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This chapter focuses on the impact of temporary migration on migrant communities in cities. It shows that migrant workers in Chinese cities are disadvantaged in terms of employment opportunities and accessibility to services and welfare benefits, such as unemployment allowances and formal employment contracts. While it has become easier for many migrants to work, stay, and earn a cash income in the cities, many of them live in the migrant-concentrated communities, which are the most disadvantaged communities with poor living conditions.

This chapter discusses challenges for poverty and inequality arising from higher levels of immigration. It examines both how migrant communities are faring in terms of labour-market experiences and educational outcomes, and possible effects of immigration on the employment prospects and wages of non-migrants. The chapter also looks at who has migrated to the UK in the period 1997–2007 and analyses the changing socioeconomic profiles of migrant communities. It then examines the impact of migration on broader progress towards greater equality in the UK.

This chapter shifts the view from how migrants see their own life to how they view each other. The chapter explores the contradictory community relations between migrants in Morocco by looking at moments of reciprocity and mutual help on the one hand, and exploitation on the other. I discuss how migrants’ relation to mobility, place and time conditions these dynamics. The data in the chapter shows that even though migrants are actually living in conditions very similar to what Agamben (1998) would term “the bare life”, it would be wrong to conclude that this prevents them from having any meaningful social and community life and therefore no basis for political agency. However, the analysis of the ethnographic material shows that migrants’ community life is characterized by activities which are mostly based on self-interest rather than on the desire to promote a common community goal.

Using a multidirectional care model, chapter three explores “communities of care” which are a form of reorganizing care horizontally, from migrants to other migrants informed by their transnational familial experience. Past chapters discuss care within transnational family units, this chapter moves beyond the transnational family into the fictive kin created abroad among migrants. Although the subject of this chapter are the relationships between migrants living and working in New York City, the stories demonstrate that migrants actively draw from their transnational subjectivities as transnational family members and domestics workers to build a community of care. Drawing from Queer theories and Black feminist thought on fictive kinship, this chapter demonstrates horizontal care among migrants are configured socially rather than biologically.

This chapter closely examines the development of Cuban migrant communities in three Mexican cities: Veracruz, Merida, Mexico City and compares them to Cuban communities established in the United States. Examining migratory patterns, economy, politics, race, culture and interstate and cross regional connections, this chapter posits that shifting our focus away from the United States and centering on Mexico allows us to truly appreciate the breadth and scope of the nineteenth-century Cuban Diaspora.

This chapter assesses how migratory trajectories in the twentieth century became channels of transmission of southern or eastern styles of Christianity to urban locations in the northern and western hemispheres, so that Latino/a, Chinese, Korean, and—rather later—African churches became for the first time highly visible elements enriching the tapestry of Christian life in North America and Europe. Some of these transmitted Christianities were very ancient—such as the Assyrian Church of the East. Other varieties of migrant Christianity were of much more recent origin. Those that have attracted most contemporary scholarly interest were Pentecostal in character. These include the older black Pentecostal churches that were established in Britain in the decade or so after the arrival in Britain in June of 1948 of the Empire Windrush, the first immigrant ship that transported 492 settlers from Jamaica. From the 1980s onwards, on both sides of the Atlantic, they also included African neo-Pentecostal churches, mostly of Nigerian or Ghanaian provenance. The rapid growth of West African neo-Pentecostal churches in European and American cities since the 1980s has been the subject of a host of recent sociological studies concerned to elucidate the leading role of these churches in the fashioning and sustaining of corporate identities within African migrant communities.

This chapter discusses the ways that women from rural transborder migrant and immigrant communities are using bifocal vision to guide their participation in local, regional, and cross-border organizations. It requires a reconceptualization of the ideas about communities in terms of how they function in relation to multiple sites. It also highlights the case of women from the Mixtec region of Oaxaca and their organizing efforts there and in the state of Oregon.

