Female refugees escaping domestic violence seem largely invisible amongst larger groups of refugees given their unclear legal situation and dichotomously-oriented policy making. In this study, I bring together literature from the sociology of migration and gender to explore how women who experience family abuse decide to flee their countries of origin in times of political conflict and persecution. How does flight from domestic violence interact with refugee migration? What roles do macro, meso, and micro forces play in triggering and perpetuating domestic-violence related migration during times of conflict when refugee flows are ongoing? Through an analysis of twenty biographical interviews with female Chechen refugees in Poland, I argue that political conflict can be both a source of and an escape from domestic violence. I find that an ongoing conflict can strengthen the patriarchal patterns present in a community or lead to a degeneration of those customs. At the same time, for many Chechen women, the refugee flow that grew out of political conflict also facilitated a way out of abusive relationships via the possibility of international escape. This phenomenon was observed at macro, meso and micro levels.

In this paper, Briana Ballis examines the spillover effects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This policy significantly increased the returns to schooling for undocumented youth, leaving the returns for everyone else unchanged. Leveraging administrative data from Los Angeles schools and variation in the concentration in DACA-eligible youth across schools, I also find significant positive effects of DACA on high school completion and student achievement among ineligible peer groups.

This paper asks how the evolution of cultural ideas about credibility shapes the form of asylum claims, and in light of this process, how asylum-seekers navigate competing demands to make credible claims of persecution and fear. Using a sample of 150 asylum claims from around the world, lodged over a 30-year period, it shows how asylum-seeking takes place in culturally “unsettled times,” which require claimants to adjust the ways they seek to demonstrate their credibility as they navigate the competing demands of organizational legibility, legal requirements, and cultural perceptions.

Faced with a long and uncertain recovery, many Puerto Ricans instead opted to move to the US mainland, where as US citizens they enjoy full rights to work and vote. Using various data sources, including data from FEMA disaster relief applications, Justin Wiltshire shows that rather than spreading uniformly throughout the contiguous states these evacuees tended to cluster heavily in relatively few areas.

In this paper, Cynthia van der Werf studies how the largest inflow of refugees in U.S. history –Indochinese refugees at the end of the Vietnam War – affected U.S. children by examining whether native children’s academic achievement was lower in ZIP Codes with higher shares of refugees using the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS88), the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and U.S. Census data.

Using two case studies (Zimbabwean migrants in South African and Burmese migrants in Thailand) Amy Skoll demonstrates how precarity is mitigated by the home country context as well as the host country context, leading to variation in migrant mobilization.