Even before the current European economic crisis, African and Asian migration to Europe has evoked economic, political and humanitarian concerns. This panel brings early attention to politics, labor, and the law into conversation with recent scholarship on the emotional impacts of migration on marriage and kin relations. Through a set of ethnographically rich case studies focused on parenting, schooling, and health care, it examines how affective circuits among transnational migrants are generated, channeled, and disrupted by governance practices.

   Affective circuits refer to the flows of love, words, moral support, advice, goods, money, and services produced in social networks (Cole and Groes n.d,).  As the electrical metaphor of circuit evokes, these flows can be blocked, slowed, dropped, and picked up again.  Transnational migrants depend on affective circuits to circulate geographically, and can use their geographical circulation to slow or ramp up the flows of goods, money, and sociality through their social networks.

   States become involved in generating, managing, and breaking these affective through managing migrants’ circulation and movement, but also through the management and control of their population: from reproduction and fertility, social welfare and education, to health and labor laws. Governance practices such as health care, social services, and border controls are constantly in motion—expanding, contracting, and shifting their fields and targets. Migrants who inhabit transnational social fields are often attuned to the governance practices of multiple nation-states.  Papers on the panel consider migrants from Cameroon, Cape Verde, China, Mali, and Senegal, to France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal.