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Meng-Hsuan Chou starts the anthology with Chapter 2, ‘EU Mobility Partnerships and Gender: Origin and Implications’. Here she shows how current EU regulations regarding migration came to be formed they way they are and how this development was motivated. She not only explores the circumstances under which European Union (EU) mobility partnerships were established, but also examines the effects in terms of migration flows. She raises the question of how the migration policies of the receiving states gender migratory flows, and also wonder whether instrument formulations are intentional or unintentional. While previous research has mostly examined these issues from the perspective of national migration policies, Chou finds that a supranational viewpoint still is missing, a gap in the literature she here aims to fill in. The EU migration instruments known as the ‘mobility partnerships’ are established by participating EU member states and certain third-world countries with the aim of facilitating circular migration. Chou approaches her questions through empirical analysis of three different data sets: (1) existing studies on the migration-development nexus, European migration policy co-operation and EU mobility partnerships; (2) publicly available reports and official EU documents and (3) position papers circulated amongst national delegates who prepared for, and defended their domestic positions at, the Tampere European Council summit. She suggests that the European governments rarely had ‘gender balance’ as priority when it came to border control. However, by definition and design, EU policies are meant to affect migratory flows. To discern how, it is necessary to look more closely at what happens in practice when member states implement the measures (e.g. from the EU level to the national/bilateral level).

In his first two months at the immigration detention facility, euphemistically called a ‘shelter’, Deruba consumed his daily lessons of vocabulary and math. ‘Good morning. My name is Deruba. What is your name?’ he would chant. ‘I am from Guatemala. Where are you from?’ ‘Good afternoon. How are you? I am fine’. He had only attended school for four years in Guatemala before his parents died in a bus accident forcing him to support his younger sister, Isura. ‘It was not a good time. We did not have anybody. No aunts, no uncles to help us. My grandparents died long ago. I don't even remember them. It was just me and my little sister’.⁵ Deruba, 13 years old at the time, and Isura, then 11 years old, lived on the streets of Livingston, Guatemala for over 2 years. He worked as a boat hand on boats [lanchas] transporting tourists to Livingston, painting cars at a small auto body shop and selling marijuana to young German and American tourists coming to soak up Livingston's bohemian environs.⁶

Nicky Busch has Ph.D. from the University of London. She is currently researching the in-home care and domestic sectors in the United Kingdom.