International Migration Review

Research on immigration attitudes rarely examines contexts in which immigrants and natives share substantial cultural proximity. Leveraging Chile's recent intraregional inflow — a context that allows us to hold cultural distance constant — this study analyzes whether labor-market, family status, fiscal, and security concerns shape public opinion in the absence of cultural threat. We embedded a factorial - survey experiment in a nationally representative poll, randomizing migrant education, family status, gender, and nationality across 120 vignettes. The design yields causal estimates of each attribute's effect on preferences about who should be admitted into Chile. Respondents strongly favor highly educated immigrants and broadly reject low-skilled ones, regardless of their own schooling level. Women are viewed more favorably than men. Colombians and Venezuelans are penalized relative to Spaniards, Peruvians, and Haitians, an aversion amplified among respondents who link immigration to crime. No systematic bias against Afro-Caribbean migration appears. These results show that — even without extreme cultural distance — natives’ attitudes toward migrants are structured by their perceived socioeconomic value for the host country and by group-specific security considerations.

In this Method Note, we present our reciprocal method of research and support — the focus-group workshop (FGW). Our framework was developed during research conducted in 2022 with individuals assisting Ukrainian war refugees in Poland and was applied in five FGWs attended by 36 participants. The originality of the FGW lies in linking the ideas of an ad-hoc support group, an educational workshop and a focus group interview. We argue that this is a much needed development in migration studies, which can help to attract participation and facilitate the involvement of interviewees, increase the richness and depth of research data and satisfy ethical requirements for benefiting participants and generating social good. In this Note, after presenting the context of our research, we explain the specificity of our research, focusing on the needs and constraints of volunteers. We then discuss the role of reciprocity in social research. Next, we present our framework and toolkit and explain in detail how we implemented them and the challenges we experienced. In conclusion, we argue that our FGW method can bring a novel approach to migration studies as it allows for immediate reciprocity in the form of competencies sharing with workshop participants as well as networking and support. It also allows us to address the power hierarchies, particularly present in research with vulnerable groups. Last but not least, FGW can be used by researchers who are also activists, as it allows for the study of specific social issues and simultaneously supports researched communities.

This study (re)examines the complex relationship between forced displacement (FD) and economic growth through the lens of security and political stability in selected European countries from 1960 to 2023. Building on a composite political instability (PI) index that captures both violent and non-violent forms of instability, we employ a simultaneous equations model with panel instrumental variable estimation techniques to address endogeneity and measurement challenges. Our findings reveal that FD generates dual effects on host states: initially, it strains resources and exacerbates PI, but when refugees can access economic opportunities, FD can foster long-term economic growth and strengthen social cohesion. The dynamic relationship between FD and PI highlights how conditions enabling refugee economic participation can mitigate security risks. These results emphasize the need for targeted, evidence-based policies that advance refugee economic inclusion as a pathway to enhancing political stability and sustaining long-term growth in host economies.

Migrant flows through and to Mexico have become increasingly complex. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2025 in Ciudad Juárez and Mexico City, we find that many of the migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean have had very long and complex itineraries, trajectories, and legal statuses within the Americas. They were negotiating new possibilities in the face of constant change in migration policies in other Latin American countries, as well as recent changes in internalization and externalization policies of border control in the United States and Mexico. Specifically, our findings showcase (1) how relatively direct trajectories to Mexico have become longer, more dangerous, and more uncertain; (2) how people have visited multiple countries and lived in multiple countries holding several legal statuses before arriving to Mexico; and (3) how a reversal of the flow is increasing, with some considering returning to countries where they lived before, not necessarily their country of birth because staying in Mexico or arriving to the United States had become harder. In this Dispatch from the Field, we focus the discussion on their implications in three domains: (1) migrant's lives in terms of future plans, international protection, and legal pathways for migration; (2) theorizing migration, refuge, integration, transit, and return; and (3) data collection and analysis.

Migration is increasingly recognized as a dynamic, often recurrent, and intergenerational process. Yet, little research has examined how childhood exposure to international migration, through one's own moves and through family history, shapes aspirations for future (im)mobility. In this article, we address this gap using a life course perspective to investigate how both direct and indirect migration experiences during childhood influence openness to international migration in adulthood. We distinguish between immobility, return migration, and onward migration aspirations, and explore underlying mechanisms such as socioeconomic status, transnational ties, multilingualism, experiences of discrimination, and identification with the country of residence. Using data from the French survey Trajectoires et Origines 2, we find that individuals with a more recent immigrant descent tend to express higher return migration aspirations but lower onward migration aspirations. Direct migration experiences in childhood are associated with greater openness toward migration overall, though differently by descent: among those with a distant immigrant background, childhood migration fosters openness to onward migration, while it increases return aspirations among those with a more recent immigrant descent. These results offer new insight into how migration and immobility aspirations are shaped early life experiences and family migration histories.

Bureaucratic processes and administrative procedures play a central role in producing differentiated statuses of legality and regularity. Over the past decade, Mexico has experienced a notable increase in the number of arrivals from a diverse range of countries of origin, with varied motivations and intentions to stay, transit, or seek asylum. As a result of this changing migration scenario, some foreign-born individuals lack valid migration documents, have expired residence permits, or have not obtained temporary or permanent residence authorization. In this research note, we use administrative data from the Mexican National Migration Institute, accessed through a request for information, to calculate the foreign-born population living in an irregular situation in Mexico and provide an overview of their main sociodemographic characteristics and countries of origin compared to those under temporary and permanent resident statuses. With this lower-bound calculation of irregularity, we aim to inform how legal pathways and socio-demographic characteristics have changed over time. Findings show age- and gender-based patterns and differences by country of birth, as well as an increase in irregularity over time, including a broad range of reasons for aiming at regularization. We hope this calculation and characterization of irregular migration—conceived not solely in terms of irregular entry—opens new avenues for research into how this phenomenon affects broader integration processes and how the Mexican case may be situated in a comparative regional perspective.

