In my thesis I deal with the question of how the activities of the EURES network helps to create a single labour market in the EU. I focus on the migration and labour mobility, because this is the main factor why the EURES network exists. Furthermore, I describe the activities of EURES and its development including previous SEDOC networks. In the thesis I analyse whether the reform of the EURES is successful and I also analyse activities of EURES advisers based on the results from questionnaire.

Rural-urban migration in Nigeria is the cause of a number of problems; the problems of overcrowding and deterioration of the urban environment associated with rapid urban growth; the economic loss resulting from the high unemployment rates in urban areas; and the problem of adverse implications of prolonged periods of frustration among the urban, poor. Nigerian governments .recognize that rural-urban migration calls for more effective policies than those attempted in the past. In this context new approaches designed to foster greater understanding of the nature of this process and more effective policies should be helpful. This thesis proceeds on the premise that rural-urban migration is in reality a process within a complex socio-economic system consisting of many interacting components and significant feed-back effects. It is thus held that a General Systems Approach provides an appropriate and useful analytical framework for the study of this process. In addition to bringing a broader perspective to the analysis, a systems framework is a powerful tool for exploratory research and therefore well suited both to the promotion of a greater understanding of the process and for the generation of a number of initial policy considerations. Relying on material from existing literature and personal experience related to the process in south-eastern Nigeria, a model of rural-urban . migration is developed in Chapter 4 (Figures 4.1 and 4.2), and applied in Chapter 5 to derive a series of testable hypotheses related to the migration process. The methodology is demonstrative of a systematic procedure for generating a series of interrelated potential policies for shaping the process. The main thrust of the work is to develop a conceptual systems model of the rural-urban migration process and thus to lay a foundation for further, substantive research on rural-urban migration in Nigeria. In the concluding chapter, some directions for this future research have been sketched. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

In this thesis the economic integration of highly educated love migrants in Sweden is investigated, focusing on the experiences of unemployed love migrants while search of employment and examines the factors that influence their economic integration in Sweden. This study is based on human capital theory, social capital theory, discrimination theory, and economic integration theory. The thesis is based on the qualitative research design, for this research, individual interviews with five participants have been conducted and interviewees stories have been analyzed. The findings reveal that human capital acquired in the country of origin could create transferability problems in Sweden. Additionally, discrimination and prejudicial treatment from the employers disadvantage immigrants’ position in the labor market. However, the human capital gain in the form of language skills and education facilitates and enhances economic integration. The study also looks at social and human capital interdependence - human capital gain can facilitate social contacts and network creation, and a social network can accelerate human capital value and overcome the discrimination factor, thus overcoming obstacles for gaining entrance to the labour market.

