Migrant mortality differences in the 2000s in Belgium: interaction with gender and the role of socioeconomic position.

BACKGROUND: Belgium has a long history of migration. As the migrant population is ageing, it is crucial thoroughly to document their health. Many studies that have assessed this, observed a migrant mortality advantage. This study will extend the knowledge by probing into the interaction between migrant mortality and gender, and to assess the role of socioeconomic position indicators in this paradox. METHODS: Individually linked data of the 2001 Belgian Census, the National Register and death certificates for 2001-2011 were used. Migrant origin was based on both own and parents' origin roots. We included native Belgians and migrants from the largest migrant groups aged 25 to 65 years. Absolute and relative mortality differences by migrant origin were calculated for the most common causes of death. Moreover, the Poisson models were adjusted for educational attainment, home ownership and employment status. RESULTS: We observed a migrant mortality advantage for most causes of death and migrant groups, which was strongest among men. Adjusting for socioeconomic position generally increased the migrant mortality advantage, however with large differences by gender, migrant origin, socioeconomic position indicator and causes of death. CONCLUSIONS: Adjusting for socioeconomic position even accentuated the migrant mortality advantage although the impact varied by causes of death, migrant origin and gender. This highlights the importance of including multiple socioeconomic position indicators when studying mortality inequalities. Future studies should unravel morbidity patterns too since lower mortality not necessarily implies better health. The observed migrant mortality advantage suggests there is room for improvement. However, it is essential to organize preventative and curative healthcare that is equally accessible across social and cultural strata.

Height convergence and internal migration in mid-twentieth-century Italy.

Height convergence across Italian regions during the second half of the twentieth century is a widely recognized fact. However, it has been suggested that this process was partly affected by the massive migratory flow of people from southern to northern Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, which greatly slowed the height growth rate in the receiving regions, since immigrants were on average shorter than the receiving northern population. The main aims of this study were to estimate the speed of height convergence of Italian military conscripts in the second half of the twentieth century, and to estimate the contribution of internal migration from the south to the north of Italy to height convergence. We hypothesized that migrants from southern Italy reduced height levels among northerners relative to what they would have been without considering migration. We used cohort data on Italian conscripts born in 1951 and 1980. Results indicate that internal migration may explain from 24 to 32.7 percent of height convergence, meaning that ignoring migration flows yields an overestimation of the height changes for conscripts living in the south of Italy.

Kinship matters: long-term mortality consequences of childhood migration, historical evidence from northeast China, 1792-1909*.

Unlike previous migration studies which mainly focus on individual migration, this article examines the long-term mortality consequences of childhood migration and resettlement. Using a unique Chinese historical population database, we trace 30,517 males from childhood onwards between 1792 and 1909, 542 of whom experienced childhood migration. We apply discrete-time event-history analysis and include a fixed effect of common grandfather to account for unobservable characteristics of the extended family. We also explore the influence of social networks on early-life migration experience by including kin network at destination. Our findings suggest that migration in childhood has substantial long-term effects on survivorship in later ages. From age 16 sui to 45 sui, kin network at destination mediates the negative effects of childhood migration and lowers mortality risks. Moreover, child migrants who survive to older ages subsequently experience lower mortality. Such findings contribute to a better understanding of the implications of social behavior and social context for human health.

Pathways to El Norte: origins, destinations, and characteristics of Mexican migrants to the United States.

The geography Mexican migration to the U.S. has experienced deep transformations in both its origin composition and the destinations chosen by migrants. To date, however, we know little about how shifting migrant origins and destinations may be linked to each another geographically and, ultimately, structurally as relatively similar brands of economic restructuring have been posited to drive the shifts in origins and destinations. In this paper, we describe how old and new migrant networks have combined to fuel the well-documented geographic expansion of Mexican migration. We use data from the 2006 Mexican National Survey of Population Dynamics, a nationally representative survey that for the first time collected information on U.S. state of destination for all household members who had been to the U.S. during the 5 years prior to the survey. We find that the growth in immigration to southern and eastern states is disproportionately fueled by undocumented migration from non-traditional origin regions located in Central and Southeastern Mexico and from rural areas in particular. We argue that economic restructuring in the U.S. and Mexico had profound consequences not only for the magnitude but also for the geography of Mexican migration, opening up new region-to-region flows.

Care workers, care drain, and care chains: reflections on care, migration, and citizenship.

In this article, we discuss a case study that deals with the care chain phenomenon and focuses on the question of how Poland and the Ukraine as sending countries and Poland as a receiving country are affected and deal with female migrant domestic workers. We look at the ways in which these women organize care replacement for their families left behind and at those families' care strategies. As public discourse in both countries is reacting to the feminization of migration in a form that specifically questions the social citizenship obligations of these women, we also look at the media portrayal of the situation of nonmigrating children. Finally, we explore how different aspects of citizenship matter in transnational care work migration movements.

