ABSTRACT
By contrast, until the late 1990s, family migration largely remained a political and academic blind spot. As a result, the role of the family in patterns of migration, settlement and integration received scarce attention (Kofman 2004). This can be largely attributed to the dominance of approaches that focused narrowly on the individual migrant who was understood as being driven predominantly by economic motives. In addition, the family was conceived as belonging to the social and reproductive sphere and outside of market logics, and thus, unrelated to the economic forces that were thought to primarily shape migration dynamics. The dominance of women and children in family f lows reinforced the notion that family migration was secondary and not worthy of study in its own right (Kofman et al. 2011). This simplistic understanding of migration started to be challenged from the 1980s onwards, but it is not until the 2000s that the role of the family in migration became an established topic of research in migration studies. To a significant extent, the recent growth of academic knowledge production on family migration is an expression of the increasing salience of family migration in public debates.
