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In this paper, we address gender differences in the host language proficiency of humanitarian migrants. Prior research has produced inconclusive results with regard to women's host language proficiency relative to that of men: sometimes women's proficiency exceeds that of men, sometimes women lag behind men, and sometimes there are no substantial differences. Using data on recent humanitarian migrants in Germany, we investigate factors contributing to similarities and differences in men's and women's language proficiency. We consider gender differences with respect to the family-related factors: marital status, children's ages and children's childcare situations are important for women but not for men. These findings point to the continued relevance of a gendered division of work. It also becomes clear that gendered role expectations are particularly consequential for mothers and wives. Moreover, we find evidence that women are more efficient learners than men are, while they have fewer learning opportunities than men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon major ongoing work into the experiences of new migrants seeking to construct new lives in the UK (Aldridge and Waddington 2002; Goodson and Phillimore 2005; Goodson et al. 2005; Phillimore et a!. 2003; 2004; Phillimore and Goodson 2002; Robinson et a!. 2003; Zetter et a!. 2003) and focuses upon the experiences of refugees who have arrived in Birmingham since the early 1990s. The paper outlines the indicators of integration proposed by Ager and Strang (2004) for the United Kingdom's Home Office. It then uses data from household surveys, in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted in the West Midlands to explore how useful indicators might be in evaluating progress towards integration within new migrant communities. The paper specifically examines the efficacy of functional indicators, which in Ager and Strang's (2004) framework are represented as 'means and markers' and include employment, housing, education and health. It aims to consider the usefulness of these functional indicators as a measure of integration and the ways in which the indicators might be shaped to help policy makers work towards promoting integration in a multi-cultural global city such as Birmingham. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to solving the following research puzzle: When the influx of refugees from Syria and elsewhere to Germany significantly increased, German society and politics seemed to be rather robust in the face of xenophobic and right-wing populist movements; however, only 2years later, the Alternative fűr Deutschland made it into the Bundestag , and in late 2018 Chancellor Angela Merkel could solve a governmental crisis triggered by the 'refugee crisis' only by announcing her stepwise withdrawal from political offices. The making of the 'refugee crisis' was facilitated by a securitization policy. On three crucial cases of domestic politics — security, socio-economics, and socio-cultural politics — it is shown that right-wing populism proved to be capable of dominating the political agenda as it came up with argumentation figures that were — though not hegemonic — also prominent among leading politicians on the whole political spectrum in Germany from the right to the left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conducting methodologically defensible, logistically feasible and affordable large-scale national surveys of migrants is a serious challenge. This paper outlines the pros and cons of working with and through NGOs which provide services to migrants, in order to conduct a national longitudinal survey on migrant access to basic public services. This access method clearly does not result in a sample which is representative of a total national population of migrants, but the paper argues that there are also benefits of such a methodology. Apart from making larger and more longitudinal surveys logistically and financially possible in the first place, such benefits include the formation of active and collaborative networks among organizations in the migrant rights sector; capacity building within this sector around research and the use and meaning of empirical data; and the direct integration of empirical data into local and national advocacy work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the existing research literature on the health of immigrant populations does not address the health care experiences of refugees, even though they likely experience unique and different health care needs relative to economic or family class immigrants. The objective of this paper is to explore the systemic barriers to health care access experienced by Canada’s refugee populations. The paper focuses on understanding these challenges as expressed by health and social service providers at the local level in Hamilton, Ontario. Data from interviews illustrate the impact of these systemic barriers for both refugees and providers. The paper examines issues of interpretation/language, cultural competency, health care coverage, isolation, poverty, and transportation in terms of health care and availability of services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper shows how successfully integrated refugees are often made invisible to institutions, academics and within social contexts. It argues that certain elements of social and institutional categorization processes—including partiality, functionality, conflation, immutability, self-confirmation and negotiability—tend to obscure people who are integrated. The paper presents a case study which juxtaposes the ways in which three different kinds of categorization have been applied to people of Mozambican birth who settled in a rural South African border area after fleeing the Mozambican civil war in the 1980s. The three cases of categorization come from the South African government for the purpose of legal regularization; from an academic unit of the University of the Witwatersrand for the purpose of demographic and public health research; and from residents of Bushbuckridge District to describe and manage their relationships with each other. The paper demonstrates how each of these different perspectives obscures the experiences of integrated Mozambican refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the complex security and economic dynamics that influence the lives and opportunities of self-settled refugees living in Uganda. It focuses on the opportunities and problems faced by self-settled refugees, and questions the assumption that Uganda's current local settlement policy is best suited to the