Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the working of a transnational labor network across the border of Hungary and Germany, by shedding light on the role of informal staffing agents in recruiting those precariat laborers from Hungary who try to practice their "right to escape" by "existential mobility".

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the working of a transnational labor network across the border of Hungary and Germany, by shedding light on the role of informal staffing agents in recruiting those precariat laborers from Hungary who try to practice their "right to escape" (Mezzadra 2004) by "existential mobility" (Hage 2009). We show the different roles each agents play in this transnational labor trade network or migration industry which is an avenue of capital (Vertovec 1999).

The paper also analyses the historical embeddedness of labor mobility of the rural Hungarian poor by drawing attention to the process of "interrupted continuity": how the long sedentary Hungarian poor (Roma and non Roma) became from weekly commuters during socialism, to transnationally mobile factory workers, after an intermittent period of "long term unemployment" due to the transition from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism in Hungary.

The article aims to provide a close ethnographic portrait to interpret the currently most typical migration trajectory, the "guest work" providing to Chinese family restaurant owners and small entrepreneurs of Hungarian origins in the construction industry in German towns.

Building on the inspirational work of anthropologists and mobility scholars who propose to resort to a global and multi-dimensional perspective on transnational movement when exploring cross border migration and its consequences, we have carried out during the last three years a multi-sited ethnography, both in the sending and in the destination localities, following our informants and their network on their movement from their homes in North Hungary to their German employers.

Paper short abstract:

By analysing their experiences of return, this paper unpacks the tensions within Romanian migrants' transnational social networks. It uses a two-fold focus: firstly examining the Romanian state's standpoint on migration, then considering how this shapes migrants' trajectories and social networks.

Paper long abstract:

Responding to fractured economic and social prospects in their places of origin, Romanians represent one of the fastest growing and most disputed migrant groups within present-day Europe. Addressing this recent phenomenon, my ongoing ethnographic research analyses the trajectories and motivations of Romanian migrants in London. This paper unpacks the tensions and contradictions embedded in migrants' transnational social networks by discussing the possibilities and realities of return.

Through its affiliated institutions in the UK, as well as its policy and public discourse at 'home', the Romanian state renders migration a shameful, immoral act. In turn, this narrative is mirrored in migrants' experiences of return and actively shapes their transnational social networks. Whether permanently or not, most of my interlocutors desire to return to Romania and maintain this possibility active through frequent online communication and remittances (money and goods) to kin and friends at 'home'. However, migrants' imagined prospects of return stand in stark contrast with their disillusionment after briefly visiting Romania during the summer or religious holidays. Perceived as 'coming from abroad' by key actors in their transnational social networks, migrants face intense scrutiny around their morality and patriotism. Their labour is also vernacularly devalued in their interactions with close kin and friends. These attitudes towards migration in turn translate into corrupt practices during migrants' interactions with local institutions. Through the prism of return, this paper illustrates how Romanian migrants in London maintain transnational social networks and unpacks the tensions and contradictions embedded in this process.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how the Polish female migrants' civic engagement through a Chicago based advocacy organization are shaped by the different temporalities and how it is inscribed in the conflicting regimes of migrant integration.

Paper long abstract:

In the proposed paper, I approach migrants' civic mobilization from the perspective of leisure studies. Being a multifaceted and debatable concept, leisure can be understood also as a right (e.g. Veal 2015). Contemporary economic migrants, especially the undocumented ones, experience difficulties in pursuing their labor rights, including the "right to leisure". Frequently migrants are also not "at leisure" to mobilize and openly demand the improvement of their situation.

The paper is based on the material gathered during the ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, where I came across a labor rights' advocacy organization that directly sought to engage immigrants working in domestic sector. Using the organization's offer, migrants formed new networks that opened opportunities for their political engagement. I will present a case study of the Polish female migrants who worked as cleaners and carers and participated in the activities of the organization.

In this paper, I will demonstrate how temporalities are crucial for civic mobilization. I will specifically focus on the relations between the engagement and the different temporalities that research participants were entangled in: migrants' life cycle; their work and leisure cycle; the organization rhythms; and the U.S. political life dynamics. I will also demonstrate how the engagement with the organization is linked to the migrants' transnational identities, and how their lived experience of civic engagement is both dependant on and resistant to the conflicting regimes of migrant integration.

Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper discusses ethnic return migratory processes between Hungary and two Latin American countries, Argentina and Venezuela, with a special focus on how the Hungarian government made them serve its political purposes on the national and on the European level.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper discusses ethnic return migratory processes between Hungary and two Latin American countries, Argentina and Venezuela, with a special focus on how the Hungarian government made them serve its political purposes on the national and on the European level. These developments were, on the one hand, inseparable from recent shifts in the Hungarian government's policy towards minority and diaspora Hungarians living outside Hungary. On the other hand, these migratory patterns were shaped by the democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe making space for diasporic return migration; and were intensified by economic crises (Argentina, early 2000s; Venezuela 2010s) and by the subsequent social insecurity there. The paper provides two examples to compare and contrast the reception and use of these two flows of diasporic return migration from Latin America to Hungary. There was visible affinity between the values and cultural practices the spontaneous diasporic return migration from Argentina and the Hungarian government's ethno political ambitions at the turn of the millennium. Particular connection is drawn between the deliberate, systematic yet subtle dissemination of the subversive and academically questionable Hungarian ethno political world view developed by a self-made historian returnee from Argentina and the recent dramatic populist turn in official Hungarian cultural politics. The second migratory pattern has taken the form of a still ongoing, informally organized, state assisted yet unpublicized immigration program for Venezuelan migrants of Hungarian descent, filling up Hungary's official European quota of refugees to be received.

Paper short abstract:

After a brief history of major political and economic changes leading up to the current Venezuelan refugee crisis, ethnographic case studies among Venezuelans at home and abroad will demonstrate the emergence of transnational networks across the Americas.

Paper long abstract:

The migration of Venezuelans to neighboring South American countries currently numbers approximately 5 million people, making it the largest transnational migration in the history of Latin America and the second largest (after Syria) in the world today. This massive exodus must be seen in historical context: deteriorating economic conditions of the 1980s and '90s; sharply declining poverty levels during the Chavez presidency (1999-2013) alongside increasing oil dependency and lack of structural economic reforms; and extreme polarization resulting in part from a failed coup d'etat in April 2002. Chavez's successor, Nicolas Maduro, reacted to the rapid decline in oil revenues in 2014 and 2015 with economic policies and political maneuvering having disastrous consequences for the Venezuelan people: hyperinflation (1.3 million percent), weaponizing of food and medicine, and flagrant abuses of power aimed at silencing political opponents. Meanwhile, international support for Venezuelan refugees remains at only $750 million, and US policy under Trump has further intensified the crisis by tying aid to an extractivist neoliberal political agenda and by taking explicitly anti-immigrant/ anti refugee policies in the U.S. The Venezuelan people are thus caught between incompetent and corrupt political forces both at home and abroad. Ethnographic cases will demonstrate some of the ways in which Venezuelan citizens at home and abroad are developing transnational networks for responding to a crisis in which remittances to the homeland, and sharply decreased oil revenues, have produced new forms of inequalities and host country resources for housing, feeding, employing, and providing medical care are extremely inadequate.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the historical political ecology of transnational migration in Central America, Mexico, and the United States and presents a critique of the representation of these population movements as a "crisis" that manifests in a historical vacuum.

Paper long abstract:

Central America and Mexico have a 14,000 year history of human migration, settlement, and relocation. Across this history, the 16th Century stands out as a period of violent transformation of human environment relations, urbanization patterns, and ethnicized and racialized relations. The incorporation of this part of the Americas into the mercantilistic system of the Spanish Empire resulted in a cataclysmic loss of life among indigenous populations and the establishment of a socio-economic order that engendered severe inequities for centuries to come. Following elite-driven criollo independence movements in the early 19th Century, the region began to experience another socio-political transformation during the late 1800s in the form of the Liberal Reforms. The Liberal Reforms were intended to once again transform human-environment relations in a way that would promote the production of export crops in large plantations for circulation and consumption in global capitalist markets. Liberal Reforms also enabled, once again, the exploitation of indigenous labor, and the appropriation of indigenous lands. The Twentieth Century witnessed bloody insurrections and armed struggles whose roots were engendered over the long course of Colonial and Post-Colonial history, and the migration patterns seen today can only be understood from the vantage point of the longue durée that led to the neoliberal present. In this presentation, I examine the strategic forgetting that the declaration of a migratory "crisis" by United States political leaders entails and make a call for a historical political ecological understanding of the intersection of climate change, migration, and American Empire building.