(Un)Settled Sojourners in Cities: Challenges of “Temporariness” among Migrants and Asylum Seekers

Temporary migration is a human response to uncertain economic, ecological, political and socio-cultural environments. This book provides an important contribution to the literature on the rights, lived experiences and trajectories of temporary migrants. It focuses on the precarity of temporary migrants at different scales in urban settings, varying from the household, institution, and neighbourhood, to the city. Temporary migrants experience oscillations in precarity that vary with their categorization as skilled (professionals with valued skill sets, international students) or unskilled (domestic workers, labourers), their ambiguous legal status and the locales in which they reside and work. Individual chapters use case studies from around the world (USA, Canada, Ireland, Turkey, Singapore, China) to show how temporal and scalar precarity intersect and are mediated by national and local policies, civil society, as well as the personal and social attributes of migrants themselves such as gender, race, and country of origin. Although often overlooked due to their transitory status, the chapters demonstrate how temporary migrants are embedded in urban life and resist their categorization as disposable through individual and collective efforts. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Human Geography, Urban Studies, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.