country's social, economic and political realities. It suggests that far from being passive victims, self-settled refugees are taking control of their lives without any additional external assistance and are planning for the day they can return to their homeland. Consequently, the paper argues that there is reason to believe that local integration is likely to succeed where other models have failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the involvement of refugees in the production and reproduction of knowledge of which they are ultimately meant to be beneficiaries. By using examples from research with Central American refugees and Rwandan displaced children, it considers forced migrants' roles as participants in research, their position in ‘participatory’ research, and the representation of refugees' voices in refugee-centred research. Power is intimately connected to the diverse ways in which participation unfolds, and the last part of the paper examines refugees' participation in research in terms of ‘power that circulates’ (Foucault) to show that they are not more or less powerful but vehicles for the circulation of power, simultaneously undergoing and exercising it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the ways in which ‘textbook’ survey research methods need to be adapted and refined for research with forced migrants, and the ways in which cross-national contexts, as well as research within one national context with forced migrants from different communities, affect the utilization of survey methods. Linked to this, the ways in which survey design issues need to be sensitive to the diversity between and within countries and communities will be explored. The paper will draw on two surveys, one a UK national survey and the other a multi-sited comparative survey in the UK and South Africa, to explore access to forced migrants in different contexts and the appropriateness of different modes of data collection between and within countries and communities (e.g. paper self-completion, face-to-face interviews and web-based surveys). The impact of politics, language and literacy, gender, and immigration status, especially irregular and insecure statuses, will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the concept of refugee labelling I elaborated nearly two decades ago. In radically different conditions, the contemporary relevance and utility of the concept are re-examined and re-established. Formulated at a time of regionally contained, mass refugee migration in the south during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the paper argues that the concept still offers vital insights into the impacts of institutional and bureaucratic power on the lives of refugees in a globalized era of transnational social transformations, mixed migration flows, and the continuing presence of large scale refugee migration. The core of the paper argues that the `convenient images' of refugees, labelled within a co-opting humanitarian discourse in the past, have been displaced by a fractioning of the label which is driven by the need to manage globalized processes and patterns of migration and forced migration in particular. The paper re-evaluates the concept using the three original axioms—forming, transforming and politicizing the label ‘refugee’. The core argument is that in the contemporary era: a) the formation of the refugee label reflects causes and patterns of forced migration which are much more complex than in the past, contrasting with an essentially homogeneous connotation in the past; b) responding to this complexity, the refugee label is transformed by an institutional ‘fractioning’ in order to manage the new migration; c) governments, rather than NGOs as in the past, are the pre-eminent agency in the contemporary processes of transforming the refugee label, a process driven by northern interests; d) the refugee label has become politicized by the reproduction of institutional fractioning and by embedding the wider political discourse of resistance to migrants and refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the overlapping fields of smuggling and asylum, and address the less studied condition of 'transit migration'. Based on a case study of Kurds in Greece, the paper describes the organization of the journey and the process of temporary and permanent settlement. Greece is currently one of the main entry points to Europe for migrants coming from the Middle East. In the absence of legal entry paths, almost all migrants arrive in Greece illegally. Many see Greece as the passage to Western Europe, and therefore do not apply for asylum but remain undocumented in the country for a couple of years. Some eventually leave the country, while others end up staying permanently. The paper explores the reasons behind the phenomenon of transit migration and its consequences for the migrants, the country and the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the comparative experiences of Rohingya who fled in the early 1990s to Bangladesh and Malaysia, this paper discusses implications for refugee protection in an Asian regional context characterized by generally applicable immigration measures and a reluctance to offer formal durable solutions. Somewhat secure from refoulement but undifferentiated or even deliberately invisible among larger irregular migrant populations, refugees in the region develop certain protection strategies and livelihood mechanisms outside the boundaries of formal asylum, which suggest they possess significant capacities to carve out their own protection space and achieve a level of de facto integration. Given the migration-focused discourse among states and regional processes as well as the impasse on solutions in Asia, this paper makes the case for further recognition of available, intermediate solutions which capitalize on ambiguities between migration management and refugee protection and empower refugee-driven solutions in all dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the early history of refugee research and shows how, from originally being prime movers in the research, refugees today have largely been reduced to invisibility. In the South, access to refugees held in camps is controlled by local government bureaucracies and by lead agencies, and may be severely restricted or completely denied; in the North, refugees held in detention centres are equally difficult to access and even more disempowered. Examples are given of studies carried out in Sierra Leone, Sudan, Egypt, Kenya, Greece and the Former Soviet Union. The paper also considers barriers to disseminating refugee research, and concludes that now more than ever