Asian Migrations

Cities attract migrants. The relationship between the two can be symbiotic, with the city acting as a magnet for opportunity and also benefitting from the hard (and often quite badly paid) work migrants do. When properly managed, this can be a win-win situation; when misunderstood or mismanaged, it can cause social and economic problems that become entrenched and hard to fix. The papers in this Focus section examine several migrations in Asia (in China, India, and Indonesia) and also Asian migration to the West (in the form of Amsterdam’s Chinatown) to see what the current unprecedented wave of migration means for the people themselves and for the cities they move to.