Brenda S.A. Yeoh, FBA

Raffles Professor of Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS)

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The ever-shifting regulatory practices that govern entry into a nation’s territory call for a new understanding of mobility in a geopolitical context of increasing securitization, where movement across borders is not necessarily smooth or easy. While national borders are becoming more closed off for some groups of people, others are conditionally and exclusively selected for entry. This had led migration scholars to think in terms of ‘mobility regimes’ in order to encapsulate the complex modes of differentiation within governing structures of mobility. We argue that the increasingly stringent mobility regimes not only negatively impact migrants or prospective migrants, but also their transnational family members living across nation-state boundaries. As transnational families encounter mobility regimes not only in space but also in time, we highlight ‘temporality’ as an especially crucial concept for understanding how different life stages of migrants in relation to their family members, can be implicated by mobility regimes. We conclude with a discussion of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, where transnational families encounter various mobility regimes with the closure of national borders, travel restrictions and lockdowns.