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Refugees are perceived as a category of people that are ‘vulnerable’ per se. However, once they have arrived in (high-income) hosting countries and are supported by a welfare state, vulnerability needs to be rethought, as they face new challenges and potential sources of inequality. In this paper, we have measured vulnerability as the probability of experiencing jointly three interdependent risks: social isolation, financial worries and poor health. For this purpose, we estimated a trivariate logit model to evaluate how individual and household characteristics are associated with vulnerability and also made inferences regarding the residual association between pairs of risks, conditionally to a set of selected covariates. Using the 2016 wave of the IAB-BAMFSOEP survey of refugees in Germany, we demonstrated the significant correlations between the risks experienced by refugees and assessed a ‘propagation effect’ that affects vulnerability when the three risks come together. Taking this result into account may be useful in preventing vulnerability among refugees when they are faced with even one of these risks

Funds of knowledges are the accumulated intellectual, social, and cultural competencies that all students bring to educational settings. Immigrants and refugees necessarily experience emotional, material, linguistic, cultural, and legal struggles as they transit from home countries to host countries. Their experiences expand the funds of knowledges that they develop. Education must respond to the needs of these students. A profound educational response is the narrative approach called Círculos de memoria (‘Circles of Memory’), which has been employed to create safe spaces for immigrant or refugee students to share their lived experiences and the funds of knowledge that have resulted from those experiences. This approach also allows host country students to express their own funds of knowledge. In these interactions, participants increase their sense of competence, deepen their understanding of themselves and other people, strengthen peaceful relationships, and contribute to more democratic ways of living. An understanding of societal differences can be accomplished by recognising and valuing the knowledges possessed by students from diverse backgrounds, including marginalised backgrounds. These knowledges can be promoted, celebrated, and amplified through culturally relevant teaching practices.

Do crackdowns by destination countries deter refugees? Much of the existing literature conflates containment measures (forcibly restricting refugees in their home region or country) and deterrence policies (discouraging refugees by making the destination appear less attractive). In addition, empirical studies have focused almost exclusively on Western countries and analyzed the effects of acceptance rates or policy reforms on the number of asylum applications lodged. In contrast, this paper examines whether rights violations deter asylees and refugees by leveraging a global dataset drawn from reports by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. I find that deportation, detention, and encampment do not decrease asylum applications or refugee arrivals, and may actually raise them in some cases. While reduced access to the labor market may deter very small numbers of asylees and refugees, there are other sound reasons for destination countries to eschew restrictive employment policies.

The abstract is available here: https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/o:1626126

Many refugee-receiving countries have restricted their asylum policies and stepped up their border control policies to prevent asylum seekers from reaching their territories. At the same time, the resettlement of refugees has gained popularity. Many states have introduced resettlement schemes or have increased the number of refugees they resettle. Why do states voluntarily admit refugees by expanding resettlement? This article develops a comprehensive theoretical account of countries' resettlement choices and identifies the determinants of their openness to refugee resettlement through an empirical analysis of 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2019. We find that the supply-side factor of wealth best predicts whether a country engages in refugee resettlement. The number of effective resettlement admissions tends to fluctuate with the demand-side factor of humanitarian need. Nevertheless, the expansion of resettlement policies has not resulted in a subsequent expansion of humanitarian protection. Instead, states combine resettlement policies with restrictive border control policies which allows them to preserve their humanitarian credentials while curtailing refugees' overall access to asylum. These findings provide important insights into the policy-making of refugee resettlement and the strategic considerations in the asylum governance of liberal democracies.

During the last decade, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of Syrian asylum seekers, including forced displaced academics (FDAs), in Turkey. Along with providing essentials, the...

This article offers an analysis of how various actors engaged in and reacted to refugee reception practices in a multi-level governance setting at the main island entry points to the European Union...

Mama Amaan Project (MAP) delivered perinatal education and doula services to underserved refugee and immigrant communities in Seattle, Washington. MAP presented at a 'global to local (glocal)' workshop for US-based global health agencies redirecting their experience and resources to address domestic health crises. Glocal models reference Global South anti-colonial social transformations through Primary Health Care (PHC) - 'health for all as a right' and investment in strong public sectors. As Black women working in our communities, we resisted labelling MAP glocal. Western donors and NGOs appropriate PHC's community participation narratives, meanwhile implementing World Bank/IMF economic structural adjustment health system cuts - thereby shifting austerity-related resource shortfalls to communities. In US contexts of neoliberal shrinking social safety nets and workers' rights, similar strategies to address austerity-related health disparities are promoted as 'global to local'. Projects like MAP cannot substitute quality public services. They expose gaps and build community empowerment to demand quality healthcare. Drawing on MAP and 'global health' experience in Mozambique, we call for re-embracing PHC's activist values - agitating for health as a universal human right for all, rather than putting the burden and blame on underserved communities. We propose decolonising the 'glocal' paradigm by embracing 'transnationality', 'relationality' and 'mutuality'.

