This is the first special issue of 2007, a double issue featuring an international range of contributors who have come together to examine social health and well-being amongst migrants. Not only do the contents of the articles have great integrity—in both senses of the word—but so too does their applied theoretical persuasion: ethnographic humanism. Collectively, these articles argue for anthropology to work sensitively, politically and personally with informants, to view them as ‘agentive selves’ who—in these cases— skillfully negotiate new lives for themselves in urban Western contexts.