Mexican Niches in the US Construction Industry: 2009–2015

From ‘elites’ to ‘everyone’: re-framing international mobility scholarship to be all-encompassing

“…Getting any solid evidence is particularly difficult, and not helped by wavering and dubious definitions of constructs (Weiner and Klekowski von Koppenfels 2020), nor the clandestine and undocumented nature of entry and exit methods of many workers (Geddes 2005). Definitional problems aside, as a proportion of the world's population, the number of low-status international workers is substantial, often over 10% of the total population in any nation (Bal 2016;Spindler-Ruiz 2020). The largest numbers reside in just a few countries in the Americas, Middle East and Asia (Asis and Piper 2008;Frantz 2013;Siniavskaia 2015), but they exist everywhere.…”

Global families: an evolving concept

“…These families experience various contexts in which their mobility unfolds; they may engage, for example, in high-status expatriation or skilled migration where all family members relocate together (Al Ariss and Syed 2011;Haslberger and Brewster, 2008;Legrand, Al Ariss and Bozionelos 2019), or in low-status expatriation/unskilled worker migration (people that are commonly referred to as 'migrant workers'; Alberti, Holgate and Tapia 2013;Kitching, 2018;Ozçelik et al, 2019) whose families remain behind in the home country. Such people number in the millions worldwide constituting over 10 per cent of the population in some countries (Bal 2016;Lahaie, Hayes, Piper and Heymann, 2009;Spindler-Ruiz 2020). These families may also be refugees and asylum seekers (Mexi, 2023;Walsh, 2021) -displaced families in cohabitating or separated arrangements as they navigate crises in their homeland that forces them to live in another country, at least temporarily until it is safe to go home.…”

From ‘elites’ to ‘everyone': re-framing international mobility scholarship to be all-encompassing

“…Getting any solid evidence is particularly difficult, and not helped by wavering and dubious definitions of constructs (Weiner and Klekowski von Koppenfels 2020), nor the clandestine and undocumented nature of entry and exit methods of many workers (Geddes 2005). Definitional problems aside, as a proportion of the world's population, the number of low-status international workers is substantial, often over 10% of the total population in any nation (Bal 2016;Spindler-Ruiz 2020). The largest numbers reside in just a few countries in the Americas, Middle East and Asia (Asis and Piper 2008;Frantz 2013;Siniavskaia 2015), but they exist everywhere.…”