Editorial

Shortly after the appearance of this final issue of International Migration for 2018, the United Nations will usher in the new Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration at a conference in Marrakech, Morocco set to take place on December 10 and 11. By the end of the year, it is expected that the UN General Assembly will endorse the Global Compact on Refugees. Furthermore, plans are set for the UN to create the United Nations Migration Network to serve as the successor to the Global Migration Group and to be managed by the International Organization for Migration which joined the United Nations family only in 2016. Together with the incorporation of migration-related phenomena in the Sustainable Development Goals and the continuation of the Global Forum on Migration and Development, these are weighty times for the international community in the migration sphere. A great many observers will be assessing the extent to which the promise of these initiatives, some of them born out of the intense and often dangerous migration and refugee flows in the Mediterranean region in 2015 and 2016, will be realized, and whether the international community's current enthusiasm will remain in place long enough to effect improvements in how the world manages migration for better results than in the past, including in emergency situations of which there will not likely be any shortage. This journal is planning a special issue to appear in 2019 that will look at the twin Global Compacts, and we look forward to the careful analyses. Our first group of articles in this issue looks at an important aspect of managing migration, the integration of those who arrive in their new cities and countries of destination. Managing migration well requires also managing the settlement and integration of newcomers; failures to bring about satisfactory integration have the potential to negate the benefits of migration. Investing energy and treasure in the one requires investments in the other. Cooray, Marfouk, and Nazir open our discussion with an examination of how public opinion towards labour market participation is formed and can turn against immigrants. In asking whether employers should show a preference for nationals over migrants when jobs are scarce, the authors raise difficult policy questions about whether discrimination can ever be justified. For some, the end result of integration is naturalization, the acquiring of citizenship. Bartram looks at the UK's naturalization regime, specifically at its citizenship test and ceremony, and asks whether its intended benefits of an enhanced experience for the immigrant are attained. The answers may not be encouraging for UK policy-makers. In a highly innovative exercise, Schlegel invokes a metaphor of property rights to examine how migrants’ skills are treated. A more commonly used metaphor, that of capital in its various forms as described separately in the 1980s by Bourdieu and Coleman, is invoked by Shen et al. in their examination of internal rural-to-urban migrants in China; they find that their integration is in fact dependent in part on the extent to which they possess human, social, and other forms of capital regarded as both static and dynamic forces. Staying in Asia, Kim takes us to the Korean peninsula to look at the challenges of North Korean migrant teachers in South Korean society, finding difficulties in both directions that, generalized, may need to be recognized and dealt with as relations between the two countries warm with the potential for greater mobility between them. Finally, Fang takes us to Newfoundland in Canada to explore the integration of refugees in the smaller cities of that island and ultimately its ability to retain them as members of an, at times, fragile economy. Our second group of articles looks at family aspects of migration. There has been a high degree of attention paid to marriage migration within Asia, especially to South Korea, and Cho extends this discussion by looking at the impact of cultural, genetic, and linguistic similarities on migration among these countries. In our next articles, the oft-noted benefits of migration receive a reality-check with regard to its effects on some families. Kuépié offers a sobering account of the effects of migration from Cameroon on the education of children left behind, particularly boys. Jennings, in a statistical study of migration within and from Nicaragua, discovers that the more prolonged the migration and the greater the distance, the greater the rate of union dissolution that follows. Silver also looks at the effects of migration on marriages, noting not only that family separation from international migration is an emotional hardship endured by millions but that return migration can spur new family separations. In our enthusiasm about the benefits of migration for all, its effects on some families and marriages ought not to be forgotten. Our final set of articles takes the form of a special section guest edited by Hari and Liew, “Precarity, Illegality, and Temporariness: Implications and Consequences of Canadian Migration Management”. Canada has long enjoyed a strong reputation for managing migration; the articles in this section raise some cautions.

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