the duty of the researcher is to speak on behalf of refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the first visit ‘back home’ is important for refugees because it acts as a catalyst for renewed engagements with host country and country of origin. The study shows that conditions in both countries impact on decision-making and ultimately that integration and return can coexist. The first reconnection with ‘home’ is described as a memorable event in and of itself. Marked by an awareness of the passing of time, it provides both an end to waiting and worrying and a measure of one's progress (or lack of) in life, thus enabling participants to move on. Establishment of safety nets in both host and home countries as a condition for permanent return distinguishes the predicament of these refugees from that of other migrants. As the meeting between imagination and reality, the first visit contributes to the re-examination of the refugee cycle, the myth of return and the meaning of home in a context where return encompasses one discrete experience, the visit, and subsequent events. Overall, the paper provides a link between the literature on return as imagined while in exile and accounts of the reality of post-return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the discussion of the methodological and ethical challenges experienced when designing and implementing a cross-sectional household survey exploring linkages between migration, HIV and urban livelihoods in Johannesburg, this paper argues that it is possible to generate data sufficiently representative of the complexities and differences present in an African urban environment. This is achieved through employing purposive and random sampling techniques across both urban formal (three suburbs in the inner city) and urban informal (an informal settlement on the edge of the city) areas. Urban informal settlements present particular challenges requiring extensive community engagement and mapping to develop a sufficiently representative sampling frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a longitudinal quantitative and qualitative analysis of textual and visual references to age in UNHCR's annual appeals and reports published from 1999 to 2008. In contrast to an assumed over-representation of children in refugee imagery, this study reveals that adults are present in the greatest number of photographs across the time period studied. However, children, particularly girls, are mentioned much more frequently than adults in the texts, primarily in reference to ‘vulnerability’ and protection, education and health. Indeed, efforts towards gender- and age-sensitivity have instead reinforced a discourse that presents ‘women, children and the elderly’ as problematic ‘vulnerable’ groups and overlooks the complex power relations of gender and social age. The article concludes with some recommendations for re-presenting refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Integration has become both a key policy objective related to the resettlement of refugees and other migrants, and a matter of significant public discussion. Coherent policy development and productive public debate are, however, both threatened by the fact that the concept of integration is used with widely differing meanings. Based on review of attempted definitions of the term, related literature and primary fieldwork in settings of refugee settlement in the UK, the paper identifies elements central to perceptions of what constitutes 'successful' integration. Key domains of integration are proposed related to four overall themes: achievement and access across the sectors of employment, housing, education and health; assumptions and practice regarding citizenship and rights; processes of social connection within and between groups within the community; and structural barriers to such connection related to language, culture and the local environment. A framework linking these domains is presented as a tool to foster debate and definition regarding normative conceptions of integration in resettlement settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The restoration of livelihoods in the event of involuntary resettlement is commonly based on providing compensation to those who are displaced. This policy has led to a series of horror stories. For this reason, it is proposed that by conducting resettlement as a development project in its own right, the performance of resettlements can be improved and the benefits will accrue to the local population. The Three Gorges Project on the Yangtze River is the first project in China in which the policy of resettlement with development was translated into practice. This paper uses the results of a survey of urban resettlers in two counties to demonstrate that development policies have been unevenly applied across the Three Gorges Region and that in some counties the policies have had some success in maintaining and raising the incomes of resettlers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category of refugee has been problematic for both practitioners and social scientists because it is difficult to define an objective category that satisfactorily brings the real world, ethics, and theory into harmony. In recent years many critiques have been made of the assumptions built into the legal refugee framework and efforts have been made to refine the concept from multiple disciplinary perspectives. This paper examines several underlying assumptions of these discussions, including the category of forced migration, through a discussion of the example of Salvadorans in the United States in the 1980s. One assumption has been noted but insufficiently theorized: the centrality of the individual. The person assumed by both the refugee and human rights regimes of the United Nations is a culturally-specific construct defining the relationship between the individual and society in a way that precludes an adequate understanding of refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refugee determination is one of the most complex adjudication functions in industrialized societies. In Canada, despite a relatively broad recognition rate and a teleological interpretation of the international refugee definition, dissatisfaction with the decision‐making process at the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) has been expressed by numerous actors. This paper documents the influence of legal, psychological and cultural factors on the process of refugee determination. Forty problematic cases referred to the research team by professionals were studied using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The results indicate