Editorial

The world has now fixed its attention on migration in the Mediterranean region with a special focus on Syrians fleeing the violent turmoil in their country as well as migrants crossing the sea from North Africa to Europe, sometimes with tragedy as the end result. The world has received a dominant image of migration chaos and human despair from this region over the past few years, peaking, at least for now, with the desperately sad photo of the Syrian boy lying lifeless on a beach in Turkey. These portrayals of chaos and despair, although undeniably accurate, do not convey the entirety of the migration experience in this part of the world. Not all migration in the MENA region is irregular, chaotic, spurred by violence or economic hardship, or wrought with despair. In this final issue of International Migration for 2015, we offer you a look into aspects of migration and the lives of migrants here that reveal a more common, less extreme experience than what we have become accustomed to seeing from the international news media. These unsensational phenomena are not for this reason of less interest or importance for either scholars or policy makers, but rather represent the enduring and quotidian realities and challenges that both must attend to if we are to have responsible and effective management of migration and its consequences for the migrants, their families, their destination countries, and their homelands. What determines socio-cultural integration outcomes are the subject of a large study by Tineke Fokkema and Hein de Haas that compares first generation immigrants from Morocco, Senegal, Egypt, and Ghana in southern Europe. They explore both pre-migration and post-migration determinants, finding that education and pre-arrival information about the destination society enhances socio-cultural integration and that, post-arrival, occupation is a significant factor, over-reaching employment alone. Lina Andersson and Mats Hammarstedt look at the integration of immigrants from the Middle East in Sweden, specifically at the relationship between residence in an ethnic enclave and the propensity of self-employment as a vehicle for economic integration. Three papers look at migration in the context of Israel. Beginning with Brent David Harris, we learn that the myth of return to Israel, aliya, is of diminishing significance as the state of Israel matures. Israelis in Vancouver express little guilt from having left Israel, their longing for family and friends displacing their longing for the homeland. Nir Cohen, Daniel Czamanski and Amir Hefetz bring us the example of internal migration in Israel amongst minority Arab Israelis, a movement that sees more women than men migrating from the rural periphery to the urban core of contemporary Israel. The consequences of new regulations governing the employment of foreign workers in Israel's construction sector is the focus of Yoram Ida's and Gal Talit's study which asks whether this regulatory change has improved the lives of these workers or not. As Turkey's economic performance has risen, so too has its allure as a destination country for migrants, Turkish emigres and non-Turks both. Juliette Tolay takes us through the development of a new field of scholarship that looks at migration to Turkey, noting its academic strengths and relative weaknesses and pointing to directions that future research in the area ought to take. And as conditions in Afghanistan remain highly uncertain, the protracted refugee situation continues. Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi and Rasoul Sadeghi look at the integration of Afghans in Iran, appropriately but sadly having to consider the second-generation's means of adaptation to life in Iran and the various factors that determine their strategies. With the current interest in migration's effects on development, much of it focussed on the impact of remittances, Selçuk Akçay and Gökhan Demirtaş break new ground in looking at the impact of remittances on energy consumption, with Morocco as the case study. Our bridge paper this issue describes the relation between immigration and the prevalence of certain first names for children in France. Not surprisingly, children of parents from Maghreb or Middle Eastern countries chose different names for their children, but perhaps surprisingly, not for religious reasons. Family and social network effects are the focus for the remainder of our articles in this issue. Laura Merla tackles the difficult matter of how migrants manage care for ageing family members in the homeland, an illustration of the far-reaching power of transnationalism. Similarly, Paola Bonizzoni takes us through the shifting challenges of migrant mothers in Milan whose children remain at home, asking whether in fact the migration experience changes the very meanings of these care relationships and the meaning of family itself. Md Mizanur Rahman takes us to Bangladesh to witness the ways in which migrants’ families incur debt to finance the migration of a family member. And Dimitri Fazito and Weber Soares look at the ways in which social and family networks support what they call the industry of illegal migration. For Brazilians intent on going to the United States, migration brokerage is a matter of who you know.

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