Drawing upon 120 semi‐structured interviews with irregular migrants in Belgium, this article focuses on their aspirations and the resources needed in order to realize these. It is demonstrated that specific aspirations require specific forms of capital. A typology is constructed, based on three types of aspirations with corresponding resources. First, investment migrants, who aspire to return and invest in upward social mobility in their country of origin, require job competencies (cultural capital) and social leverage (social capital). Second, legalization migrants, who aspire to obtain legal residence, require different forms of capital, depending on the marriage market they are active in. Third, settlement migrants, aiming at residing legally or illegally in the receiving society, require both social support and social leverage (combined social capital). These findings indicate it is important to adopt a contextualized approach studying the mechanisms through which various forms of capital lead to different outcomes for irregular migrants.

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Scholars have found that many migrants are vulnerable to exploitation and that there are many immigrants among victims of extreme forms of labour exploitation. In the Global North, empirical studies have scrutinized the link between irregular migration and labour trafficking, yet empirical studies that focus on labour schemes involving regular migrants remain scarce. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 8 investigative police files of labour trafficking involving regular migrants in the Chinese catering industry in the Netherlands, this study investigates the mechanisms through which exploitation comes about and is sustained. It is concluded that exploitation is the result of the ways in which both the employers and the victims manoeuvre the space provided by immigration policies. Employer-bounded residence and work permits emerged as an especially important contributor to the initiation and continuation of exploitative situations. Policymakers should be highly aware of the vulnerabilities of temporary labour migrants' positions created by such policy arrangements. Future research is needed in order to create a better understanding of how exploitative work situations develop and are sustained, and the role different factors such as immigration policies play in such processes.

Studies aimed at understanding different post-return experiences point at various factors that are involved. In this article, we show the importance of striving for a contextualized understanding of post-return experiences as different factors appear to be important in different cases. Our study sets out to seek the value of the theory of preparedness proposed by Cassarino and simultaneously contribute to further contextualization of this theory through a qualitative study conducted in Morocco. Drawing on 44 qualitative interviews with a diverse set of returned migrants we scrutinize how mechanisms related to intersections between factors commonly found to be important in the literature take shape to make different factors important in different cases. For example, we show how the ability to keep transnational contacts with the destination country after return adds to positive post-return experiences, but only for migrants with specific return motives. In doing so, this article contributes to theory specification and contextualization.