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This chapter is based on a study of 60 migrant women in Washington State, USA, and their communication with their families in and across borders through information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four themes were identified in the research concerning the uneasy ways family members used the ICTs to: (1) predicate migration decision-making through word-of-mouth and social media; (2) facilitate the movement of members across borders through stepwise migration; (3) affect the transition to a transnational family through establishing a sense of co-presence; and (4) mediate care through communication chains. The significance of the study demonstrates the need for relational thinking about transnational family communication and the mobilities of families. Transnational family members develop sophisticated ways of communicating through ICTs, albeit with difficulty, and which are embedded in interdependent systems of migration and mobilities.

We contextualize contemporary domestic worker organizing in Vancouver within a history of domestic worker organizing in Canada and then build the argument that their organizing has been structured by the gendered geographies of: international migration; the location of the work in the private home; and the prevalence of stepwise migration of Filipina domestic workers to Canada. These gendered geographies have led to a distinctive mode of organizing: in the community around a wide range of issues that enfold social reproduction into workplace issues to engage the entirety of individuals’ and families’ lives across the life course. Domestic workers’ organizing is grounded in the spatialities and materialities of their lives, and seemingly familiar gender scripts take on an active force in the domestic workers’ mobilization. Confronting the contradictions of organizing domestic workers and organizing to revalue domestic work points to the enduring undervaluation of feminized workers and their work, as well as the potential for intersectional solidarities along with the need for multisectoral strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of empirical research on welfare magnetism and to assess the size and scope of the welfare magnet effect on the non-EU migrants in selected immigration countries of the European Union.

A conditional logistic regression model with interactions is used to estimate the strength of the welfare magnet effect, while controlling for demographic characteristics of the migrants and country-specific economic indicators. Data, used for estimation, comes from the Immigrant Citizen Survey, which provides a large, representative sample of first-generation (i.e. non-EU born) migrants. Various measures of welfare generosity are tested to assure the robustness of the results.

The coefficients suggest that the welfare magnet effect is present and significant in some immigrant groups, although it can have a negative impact on location decisions in other cases. Similar results are obtained for wage and unemployment indicators.

Results corroborate the welfare magnet hypothesis, which states that more generous welfare states should expect greater clustering of negatively-selected (i.e. lower educated) migrants. One potential limitation comes from the sample size, which does not allow for more general conclusions.

Heterogeneous effects of basic economic indicators in different demographic groups show that aggregate immigrant flows, used widely in the literature, can provide biased estimates of welfare magnet effect.

This paper adds to the available literature by using representative, recently collected data and employing a more complete list of controls in a quantitative analysis of migration decisions.

My research builds upon masculinity studies as well as migration and gender theory to evaluate emerging strategies of gendered labor control at work sites within temporary worker programs. In particular, my multisite ethnography consisting of 97 interviews with US guest workers, oil industry employers, and Indian labor brokers shifts focus to the recruitment of male workers into the US oil industry. The study evaluated a multi-country recruitment chain from India to the Middle East and into the US Guest Worker Program. Findings identified a relationship between the construction of masculinities and employer strategies for labor control. The article addresses the following question: how is hegemonic masculinity used as a strategy for labor control? The study identifies the double bind of hegemonic masculinity within contingent employment relationships as a means of labor control for curbing male migrant dissent.

Empirical studies show substantial variation across immigrants in the rate and direction of assimilation along various dimensions (e.g., cross-ethnic contact, language, identity). To explain this variation, past research has focused on identifying exogenous factors, such as discrimination, human capital, and settlement intention. In this chapter we argue that variation in immigrant outcomes emerges endogenously through positive interaction effects between dimensions of assimilation. We propose a new assimilation model in which processes of social influence and selection into congruent social environments give rise to multiple long-term equilibria. In this model, migrants who are already assimilated along many dimensions tend to also adapt along other dimensions, while less assimilated migrants become more strongly embedded in their ethnic group.

To test the assimilation model, we derive a number of hypotheses, which we evaluate using trend analysis and dynamic panel regression on data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada.

The data mostly confirm the hypotheses, providing overall support for the assimilation model.

Our theory and findings suggest that immigrants would follow divergent assimilation trajectories even in the absence of a priori population heterogeneity in external factors.

The positive interaction effects between cultural and structural dimensions of assimilation suggest that mixed policies that promote integration while seeking to prevent loss of identity go against the natural tendency for cultural and structural assimilation to go hand in hand.

The present chapter proposes a novel model of immigrant assimilation and an empirical test.