QCA

This research project aims to understand the organizational and cognitive consequences of the election of specific national political representatives by citizens living abroad. The proposal is based on a comparative analysis of two expatriate populations with such rights, Italians and French, in two host countries, Belgium and Canada. The focus of the research is the motivations, representations and strategies of politically active emigrants in branches of home political parties abroad. The research will be done through an original multi-methods research design – computer-assisted discourse analysis, qualitative comparative analysis and quantitative questionnaire analysis – to gather rich and sociologically relevant data. The combination of CAQDAS techniques with QCA, as a comparative tool of analysis, will produce robust results and provide good grounds for tentative generalization beyond the considered case studies. The project will originally contribute to the theoretical advancement of many research fields. It will develop the theory of political parties, since the knowledge is weak and fragmentary concerning the role and functioning of political parties abroad, and almost inexistent in non-contentious contexts. The project will also advance the theory of transnational politics, since it will focus on two dimensions underdeveloped in the existing literature: the involvement of emigrants in home politics and the analysis of banal transnational politics. The project will finally contribute to the theory of national identity and citizenship since it will question the reconfiguration of established nation states that might result from giving citizenship rights and representation to nationals living abroad. In a policy perspective the research responds to recurring demands to further investigate the governance of migration as well as the implications of multilevel citizenship in a context of growing mobility of EU citizens from, to and within the EU.

This project asks how governments of migrant sending countries can influence the rights of their low skilled migrant workers in receiving countries. The project approaches this question from both the sending and the receiving country side; looking at factors that determine when and how sending states intervene and what determines the responses from receiving countries. The surplus of aspiring migrants and economic importance of remittances would suggest sending states have little bargaining power. Single case studies however suggest that some nevertheless intervene. A comprehensive overview of the drivers of immigration and emigration policy will result in a set of hypotheses. A survey of policy makers in sending countries will generate an overview of interventions by sending country governments. The project’s core is a systematic comparative case study of six sending countries with partly overlapping receiving countries and three of these receiving countries. The sending country cases are three sets of two countries in which migrant remittances constitute a similar share of GDP but involvement with the rights of their workers abroad differ; the Philippines, Senegal, India, Ecuador, Morocco and Vietnam. The receiving countries are South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Italy. These countries vary strongly in the rights for migrant workers and the level of cooperation with sending states. QCA and process tracing will be used to assess the hypotheses. The project is innovative in 1) providing a systematic analysis of a larger number of cases including countries rarely covered in comparative studies on migrant rights, 2) examining of the actions of both sending and receiving countries, and 3) taking the trade-off between migrant numbers and rights into account. The project will push theory development forward by connecting theoretical fields and expanding geographic scope. It is policy-relevant by providing further insight into how the rights of migrant workers can be improved.

In order to manage the long-term challenges of global migration, Europe must create effective and coherent policies for engaging with countries of origin and transit. Effectiveness and cohesion depend on the real-world mechanisms at work: How do the root causes of migration operate? What do prospective migrants see as alternatives to migration? How do policy measures interact with other factors in shaping migration outcomes? Because the quality of policies is so intimately connected with the actual development-related causes and consequences of migration, MIGNEX addresses the full scope of the topic as described in the Work Programme. The project’s overall objective is to contribute to more effective and coherent migration management through evidence-based understanding of the linkages between development and migration. Steps toward this objective comprise extensive research in ten strategically relevant countries of origin and transit, including Afghanistan, Guinea, Somalia, Nigeria and Turkey. The project team will conduct a survey with a target sample of 12,500 individuals, in addition to qualitative data collection and policy analysis. Correctly identifying two-way causal mechanisms between migration and development is imperative but very difficult. The project design incorporates two innovative responses to this challenge. First, it follows a principle of disaggregation, which, among other things, entails specific attention to local-level mechanisms. Second, the analysis combines conventional methods, such as multivariate regression, with Qualitative Comparative Analysis, which is a technique that allows for identifying complex causal relationship on the basis of in-depth case studies. In the analysis of policy coherence, the consortium will focus on identifying the causes of incoherence. The proposal clearly specifies three primary expected impacts and sets out an ambitious and professional strategy for impact maximization.

This Is Evidence: Re-Picturing South Asian Migrant Men in Greece is a multi-media installation that features photographs, videos, and narrative pieces from four groups of Bangladeshi and Pakistani migrant men living and working in Greece. The exhibition is a collaboration between the migrant men and Dr. Reena Kukreja, from Queen’s University in Canada. The men used their cell phones to take images and videos. Compounding the exploitation that many migrant workers experience is the social and political exclusion. Prevailing discourses of Islamophobia and xenophobia have enabled an “us” versus “them” narrative in the Greek political landscape. This Is Evidence actively counters this narrative as the migrant men “re-present” themselves and their experiences directly to the people. This exhibition uses “photovoice” a social justice artistic method that gives marginalized groups such as these migrant men a voice through images and videos that they take of their lives. The exhibition premiered in Athens, Greece in 2022 before moving to Kingston and Toronto in Canada. It is slated for exhibition at the University of Namur from 19 April - 27 June 2023.

