Aspiration, Desire and the Drivers of Migration

Francis L. Collins is a Professor of Geography in the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research focuses on international migration and cities with a particular emphasis on the experiences, mobility patterns, and government regulation of temporary migrants in urban contexts. Jørgen Carling is a Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Norway. His research addresses migration theory, transnational practices, and the links between migration and development. He has a particular interest in the thoughts and feelings that precede migration, and in the experience of involuntary immobility.

• Introduction: Aspiration, desire and drivers of migration  1. Push-pull plus: reconsidering the drivers of migration  2. Revisiting aspiration and ability in international migration  3. Desire as a theory for migration studies: temporality, assemblage and becoming in the narratives of migrants  4. Forced to leave? The discursive and analytical significance of describing migration as forced and voluntary  5. Shifting migration aspirations in second modernity   6. Desiring ‘foreign talent’: lack and Lacan in anti-immigrant sentiments in Singapore  7. Navigating aspirations and expectations: adolescents’ considerations of outmigration from rural eastern Germany