Thesis submitted for the fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Zululand, 2005. / African migrant entrepreneurship is fast becoming an increasingly important part of discourses of African migration to South Africa. This field of study is new in South Africa, because African women’s transnational activities have been neglected until now in studies on African entrepreneurship in South Africa. As Ghanaian women in South Africa through their entrepreneurial activities provided the background through which this researcher has initiated a discursive space, it has paved the way for Ghanaian transnational entrepreneurship to become an intellectual field. It is hoped that this study will become a starting point from which African women’s cross-border engagements can be viewed. Interrogating entrepreneurship through ‘cultural lenses’, this study reveals that the drive to succeed entrepreneurially and the spirit of entrepreneurship lie within certain groups of people, since they are embedded in peoples’ culture. Thus Ghanaian women have a high propensity to be engaged in entrepreneurial activities, even when they are living ans working in other countries. This study hopes to demonstrate that a shared culture facilitates entrepreneurial performance. The thesis has explored how their identity as Ghanaians in South Africa promotes their ability to succeed. This is because in post-apartheid South Africa, being a Ghanaian woman is being interpreted by South African blacks as knowing how to dress hair professionally. The findings indicate that although being first generation migrants, these women have developed hybrid and cosmopolitan identities in the manner in which they carry out their entrepreneurial activities. This has been facilitated by the researcher’s attempt to locate the women’s entrepreneurial activities within a historical context of identity formation and the contemporary melange of their identity in South Africa. The evidence suggests that there exists a symbiotic relationship between being a Ghanaian woman in South Africa and the tendency to succeed entrepreneurially, especially in the field of hair dressing. Their ‘maniere de fait’ allows them to be defined as a group of successful entrepreneurs. These women are also desperate to succeed because they are expected to send remittances home to their families and friends and also to participate in community projects in Ghana. Success is primarily judged by the assets they have acquired back in Ghana and their ability to bring family members to join them in the diaspora. These Ghanaian women are succeeding in this sector because after the fall of apartheid, hair care has become a major indicator of modernity for black South African women. This entrepreneurial area that these women have gotten into is one that has considerable opportunities for growth because black women after apartheid are earning more money and they want to spend that money on their appearance. The best way to show that they are modern is by keeping up with the latest hairstyles. This research has demonstrated that Ghanaian women’s entrepreneurship is producing benefits for South Africa. Coming from a system of apartheid where black South African women were not given the opportunity of knowing how to dress hair in what seems like western fashion, Ghanaian women have brought in these hairdressing skills and transmitted them to South Africans. These skills are being used by these South Africans as a source of both social development and economic empowerment. By providing employment to some South Africans (who before their encounter with Ghanaians were unemployed because of lack of skills), they are not only transmitting skills but providing for the daily needs of entire families. This sort of contribution by Ghanaians to the economy of South Africa is rewarding and represents a sufficient opportunity for recognition by the South African government. The study also reveals that in transnationalism, gender becomes unimportant. While the opportunistic tendency of migrants is given ‘the front seat’, gender is given ‘the back seat’. Through the need to migrate and the opportunistic tendency of migrants, hairdressing has produced a distinct social place in which Ghanaian men have hijacked a cultural space which had been a female domain as they have become hairdressers in South Africa as well as Ghanaian women. This research has also shown that religion and entrepreneurship are ‘bedfellows’. This is demonstrated by the fact that Ghanaian women believe that Christianity lies in the shadows of their business activities. Therefore, they see their businesses as a way of carrying out God’s redemptive plan and as one of God’s divine plans for them which gives significance to what they do. These values have been transmitted through different structures like schools and churches in Ghana and forms part of the socialisation process for children. When people who come from Ghana grow up, it becomes difficult for them to distance themselves from these values.

Rezension zu Alina Gromova: Generation „koscher light“. Urbane Räume und Praxen junger russischsprachiger Juden in Berlin, Transcript 2013

This study seeks to analyse how migration has been constructed into a security question in the European Union during 2015. As denoted by the Copenhagen School, something is a security problem when elites declare it to be so, and securitization legitimises extraordinary measures beyond the political established norms. Migration has been portrayed as a potential threat for the continuity of the cultural identity, the preservation of the public order as well as for the economy stability of the Member States, and consequently it has been securitized. The implication of the European integration process in the construction of the concept of migration into a security question, with the creation of common migration strategy, an increased in surveillance and a reinforcement of border control will be developed. From this standpoint, during 2015 the Union has attended to the biggest refugee influx since the end of the Second World War, and the current research aims to analyse how the Member States have responded to it. To that end, the political discourse of three selected countries: Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic, is going to be examined and compared. Key Words: European Union, securitization, refugee crisis, migration, asylum-seeker

Includes bibliographical references. / In context of increasing global migration and its correlation to heightened tensions around the meaning of a "foreign" body, this research questions the experiences of bodies crossing borders into the social and historical space of Cape Town, South Africa. Grounded in theories of surveillance, embodiment, and feminist geography of fear of crime, the study employed a feminist methodology using qualitative group interviews with international students from the Southern African Development Community at the University of Cape Town. The transcribed data was analysed through the participants' use of discourses and their descriptions of experiences. Questions arose around the meaning of surveillance and notions of respectability in transition. Furthermore, participants navigate amid new spaces of fear and insecurity in relation to their subjectivities, particularly as "foreigners". The research suggests that fear becomes a fundamental attribute of bodies in migration through which individuals mitigate through "passing" subverting expressions of embodied nationalities, knowledge gathering of the local terrain, among others. The challenges and techniques to overcome these fears become part of a process to re-establish the "self" in a foreign context.