This study examines the size and diversity of immigrant bonding and bridging networks across residential mobility pathways. Prior research has relied heavily on size-based or categorical measures of coethnic and interethnic ties, revealing little about the breadth of institutional and occupational domains to which networks connect immigrants. Network diversity, measured through a position generator, captures this structural dimension, and residential mobility provides a complementary lens by situating network formation within the sociospatial environments immigrants encounter over time. Using original survey data from 1,415 Chinese immigrants in Japan, I analyze network size and occupational diversity across four residential mobility patterns that precede network measurement. Socioeconomic resources are consistently associated with larger and more diverse bonding and bridging networks. Residential trajectories further differentiate network structure: early or sustained residence in ethnic neighborhoods corresponds with larger coethnic networks, while movers into ethnic neighborhoods have the largest and most occupationally diverse coethnic networks and comparatively high interethnic diversity. These findings show that immigrant incorporation is reflected not only in the volume of coethnic and interethnic ties, but also in their structural heterogeneity and in the residential pathways through which they are assembled.

Migrant employees have knowledge, skills, and abilities that may not be recognized by organizations or countries. Typically, they have knowledge of, identification with, and internalization of more than one culture. This allows them to support international knowledge flows and facilitate intercultural social networks by engaging in cultural brokering — the act of facilitating interactions across cultures. In a series of four studies employing qualitative and quantitative methods, we developed and validated a context-general assessment of cultural brokering. The result is a scale assessing the frequency of five cultural brokering behaviors: interpreting culturally based behavior, teaching others about a cultural group, mediating between cultures, advocating for a cultural group, and advising people across cultures. Since this scale is not limited by organizational context, it can be used to assess and leverage cultural brokering across a wide range of settings that would benefit from cultural brokering, including multinational enterprises (MNEs), international nongovernmental organization (NGOs), and intergovernmental associations.

Asylum is widely associated with humanitarian norms and domestic laws in liberal democracies. Reflecting this assumption, systematic information on the evolution of asylum provisions in national constitutions remains limited, and comparative analyses of the motives behind the legal codification of refugee protection in autocracies are even scarcer. This research note addresses these gaps by introducing the Constitutional Asylum (COAS) dataset, which captures asylum provisions in the constitutions of all 193 UN member states from 1789 to 2023. The findings challenge conventional wisdom, revealing that autocracies, not democracies, have been the main adopters of constitutional asylum. While both regime types have used constitutional asylum to spread ideologies abroad, autocracies have done so more extensively and additionally leveraged it to strengthen presidential power. These results show that asylum is not merely a humanitarian norm but also a strategic instrument of statecraft, used to consolidate power within states and advance geopolitical agendas abroad.

The integration of refugees is a widely debated issue, yet scholarly discussions often overlook a crucial factor: The role of host society hostility in shaping this process. Across Europe, the erosion of social norms has emboldened xenophobic discourse, fueling a surge in anti-refugee sentiments. As hostility toward refugees intensifies, a critical question emerges: How does this environment affect the lived experiences of refugees themselves? One key yet underexplored aspect of refugee experiences is social marginalization, the perception of being unappreciated, excluded, or unwelcome in society. This paper contributes to the growing literature on host society antagonism by examining how anti-refugee violence in Germany influences social marginalization among refugees. Drawing on the German Socio-Economic Panel surveys from 2016 to 2017, linked to administrative data on anti-refugee violence from the Anti Refugee Violence in Germany (ARVIG) project, the study employs multilevel modeling to assess this relationship. The findings show that refugees living in counties with higher levels of anti-refugee violence report significantly greater social marginalization. These results underscore the importance of considering the broader socio-political climate of the host society when analysing integration and assimilation outcomes.

Building on an ethnographic approach, this article aims to explore how the social dimensions of hope shape and relate to the migration trajectories of people seeking asylum in Sweden. Departing from the concept of asylum hope, a fragile form of hope that persists under conditions of oppression and uncertainty, the study examines how everyday interactions shape and transform it. Using Randall Collins’ theory of interaction rituals, the analysis shows how emotional energy generated in encounters influences hope. Based on interviews and observations with 43 participants, the study further demonstrates that hope is not an individual psychological state of mind but a socially negotiated and embodied process formed in relation to migration authorities, bureaucratic routines, and informal networks. Asylum hope emerges as fluid and dynamic, influencing the trajectory of migration journeys while being continuously reshaped by administrative and emotional experiences. The article also highlights how administrative violence is enacted through mundane practices that intertwine bureaucratic power with everyday social life. These encounters reveal that migration governance is socially embedded, operating through rituals that can suppress or enable agency, recognition, and solidarity. By foregrounding the emotional and relational dimensions of bureaucratic processes, the study challenges the idea that state power functions solely through law and policy. Understanding asylum hope as socially and emotionally situated allows for a deeper grasp of how migrants navigate precarious futures within the entangled structures of governance, affect, and everyday life.