The contributors investigate the inter-relationships between migrant remittances and the family in Asia. They argue that, in the context of Asian transnational labour migration where remittances tend to become a primary currency of care, the making or breaking of the family unit is mainly contingent on how individuals handle remittance processes.

"The home is at the forefront of rapid transformation brought upon the expansion of globalising economies, transnational migration, and the widespread uptake of ubiquitous digital communication technologies. This book unravels how geographically dispersed family members use smartphones, social media, and mobile applications in forging and sustaining long-distance relationships. It foregrounds the diverse, personalised, intimate, and creative mobile practices of fragmented family members in the conduct of everyday household interactions, festivities, homeland connections, and crisis management. On the one hand, mobile device use facilitates transnational connectivity, paving the way for enabling intimate ties, care expressions and homeland linkages. Yet, communicative tensions also arise when digital routines are shaped by familial norms and expectations, uneven financial conditions, asymmetrical technological access and capacities, and migration policies and processes. It is by deploying various strategies that transnational family members cope with an often unstable, unsettling, and ambivalent networked environment. Ultimately, this book provides a nuanced perspective on examining the mobilisation of a home from afar in the age of smartphones and mobile applications"--

When youth shake off their rural roots and middle-aged people migrate for economic opportunities, what happens to the grandparents left at home? Linked Lives provides readers with intimate glimpses into homes in a Sri Lankan Buddhist village, where elders wisely use their moral authority and their control over valuable property to assure that they receive both physical and spiritual care when they need it. The care work that grandparents do for grandchildren allows labor migration and contributes to the overall well-being of the extended family. The book considers the efforts migrant workers make to build and buy houses and the ways those rooms and walls constrain social activities. It outlines the strategies elders employ to age in place, and the alternatives they face in local old folks’ homes. Based on ethnographic work done over a decade, Michele Gamburd shows how elders face the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world.

This Handbook is a timely and critical intervention into debates on changing family dynamics in the face of globalization, population migration and uneven mobilities. By capturing the diversity of family ‘types’, ‘arrangements’ and ‘strategies’ across a global setting, the volume highlights how migration is inextricably linked to complex familial relationships, often in supportive and nurturing ways, but also violent and oppressive at other times.

Migrant Citizenship from Below explores the dynamic local and transnational lives of Filipina and Filipino migrant domestic workers living in Schönberg, Germany. Shinozaki examines their irregular migrant citizenship status from 'above', which is produced by complex interactions between Germany's welfare, care, and migration regimes and the Philippines' gendered politics of overseas employment. Despite the predominant representation of these workers as invisible, these spatially immobile migrants maintain sustained transnational engagements through parenting and religious practices. Shinozaki studies the reverse-gendered process of international reproductive labor migration, in which women traveled first and were later joined by men. Despite their structural vulnerability, participant observations and biographical interviews with the migrants demonstrate that they enact and negotiate migrant citizenship in the workplace, transnational households, religious practices and through accessing health provisions.

The emotional, social, and economic challenges faced by migrants and their families are interconnected through complex decisions related to mobility. Tangled Mobilities examines the different crisscrossing and intersecting mobilities in the lives of Asian migrants, their family members across Asia and Europe, and the social spaces connecting these regions. In exploring how the migratory process unfolds in different stages of migrants’ lives, the chapters in this collected volume broaden perspectives on mobility, offering insight into the way places, affects, and personhood are shaped by and connected to it.

High-profile events such as the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar have made one thing abundantly clear: Much of today's economic growth would be unthinkable without the low-wage employment of migrant workers. But which cultural, economic, and political infrastructures in the »source« countries make these types of migration possible in the first place? Based on multi-sensory ethnographic research in Nepal, Hannah Uprety retraces the practices of recruitment and instruction that - step by step - transform Nepali labor into an internationally marketable commodity. In doing so, she uncovers a migration regime that effectively turns local men and women into »migrant workers« before they even leave the country.

This open access IMISCOE Regional Reader explores the issues faced by migrant groups in Southeast Asia and the challenges of getting of their human rights recognized. It analyses the different responses, or lack thereof, of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to these highly complex situations which are shaped by contemporary debates around borders and concepts of states, migrants’ rights as well as access to citizenship and how these concepts and paradigms are intertwined with issues such as agency and resilience of migrants. Crucial attention is given to the region’s lesser known populations and issues such as the Vietnamese in Thailand, people of Indonesian descent (PIDs) in Southern Philippines, independent child migrants across the region, and the vulnerabilities of migrant workers facing the COVID-19 pandemic. With its unique regional focus, this book provides a valuable resource to those studying human rights and migration issues, policy makers and researchers and students.

Explores how global markets, middlemen and destination aspirations drive the 'stepwise migrations' of Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers.

"How do individuals protect and provide for themselves in a world where so many people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship and where many states are reneging on their contract to provide basic social welfare to their citizens? The conventional wisdom is that access to social protections is limited by proximity-membership in the nation-state of residence via citizenship, geographic proximity to the distribution of services within a given territory, and embeddedness in specific local family or social networks all place natural limits on the availability of social protection. We believe this conventional wisdom is sorely out of date. How and where people earn their livelihoods, the communities with which they identify, and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled has changed dramatically. Societies are increasingly diverse-racially, ethnically, and religiously, but also in terms of membership and rights. There are increasing numbers of long-term residents without membership who live for extended periods in a host country without full rights or representation. There are also more and more long-term members without residence who live outside the countries where they are citizens but continue to participate in the economic and political life of their homelands. There are professional-class migrants who carry two passports and know how to make claims and raise their voices in multiple settings, but there are many more poor, low-skilled, and undocumented migrants who are marginalized in both their home and host countries. Our book analyzes how these changes are transforming social welfare as we know it. We argue that a new set of social welfare arrangements has emerged that we call Hybrid Transnational Social Protection (HTSP). We find that HTSP sometimes complements and sometimes substitutes for traditional modes of social welfare provision. Migrants and their families unevenly and unequally piece together resource environments across borders from multiple sources, including the state, market, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their social networks. Local, subnational (i.e., states and provinces), national, and supranational actors (i.e., regional and international governance bodies) are all potential providers of some level of care. Changing understandings of how and where rights are granted that go beyond national citizenship will aid migrants and non-migrants in their efforts to protect themselves across borders. In fact, we suggest four logics upon which rights are based: the logic of citizenship, the logic of personhood/humanity, the logic of the market, and the logic of community. The conflicts between these different logics are at the core of the contemporary controversies and conflicts over what we can and what we should do to protect dispersed individuals and families from risk, danger, and precarity"--