‘In‐betweeners’ in turbulent times: Migrants in the epicentre of diverse ‘crises’ in the Americas and Europe

This Special Issue (SI) brings together a selection of articles connected by the interplay of two main concepts or ideas. The first one refers to the fact that we are living through increasingly unstable and challenging times, defined by a succession of 'turbulences' that are often characterized as overlapping and interconnected 'crises' – a so-called era of 'polycrisis' with implications in multiple domains (Henig Lafleur Sassone Gius, 2021) but also in terms of migration categories, political practices, mobility strategies, and family relations. The articles in this SI explore how migrants as in-betweeners often find themselves at the epicentre of turbulent scenarios, portrayed alternatively as threats, victims, scapegoats, or agents. In this respect, our main goal is to investigate the (re)definition of migrants' positions and roles in such scenarios and how their strategies intersect with policy frameworks. To do so, we focus on the intersections between policy and agency at local, national, regional, and transnational realms, thus bringing in a diversity of relevant units and levels of analysis in the understanding of the global context (Panizzon Margheritis, 2018; Sassone Scholten Bermudez Lafleur Padilla et al., 2016). Regarding perspectives from the Global South, Latin American scholarship on migration and crises has addressed this largely at the national level in response to several economic, political, or social crises (e.g. Jokish Pellegrino, 2002). Some of the latest studies reflect that the entire region currently struggles with long-standing and recent interconnected challenges, including refugee flows, mass emigration, intra-regional mobilities and return migration (Bengochea Herrera Margheritis, 2018; McIlwaine, 2011; Sassone mutual aid responses to COVID-19 from migrant groups in New York as potential stepping stones towards structural transformations (Délano Alonso and Daria Samway), and the production of 'fitful circulations' in Sicily as the result of experiments in border control that are the consequence of the interaction between (g)local markets and migrant agency (Anderlini). In addition, the text by Herrera, Carrillo Espinosa and Lara Reyes on Ecuadorian migrants in Europe during the pandemic, provides a broader approach to understanding the different meanings of crises for transnational migrants. The notion of migrants as 'in-betweeners' in turbulent times works here also as a central image that all the contributions in the SI evoke, albeit in different ways. Overall, this notion highlights that migration has an intrinsic element of transition between a place of origin and one or more destinations and between moments in time in a migration trajectory, as movement situates people in intermediate positions or in-between spaces and points in time. For authors like as Crawley and Jones (2021), the idea of in-betweeners helps understand better migrants' material and symbolic journeys, rather than focusing on linear narratives between 'origin' and 'final destination.' For others, like Gius (2021), being in-between may refer to different time-based migration flows within the same community (e.g., Italian migrants in Toronto). However, our SI goes beyond these meanings to consider more broadly the many ways in which migrants are sometimes positioned or feel as in-between, especially in turbulent contexts. Growing and increasingly diverse flows, the politicization and securitization of migration, and the rise of nationalist ideologies, among other global trends, are recasting the figure of the migrant amidst diverse crises increasingly in dichotomist terms either as victims or villains (e.g., Herrera Hintjens, 2019; Padilla compartmentalized perspectives preclude cross-regional fertilization. Hence, our SI looks at both continents under a common framework to shed light not only on the empirics of migrants being at the epicentre of crises but also on the lenses we use to understand this. Our goal is to encourage a cross-regional dialogue based on both migrant-based and policy/institutionally driven issues. We aim to illustrate how top-down and bottom-up dynamics intersect and influence each other. However, a caveat is in order: we do neither attempt to cover both regions equally, nor address all relevant intra- and inter-regional issues in a comprehensive fashion. The unintended unbalanced distribution reflects the bias in existing literatures within migration studies, within which an overwhelming number of academic works focus on Europe. It is indeed in the European experience that the notion of migration crisis has been ingrained in most studies for decades, thus paving the way to arguments about the emergence of a 'crisis mode of governance' (Sahin-Mencutek et al., 2022). In contrast, in the Americas, the migration crisis is either rarely mentioned in the North American-dominant debate on immigration policy, or relatively new in the South American context (Margheritis Escriva, Bermúdez Figueroa Filippi) and the Americas (Délano Alonso & Samway). Consequently, it is around the primary level of analysis applied that we have arranged the order of the articles. In sum, this SI makes a timely contribution to current debates in academia and among practitioners on transformations in migration flows, migrant experiences, and migration and refugee policy within and across Europe and the Americas. Besides establishing geographical and analytical connections between these two regions, the different articles included allow us to move between the macro and the micro levels of analysis when investigating (im)mobilities, diverse crises, and the interplay between governance and agency in local, national, inter- or intra-regional contexts. In these 10 articles, migrant subjects and groups find themselves at the epicentre of several crises, sometimes linked to specific turbulences. Our research situates these junctures within a broader setting of longer-term neoliberal transformations that serve to expose class, gender, racial and ethnic inequalities. The interconnections identified here are crucial to understanding how people build their (im)mobile lives 'in-between,' both materially and symbolically, in a context of rapid policy changes that sometimes react to specific developments constructed as crises or are the result of tensions among economic utilitarianism, humanitarian discourses and securitization pressures. The articles included here provide evidence of 'in-between' lives forced to devise new strategies within policy frameworks that at times make it hard for individuals to become (im)mobile and often force them to remain (im)mobile. However, as various articles demonstrate, labels are consequential, and migrants are not always passive subjects, they are often able to develop social and political tactics to attain their goals. The proposed notion of 'in-betweeners in turbulent times' proved fruitful in capturing the contingency of those strategies, as well as the nuances of migrants' pivotal role in times of crises. The findings and analyses offered here should serve as a starting point to stimulate further investigation and debate. Overall, this SI invites a detailed exploration of cross-regional ties originated in, or affected by, human mobility and ensuing policy approaches during turbulent times. Our contributions aim to make the widely accepted connections between crisis and migration/migrants problematic, highlighting the need for conceptual and methodological refinements. Each article offers specific new questions, too, whether around migrant categories, policy responses to diverse crises or migrant social and political agency. We expect these to generate interest and the search for further innovative lines of research. For example, from a bottom-up perspective, some of the contributions illustrate new forms of social and political organization and solidarity that are worth monitoring to confirm if these are ephemeral developments growing at the peak of a crisis or manifestations of deep changes with long-term implications. From the top-down point of view, reactive policies and governance arrangements seem to reflect ambivalent positions and more contestation in times of crisis – an outcome that defies generalizations and requires more research. Comparisons between different regions also remain a pending task. In short, this SI offers several entry points to a promising interdisciplinary research agenda. NA.