Introduction: Migration, Reproduction, and the Place of Families

This introductory chapter presents the book topic and its research foci on migration and the articulations of family life. My investigation aims to rethink the role migrant families and kinship are deemed to play in times of national boundary enforcement, focusing on household closeness and reproduction understood as interwoven elements that work both as a driver and goal of migrants’ trajectories. Specifically, I engage the prevailing notion of transnational family to explore: first, how vital events such as marriages, family formation, household settlement, and births are interrelated with and triggered by mobility between contexts of origin and destination; and second, the evolution of the family cycle across migration, the population dynamic this process entails, and the issues of demography and nationality that it raises. The case study under examination will also be introduced in this chapter, by presenting the fieldwork and qualitative data set, collected among 50 Moroccan families living in Italy, that underpins the analysis. To conclude, an overview of the book’s various chapters is presented.