Although many return migrants had planned to go back to their country of origin, other return migrants who had originally planned to pursue the immigrant dream––the idea that one can have a better life by migrating—eventually change their mind and return to their society of origin. Just as the identity of individuals must adjust to the loss of a relationship, job, or membership of a group, many formerly aspiring immigrants give up on immigrating. I analyze data from oral history interviews and social media narratives of 121 Chinese ex-immigrants from 16 different countries. I show how disappointments, the language barrier, cultural alienation, racial-ethnic discrimination, intersectional-gender issues, barriers to upward socioeconomic mobility, and/or restrictive immigration policies interact with each other to constitute ex-immigrant subjectivity. This article highlights why immigration is a far less certain process than many perceive it to be, contributing to the broader sociological literature on how in different and similar ways processes of abandoning important social endeavors, like a romantic partnership, political party, or religious faith, transform subjectivities and social identities in other domains of social life.

Studying the transformation of France’s social security system between 1970 and 2020 reveals a recomposition of the power of unelected governmental elites. The institutionalization of a group of “welfare elites” characterized by a new sociological profile (social background and career paths) has led to a reshaping of policy governance (“Iron Triangle”). These High civil servants have carried out a program of “sustainable social welfare,” reinforcing state interventionism in health and social insurance policies. In the context of this program’s implementation, they have developed the role of custodians of state policies. This strengthening of the French state’s capacity sheds new light on the question of its reconfiguration.

Recent years have seen a flourishing of everyday experimentations with the category of religion: the “spiritual but not religious,” “religionless” Christians, and many more. Why is there such proliferation of popular experimentation with—and often distancing from—the category of religion? This article explores two such cases of experimentation, a religion-disavowing evangelical Christian brotherhood in Mexico and a Masonic lodge in Switzerland, and shows how, in these two cases, disavowing religion is in part a response to problems associated with a founding principle of liberalism, the separation of private conscience from public citizenship. Subjects of liberal separation are vulnerable to feelings of cloistered conscience and hollow citizenship, problems that are inherent to liberal separation, as evidenced by Freemasonry’s age-old experimentations. These problems are also, however, exacerbated by dwindling popular faith in the institutions of religion and liberal democracy, as evidenced by contemporary evangelical trends of which the Christian brotherhood is exemplary. Such experimentations can be distinguished between those that collapse conscience and citizenship and those that defend the separation while still looking for indirect connections. This contrast is also highlighted by the comparison of religion-disavowing evangelical Christians and Freemasonry.

Since 2008, we have observed a more prominent role of the state in economic life, with the widespread use of financial tools. Advancing discussions on the financialization of distributional politics, the expansion of financial statecraft as a result of fiscal conflicts, and the fragmentation of state power, this article explores how proliferating financial policies reconfigure the state and its relationship with the economy as well as its democratic foundations. I introduce the concept of financial security states to theorize reactions to mature financialization and its inherent instabilities, which provoke socially structured demands for public stabilization. Leveraging the tradition of fiscal sociology, I work out differences between taxation and welfare systems and those based on financial security. In particular, I show that financial security states exploit value uncertainties to postpone loss-reckoning, are carried by hybrid state-banking institutions, and leverage the states’ endogenous power within market-based finance. This article argues that the by-and-large regressive distributional outcomes and fiscal costs of financial policies remain opaque, due to strategic obfuscation, the failure of traditional modes of political mediation, and deficient budgeting procedures.