Transnational spaces of care: migrant nurses in Norway.

This article argues that international nurse recruitment from Latvia to Norway is not a win­win situation. The gains and losses of nurse migration are unevenly distributed between sender and receiver countries. On the basis of empirical research and interviews with Latvian nurses and families they left behind, this article argues that nurse migration transforms families and communities and that national health services now become global workplaces. Some decades ago feminist research pointed to the fact that the welfare state was based on a male breadwinner family and women's unpaid production of care work at home. Today this production of unpaid care is "outsourced" from richer to poorer countries and is related to an emergence of transnational spaces of care. International nurse recruitment and global nurse care chains in Norway increasingly provide the labor that prevents the new adult worker model and gender equality politics from being disrupted in times where families are overloaded with elder care loads.

Negotiating user preferences, discrimination, and demand for migrant labour in long-term care.

The restructuring of long-term care for older people has been marked both by the role of the market and by the role of migrant labor. This article develops the analysis of these processes at the microlevel of the provision of care. It draws on data collected as part of a cross-national comparative study on the employment of migrant care workers in residential care homes and home care services for older people in England and Ireland. The article examines, first, the ways in which divisions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship shape the preferences of service providers/employers and some service users as regards who provides care. Second, it examines how the institutional context of quasi-markets in long-term care shapes the negotiation of demand for migrant labor, the racialized preferences of individual users, alongside the rights of care workers to non-discrimination. It is argued that market-oriented policies for personalization, as well as for cost containment, raise implications for divisions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship in the provision of long-term care. At the same time, those divisions point to the limits of framing care in terms of the preferences of the individual as opposed to the social relations in which care is embedded.

Transnational aging careers: on transformation of kinship and citizenship in the context of migration among Bulgarian Muslims in Spain.

This article focuses on "transnational aging careers," a group of elderly migrants who are in constant movement between social contexts, families, and states. Drawing on a case of Bulgarian Muslim migrants in Spain, I look into the ruptures in the structure of care arrangements, kin expectations, and family relations, which migration triggers. I suggest that these transformations, albeit subtle, lead to reformulation of the fabric of the family. In this way, transnational care-motivated mobility affects future security based on kin reciprocity. At the same time, migration disrupts aging careers' social citizenship both in Bulgaria and in Spain by limiting or even excluding them from state welfare support. I argue that these two lines of transformation, kinship and citizenship, result in new forms of gender and intergenerational inequalities. Furthermore, their intersection leads to a move from welfare to kinfare, which not only affects present arrangements between migrants, but also entails future insecurities.

Care of older people in migration contexts: local and transnational arrangements between Peru and Spain.

Care arrangements for the elderly are becoming a main social process in contemporary societies due to socio-political and lifestyle changes over the last few decades. The family and the State play a basic role in the construction of care systems and in the establishment of strategies to access care resources. In the present context of migration, these resources interact at a transnational level, challenging family and State migratory regimes. These new realities need the recognition of basic international social rights, as the experiences of Peruvians living in a migration context in Spain show.

Rethinking care through social reproduction: articulating circuits of migration.

Care has come to dominate much feminist research on globalized migrations and the transfer of labor from the South to the North, while the older concept of reproduction had been pushed into the background but is now becoming the subject of debates on the commodification of care in the household and changes in welfare state policies. This article argues that we could achieve a better understanding of the different modalities and trajectories of care in the reproduction of individuals, families, and communities, both of migrant and nonmigrant populations by articulating the diverse circuits of migration, in particular that of labor and the family. In doing this, I go back to the earlier North American writing on racialized minorities and migrants and stratified social reproduction. I also explore insights from current Asian studies of gendered circuits of migration connecting labor and marriage migrations as well as the notion of global householding that highlights the gender politics of social reproduction operating within and beyond households in institutional and welfare architectures. In contrast to Asia, there has relatively been little exploration in European studies of the articulation of labor and family migrations through the lens of social reproduction. However, connecting the different types of migration enables us to achieve a more complex understanding of care trajectories and their contribution to social reproduction.

Migrants and the diffusion of low marital fertility in Belgium.

