(Un)Settled Sojourners in Cities

Temporary migration is a human response to uncertain economic, ecological, political and socio-cultural environments. This book provides an important contribution to the literature on the rights, lived experiences and trajectories of temporary migrants. It focuses on the precarity of temporary migrants at different scales in urban settings, varying from the household, institution, and neighbourhood, to the city. Temporary migrants experience oscillations in precarity that vary with their categorization as skilled (professionals with valued skill sets, international students) or unskilled (domestic workers, labourers), their ambiguous legal status and the locales in which they reside and work. Individual chapters use case studies from around the world (USA, Canada, Ireland, Turkey, Singapore, China) to show how temporal and scalar precarity intersect and are mediated by national and local policies, civil society, as well as the personal and social attributes of migrants themselves such as gender, race, and country of origin. Although often overlooked due to their transitory status, the chapters demonstrate how temporary migrants are embedded in urban life and resist their categorization as disposable through individual and collective efforts. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Human Geography, Urban Studies, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Elizabeth Chacko is Professor of Geography and International Affairs at George Washington University, USA. She has conducted research in the United States, India, Ethiopia, and Singapore on the flows of people, capital and ideas, and their impacts on economic, cultural and social geographies in cities. Marie Price is Professor of Geography and International Affairs at George Washington University, USA. She is interested in how cities and civil society respond to immigrants as well as how immigrants influence these localities through their own agency and networks. Most of her work focuses upon the Americas.

1. Introduction-(Un)settled sojourners in cities: the scalar and temporal dimensions of migrant precarity 2. The uneven geography of asylum and humanitarian relief: place-based precarity for Central American migrant youth in the United States judicial system 3. Precarity of refugees: the case of Basmane-Izmir, Turkey 4. Soft violence: migrant domestic worker precarity and the management of unfree labour in Singapore 5. Temporary migrants and public space: a case study of Dongguan, China 6. Consuming the neighbourhood? Temporary highly skilled migrants in Montreal's Mile End 7. Promising precarity: the lives of Dublin's international students 8. Emerging precarity among international students in Singapore: experiences, understandings and responses 9. The ordinary lives and uneven precarity of the DACAmented: visualising migrant precarity in metropolitan Washington