Migration is an increasingly prominent phenomenon in today's globalising world and it has been perceived in very different ways. The poetics of exile, the pain of diasporic lives and the celebration of hybridity in popular cultures across the globe are curiously at odds with the ways in which sociologists and economists have tried to conceptualise and analyse migration. In this book, two leading authorities on migration and nationhood attempt to bridge the gap between experience and analysis, looking at: the ruptured experience of space and time created by migration the effects of migration on our understanding of national affiliations and the nation state the impact of cross national economic relations on everyday life. The authors argue that the figure of the migrant, embodies and imagined, condenses out concerns with race, space and time and the politics of belonging. They examine the migration of both rich and poor, crossing borders and living increasingly diasporic lives and show how even as people move across borders, they still seek to be at home in the world through the creation of a "politics of belonging".