Conventional modeling and migration for tilted transversely isotropic (TTI) media may suffer from numerical instabilities and shear wave artifacts due to the coupling of the P-wave and SV-wave modes in the TTI coupled equations. Starting with the separated P- and SV-phase velocity expressions for vertical transversely isotropic (VTI) media, I extend these decoupled equations for modeling and reverse-time migration (RTM) in acoustic TTI media. Compared with the TTI coupled equations published in the geophysical literature, the new TTI decoupled equations provide a more stable solution due to the complete separation of the P-wave and SV-wave modes. The pseudospectral (PS) method is the most convenient method to implement these equations due to the form of wavenumber expressions and has the added benefit of being highly accurate and thus avoiding numerical dispersion. The rapid expansion method (REM) in time is employed to produce a broad band numerically stable time evolution of the wavefields. Synthetic results validate the proposed TTI decoupled equations and show that modeling and RTM in TTI media with the decoupled P-wave equation remain numerically stable even for models with strong anisotropy and sharp contrasts. The most desirable feature of the TTI decoupled P-wave equation is that it is absolutely free of shear-wave artifacts and the consequent alleviation of numerical instabilities generally suffered by some systems of coupled equations. However, due to several forward-backward Fourier transforms in wavefield extrapolation at each time step, the computational cost is also high, and thereby hampers its prevalence. I hereby propose to use a hybrid pseudospectral and finite-difference (FD) scheme to solve the TTI decoupled P-wave equation. In the hybrid solution, most of the cost-consuming wavenumber terms in the equation are replaced by inexpensive FD operators, which in turn accelerates the computation and reduces the computational cost. To demonstrate the benefit in cost saving of the new scheme, 2D and 3D RTM examples using the hybrid solution to the decoupled P-wave equation are carried out, and respective runtimes are listed and compared. Computation examples show that the hybrid strategy demands less computation time and is faster than using the pseudospectral method alone. Furthermore, this new hybrid TTI RTM algorithm is less computationally expensive than the FD solution to the conventional TTI coupled equations but more stable.

In view of theoretical proliferations in migration studies, there is a need for a more comprehensive approach to migration modeling. A central problem identified in this study was the multitude of potential variables for migration research and the lack of established procedures for selecting among them. Several studies on migration have attempted to answer cornmon migration questions, but with differing variables and therefore divergent conclusions. There is thus a strong potential for misinterpretation by researchers and policy makers. Partial theories of migration have been developed rather than a unified one. This study offers an objective process through which variables may be selected for purposes of migration model design or interpreting completed studies by researchers, policy makers and others. Meta-analysis was used to develop a heuristic framework as an operational tool for selection of migration modeling options. Because meta-analysis uses past studies as its data, a wide range of previous literature was reviewed. The literature was derived from a number of disciplines, i.e., economics, sociology, geography, demography, and schools of thought within disciplines to move toward a unified modeling framework. The variables identified for meta-analytic procedure were further subjected to a factor analysis to identify the inherent variable constructs. The 1980 intrastate migration between counties in the state of Oregon was used. The data were obtained from the IRS County to County Migration Records, the County and City Data Book, and the 1980 Census of Population. Seven clusters (constructs) emerged. They included: urban amenity, low mobility, individual mobility, negative amenity, low spatial mobility, mobility, and amenity. Each cluster was representative of a partial approach. These clusters were then tested by a regression analysis by sorting them out into amenity, spatial, and mobility related variables. The two most frequently used techniques, i.e., the basic Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and the gravity approach, were used with the same data as in factor analysis. Both OLS and the gravity approach produced a similar pattern of results. Thus, when mobility, spatial, and amenity variables were tested individually their R2 was not as high as when variables were selected from each (in spite of having the same number of variables in each). These findings have several implications. Thus a rationalized unified model, where each significant cluster is represented by a variable, allows parsimonious prediction of migration. A factor analysis is the key technique in pinpointing the minimal set of useful variables. The significance of this heuristic approach also has further implications. First, identification of an analytical structure for the development of a unified theory in migration studies. This heuristic is useful as an applied forecasting device and an academic tool in policy areas. Secondly, it provides a framework that may be useful in other social sciences’ development of theory. This modeling heuristic has some caveats. Whether an OLS or gravity model specification is used, a factor analysis of potential independent variables is an essential step. In some cases, actual data for this factor analysis may be expensive and difficult to obtain. Variables representing all clusters may not be available: irreducible specification errors are implied. Also, factor analysis requires some qualitative interpretation to elaborate clusters, both in naming them and selecting those to appear: in the reduced model. Hence, there is not a single specification from a given structure. Similarly, qualitative analysis is critical in phase I of the framework. However, in both of these instances, a wide coverage of literature provides reasonable insurance against subjective error.

