Recent Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of Migration
Recent Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of Migration

Summary/Abstract: Over the past two decades, the sociology of migration has been fundamentally reconfigured, moving from linear, state-centred explanations and teleological models of “integration” to a relational grammar of (im)mobility in which migration is co-produced by infrastructures, markets, legislation, digital platforms, family networks, and moral regimes. The article advances a four-chapter synthesis: a critical revision of methodological nationalism and the articulation of a mobilities paradigm; the consolidation of the perspective on migration infrastructures and the migration industry alongside the aspirations–capabilities and motility frameworks; governance through categories, everyday bordering, and the digitization of control; immobility, the temporalities of waiting, the platformization of migration, super-diversity, and the transnational rearrangements of care. The discussion integrates conceptual interventions with empirical results from anthropology, sociology, urban studies, and public policy to outline a research program attentive to time, scale, and (data)fication—one that accounts not only for why people move or stay but also for how contemporary regimes produce the possibility or impossibility of movement.

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