The IMMERSE project “Integration Mapping of refugee and Migrant Children in Schools and Other Experiential Environments in Europe” emerges at a time where Europe and its socio-educational system are facing a lot of pressure because the migration flows and the current refugee crisis. In this situation, refugee and migration children are the most vulnerable group and Europe is committed to provide them support and to promote more inclusive European societies. In this sense, IMMERSE aims to enhance the socio-educative inclusion of all refugee and migrant children through the generation of new data and policy recommendations on the integration of refugee and migrant children. An innovative and ICT supported solution has been proposed to carry out research activities in order to create a dashboard of socio-educational indicators that will allow to collect information to be analyzed and become practical policy recommendations. IMMERSE aims to foster the empowerment of children and other relevant stakeholders that impact on their integration and successful transition to adulthood into host societies. IMMERSE follows a whole school approach and aims to implement co-creation methods to involve all the key actors in the achievement of the results.

The European challenges in the field of migration have an impact on society, since the division between them opposed to newcomers and welcoming them has been continuously increasing. The project addresses the perceptions of the Belgian and European population about refugees/migrants and vice versa as well as their interactions with the policy agenda of asylum and migration with a European comparative perspective and a specific focus on Belgium. As Europe face important migratory challenges and political difficulties we have seen an increase of the public opinion’s polarisation regarding asylum and refugees, it is important to address this question. Including teams from our project will analyse this polarisation and its links to policies, as it is necessary for a better understanding of the current debate on migration in Europe and Belgium. The 2015 asylum crisis will be considered as indicative of the general European and Belgian citizens’ reactions about migration. The focus is then on attitudes, representations, discourses and practices about refugees, on the interactions at the local level between the majority populations and newly arrived migrants. The project will follow two objectives. First studying public opinion towards asylum seekers and refugees with a European cross- national perspective but also how these groups perceive Belgium, its asylum system and its reception policies. The second objective is to analyse the polarisation of the public opinion by focussing on pro and anti-refugees’ actions at the local level. This will allow understanding the links between public opinion and the implementation of asylum and reception policies. In order to fulfil these objectives, our project is based on 5 Work Packages that each focus on a specific dimension. The first two ones aim at developing a European comparative perspective on perceptions towards migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. This then includes a quantitative analysis of public opinion’s perceptions towards new immigration flows as well as a comparison of 5 European case studies (Sweden, Italy, Grece, Hungary and Germany). The three other work packages aim at a deep analysis of the Belgian situation. First, they consist of understanding actions and reactions towards asylum seekers and refugees at a local level. This implies to study the opposite reactions with an in-depth analysis of their content, justifications and determinants but also to focus on interactions between social groups (pro vs. anti migrants groups; ional citizens & refugees) as well as the interactions between the population’s reaction and the implementation of asylum and receptions policies. Second, studying the Belgian situation implies to analyse asylum seekers and refugees perceptions regarding the country’s asylum and reception policies. Lastly, it implies to realise a policy evaluation of those policies. The aim of this project and the main questions it addresses focus more on the relations and on the dynamics existing between the citizens and the migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Hence, we propose to broaden the scope of what is usually done by extending the focus on actors that are often not implied in migration studies: the majority population and the impact of new migration waves on social cohesion. The expected results concerns: 1) an in-depth and comparative knowledge of attitudes towards migrants and refugees in Europe; 2) an analysis of the factors influencing the attitudes of rejections, disregards and support; 3) an in-depth analysis of the specificities of the current wave of migration compared to the last ones; 4) an in-depth analysis of citizens’ and migrants’ discourses, representation and practices and of their reaction on social cohesion at a local level;

The negative employment and social developments across Europe since the start of the crisis, coupled with increased fiscal constraints and changing migration patterns, have led to increasing depictions of EU and third-country immigrants as ‘abusers’ of their social protection systems. Member States have accordingly sought reduce migrants’ ability to access social protection benefits, despite the fact that they are disproportionately at risk of poverty and social exclusion. This project looks at the different strategies that migrants have to access social protection within (post) crisis Europe and does so by explicitly integrating social policy and migration studies’ approaches on the phenomenon. More precisely, it aims to study transnational social protection, that we define as migrants’ cross-border strategies to cope with social risks in areas such as health, long-term care, pensions or unemployment that combine entitlements to host and home state-based public welfare policies and market-, family- and community-based practices. This study thus consists in, first, identifying the social protection policies and programs that home countries make accessible to their citizens abroad, and then compiling this information into an online database. We will then aggregate the results of the database into a Transnational Social Protection Index (TSPIx) in order to determine the overall level of engagement of each state with citizens abroad in a comparative way. Second, on the basis of the results of the index, we will select case studies of migrants from two EU and two non-EU countries that vary in their level of engagement in providing social protection to their citizens abroad. We will then undertake multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork to qualitatively assess the informal social protection strategies used by migrants and examine their interaction with formal host and home state social protection provision.