A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Environmental Science (Coursework and Research Report) to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2017. / Various studies have been conducted on the determinants of herbaceous vegetation composition and structure in savannas, but there is still no consensus on the extent of the role played by each. This is particularly so for disturbed savannas in communal rangelands. This study aimed to investigate the relative influence of rainfall, catenal position and distance from village on composition and structure of herbaceous vegetation in communal rangelands of Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga Province in South Africa. The study used pre-existing data collected in 2012 in 56 plots located across nine villages in three rainfall zones: Low (<600 mm), Medium (600-700 mm) and High (>700 mm). In each zone, the communal rangelands of three villages were sampled in upslope and downslope positions and across three distance (disturbance) categories of, 0-599 m, 600-1799 m and >1800 m relative to nearest villages. The composition-related measures investigated were: absolute and relative abundance of species present, species richness, Simpson’s Diversity Index and relative abundance of perennial and annual grasses, as well as categories of forbs whilst the herbaceous structure measures used were distance in meters measured along transect line to perennial grass tuft and grass basal cover. Both individual and interactive effects of the rainfall zone, landscape position, and distance from village on herbaceous composition and structure were investigated using bivariate and multivariate statistics. Both grass species richness and Simpson’s Diversity Index were significantly higher in the high rainfall zone than in the low and medium rainfall zones. Perennial grasses in all rainfall zones heavily dominated the herbaceous layer, with the mean percentage perennial grass contribution being lowest in the high rainfall zone whilst the low rainfall zone had the highest. The percentage composition of annual grasses was highest in the medium rainfall zone and lowest in the low rainfall zone whilst it was intermediate in the high rainfall zone. The mean distance to perennial grass, which is an index of density of perennial grass tufts, was significantly higher in the high rainfall zone than in the low rainfall zones. The mean percentage grass basal cover was higher in low rainfall zone than in high rainfall zone. The mean species richness in the upslope and downslope catenal positions was not significantly different which was contrary to what was expected. Mean Simpson’s Diversity Index was higher on the downslope position than on the upslope catenal position. The relative abundance of perennial grasses between the upslope and downslope catenal position was not significantly different. The proportion of perennial grasses was more than that of annual grasses and other life forms sampled. Neither mean distance to perennial grass nor basal cover differed significantly between catenal positions. It was established in this study that closest plots to villages had 22% more species than the plots between medium and far plots from the villages. Near the villages (0-599 m), the species richness was found to be higher than in the medium (600-1799 m) and (>1800 m) distance categories. The mean Simpson‘s Diversity Index in all distance (disturbance) categories were found to be not significantly different. There was no significant difference in the percentage of perennial grass among the disturbance gradient categories. The perennial grasses were consistently dominant over the annual grasses along the disturbance gradients. The distance to perennial grass indicated no difference across all distance gradients. Percentage basal cover decreased with increasing distance from settlements. The composition and occurrence of grass species were associated with different environmental gradients studied. There was significant interactive effect due to a combination effect of rainfall, topographical gradients and distance gradient on the distance to perennial grass. However, the mean distance to perennial was lower at distance and rainfall combination, though was not significant. The interactive effect on basal cover due to a combination effect of rainfall, catenal position and distance gradient was found to be not significant. Overall, the herbaceous composition and structure was more strongly impacted by rainfall zone than by catenal position. The herbaceous composition and structure was affected by disturbance gradient specifically on species richness and grass basal cover only, while there was no effect on Simpson’s Diversity Index, perennial grass percentage, and distance to perennial grass as measured along transect line. It was also established that there was association of species with environmental gradients. It is recommended that in future a multi-year study on the same variables that have been studied here be undertaken in order to establish long-term trends on the effect of the gradients on herbaceous vegetation. It must be ensured also that there be representativity of disturbance gradients samples when designing sampling programme. It will also be beneficial to establish the density per village or stocking rates of different villages and the management aspects of the stock and how it is related to herbaceous composition and structure. Such studies will provide further knowledge on the extent of human induced disturbance like grazing in the communal rangelands given a set of environment gradients. / LG2018