APMJ – Chronicling 25 years of migration in Asia and the Pacific

Abstract

When the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal was launched in 1992, it was the only journal in the region devoted exclusively to the study of migration. At that time, temporary labor migration from and within the region was already significant and it has continued to grow in volume, and national migration policies have evolved to cope with it. International migration has also received increasing attention from the United Nations and several targets of the Sustainable Development Goals explicitly refer to it. APMJ has chronicled most of these changes and emphasized such themes as migration and macro-level development, the human rights of migrants, women in migration, the social impacts of migration, national policy-making, multiculturalism and transnationalism. As migration research has been strengthened in universities and institutes within Asia, coverage by countries has shifted from articles about the region as a whole and Australia to a preponderance of articles concerning East Asia, especially China, Japan and the Republic of Korea, and a similar shift has been observed in the origin of the lead authors. Because the Journal largely reflects the research being conducted in Asia and the Pacific, gaps in coverage relate to migration from South Asia and to the Middle East, the Central Asian migration system, forced migration, the role of private recruitment agencies and methodological approaches to migration research.