Punctuated temporalities: Temporal borders in student-migrants’ everyday lives

Abstract

The punctuation of time through visas and residence permits intimately affects temporary migrants’ everyday lives. The temporal forms of control engendered through the global border and visa regime and their impact on fragmenting lived time have received little attention in comparison to the extensively studied spatial aspects of migration, particularly in the research context of mobility conceptualised as skilled migration. By drawing on in-depth interviews with migrants holding a temporary student status in Finland, the article examines the ways in which temporal borders bring about punctuated temporalities among non-EU/EEA student-migrants. Moreover, it demonstrates how the time limits of the student permit offer fruitful ground for the production of a low-paid labour force and how temporal borders assist in hierarchising this labour force in terms of mobility and rights. The article contributes to the sociological literature on migration and precarious labour markets by emphasising the analytical relevance of examining temporal borders as engendering a hierarchising function of the border regime and the role of temporal borders in facilitating the production of precarious migrant labour.

What Makes Resources Capital? The Labour Market Integration of Highly Skilled Japanese in Finland

“…The rapid growth of the ICT-based Finnish economy has been the factor to attract more HSM workers and thus retaining HSMs is a central concern among the Finnish business sectors and policymakers (Habti & Koikkalainen 2014;Koskela 2010). However, scholars have pointed out challenges HSMs experience when accessing the Finnish labour market, involving discrimination, exploitation, overqualification and unemployment (Alho 2020;Maury 2020). To understand better how HSMs become integrated into the Finnish economy, more empirical research is required (Kilinç 2021).…”

Ambivalent Strategies: Student-Migrant-Workers’ Efforts at Challenging Administrative Bordering

“…Research on student migration has increasingly diverged from the image of the international student as the ideal highly skilled and wealthy migrant enjoying smooth crossborder mobility. Research demonstrates that migrants holding student residence permits or visas often have experiences of low-paid work and precarity due to their insecure and temporary migration status (Maury, 2017(Maury, , 2020a(Maury, , 2020bNeilson, 2009;Robertson, 2011Robertson, , 2019a. However, research on student-migrants' efforts at contesting the border regime remain scarce.…”

Wayward academia—Wild, Connected, and Solitary Diffractions in Everyday Praxis

“…A specific feature of this setting is historical: Aspirational whiteness, or a melancholic longing to be part of 'proper' Europe and the 'West' that has never been quite accomplished due to anxiety about perceived connections to an imagined 'East' or the 'far North,' leading to defensive attempts to claim Nordic exceptionality (Oinas, 2018;Vuorela, 2009). Universities are prime sites for the performance of national investment in aspirational Western modernity, alongside the high arts, classical music, IT and mobile technology, and an exclusionary welfare-state democracy with an intensive border regime (Maury, 2020).…”