complexities surrounding judicial dialogue and enforcement of EU law. It offers insights into how the interplay of institutional, legal, and social factors shapes legal mobilization and strategic litigation.

Why does religion continue to emerge as a flashpoint in the age of secularization? Although models of religious resurgence suggest that religious cleavages are more prominent in the modern era, other models continue to show declining religious involvement. What is needed is a theory that can observe both resurgence and secularization at the same time. I argue that globalization—and the flow of people across borders, in particular—provokes a religious backlash at the societal level due to its secularizing effects. As the public is exposed to new and diverse religious traditions, religiosity declines; as a result, however, religious practitioners become more aggressive toward other religious groups. I test this theory using data on globalization, religious discrimination, and religious practice. I find that types of globalization dealing with the flow of people and information across borders have an outsize effect on societal religious discrimination, or SRD. This effect, however, is contingent on a decline in religious practice. This study suggests that religious resurgence can take place in secularizing environments, and that both resurgence and secularization share root causes.

Strategic litigation plays a crucial role in advancing human rights in the digital age, particularly in cases where data subjects, such as migrants and protection seekers, experience significant power imbalances. In this Article, we consider strategic litigation as part of broader legal mobilization efforts. Although some emerging studies have examined contestation against digital rights and migrant rights separately using legal mobilization frameworks, scholarship on legal mobilization concerning the use of automated systems on migrants and asylum seekers is scarce. This Article aims to address this gap by investigating the extent to which EU law empowers strategic litigants working at the intersection of technology and migration. Through an analysis of five specific cases of contestation and in-depth interviews, we explore how EU data protection law is leveraged to protect the digital rights of migrants and asylum seekers. This analysis takes a socio-legal perspective, analyzing the opportunities presented by EU data protection law and how civil society organizations (CSOs) utilize them in practice. Our findings reveal that the pre-litigation phase is particularly onerous for strategic litigants in this field, requiring a considerable investment of resources and time before even reaching the litigation stage. We illustrate this phase as akin to “climbing a wall,” characterized by numerous hurdles that CSOs face and the strategies they employ to overcome them.

In 2020, amid aggressive and inflammatory political discourse and an unprecedented wave of violent attacks against migration Non-Governmental Organizations and their staff, the Greek Government sought to establish a new legal framework for the registration of Non-Governmental Organizations active in the fields of international protection, migration and social inclusion, and their members. This Article aims at providing an overview of the EU-law based litigation brought by Greek Civil Society organizations to challenge the new framework for breaching fundamental rights, and at exploring its effects beyond the Court proceedings. This Article concludes that, counterintuitively, the existence of pending litigation against the Regulation establishing the NGO Registries hampered advocacy on this issue with the European Commission.

In this presidential address I offer a critical examination of how Africa was misrepresented in the Global North’s imaginations and media reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such biased imaginings of Africa as a site of inevitable catastrophe account for the racialized under-accounting of the history of African scientists’ pioneering success in biomedical research and with epidemics. The global archives of COVID-19 pandemics must acknowledge these scientists, as well as the humanistic contributions of African artists who collaborated with health experts and produced poetic/musical performances in local and world languages to tackle biomedical and social pandemics.

Forecasting international migration is a challenge that, despite its political and policy salience, has seen a limited success so far. In this proof-of-concept paper, we employ a range of macroeconomic data to represent different drivers of migration. We also take into account the relatively consistent set of migration policies within the European Common Market, with its constituent freedom of movement of labour. Using panel vector autoregressive (VAR) models for mixed-frequency data, we forecast migration in the short- and long-term horizons for 26 of the 32 countries within the Common Market. We demonstrate how the methodology can be used to assess the possible responses of other macroeconomic variables to unforeseen migration events—and vice versa. Our results indicate reasonable in-sample performance of migration forecasts, especially in the short term, although with varying levels of accuracy. They also underline the need for taking country-specific factors into account when constructing forecasting models, with different variables being important across the regions of Europe. For the longer term, the proposed methods, despite high prediction errors, can still be useful as tools for setting coherent migration scenarios and analysing responses to exogenous shocks.