Methodological innovations in studying multinational migrations

Abstract

A growing body of migration scholarship has highlighted the inadequacies of a single‐origin, single‐destination model for thinking about international migration in the 21st century. Multinational migrations—involving the varied movements of international migrants across more than one overseas destination with significant time spent in each overseas country—have been observed among high‐skilled migrants, low‐wage labour migrants, and documented and undocumented migrants. But given the extended temporality, multispatiality, and complexity of multinational migrations, the study of such onward movements can be fraught with difficulty. These methodological challenges must be added to the existing issues surrounding most international migration scholarship: methodological nationalism, essentialism, and skewed positionality. This special section highlights a range of research methods and approaches well suited to addressing these concerns. Collectively, the papers investigate various patterns of multinational migration across a range of migrant categories and spanning multiple world regions, addressing questions about the prevalence and drivers of these complex processes. They also offer a toolkit of methodological approaches—including mental mapping, trajectory analysis, attending to the family/household as the scale of analysis, multisited ethnographies, and longitudinal research—as suggested ways of studying multinational migrations.

Geographies of migration I: Platform migration

“…This pattern has been observed among migrant domestic workers in particular (Francisco-Menchavez, 2020;Paul, 2017;Silvey and Parreñas, 2020), although it is also identified among working migrants in other globalised sectors such as nursing (Walton-Roberts, 2020), agriculture (Collins and Bayliss, 2020) and sex work (Hwang, 2017). Multinational migrations are particularly apparent in Asia (Paul and Yeoh, 2020) and Europe (Ahrens et al, 2016), reflecting the establishment of socially sustained channels of migration (Findlay and Li, 1998), migration industries (Cranston et al, 2018) and broader infrastructures connecting migrants to opportunities to move at multiple points on migration trajectories (Lin et al, 2017).…”

“…Accounts of onward and stepwise migration are not themselves particularly new, having been observed in internal migration for several decades (Keown, 1971;Withers and Watson, 1991) and aligning with established research on the connection between internal and international migration (Huang, 2016;Hugo, 2016). 'Multinational migration' is a more recent observation (Paul, 2017) and is taken to refer to 'the varied movements of international migrants across more than one overseas destination with significant time spent in each overseas country' (Paul and Yeoh, 2020: 2). This pattern has been observed among migrant domestic workers in particular (Francisco-Menchavez, 2020;Paul, 2017;Silvey and Parreñas, 2020), although it is also identified among working migrants in other globalised sectors such as nursing (Walton-Roberts, 2020), agriculture (Collins and Bayliss, 2020) and sex work (Hwang, 2017).…”

“…Multinational migrations are not ordinarily planned in advance, and nor are they predictable by either researchers or migrants themselves (Paul and Yeoh, 2020). Rather, subsequent migrations are often generated through experiences or encounters that occur in initial forays.…”

Geographies of migration II: Decolonising migration studies

“…Yet, and indeed because of this obscuration, migration studies itself is fundamentally entangled in what Mignolo, (2000) describes as the ‘coloniality of knowledge’. Theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches and assumptions in migration studies are overwhelmingly based on European traditions (Mayblin and Turner, 2020); leading researchers in the field are often part of and apply knowledge from dominant white ethnic communities in the West (Kosnick, 2021; Paul and Yeoh, 2020), to say nothing of the predominance of masculine and heteronormative perspectives (Marchand, 2016). With limited attention paid to the historical contextualisation of migration patterns and governance (Bhambra, 2017) this epistemic coloniality has shaped migration studies in a way that sustains and legitimises the world created through colonialism: notions of sovereignty, (un)freedom and human rights; distinctions between citizens and foreigners; the constitution of migrants through bordering practices; and the extension of racialised hierarchies (Mayblin and Turner, 2020).…”

“…The first challenge for decolonising migration studies emerges from recognition that research is often on rather than with migrants and rarely foregrounds the contributions of non-Western scholars. Transnational research is dominated by researchers based in the West (Paul and Yeoh, 2020) and even within multinational teams, funding structures and institutional hierarchies often give leadership to those advancing European and/or North American perspectives. Researchers from migrant sending countries are afforded less prominence (Khan, 2020) and Indigenous perspectives are ordinarily completely erased (Kukutai and Rata, 2017).…”