numerous problems affecting the role and behaviour of all actors: difficulties in evaluating evidence, assessing credibility, and conducting hearings; problems in coping with vicarious traumatization and uncontrolled emotional reactions; poor knowledge of the political context, false representations of war, and cultural misunderstandings or insensitivity. In a majority of cases, these legal, psychological and cultural dimensions interact together, often impacting negatively upon Board Members' ability to evaluate credibility and upon the overall conduct of hearings. These findings suggest that the refugee determination process might benefit from revised selection criteria for Board Members and refugee claim officers, as well as improved training and support for all actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this special issue, we seek explanations for international- and local-level variations in policy approaches to 'irregularized humanitarian migrants', who left their country of citizenship in hopes of finding protection abroad but do not, or no longer, hold a permanent legal status. We shed light on different policy responses and experiences across Europe, Africa, and the wider Middle East by drawing on a wide array of political systems and migration patterns and different groups of humanitarian migrants. We explore to what extent the outcomes of various policies and practices can be regarded as better and more durable solutions, defined as increasingly taking into account the interests of migrants and the communities they live in. Ultimately, we stress the importance of gaining deeper and more comprehensive understandings of the historically informed context-specific circumstances that irregularized humanitarian migrants find themselves in, as well as the patterns that we see emerging in the comparison of these cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Referring to the theoretical reflection on securitization in the area of forced migration and applying Barak Kalir's concept of Departheid, we investigate policies and practices deployed by the Polish authorities to deal with humanitarian migrants. In particular between 2015 and 2021, in the Polish context, humanitarian migrants were usually equated with 'bogus' asylum seekers, 'undeserving' of protection or even the right to apply for it. With the increasing presence of Belarusian and, more recently, Ukrainian asylum seekers in Poland, two completely different state attitudes towards asylum seekers reaching Poland's borders became visible. People directly fleeing Belarus and Ukraine were seen as deserving protection and support, and faced no obstacles in entering Poland through its eastern border. At the same time, non-White people forced to leave Asian or African regions in crisis, attempting to cross the border and to enter Poland remained 'unwanted'—to be deterred or deported, and thus illegalized at some stage of their mobility, usually already at the point of entrance. Based on the analysis of empirical data gathered between 2018 and 2021, we look for durable solutions for the latter category of migrants and investigate the reasons for the selectivity observed in the Polish practices towards asylum seekers. We conclude that the governmental approach perpetuated towards keeping humanitarian migrants away from Polish territory, especially in the post-2015 context, builds on xenophobic sentiments, making the concept of Departheid applicable to the realities of forced migration management in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the shame that forced migrants bear because of experiences of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). Using data from the UK, Turkey, Sweden, and Australia, we focus on shame experienced by women and LGBTQIA+ forced migrants throughout their journey, across borders and cultures. We propose three key ways to understand the complexities of shame from an experiential, temporal, and spatial perspective. First, we discuss how shame, often relating to family honour and stemming from survivors' experiences in their home country, travels with them over time and space. We then move on to illustrate how prolonged and/or delayed feelings of shame impact on survivors' self-confidence, self-worth, and trust in people and institutions. Finally, we consider the specific challenges LGBTQIA+ individuals face and how shame affected their settlement prospects. We argue that the SGBV experiences of forced migrants and the associated shame transcend time and space, forming landscapes of transnational and diachronic shame. Our analysis underlines the need for gender and sexuality-sensitive services for forced migrants in countries of refuge, which take into account potential ongoing effects of experiences of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While living migrants are the object of enormous attention, counted and screened on arrival and throughout their presence in European states, those who die crossing the Mediterranean remain uncounted and largely unidentified, as a result of a failure of European states to collect data from both bodies and from families looking for missing loved ones. Living migrants are seen as objects of interest to and control of biopolitical regimes, yet, once migrants are dead, they become marginal to their concerns. The body of the migrant is neither fully inside nor outside the social and legal order, while family members waiting for news of a loved one are entirely invisible to it. The result of death at the frontier is that the border gains an affective dimension, with the capacity to communicate trauma over large distances, plunging into ambiguity families in states of migrant origin who are unable to learn if loved ones are alive or dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European migration discourses emphasize that unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs) are one of Europe's most vulnerable migrant groups. The absence of an adult caregiver often serves as the sole explanation for the heightened vulnerability of URMs vis-à-vis their accompanied counterparts. This article challenges the assumption that the absence of adult caregivers always breeds greater vulnerability among young refugees who have received international protection. Based on 72 surveys and 31 in-depth interviews with refugees who received international protection and who arrived in Vienna, Austria between the ages of 14 and 18, this article contributes to empirical analysis on the complex impact adult relative caregivers specifically have on the integration and resiliency of refugee youth. It explores the influence that family status has on