The transition to retirement marks an appropriate juncture for older migrants to relocate to countries of origin if so desired. As recent survey data from France demonstrate, most older immigrants are well integrated and prefer to live out their old age in the host country. This paper examines return decisions at retirement in the case of older men living in migrant worker hostel accommodation, who seem on fi rst inspection to be far from integrated in France. Despite this lack of integration, they tend not to return defi nitively to places of origin at retirement. Instead, their preference is for regular back-and-forth trips. In order to make sense of these mobility decisions, several theories of migration are presented and evaluated against qualitative data from interviews conducted in several hostels in the Paris region in spring and summer 2008. While no one theory adequately accounts for all the phenomena observed, the evaluation shows that at various points in the data there is support for several theories. The added value of each theory becomes most apparent when levels of analysis are kept distinct: at the household level as regards remittances; at the kinshipvillage level as regards reintegration in the home context; at the meso-level of ethnic communities in terms of migrants' transnational ties; and at the macro-level of social systems concerning inclusion in healthcare and administrative organisations.

This guest editorial introduces a special issue entitled “Older migrants: (im)mobilities of ageing.” The movement of people is a core concern of population geographers, and the last decade has witnessed a “mobilities turn.” This literature has given much attention to younger people who move, but thus far has largely ignored people who migrate in later life, or whose previous migrations significantly shape their present experiences of ageing. The articles in this special issue address this lacuna, drawing on different categories of older international migrants to and from various European countries. More specifically, the special issue's ambition is to respond to 2 questions. What added value does the “new mobilities paradigm” contribute to the study of older migrants, who may have migrated long ago or be less mobile today than in the past? And conversely, what added value does studying older migrants contribute to the mobilities paradigm? While acknowledging earlier critiques of this paradigm, we contend that the mobilities perspective helps to elucidate the experiences of older migrants, through its insistence on the capacity for mobility—whether physical, virtual, communicative, or imaginative—at diverse scales, including but certainly not limited to international cross‐border moves. Mobility thus conceived is an important but neglected factor for older people to achieve better quality of life. We also argue that research with older migrants offers rich potential for refining the mobilities paradigm, for example, in terms of “mobility regimes” governing access to health care and social protection, to which older migrants may be particularly exposed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In the last two decades, transnational social fields have been transformed by advances in information and communication technologies (ICT

The emerging literature on deathscapes has thus far neglected the diversity of mortuary practices resulting from the inherently spatial phenomenon of migration and the increased capacity for transnational activities linking migrant communities with places of origin. Against this sedentarist bias, this article proposes that the end of life is a critical juncture in the settlement process for emerging diasporic communities. On the one hand, practices such as posthumous repatriation may serve to reinforce shared perceptions of temporary presence in host countries. On the other hand, death may be the occasion to lay what are perhaps the deepest foundations for home-making in diaspora, through funeral rituals and memorialisation. However, these latter claims to space in adopted homelands may also be the object of legal and political contestation, as demonstrated through an analysis of disputes in the UK over open-air Hindu funeral pyres and planning permission for an Islamic cemetery. What is at stake is the legitimate symbolic re-inscription of space. As such, diasporic deathscapes are an exemplary site of contestation and negotiation between migrant place-making practices and the domesticating urges of governmental subjects.

UK governments have frequently set up commissions to produce reports on complex policy problems, especially following 'crisis' focusing events. Such commissions are ad hoc, limited in duration, and engage external actors in providing policy advice and expertise to governments. This problem-solving, or instrumental function, is prominent in the literature: commissions are valued as a means of producing useful knowledge to inform policy responses. However, we believe that the problem-solving rationale does