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Through legal interpretation of immigration categories, such as the refugee definition, signatories to the UN Refugee Convention restrict access to political asylum. This paper examines how scalar logics are used in legal interpretation to filter out particular people from national space and control the number legally entitled to enter and remain in the U.S. Scalar logics shape access by requiring asylum seekers to prove they have been 'singled out' for persecution and by steering the meaning of the 'particular social group' provision of the refugee definition. The restrictive effects of these scalar logics are analyzed in relation to case law involving Central American asylum seekers fleeing gang‐related violence. These cases are often rejected on the basis that the asylum seekers possess identities and experiences exceeding the limited protection offered by asylum. Through analysis of these scalar logics, the paper highlights how interpretations of the refugee definition are an ongoing site of struggle over the scope of asylum protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim in this Special Issue (SI) is to bring together a collection of papers that focus on the ways in which different (or indeed somewhat similar) policies and practices of what we call multiterritorialized[1] urban governance and planning shape and are shaped by the lives of migrants in cities in North America and Europe (for a similar discussion, see Nicholls and Uitermark [30]). That is, by taking migration and migrants as one of the starting points for our analysis, we shift the focus to a multitude of actors, but especially migrant actors in cities, with the intent of avoiding a univocal perspective in which migrants are only portrayed as victims or subjects in need of intervention. Similar reactive, anti-migrant, or migrant-reluctant scenes have played out in Cottbus and Halle in eastern Germany (Caglar and Glick-Schiller, this issue); Hazelton, Pennsylvania; or more than a hundred cities in the United States. that have enacted anti-migrant ordinances that criminalize immigrants (for example, Varsanyi et al. [44]). Yet, the term pro-migrant needs to be nuanced, since some urban governments and NGOs are pro-migrantion and promigrant with respect to highly skilled migration and international student migration for the economic sake of cities, but neglect the often more complicated or contentious issues of asylum and "illegalized" migration, as well less-skilled migrants already residing in their cities. [Extracted from the article]

Refugees in the Netherlands are prioritized and given assistance with housing, although they have no say in where this housing is located. In this paper, we explore how recently arrived Syrian refugees cope with these regulatory practices by the national government and how their process of homemaking evolves in the new environments assigned to them. The article draws on qualitative data, including sedentary and walk-along interviews and pictures taken by recently arrived Syrian refugees in different Dutch cities. It shows how daily routines are vital for the social incorporation of refugees and how specific places can harm, but also matter, for processes of homemaking. Refugees actively find "places of restoration"—both within their new locality and beyond—and it is both the claim to belong as well as the claim to exert control over their own lives that plays an important role in newly arrived Syrians' homemaking processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While feminist scholarship has long recognized the inherent "messiness" of fieldwork, research encounters can easily mutate from messiness to "failure." As little work has been conducted on fieldwork failure, reflexive analysis of the complications and disappointments of fieldwork is crucial. Increasingly, human geographers are engaging in participatory and visual methods with populations characterized as "marginalized" or "vulnerable." Though touted as reflexive, possibly empowering, and culturally sensitive, these methods do not automatically overcome neocolonial tendencies of fieldwork. Realization of these methods varies between participants, sites, and the fieldworkers themselves. Drawing on field notes and reflections, this paper analyzes fieldwork failure in dissertation research involving participatory visual methods with resettled refugees. These encounters reveal complex and challenging circumstances that can arise in implementing participatory visual methods with marginalized or vulnerable populations. This analysis advances understandings of participatory visual methods, and answers calls for transparency in fieldwork reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the role of the American Geographical Society and its flagship journal, Geographical Review, in the Paris Peace Conference and its prominence in the discipline of geography ever since, this paper considers how the journal takes account of refugees in its pages from 1916 to 2018 using a bibliometric approach. The term "refugee" was tracked in every Geographical Review article published during this time period, using content to generate data and analysis in QSR NVivo. First, we identify key trends in scholarship over time, then we note the rise and fall of important key terms, and finally, we examine both the countries analyzed and how these geographies change over time. The results of this bibliometric analysis of refugees in Geographical Review reflect both global geopolitical dynamics and refugee governance structures, and broader trends in epistemology in the discipline of geography. Observations made on these trends and variations indicate a need to further explore shifting paradigms and master narratives, both past and emerging, built around the "refugee" concept and its treatment within the discipline of geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. Hurricane Mitch, the most deadly hurricane to strike the Western Hemisphere in two centuries, killed at least 10,000 people in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador and left tens of thousands homeless. Some needed food; others, medical attention. Americans, Europeans, Mexicans, and others almost immediately responded to the widespread devastation by sending large donations of food, clothing, and medicine. Six weeks after Mitch struck the Honduran mainland, the author traveled to Honduras with the aim of photographing the physical damage and its effect on humans. In San Pedro Sula he was sidetracked by the issue of where the refugees were being housed and whether they were receiving the donations that had been sent on their behalf. This essay narrates that search and what he found. Keywords: Honduras, Hurricane Mitch, relief donations, San Pedro Sula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s Wilbur Zelinsky's theory of "heterolocalism" has provided human geographers and other social scientists with a new approach to analyzing the spatial patterns and ethnic identities of recent immigrants in the United States. Zelinsky's heterolocal model suggests that, to a degree unknown in the past, new migrants in North American cities may choose to settle in widely dispersed places, rather than in more concentrated ethnic enclaves, while maintaining their ethnic identities. This article expands on and critiques prior work on heterolocalism in Oregon by examining the spatial patterns, ethnic and religious identities, and transnational relationships of two recent refugee groups in three urban areas in the Pacific Northwest. Using data from U.S. and Canadian census records, refugee resettlement agency files, survey questionnaires, structured and unstructured interviews, and participant observation with post-Soviet Russians and Ukrainians in the Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon metropolitan areas, I analyze the spatial patterns and related social networks that define the identities and residential and religious spaces of these groups to test the efficacy of relating heterolocalism and transnationalism across an international boundary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]