employment, education, social connections and personal outlook and sense of belonging. We hypothesize that refugees who arrived as older URMs experience a financial and social autonomy, as well as benefit from a more advantageous legal and social treatment, speeding up their adaptation process and engendering greater resiliency. While the findings highlight that family matters, they also show that family may not play a ubiquitously positive role in young refugees' adaptation process as previously assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the mediating role of service providers between citizens and refugee reception policies. Based on an analysis of interviews with local government officials and NGO workers and observations in two districts of Istanbul, I examine the 'street-level justifications' that service providers use to counter anti-refugee resentments expressed by the citizens. The article suggests that as street-level bureaucrats endeavour to justify their work with refugees through three types discursive strategies; cultural similarity, call for empathy, and pragmatic explanations. Such strategies by constantly re-defining us and them, bear implications for social cohesion. The article offers a meso-level analysis of refugee reception policies in the Turkish context and highlights the limits of initial hospitality. The findings have wider implications for other contexts where the settlement of displaced or migrant populations is rather nascent, policies are top-down and where bureaucratic structures mediate among displaced populations, citizens, and the resources available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adequate knowledge about the spatial distribution of immigrants, particularly those undocumented, can be a significant challenge while designing social science surveys that are aimed at generating statistically valid results using probability samples. Often the underlying expectation of documented information on a population’s physical distribution and orderly surveillance units needed for random sampling is frustrated by the lack of knowledge about immigrants’ settlement patterns. Addressing these challenges, this paper summarizes a strategy employed for surveying difficult-to-reach immigrant populations in the absence of a reliable sampling frame in inner-city Johannesburg. The survey applied a nationality stratified, three-stage cluster random sampling strategy involving an innovative use of spatial information from a geo-database of buildings within inner-city Johannesburg. An enumeration of the method and challenges faced in the data collection are discussed here to demonstrate the feasibility of probability sampling within non-homogeneously distributed population groups in the absence of pre-existing sampling frames. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘Urban internally displaced persons’ is a contested category in Uganda. Both international and national definitions of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) include, in principle, persons displaced by conflict and dwelling in urban areas. However, existing assistance and protection practices have transformed the IDP label, effectively restricting its application to people residing in IDP camps. Displaced people living in urban areas are perceived either as economic migrants or as former IDPs who have reached a durable solution. This article analyses the process, outcomes and challenges of a collaborative research project between forced migrants, the Refugee Law Project (a national organization), and researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The joint goal of the researchers and urban IDP representatives in the research project was to promote the inclusion of urban IDPs in the IDP label by revealing the political and bureaucratic institutional agency at work in the processes of labelling. This article seeks to demonstrate how such collaborative action research may lead to strengthening the knowledge base regarding forced migration in urban areas, mobilizing communities for advocacy, and influencing the formation of humanitarian categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the means through which Palestinian refugees have sought to make themselves and their claims visible, both within their community and to the 'international community'. The principal site for this exploration is the Gaza Strip under Egyptian Administration (1948-1967). Because Gaza is home to both a large refugee population and a significant native population that was also dispossessed in the aftermath of 1948, it is an illuminating site for this investigation. In mapping the visibility field, the essay looks at both the monumental and the mundane, at both the bureaucratic and the symbolic, and at both the instrumental and the affective. Particular attention is given to identification documents, whether issued by governments or humanitarian organizations, as visible markers of existence and continued claims. The essay illuminates ways that a humanitarian apparatus can incidentally offer tools for ordinary people to demand that they and their community be recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 10 May and 10 June 2020, the author conducted a mixed online survey amongst Venezuelan refugees and migrants currently living in Trinidad and Tobago, to assess the impact of local COVID-19 measures on their livelihoods and food security. Responses were alarming: 92 per cent felt their livelihoods disrupted; 50 per cent lost all income, and a further 36 per cent lost between half and three-quarters. Almost 80 per cent resorted to borrowing money to avoid eviction and meet basic needs; 83 per cent either skipped meals or reduced choice. The majority of respondents indicated that individuals or independent church organizations were their main source of help. Assistance from organizations whose raison d'être is to protect refugees and migrants in Trinidad and Tobago was classed as insufficient by 39 per cent, and seriously insufficient by 33 per cent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' declaration of an emergency in 2016, Thessaloniki's refugee regime began to develop rapidly. Local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were transformed from underfunded initiatives to institutions managing large budgets and requiring staff with intercultural competencies and experience with migrant populations. For this, they turned to the 'lost generation'— Greek youth who had come of age during the economic crisis and who had formed close relationships with migrants through political mobilizations and local solidarity networks that had sprung up in response to