Qatar and the UAE in particular are emerging as a new destination for sport labor migration, including from the Maghreb and the Maghrebi community in Europe, which is the focus of this chapter. Specifically, the study examines the patterns and motives of sport labor migration in three sectors: professional football, elite sport development, and sport TV broadcasting. Migration flows in sport can be understood as a legacy of colonial history, or a dependency of former colonies upon former colonizers in social, cultural, economic, and sport domains. Sport migration is also a product of globalization characterized by increased interconnectedness between territories due to advancements in the means of transportation and communication. While it is becoming more difficult to migrate to Europe and North America, sport migrants from the Maghreb, like other Arab communities, are attracted to the GCC because it offers both material facilities and the familiarity of Arab and Islamic cultures.

This chapter summarises the main migration trends in Hungary ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The discussion is based on two main objectives. It examines the most striking characteristics of the integration of migrant communities, and at the policy implications that followed the accession to the European Union in May 2004 and the Schengen Area in January 2008. A short theoretical discussion of the determinants of migration is provided, along with a detailed overview of migration in Hungary.

The concluding chapter argues for the importance of a reflexive relation with history that does not solely rely on ancestry and ‘blood’ and for recognising the contingency of the citizen/migrant binary that often obscures more than it reveals

The basis of a Punjabi migrant community, noticeable during the Lajpat Nagar demolitions, lies in the master narrative of Partition uprooting, migration, and resettlement, which dissolves the socially divisive categories of caste, class, and gender. What emerges is a community of narratives that comes into existence only when the master narrative is invoked. The popular refrain of ‘we did everything on our own’ is what defines the personal narratives told by Punjabi migrants in Delhi. It has been shown that the process of migration and resettlement was experienced by different sections of society, and that no single narrative can claim to represent the Partition reality. It is the adverse and critical moments that catalyse past experiences to develop a powerful, tangible community.

This chapter introduces and discusses examples of social innovation in response to the growing and pressing need to provide care for different groups. Social innovations in this area are often user-led and highly participatory. Many of the most imaginative such initiatives emerge from bottom-up responses developed by citizens’ groups. In other cases, social innovations are initiated by former public officials, frustrated at the lack of an effective response to care needs. The chapter discusses examples of such innovations. These include parental self-provision of childcare in France; involving members of migrant communities to assist with integrating new migrants in Germany; and supporting independent living for older people while providing accommodation for young people in Italy. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the lessons and potential transferability of such innovations to other contexts.

This chapter assesses the role of the political context bringing a transformation of identity rankings in diasporas. Specifically, it studies the role played over the past 15 years by British state policies in the transformation of relationships between two migrant communities originating from South Asia: Sikhs and Muslims. Each community shares antagonistic representations of the other, based on past conflicts, such as the Partition. What they perceive as a hereditary antagonism is not simply imported but transformed in the diaspora by several local variables. Among these, British integration policy toward ethnic minorities is a key factor. While striving since 2005 to foster “community cohesion,” it actually tends to exacerbate the competition between migrant communities related to the allocation of resources, both symbolic and material.

This chapter delineates the history of Chinatown theater as a public space for social interaction and community building in migrant societies. With Chinese migrants living under highly circumscribed conditions without much access to resources and amenities in mainstream society, the theater acquired extra significance within the enclave. Especially noteworthy is the active involvement of traditional organizations in promoting Cantonese opera and cultivating patronage with the touring companies and itinerant actors. On the one hand, the close-knit personal and social networks, and the group affiliations and loyalties associated with these organizations, were critical ingredients for the success of the theater business. On the other hand, the theater personnel and the spectacle of the stage became available to aid the organizations and the leaders in furthering their agendas by gaining visibility and public support. On the overseas stage, the enthusiastic reception afforded to actresses unleashed interesting dynamics of gender in an overwhelmingly male population. Aside from an entertainment venue enjoyed by many, the immigrant theater was acted upon by those concerned as an important site for the negotiation and inscription of power relations, normative behaviors, and community politics in exclusion-era Chinatown.