The Global Crisis, International Migration and Social Change : Increased Needs for Employment Flexibility and Its Consequences for Social Inequalities

The recent global economic down-turn, resulting in insecure and precarious labour markets, is likely to intensify the societal transformations. The paper seeks to produce a deeper understanding of global social inequality and addresses contemporary inequality from the perspective of the multiple discourses of difference. Migration, and porous economic, social and political boundaries burden governance and demand innovative solutions to problems unique to global crisis. Asia is not only a migration-receiving area but it is notable for sending massive emigrants. The author utilizes the mobilities paradigm or integrates it with other perspectives of inequality, such as global cultural and political economy. The paper examines mobility as the paradigm for understanding social life, and explores these new migration situations as well as the attempts of management of this new migration landscape. The author articulates three analytic approaches of migration: the first one focus on spatial dynamics bound to the international mobilities of populations whether they are transnational or transborder; the second one, from working sites, consists in analyzing the strategies of mobility and migration that structure labor markets; the third one deals with the temporal dimensions of migration, in its family and social components. The paper that should address include: (1) the uneven embeddedness of transnational migrants in the societies to which they are connected transnational migrants’ adaptation strategies to become embedded in more than one society, (2) constructions of cultural hybridity and/or cosmopolitanism as strategies to attempt to maintain and/or increase social integration in more than one society, (3) the issues that arise for transnational migrants when they have crossed national boundaries to live elsewhere in terms of not being or feeling integrated in either one society. The author concludes with a summary of the main arguments and recommendations. The methods of the study include literature review and survey research.