widespread austerity. In this article, I ask: How is the conversion of young 'radicals' from 'anti-state' activist networks into NGO representatives achieved? How does this transition impact former activists' relationships with migrants and how do former activists make sense of this change? What, if anything, makes this a 'Thessaloniki story'? My argument is three-fold. First, the conversion of activists into NGO representatives is made possible by a combination of young people's exclusion from economic opportunities and the state's disciplining of forms of solidarity that exist outside of the refugee regime. Second, the refugee regime converts solidarity established through political struggle into a form of human capital that affords former activists social mobility. Existing solidarity between former activists and migrants is undermined as a result. Third, on account of their new role as gatekeepers in NGOs, former activists struggle to offer a compelling narrative of continuity with their left-wing identity and their politicized commitment to migrants. In doing so, they rely on identifiable forms of boundary work and justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst it is increasingly acknowledged that integration is 'a dynamic, two-way process of mutual accommodation by all immigrants and residents', the focus in integration theory, policy and practice has been placed upon refugees or migrants themselves. The role of receiving societies in supporting and providing the context for integration has not been systematically interrogated. This article is original in its focus upon the role of receiving societies in shaping refugee-integration outcomes. It attends to multiple interconnecting receiving-society-opportunity structures shifting thinking about refugee integration by asking how refugee-receiving countries influence refugee integration. Introducing five sets of host society opportunity structures: locality, discourse, relations, structure and initiatives and support, the article highlights the impossibility of understanding integration outcomes using the unidimensional models that have largely dominated thinking to date. Instead, a multi-dimensional integration model is proposed that will allow more nuanced understanding of integration processes and how they occur at different levels. The article ends by outlining some ideas around how migration scholars shift their focus from refugee characteristics to understanding better the influence of host society opportunity structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of Europe's 2015 so-called refugee 'crisis', tens of thousands of border crossers remain stuck in Greece aided by an array of humanitarian workers, government employees, and volunteers. Drawing on previous scholarship about street-level bureaucracy, I discuss the work of informal volunteers in Athens and Lesvos, where they continue to aid border crossers attain entitlements and rights. Based on 10 months of ethnographic research conducted from 2017 to 2018, this article explores how volunteers within the humanitarian landscape of Greece sought to enact their ethical principles within governance regimes that categorized border crossers in restrictive and at times harmful ways. I show how the struggle to assist border crossers in effect transformed volunteers into informal street-level bureaucrats, who drew on a range of tactics that simultaneously reproduced and subverted the policy categories of refugee or vulnerable person. This article argues that rather than facilitating administrative care of border crossers, these categories were in fact a political battleground upon which volunteers struggled to pursue their moral rationalities despite an exclusionary governance regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study unravels religious practices, politics and perceptions as forms of multiple identities within and amongst different types of migrant groups in South Africa. Using purpose sampling from members of the Christ Assembly Church of Africa, we explore how the appeal to religion is a form of identity construction that differentiates Congolese from other groups of migrants. We utilized social identity theory in showing how Congolese use religious practices at the mentioned church to assert and reaffirm their identity and use it as a form of resilience to any external threat to the existence of their 'culture'. Our findings reveal that there exists a complex relationship between religion and Congolese refugees in Durban that is an identity maker that acts as a form of mobilization and resilience to any form of external threats to the identity of the Congolese community in Durban. Furthermore, our findings reveal that the negotiation and construction of Congolese identity through religious practices at Christ Assemblies Church of Africa can play an important role in determining how prejudices and behaviour that reject, exclude and often vilify persons based on the perception that they are outsiders or foreigners to the community are constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of the mismatch between the numbers of forced migrants that host governments are prepared to deal with and the actual number of those seeking refuge is that many forced migrants must find what I term 'reluctant' refuge—precarious, unofficial shelter. In this article, I first theorize 'reluctance', before introducing the concept of archaeology of the contemporary world in order to establish what makes fieldwork drawn on explicitly archaeological. Following this, I offer a concise history of the current political situation in Athens before describing my methodology. I then provide three 'portraits' of sites of temporary refugee shelter in the city—a squat, a non-governmental organization-managed hotel and a co-operative day centre—and discuss how these inter-relate to form a landscape of reluctant refugee shelter. The article contributes an explicitly 'translational' (Zimmerman et al. 2010) view of how experiences of shelter affect and shape forced displacement in Athens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to explore the association between self-reported reasons for migration, age upon arrival and Eurostat's country-of-birth classification, and to study these measures in relation to education, employment and language skills. The European Union Labour Force Survey 2014 (11,345 women; 9,825 men) was used to study the immigrant working-age population (20–64 years) from seven West European countries with a substantial number of refugees. A third had arrived as children (0–19 years). Each reason for migration was well represented within all country-groups and