Editorial for International Migration, 54 (2)

World migration news continues to be dominated by the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East with not only continued flows from the Syrian civil war and strife elsewhere in the region, but also with ever-stronger reactions from within the European Union. Predictably, some members of the European public have voiced vigorous concerns over the arrival of large numbers of refugees and other migrants, and various political interests have taken their cues from these reactions or, some might argue, led them on. So strong have these concerns been that some governments have re-introduced intra-European border controls, thereby opening the question of the viability of the Schengen agreement. Reports of sexual violence against women committed by some of the migrants have made an already uncertain social situation even less so, and governments are scrambling to restore the public's confidence in their ability to manage the movement of refugees and other migrants into their communities. At the same time, other voices, from both within Europe and the international community, implore Europe to do yet more to help these victims of violence and political oppression and to work to uphold human rights and maintain European values of openness and compassion. The European refugee crisis remains indeed a crisis, and this publication watches with great interest and in anticipation that members of our community will submit their careful analyses for publication. This issue of International Migration offers contributions in three areas: the relationship between migration and development, the relationship between migration and security, and migration management. Over the past decade, much has been made of the development benefits of remittances with calls for reducing the costs of sending them and suggestions for how their benefits can be enhanced. But Syed Tehseen Jawaid and Syed Ali Raza offer some prudent cautions, noting that, while remittances are generally of considerable value to homeland economies, under some circumstances they are seen to increase voluntary unemployment and reduce economic growth. Annalisa Busetta, Valeria Cetorelli and Manuela Stranges examine remitting behaviours among migrants to Italy, finding a surprising degree of invariance over time. The European Union has long supported the management of migration for development purposes. Niels Keijzer, Julie Héraud and Malin Frankenhaeuser find, however, that migration policies of individual member states do not always reflect the EU's position on the relationship between migration and development that some member states still regard migration primarily as a domestic problem to deal with unilaterally. João Resende-Santos explores the perspective of a small, low income island society and demonstrates the signal importance of migration and the Cape Verdean diaspora for its economy. What some refer to as the “securitization of migration” remains of high interest to academic researchers, many of whom see in it numerous disadvantages for migrants. Gilberto Rosas looks at the “thickening of the US border” following numerous measures including the Immigration Reform and Control Act and the militarization of border patrols, noting the effects of these measures on migrants, including reductions in their human security. Staying within North America, Suzanne Huot, Andrea Bobadilla, Antoine Bailliard and Debbie Laliberte Rudman look at how security measures introduced into the immigration system by the Canadian government have contributed to the “othering” of certain migrants, asylum seekers in particular, and eroding the government's responsibilities to these people. Maurizio Ambrosini, in analyzing the ways in which governments manage irregular migration, identifies four dominant patterns: exclusion, stigmatization, tolerance, and integration. He offers a detailed analysis of the governance of irregular migration by Italy and other states in Southern Europe. Greece provides another European setting for examining the effects of the securitizing of migration, and Gabriella Lazaridis and Dimitris Skleparis take us through the dynamic relationship between heightened enforcement practices and the rise of the far right in that country. On a different track, Jana Arsovska takes us on a fascinating tour of Albanian organized crime groups in New York, looking at the extent to which these groups are connected to criminal organizations in Albania, asking, were they sent by the power brokers in the Balkans to launch branch operations in the U.S.? For many administrations, the ultimate but often elusive goal is managed migration, migration flows that follow a carefully determined set of objectives with the numbers of arrivals per year and their human capital characteristics matching labour market needs and the capacity of a society to welcome and integrate them. Henrik Emilsson looks at the effect of Sweden's 2008 labour-migration policy change wherein most state control was abandoned and an employer-led selection was introduced. The UK has been eyeing reduced net migration targets for a number of years now, and Alessio Cangiano explains the surprising level of difficulty encountered in managing migration to these sorts of target. Finally in this issue, Erin Trouth Hofmann, Julia L. Carboni, Beth Mitchneck and Igor Kuznetsov explore how economic and socio-political objectives vie for dominance in attempts by Russia, now with one of the world's largest migration stocks, to manage the inflows of people from example former Soviet states.

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