Emotions in migration studies

The migration experience often necessitates analysis of host societies’ immigration policies. This frequently leads to a focus on this experience’s legal, political, economic and social aspects. Yet, more recently, the field of emotions and migration has brought into social research the role that emotions play in the entangled relations between actors involved along the way. Inspired by these extant debates on emotions on the move, this chapter highlights how the prism of emotions can shed light on a key factor in the migration experience: that of human resilience in the face of adversity. While migration debates are regularly marred with toxic metaphors, migrants themselves emotionally process and make sense of what is happening to them in their everyday encounters. Emotions thus take migrants a long way in terms of their aspirations for the “good life” in their host societies. This chapter showcases the relevance of emotions in the politics of migration.