Introduction: presumed white: race, gender, and modes of migration in the post-Soviet diaspora -- The post-Soviet diaspora on transnational reality TV -- Highly skilled and marriage migrants in Arizona -- Segmented assimilation and return migration -- The desire for adoptive invisibility -- Fictions of irregular post-Soviet migration -- The post-Soviet diaspora in comparative perspective -- Conclusion: immigrant whiteness today

This work examines the reasons for and the practice of ethnic migration and the challenges it produces.

In a world of mutually exclusive nation-states, international migration constitutes a fundamental anomaly. No wonder that such states have been inclined to select migrants according to their origins. The result is ethnic migration. But Christian Joppke shows that after World War II there has been a trend away from ethnic selectivity and toward non-discriminatory immigration policies across Western states. Indeed, he depicts the modern state in the crossfire of particularistic and universalistic principles and commitments, with universalism gradually winning the upper hand. Thus, the policies that regulate the boundaries of states can no longer invoke the particularisms that constitute these boundaries and the collectivities residing within them. Joppke presents detailed case studies of the United States, Australia, Western Europe, and Israel. His book will be of interest to a broad audience of sociologists, political scientists, historians, legal scholars, and area specialists.

This book discusses the concepts of migration, race, and ethnicity and demonstrates how these can be applied in scientific research, policy making, health service planning, and health promotion. Extensive examples are used to demonstrate the application of the theory.

Based on a qualitative study on migrants of Somali origin who have settled in Europe for at least a decade, this open access book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the idea of mobility, both empirically and theoretically. It draws a comprehensive typology of the varied “post-migration mobility practices” developed by these migrants from their country of residence after having settled there. It argues that cross-border mobility may, under certain conditions, become a form of capital that can be employed to pursue advantages in transnational social fields. Anchored in rich empirical data, the book constitutes an innovative and successful attempt at theoretically linking the emerging field of “mobilities studies” with studies of migration, transnationalism and integration. It emphasises how the ability to be mobile may become a significant marker of social differentiation, alongside other social hierarchies. The “mobility capital” accumulated by some migrants is the cornerstone of strategies intended to negotiate inconsistent social positions in transnational social fields, challenging sedentarist and state-centred visions of social inequality. The migrants in the study are able to diversify the geographic and social fields in which they accumulate and circulate resources, and to benefit from this circulation by reinvesting them where they can best be valorised.The study sheds a different light on migrants who are often considered passive or problematic migrants/refugees in Europe, and demonstrates that mobility capital is not the prerogative of highly qualified elites: less privileged migrants also circulate in a globalised world, benefiting from being embedded in transnational social fields and from mobility practices over which they have gained some control.

Introduction: presumed white: race, gender, and modes of migration in the post-Soviet diaspora -- The post-Soviet diaspora on transnational reality TV -- Highly skilled and marriage migrants in Arizona -- Segmented assimilation and return migration -- The desire for adoptive invisibility -- Fictions of irregular post-Soviet migration -- The post-Soviet diaspora in comparative perspective -- Conclusion: immigrant whiteness today