Due to the lack of formal refugee protection framework, the Asia-Pacific region represents a particularly interesting case study regarding the interface between migration management and refugee pro...

Refugee repatriation rests on a fundamental norm: the right of return. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) styles itself as the chief defender of international norms on refu...

The EU has drawn on its migration policy in the Middle East and North Africa as a method of region-building set to reconfigure a broader EU Mediterranean Neighborhood. At the same time, EU migration policy as a region-building initiative has had contentious, albeit understudied, effects. We know little about either variation in states’ responses to the EU or the contextual dynamics and motives pushing them to challenge EU migration policy as a vector for regulating regions ‘from beyond’. Building on the case of displacement from Syria, the article targets the EU’s refugee approach in its ‘neighborhood’ as a site of contention whereby states, rather than being policy borrowers, dispute the EU’s attempt to regulate regions. The article employs insights from EU refugee cooperation with Lebanon, one of the key regional host states. It shows how Lebanon has sought to contest and adapt the EU’s script of resilience-building, which consists of strengthening governments’ capacity to host refugees ‘within the region’ and at a distance. Looking at EU neighbors as policy agents rather than vessels helps to unravel the tensions underlying the external, regional, and bilateral dimensions of EU migration policy and delineate how these overlapping dimensions play out on the ground.

While refugees are part of patterns of global migration, their ordinary lives remain obscured. In a narrative inquiry into the lives of Syrian refugee families who came to Canada within the past 4 ...

This article explores the haunting aspects of queer migration within two documentary films: Season of Migration to the North (Laumann 2015), a film about a queer Sudanese migrant who fled to Norway after hosting a fashion show, and Shelter: Farewell to Eden (Masi 2019), a film about a Filipino transgender migrant navigating European borders. Instead of focusing on how the films make the protagonists intelligible, I focus on how absences are conjured to question the necessity of making the subject intelligible. This is important because queer migrants are often framed as only victims of persecution who must become intelligible to the demands of sexual humanitarianism. Disrupting the way visibility is heralded as an achievement for queer migrants, I explore the importance of unintelligibility in migration, especially when the terms of appearance are controlled by not only norms surrounding sexuality, gender, race, and class but also the violence of European borders.

The “refugee crisis” has drawn attention to the role of cities (local authorities) in asylum seekers and refugees' reception and integration processes, with many developing creative and innovative ...

In this study we evaluate the impact of a literacy program for internally displaced female refugees in Afghanistan. The results of the evaluation show that the program was beneficial both for the w...

This article explores the central themes in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) by focusing on the complexities of finding oneself placeless and seeking refuge in an unwelcoming global world with porou...

Refugees’ effect on domestic terrorism is conditioned by host-country social perception (attitude about living next-door to foreigners) and economic competition. These hypotheses are tested cross-nationally from 1995-2014 leveraging data from the World Values Survey. The results show social perception matters. When refugee flow to a country increases from the mean to 75th percentile, it does not statistically alter domestic terrorism risk. But when a host-country’s preference to not live next-door to foreigners is accounted for and changes from the mean (20.9%) to 75th percentile (30.3%), the change in refugee flow increases the risk of domestic terrorism by 40%.

Vocational decisions made at school have significant long term impacts on young people’s life chances, their opportunities for securing decent jobs and economic growth for themselves, their familie...

What drives the evaluations of extending protections and services to refugees and asylum seekers? In dialogue with research on attitudes towards refugees, in particular, work pointing to the import...

FitzGerald and Arar (2018. “The Sociology of Refugee Migration.” Annual Review of Sociology 44 (1): 387–406) suggest that adapting the New Economics of Labour Migration Theory (NELM) to include the...

The League of Ireland is commonly seen as a development league, one whose best players are signed at an early age, usually by larger, wealthier clubs from Britain, following a pattern established m...

In 1972, upon expulsion from Uganda by Idi Amin, diasporic Asians, who had settled in East Africa during colonial times, underwent a second stage of global dispersal. Many of them managed to resett...

Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) refugees and immigrants in the United States (U.S.) face barriers to accessing health care, and are more likely to have worse health outcomes as it rela...

Displaced persons are exposed to trauma and experience posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTS). Many displaced Muslims come from communities that rely on religious practices to cope with traumatic experiences, and religious coping has been identified as predictive of posttraumatic growth (PTG). Discrimination may contribute to increased PTS and promote in-group identification. In this study, we hypothesized that perceived discrimination would enhance the relationship between religious coping and PTG. Results indicated that religious coping predicted PTG, but the overall interaction with discrimination was not significant. However, probing moderating effects at discrete levels of discrimination yielded enhanced relationship between religious coping and PTG at its mean and above until reaching the highest values of discrimination. For individuals who experience moderate to high levels of discrimination, religious coping increased PTG. These findings highlight the essential role of religious coping in promoting growth for many Muslims exposed to forced migration and elevated levels of discrimination.

Japan is one of the richest democracies of Asia, a pillar of the international liberal order in the region, and a strongly pacifist nation with the only anti-war constitution in the world. It is al...

