Immobility is to be complicated as a topic of study in research on human migration. This paper analyses different ways of staying put, investigating the motivations, degree of (in)voluntariness and associated narratives, to show how immobility is as complex a research category as mobility. It does so in the context of irregular male migration from a rural location in Andean Ecuador to the USA. This paper also focuses on the interactions between mobility and immobility. Families with migrant and non-migrant members are imbued with and affected by changing mobility-immobility dynamics. This paper explores such dynamics to facilitate the understanding of local sociocultural logic, where mobility and immobility are infused with specific meaning, while placing such dynamics within global regimes of (im)mobility.

This paper ethnographically explores particular ways of staying put in a Mexican village that builds upon a myriad of present and past mobilities. By doing so, the research contributes to open the black box of rural immobility. Three broad types of stayers are identified: desired, acquiescent, and involuntary stayers. The ethnographic material supports the explanatory power of breaking down the aspiration phase from the realisation one to understand the (mis)matching between desires and capacities for situations of permanence. The research particularly explores how villagers willing to remain, have managed to stay put in a context of high physical mobility, and how staying villagers perceive the desirability and feasibility of staying put compared with that of migrating. Staying put, similarly to migration, is often part of complex life strategies that involve changing mobility-immobility articulations. In the particular ethnographic context, staying put is ascribed an intrinsic positive value. Migration (whether internal or international) has an instrumental value as the means to be able to remain in the village.

Set within the growing literature on migration and development, this paper has two interlinked objectives. First, it examines remittances, a key element of the migration-development nexus, from a gendered perspective. Second it does so in a comparative empirical perspective, focusing on remittance behaviour in two contrasting settings, albania and ecuador. both countries have experienced mass emigration in recent decades. research is based on household surveys with remittance receivers in selected rural areas of both countries, supplemented by in-depth interviews with both senders and receivers of remittances. by using the concept of 'remittance dyads' -person-to-person transfers of money and gifts -we examine the gendered mechanics of conveying and managing remittances to see if they have the potential to reshape gender relations in these migrant households. they do, but the effects are limited.

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Migration is often aimed to build migrants' own house in their places of origin. In rural highland Ecuador remittances sent from the US are habitually used to build houses which have changed the housing landscape of many villages. This paper describes the housing landscape of a village, Xarbán, and how it has changed over the last fifty years due to migration and remittances. It unpacks the reasons why many of the recently built houses remained empty or inhabited by only one or two people. It particularly explores the impact of migrants' legal status abroad on their housing decisions and behaviour. Finally, the article looks for positive impacts of these so-called "wasted houses" on migrants, their relatives and non-migrant villagers. Remittance houses' do have positive effects which are different for female and male villagers.