Editorial
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Howard Duncan |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12530 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
Editorial
Shortly after the appearance of this final issue of International Migration for 2018, the United
Nations will usher in the new Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration at a con-
ference in Marrakech, Morocco set to take place on December 10 and 11. By the end of the year,
it is expected that the UN General Assembly will endorse the Global Compact on Refugees. Fur-
thermore, plans are set for the UN to create the United Nations Migration Network to serve as the
successor to the Global Migration Group and to be managed by the International Organization for
Migration which joined the United Nations family only in 2016. Together with the incorporation of
migration-related phenomena in the Sustainable Development Goals and the continuation of the
Global Forum on Migration and Development, these are weighty times for the international com-
munity in the migration sphere. A great many observers will be assessing the extent to which the
promise of these initiatives, some of them born out of the intense and often dangerous migration
and refugee flows in the Mediterranean region in 2015 and 2016, will be realized, and whether the
international community’s current enthusiasm will remain in place long enough to effect improve-
ments in how the world manages migration for better results than in the past, including in emer-
gency situations of which there will not likely be any shortage. This journal is planning a special
issue to appear in 2019 that will look at the twin Global Compacts, and we look forward to the
careful analyses.
Our first group of articles in this issue looks at an important aspect of managing migration, the
integration of those who arrive in their new cities and countries of destination. Managing migration
well requires also managing the settlement and integration of newcomers; failures to bring about
satisfactory integration have the potential to negate the benefits of migration. Investing energy and
treasure in the one requires investments in the other. Cooray, Marfouk, and Nazir open our discus-
sion with an examination of how public opinion towards labour market participation is formed and
can turn against immigrants. In asking whether employers should show a preference for nationals
over migrants when jobs are scarce, the authors raise difficult policy questions about whether dis-
crimination can ever be justified. For some, the end result of integration is naturalization, the
acquiring of citizenship. Bartram looks at the UK’s naturalization regime, specifically at its citizen-
ship test and ceremony, and asks whether its intended benefits of an enhanced experience for the
immigrant are attained. The answers may not be encouraging for UK policy-makers. In a highly
innovative exercise, Schlegel invokes a metaphor of property rights to examine how migrants’
skills are treated. A more commonly used metaphor, that of capital in its various forms as described
separately in the 1980s by Bourdieu and Coleman, is invoked by Shen et al. in their examination
of internal rural-to-urban migrants in China; they find that their integration is in fact dependent in
part on the extent to which they possess human, social, and other forms of capital regarded as both
static and dynamic forces. Staying in Asia, Kim takes us to the Korean peninsula to look at the
challenges of North Korean migrant teachers in South Korean society, finding difficulties in both
directions that, generalized, may need to be recognized and dealt with as relations between the two
countries warm with the potential for greater mobility between them. Finally, Fang takes us to
Newfoundland in Canada to explore the integration of refugees in the smaller cities of that island
and ultimately its ability to retain them as members of an, at times, fragile economy.
Our second group of articles looks at family aspects of migration. There has been a high degree
of attention paid to marriage migration within Asia, especially to South Korea, and Cho extends
Dr. Howard Duncan, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
doi: 10.1111/imig.12530
©2018 The Author
International Migration ©2018 IOM
International Migration Vol. 56 (6) 2018
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
To continue reading
Request your trial