Migration industry has recently emerged as a lens through which to theorise the intertwinement of non-state actors who aim to provide diverse migration-pertaining services. However, while much of their work is done in and through cities, consequently (re)forming variegated urban landscapes, scholarly literature has thus far neglected the nexus between cities and the migration industry. In this special issue, we begin filling this gap by exploring the significance of migration industries – as a resurgent concept and an area of research from migration studies – for understanding the urban. We start by reviewing the urbanisation of migration studies, highlighting its key limits. We then move on to introduce the migration industries debate, pointing out its existing implicit urban dimensions. We proceed by elaborating our main argument about why and how migration industries provide an especially productive lens for urbanists to consider. Specifically, we stress the three key analytical vantage points that the attention to migration industries enables us to see as central to contemporary city-making. These are its political-economic embeddedness, the urban-constitutive nature of trans-local connectivities, and how business-driven city-making dovetails with more serendipitous, bottom-up shaping of the arrival city. Each of these points also describes how individual papers speak to them. We conclude by briefly outlining a research agenda for migration industries that is thoughtfully embroiled in the (post-)pandemic urban.

This article explores settled Western migrants whose digital content provides recent, mostly Western migrants in Copenhagen with local know-how and city-related information. This new type of informal integration intermediary functions as an emerging digital component of wider urban integration industries that assist migrants with settlement and social integration. We draw on the sociological theory of translation as a social, productive practice that constructs new meanings through selective interpretations and conceptualise the work of these bloggers as translation. Relying on the analysis of their blog and Instagram posts, and on interviews, this article shows how their translations of the city, and through it Danishness, play a critical role in mediating narratives of ‘becoming local’. Despite the differences between the bloggers’ respective translations (including those afforded through blogs vs Instagram) and despite criticism of a lack of inclusion of the socio-cultural differences in Denmark, these intermediaries ultimately reinforce for newcomers the expectations of the ‘green-city citizen’ and integration into Danish culture and lifestyle. We argue that what makes their translations resonate is not only that social media itself allows them to perform their having become (almost) local, but also that they carefully use their personal reflections as migrants. At the same time, the fact that their personal experiences of the city have been shaped by their positionality as white migrants feeling very welcomed, and even passing for locals, in the city curtails these bloggers’ wider potential as informal intermediaries filling a gap within Copenhagen’s urban integration industries.

No abstract

No abstract

This article examines an issue that highlights intimate connections between minority and migration politics, namely, politics of religious accommodation.It does so through analyzing a conflict between the Copenhagen municipality and a Jewish kindergarten that resulted in an enforced privatization.Conceptualizing it as a part of wider struggles over recognition (broadly conceived) of migration-pertaining difference in Denmark, I analyze the case through Nancy Fraser's (2009) theory of justice as comprised of singular but interrelated arenas of (cultural) recognition, (institutional-political) representation and (economic) redistribution, bound together by a norm of participatory parity. I argue that while the negotiation was characterized by instances of both misrepresentation and misrecognition, the municipality's preference for the institution's privatization reflects not only a return to the traditional preference for the privatization of difference but also the centrality of the redistributive arena of justice in Denmark. If the latter tends to be in welfare contexts understood by the majority as always already expressing recognition, from a minority perspective, the state's embrace of such a recognition-through-redistribution approach can entail an injury of lacking or erroneous recognition. Whether the minority will perceive a single case as such an injury depends on the broader tenor of politics of minority and immigrant difference at the time.