Beyond ‘Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay’: the simultaneous impacts of co-agency in migration*

What are the impacts of migration on those directly involved in it: those who stay and those who leave? The deceptive simplicity of this question becomes obvious once we look at the diverse and mutually contradictory empirical answers it has received. On the basis of Web of Science data, we provide a mapping of existing studies on migration’s impacts, which reveals a clearly pronounced modularity between different disciplines and theoretical approaches, with psychological studies on migrants’ mental health, political science studies of remittances, and economic studies on labour market impacts, for example, often speaking at cross-purposes and not engaging in a meaningful dialogue. To reconcile available evidence and bridge the gap between different disciplines and approaches, in this Special Issue, we put forward the concept of co-agency that underlines the dynamic, relational, co-constructed, and co-performed nature of migration and its impacts. The concept of co-agency draws attention not to what happens to actors involved in migration, but on what they attain, what they perform, ultimately: what they do through migration. Furthermore, co-agency emphasises what actors involved in migration–both those who leave and those who stay behind–do together, rejecting a distinction between migrants as active and those staying behind as simply passive recipients of remittances, development, etc. Focusing on the co-agency of a wide variety of actors–both individual and collective, our conceptual approach emphasises the need to study the interplay between simultaneous impacts of co-agency in migration–including, but not limited to, health impacts on individuals, care-provision impacts on families, and development and policy impacts on states as collective actors. Ultimately, rather than promoting migration-pessimism or migration-optimism, we argue for a nuanced multi-level understanding of the complex interacting impacts of co-agency in migration.