the proportion of respondents reporting each reason was fairly similar across the country-groups. Regression analysis identified significant variation in education, employment and language skills by reasons for migration within country-groups and vice versa, with (female) refugees and family migrants arriving as adults faring worse than other migrants in language skills and employment. There were few significant gender differences. We recommend implementing reasons for migration and age upon arrival as core variables in quantitative migration studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concept of 'time' in order to better understand the situation of precarious migrants in Sweden. Through analysing a number of reports and interviews undertaken with newly arrived migrants in Sweden, it displays how different temporal understandings of the migrants are linked to and managed by governing bodies, laws and regulations. The article centres around two related research questions: (i) What constructions of time are used in the governing of precarious migrants? and (ii) How do these migrants understand their own and society's time? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines mobile phone use among migrants in the Naples region to consider how this mediated technology enables them to mitigate or resolve uncertainties of everyday working life in relation with others. In particular, I am interested in precarity, which has been understood as both an analytical concept and an emergent subjective form of identification for citizens in Europe to express anxiety about work conditions and social alienation. Precarity emerges from the reconfigurations of political economies in neoliberal regimes that force flexible and temporary labour contracts, in contrast to the ‘certainties’ of welfare state labour markets and social arrangements. ICTs recently introduced in European states, such as biometric analysis tools and computer software and networks used to harmonize border entry across EU member states, can create an impediment to legal status and increase the surveillance and exclusion of others, but at the same time ICTs are vital to a forced migrant’s sense of security and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the on-site and online realities of Bosnian immigrants in Austria whose migration, at least initially, started as a forced displacement. It describes how their social networks—performed and sustained both in real and cyber space—are utilized in strengthening social cohesion and trans-local identities in relation to places in Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ultimately, the article attempts to challenge the established methodological and theoretical orthodoxies in migration studies and to deconstruct the myth about refugees as a ‘societal burden’ subject to charity, arguing that any strict division between different migration categories and paradigms will miss addressing the multiplicity of ever-changing relationships, meanings and opportunities especially as they are (re)imagined in the realm of cyberspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many refugee communities are host to a wealth of research projects. Yet, relationships between researchers and refugee research participants have been little studied. The current study provides an empirical, qualitative investigation of the relationships that may evolve between researchers and members of Tamil voluntary associations in Norway. It explores whether these relationships provided research participants with access to resources outside their group. The study draws on participant observation among researchers and Tamil research participants between 2006 and 2011, with particular focus on events related to the final stage of the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2009. It was found that social connectedness with researchers provided research participants with linking social capital. Researchers played multiple and overlapping roles within this part of the Tamil community, enabling access to resources outside the community. The study contributes to the theoretical development of the concept of linking social capital by construing it as the outcome of specific conscious or unconscious strategic investments embedded in features of social organization and cultural orientations of the involved actors, and the social and political context these investments occur in. Implications of the study for research designs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a mixed-methods study of social exclusion experiences among 233 resettled refugees living in urban and regional Queensland, Australia. The findings reported here are drawn from the SettleMEN project, a longitudinal investigation of health and settlement experiences among recently arrived adult men from refugee backgrounds conducted between 2008 and 2010. Using questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews, we examine four key dimensions of social exclusion: production, consumption, social relations, and services. We show that, overall, participants experienced high levels of social exclusion across all four dimensions. Participants living in regional areas were significantly more likely to be excluded from production, social relations, and services. We argue that there is a pressing need to tackle barriers to economic participation and discrimination in order to promote the social inclusion of men from refugee backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is relatively little research into the housing experience of refugee immigrants to Australia as a category or into variations in their housing careers according to cultural backgrounds. To address this issue, data from the 1999/2000 Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia, the most recent available survey to include refugee immigrants, are used to examine the housing and related circumstances of the nine largest groups of refugees during their first 18 months of resettlement. Most resettled into the private rental market and were satisfied with their housing situation. Statistical analysis suggests that differences in individual characteristics rather than cultural backgrounds are for most groups the major cause of variations in housing experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author focuses on the article "Communities of Knowledge or Tyrannies of Partnership: Reflections on North-South Research Networks and the Dual Imperative,- by Loren B. Landau. According to landau, the researchers of the poor countries always look for the projects that pay well because their salaries are very less in comparison with the researchers of the rich countries. The author argues that the migrant researchers have potential despite of the scarce resources.