Literature indicates that trauma exposure leads to autobiographical memory (AM) impairment, but the differential effects of direct and indirect trauma on memory remain unclear. We investigated AMs of 100 Rohingya refugees (Mean

For refugee migrants, proficiency in the language of their host country is a significant factor affecting their chance of integration and employment in their new society. For this reason, many West...

It is now more than 5 years since Europe experienced a so-called “refugee crisis” challenging the European Union's asylum system to such an extent that the system is still transforming. This commentary identifies a dangerous trend in these transformations. It does so with reference to the manifestation in Europe in 2015 of grassroot engagement and cross-border initiatives to welcome and support refugee arrivals, known as “welcome cultures”. Bearing this willingness to support refugees in mind, the EU Migration and Asylum Pact appear to communicate an even more exclusive notion of Europe than hitherto seen. Even though “solidarity” is a core notion in The Pact, it is a very different understanding of solidarity than the ones expressed in the welcome cultures: In The Pact “solidarity” refers to the collective responsibility of EU member states to follow refugees back to where they came from. This consensus, neglecting how civil society was an invaluable resource during the summer and autumn of 2015, endanger the activities and maybe even the very existence in Europe of civil society engagement in refugee relief work. We write this commentary because we think these developments should be recognized as a dilemma located at the heart of European democracy.

This article analyses the role of affect and emotions in Finland’s first large-scale anti-deportation protest, the 2017 Right to Live protest in Helsinki. Despite deportation protests having recently gained scholarly attention, their emotional dimensions have not been sufficiently studied, especially as concerns the emotions of protestors with vulnerable legal status. This article is based on in-depth interviews with key activists in the anti-deportation protest network in Finland, including asylum seekers, refugees and Finnish citizens. The article argues that in order for the protest of asylum seekers facing the threat of deportation to become public and visible, it was important that citizens who supported the cause not only offered material assistance but also shared their emotions. The article applies Margaret Wetherell’s theoretical concept of affective practices to analyse interactions between asylum seekers and their supporters, and Sara Ahmed’s circulation of affect and affective economies to explain how affect and emotions played a role in mobilizing protesters and sustaining the protest. The article concludes that the circulation of affect within the network of asylum seekers and supporters produced lasting affective value during the protest and after the protest ended. Strong affective ties enabled the protesters’ network to function effectively in a challenging political climate and despite the network’s lack of formal organization, leadership and shared ideological premises. peerReviewed

The experience of torture can have a lasting impact on survivors’ physical, psychological and social well-being and threaten their sense of safety. Methods: This study utilized a constructivist gro...

School belonging is fundamental to the wellbeing and academic success of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students. While the psychosocial factors associated with belonging have been we...

This article examines how children draw on local sources of morality and moral worth to forge connections, build friendship and enforce distinctions across difference in a rural multicultural city ...

Refugee students may come to schools with fragmented educational histories and other exile-related stressors, but many also settle fast, enjoy school and live rather ordinary childhoods. These more positive stories are not told because they get overridden by well-meaning but counterproductive stories of victimhood. This article presents a storycrafting project with 13 primary school aged refugee children in Australia, with an aim to problematise this deficit-discourse. The outcome was the group’s “preferred narrative”, that is, a story combining fact and fiction within the dialogical process between the teller and the audiences. The story was published as a fictional book and an animated film entitled Ali and the Long Journey Australia. This article discusses this process and its outcome; how a child-led project combining fact and fiction can inform qualitative research, and how stories are welcomed by audiences which are out of reach by regular research outputs. publishedVersion

Currently 26 million people live as refugees, 40% of whom are school-aged. As global policy shifts to include refugee children and young people in education systems in settings of exile, language-i...

The aim of this article is to critically explore and analyse opportunities and obstacles faced by highly skilled migrants in rural areas seeking to re-enter their profession, focusing on the lived experiences of migrants residing in northern Sweden. Analysis of their stories focusing on intersections of temporal and spatial positionings reveal different lived experiences and opportunities depending on migration regime and policy, gender, age and family situation, profession and labour market needs. However, similar challenges also emerged related to rurality such as rural dismantling and poverty of access to (and support for) both adult education generally and specific fast tracks for highly skilled migrants, with accompanying risks of deskilling and marginalisation. The stories also indicate that the rural idyll tends to provide closer social networks than those in cities, thereby increasing opportunities for re-entry to former professions. However, workfare policies and devaluation of foreign credentials lead to requirements for re-education to re-enter former professions or undertake other work (high- or low-level) that are particularly difficult to meet in rural settings.

This paper investigates the politics of refugee arrival and integration at urban level in Germany following the migration influx in summer 2015. How have cities redefined themselves? How have newco...

The purpose of this study is to explore the use of equivalent conceptual metaphors and the correspondent linguistic expressions in refugee students’ L1s and L2s and examine the possible positive ef...

This article examines the situations faced by refugee families in Germany and analyses the role of family education programmes in supporting their inclusion in society. We focus on two internationa...