Migration, Mobility and Immobility: A Call for the Right to Stay Challenging the Mobility Bias in Migration Studies

Abstract

The mobility bias in migration studies results in immobility or better sedentism to being neglected in migration studies. Likewise, in normative discourses, migration scholars as well as practitioners often, instead, focus on the right to migrate and to seek international protection. What is neglected, though, is the right to stay put, the right not to be displaced, the right to a life in dignity at the place of one’s habitual residence and thus the right not to be compelled to migrate. This intervention sketches the state-of-the-art and calls for more studies into non-mobility and better recognition of the right to not have to migrate.