Funding tool: Dissertations
Project-ID: FTI22-D-005
Project start: 01. November 2023
Project end: 31. Oktober 2026
Runtime: 36 months / ongoing
Funding amount: ca. € 71.000,00

Brief summary:
Do people’s aspirations to migrate ever change and adapt? Do they disappear or ‘saturate’ once people have moved? The concept of migration aspirations and its separation from migration abilities has been a major advancement in research on the foundational question of why and when people move. Yet, there remains a fundamental blind spot in the literature, that is, how and under what conditions migration aspirations evolve and adapt over time. This project is dedicated to this question. Specifically, it will focus on how 1) changing personal circumstances, 2) changing migration opportunity structures, and 3) migration-related experiences affect migration aspirations. Further, the project will investigate the dynamics of how and why migrants’ initial aspirations to settle, return, or migrate onward from a destination may change over the course of their sojourn at the destination. Empirically, the project will use a mixed-methods design to research changes in migration aspirations of young Nepalis living in 1) Nepal’s urban centres Kathmandu and Pokhara, and 2) Portugal—an emerging destination for South Asians with a seemingly paradoxical effect of its liberal citizenship policies attracting migrants with both settlement and onward migration aspirations. To lay the conceptual groundwork, the project will develop and operationalise key dimensions of migration aspirations and indices of change, allowing for the measurement of subtle changes over time. However, this conceptual work will also generally improve the precision, operationalisation, and measurement of migration aspirations. Beyond this innovative potential for foundational advances in migration studies, the project’s objectives are highly relevant for contemporary policy questions, that is, whether migration aspirations can be influenced and ‘managed’—for instance through prohibitive or encouraging migration regulations or so-called ‘information campaigns’.

Keywords:
Migration, Migrationsaspirationen, Staatsbürgerschaft, Anthropologie, Nepal, Portugal

Results