Temporary migration: category of analysis or category of practice?

Abstract

Temporariness has become an increasingly salient feature in international migration that presents itself as fragmented, non-linear, including different intermediate stops and multiple returns and new departures. This special issue proposes a new analytical framework that brings together the role of policies defining migrants as temporary and the role of migrant’s own agency in perceiving their migration project as temporary or permanent. The proposed analytical framework covers both low- and high-skilled, legal and irregular migratory flows, and different visa and citizenship regimes. This introduction starts by discussing the relationship between migration and time pointing to its multiple facets. The second section discusses temporary migration as a policy category looking at how it is regulated in more or less flexible regimes, including categories of temporary migrants that are not usually included in temporary migration debates, notably international students or working holiday makers. Section three turns to the lived experiences of migrants and the ways in which they conceptualise their migration (or their migration plans) as temporary or more long term, emphasising how these views can be also changing over time and through the actual migration experience. The final section brings the two strands together and presents the contents of this special issue.