The literature on the adaptation of international migrant populations to host societies has consistently relied on comparative studies among natives, voluntary migrants and/or forced migrants. Although this approach has been widely used due to the availability of comparative data in countries of destination, it has been rarely used in the study of internally displaced populations and their adaptation to predominantly urban host communities. This article provides a comparative analysis of the labour adaptation of internally displaced persons into formal and informal labour markets. It uses data from an experimental census collected in a municipality with high prevalence of internally displaced persons located in the metropolitan area of Bogotá, Colombia. Results from the analysis indicate that internally displaced persons are more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be employed in the informal sector of the economy relative to non-migrants and voluntary migrants. In addition, the probability of employment in the formal sector for the internally displaced decreases over time. The analysis also incorporates gender differences in household composition and household headship across groups with diverse migration experiences. The findings indicate the need for public policies that improve the employment opportunities of the internally displaced populations and other vulnerable populations in urban areas of resettlement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the past, refugee camp security has been examined in many lights; however, the demographic make-up of camps has not been focused on. In this article, I present a quantitative model that examines attacks on refugee camps. I argue that the likelihood of an attack on a camp is affected by the demographic make-up of the camp. The primary demographic causes that affect vulnerability are the level of male population of the camp, age of camp residents, and the size of the camp. With the available data, I find that these demographic indicators are significant in determining the likelihood of an attack. Assessing what characteristics of camps and their populations increase the likelihood of an attack should serve as a guide to the implementation and organization of new refugee camps to ensure peace and stability for an already fragile community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the processes of integration of forced migrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina into Slovenia from a historical perspective. In the autumn of 1991, Slovenia saw a large inflow of forced migrants from Croatia, followed by an even greater number of forced migrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the spring of 1992. The results of long-term anthropological fieldwork conducted among forced migrants in various Slovenian towns from 1992 to 2006 are presented. It is argued that in the 1990s, Slovenia adopted a policy of hidden repatriation, thus severely hampering the integration of forced migrants. The various dimensions of integration will be discussed. Due to space restrictions, specific focus is given to economic, political and psychological integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article starts from the premise that the way that policy is made plays an important role in how it is subsequently received. It is argued here that New Labour asylum policy and the symbols and rhetoric that accompanied policy-making, constructed asylum seekers as a threat. This construction problematized immigration generally and created a sense of crisis within the policy field. This assumed crisis then acted to encourage hostility within the general population. The hostile political environment then raises significant problems in terms of integration for all migrant groups, but particularly for asylum seekers and refugees. The article contextualizes these developments and locates cohesion and integration ‘problems’ within the policy-making processes of the Government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is often assumed that refugees in the US are at an economic disadvantage compared to other immigrants. A number of hypotheses have been postulated to explain this ‘refugee gap’. Refugees, on average, have less English language ability, less educational experience, different forms of family support, poorer mental and physical health, and generally reside in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods than other immigrants. Although these factors are well supported by evidence for specific refugee groups, a lack of representative data for both refugee and non-refugee migrants has made the testing of this refugee gap challenging. Using the first wave of the New Immigrant Survey, these hypotheses are tested on employment, occupation, and earnings outcomes using multivariate modelling techniques among recent immigrants in the United States. Findings demonstrate that accounting for each of the aforementioned explanatory factors minimizes the earnings and occupational differences between refugees and all other immigrants. Despite the inclusion of these factors within the model, however, a refugee disparity in earnings and occupational attainment continues to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While UNHCR and its local partners in Malaysia have commemorated World Refugee Day with a number of ‘awareness-raising’ activities and festive events each year, starting in 2005, the Malaysian authorities have pursued a range of increasingly punitive measures targeting ‘illegal migrants’ during this period. In the context of a country which is, at the same time, a non-signatory to the 1951 Convention and a destination for significant refugee populations in the region, the celebration and commemoration of the figure of the refugee raise a number of questions. First of all, how does the figure of the refugee appear, as such, in Malaysia when seen through the prism of the various activities, events and campaigns held in conjunction with World Refugee Day since 2005? Second, how is it possible for this figure—an ‘illegal migrant’ under the Immigration Act—to emerge, however sporadically and incompletely, in Malaysian public discourse as another Other, one deserving of ‘our encouragement, support, and respect’, to quote UNHCR's official website? Third, how does the case of Malaysia help illuminate our understanding of the slippage produced in the encounters between national body politic and international humanitarian spirit? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]