Although the diffusion of fertility behavior between different social strata in historical communities has received considerable attention in recent studies, the relationship between the diffusion of fertility behavior and the diffusion of people (migration) during the nineteenth century remains largely underexplored. Evidence from population registers compiled in the Historical Database of the Liège Region, covering the period of 1812 to 1900, reveals that migrant couples in Sart, Belgium, from 1850 to 1874 and from 1875 to 1899 had a reduced risk of conception. The incorporation of geographical mobility, as well as the migrant status of both husbands and wives, into this fertility research sheds light not only on the spread of ideas and behaviors but also on the possible reasons why the ideas and behaviors of immigrants might have been similar to, or different from, those of a native-born population.

Labour mobility and housing: the impact of housing tenure and housing affordability on labour migration in the Czech Republic.

This article examines whether housing tenure and regional differences in housing affordability have an impact on labour mobility. This relationship is important for understanding the sources of structural unemployment and impediments to economic growth. Using two sample surveys from the Czech Republic, this research reveals that at the individual level housing tenure is the most powerful factor determining willingness to change residence for employment reasons. A time-series regression analysis reveals that the impact of housing affordability on observed interregional migration patterns is relatively weak and that this effect is concentrated among the highly educated seeking employment in the capital, Prague. These results demonstrate that housing tenure has a significant impact on labour migration plans in case of unemployment and that the dynamic impact of regional differences in housing affordability on labour mobility is concentrated within the most highly skilled segment of the labour force.

"Humanitarian aid is never a crime": humanitarianism and illegality in migrant advocacy.

I analyze the case of humanitarian pro-migrant activists in southern Arizona between 2000 and 2010 to explore how contending groups wield law and legality claims in a dynamic policy environment. Humanitarian activists both evade and engage the law. They appeal to a higher law to elude charges that they are acting illegally, while seeking assurances that their actions are within the law. Law enforcement agents rely on the authority and technical neutrality of the law in redefining humanitarian aid as illegal, while expanding their own claims to carry out humanitarian work. This case study of advocacy on behalf of "illegal" migrants highlights how both activists and those who enforce the law redefine legality in strategic ways.

What is love? The materiality of care in Ghanaian transnational families.

In the West, economics and intimacy are assumed to occupy separate ­ even antithetical ­ domains. In Ghanaian family life, however, affection is understood to be expressed through the distribution of material resources across generations and a person's life cycle. Such an understanding of love means that migrant parents who leave their children behind in Ghana can continue to be good parents by sending remittances, and, in fact, may be considered better parents than caregivers who stay and are poorer. This construction of love also means that children tend to attach themselves to more financially secure caregivers over those with fewer economic opportunities ­ to men in favour of women, to those abroad over those in Ghana. It is precisely because love is signalled through material exchanges that children long to be with parental migrants far away who support them and feel abandoned by those parents who do not. The intertwining of economic and emotional ties in Ghanaian transnational families has significant implications for policy, as discussed in the conclusion.

Not in the eyes of the beholder: envy among Bolivian migrants in Spain.

This article explores a culturally sensitive topic, envy, among Bolivian migrants in Spain. Following a constructivist approach to emotions, we examine discourses of envy, as they are shaped by the cultural contexts in which they emerge. Our study uses a sample of 30 transnational households and multi-sited ethnography to illustrate the ways emotions and their effects on sociality serve as a mechanism of social control, especially when the boundaries of such a community have been stretched transnationally. Envy is an important component of a belief system central to understanding the emergence, or lack thereof, of trust and solidarity among migrants and can shape the types of social relations and conflicts between migrants and non-migrant households back in Bolivia. These conflicts have been exacerbated by economic instability, high unemployment rates and precarious wages especially for the undocumented migrant community in Spain.

"Deseos y Dolores": mapping desire, suffering, and (dis)loyalty within transnational partnerships.

This piece considers the deseos -- wants, desires, needs -- and dolores -- pain or sorrow -- of individuals in US-Mexico transnational partnerships. For transnational Mexicans, "desire" manifests as diverse, even contradictory, expressions of emotion. Migration is intertwined with multiple desires within intimate relationships, but is also tied to suffering across borders. Conflicting articulations of deseos y dolores reveal gender politics as well as the broader socioeconomic inequalities that drive migration and result in the transborder movement that separates couples and family members in a transnational space.

Economic participation and national self-identification of refugees in the Netherlands.

This study examines whether refugees self-identify as a member of the host society. We use survey data of more than 2,500 Somali, Iraqi, Afghani, Iranian, and ex-Yugoslavian refugees in the Netherlands. The results show that economic participation in the host country is positively related to refugees' national self-identification. In addition, we find that refugees' social ties with Dutch natives are associated with national self-identification and that the relationship between economic participation and national self-identification is partially explained by these social ties. Perceived discrimination is not related to refugees' national self-identification. Implications of these findings for debates on immigration and integration are discussed.