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This chapter sets up the book's central concepts and arguments, drawing on existing literature on the turn towards temporal analysis in migration studies over the last decade. It sketches out in detail how chronomobilities are structured through specific time-regimes and time-logics. The chapter seeks to work through the complexities of the relationship between migrant temporalities and migrant mobilities, and to build the framework that guides understandings of this relationship and the experiences it produces in migrants' lives. The concept of chronomobilities underpins the analysis in the remainder of the book. This portmanteau achieves two fairly prosaic aims. It simply and concisely suggests and reiterates the indivisible and mutually constitutive nature of temporality and mobility, and it names a framework made up of time-regimes and time-logics that provides the scaffolding for making our way through the complexity and multiplicity of migrant experiences of time.

This concluding chapter returns to and reflects on the fundamental questions posed by the book as a whole. Why does time matter to the study of migration? How are spatio-temporal formations, and subsequently scholarly understandings, of migrant mobilities changing in the contemporary world? What new insights does a temporal perspective add to the sociology of migration? How can we understand the middle as a range of migration experiences that sit between the liminal mobilities of those disenfranchised by globalization and the fluid mobilities of those privileged by the same forces? Migration governance creates both friction and possibility as it comes up against migrants' own desires to use mobility strategically to create new pathways, new lives and new ways of being. Such desires are linked, culturally, to the life-stage in-between youth and adulthood in Asian middle-class imaginaries. The negotiation of mobility thus takes place in intertwinement with the negotiation of both normative and emergent social and cultural imaginaries of 'becoming adult' and the timings and milestones that this entails. The temporalities of settling and staying, of sedentariness and belonging, still very much matter, particularly to ideas of 'achieving' the imagined stability of adult life. Exploring middling mobilities reveals how migration can simultaneously and paradoxically embody freedom and constraint, closure and openness, anxiety and opportunity.

This chapter writes an ethnography of eviction that highlights the ambiguous position of Indonesian migrant labor in the Growth Triangle. More specifically, it demonstrates not only a process of eviction, but also a kind of revolving door of accruing dispossession. This suggests that the position of Indonesian migrant labor in the Growth Triangle should be located at the historically contingent intersections between state regimes of deportation, a gendered transnational labor market, and the emotional economy that keeps migrants on the move. Moreover, taking the experiences of migrants seriously, and situating them historically, illustrates how state strategies and migrant tactics form part of an interconnected system that keeps people on the move in the borderlands.