(Un)Settled Sojourners in Cities: Challenges of Temporariness among Migrants a [Paperback]

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.

Elizabeth Chacko is Professor of Geography and International Affairs at George Washington University, USA. She has conducted research in the United States, India, Ethiopia, and Singapore on the flows of people, capital and ideas, and their impacts on economic, cultural and social geographies in cities.

Marie Price is Professor of Geography and International Affairs at George Washington University, USA. She is interested in how cities and civil society respond to immigrants as well as how immigrants influence these localities through their own agency and networks. Most of her work focuses upon the Americas.

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 themlӁ