Refugees and Displaced People

GMC Deputy Director Robert Irwin and grad student affiliate María José Gutiérrez on the increasingly precarious migration routes and processes for those heading from South and Central America and the Caribbean to northern Mexico in hopes of entering the United States.

Resumen:

La migración que hoy en día se traslada por las rutas que se extienden de América Central a Estados Unidos, y por otros caminos precarios a través de las Américas, suele implicar una búsqueda de refugio por aquéllos que no encuentran protecciones adecuadas ante las inseguridades de su país natal. Los procesos contemporáneos de migración, que pueden extenderse por años sin resolución, implican para los migrantes una exposición prolongada a los peligros de la intemperie, mientras que el sueño de asilo (sea éste legal o informal) se vuelve casi inalcanzable. Las personas son expulsadas de sus países de origen y convertidas en migrantes, estando sujetas más adelante a exclusiones o deportaciones de los países en los que aspiran reasentarse. Las nociones de refugio, abrigo y asilo se vuelven casi sinónimos de desprotección, desamparo y descuido. Para los migrantes contemporáneos, la intemperie se ha vuelto ubicua, y la migración ha asumido como atributo ineludible, y acaso perpetuo, la precariedad. Este escenario lleva a situaciones que parecen ilógicas, en las que los migrantes mismos eligen la intemperie, pero que pueden también considerarse un reflejo de la racionalidad de actores sociales cuya agencia se debe interpretar desde las precariedades de sus vidas y las volatilidades de sus entornos. En las narrativas testimoniales de migrantes se observa que éstos se acomodan a las más extremas condiciones de desamparo por necesidad. Sin embargo, en otras ocasiones parecería que donde la autonomía de la migración más se afirma es en el albergue a la intemperie.

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We evaluate the effect on newly arrived refugees' employment of a policy, introduced in Denmark in 2013, that matched refugees to occupations with local labor shortages after basic training for those jobs. Leveraging the staggered roll-out across municipalities, we find that the policy increased employment by 5-6 percentage points one year after arrival and 10 percentage points two years after. The policy was especially effective for male refugees and refugees with some secondary education. The findings suggest that this type of policy could alleviate long-term labor shortages and integrate low-skilled immigrants, while having minimal competition effects on natives.

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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is of increasing global concern. Human mobility is one factor that has recently been associated with AMR, though the extent of its impact has not yet been well established due to the limited availability of rigorous data. This review examines the existing literature regarding various types of human mobility including short-term travelers, forcibly displaced persons, migrant populations, and their association with global rates of AMR.

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Introduction:
Climate change can affect agricultural productivity and the incentives of people to remain in rural areas. This column looks at the effects of warming trends on rural-urban and international migration. In middle-income economies, higher temperatures increased emigration rates to urban areas and to other countries. In very poor countries, however, higher temperatures reduced the probability of emigration to cities or to other countries, consistent with the presence of liquidity constraints.

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Abstract:
We analyze economic life in three Congolese refugee camps in Rwanda and the interactions between refugees and local host-country economies within a 10-km radius around each camp. Refugees in one of the three camps received food aid in kind, while in the other two camps they were given cash via cell phones provided by the UN World Food Programme. We find that refugee economies arise inside each camp, and the structure of these economies reflects the economic context around the camps. Despite undergoing forced migration and often living in destitute conditions, refugees actively interact with host country economies. Interactions with the host country result in a divergence of refugee households’ income from the assistance they receive. A shift from in-kind to cash aid appears to increase refugee welfare while strengthening market linkages between camp and host economies. This finding is potentially important for refugee policies as well as for other types of development assistance, as donors find themselves under pressure to shift from in-kind to cash aid.

Abstract:
A variety of phenomena including mass migrations, diasporas, dual citizenship arrangements, neoliberal economic reforms and global social justice movements have since the 1970s produced shifting boundaries and meanings of citizenship within and beyond the Americas. This special issue builds upon, but also extends, prior discussions on transnational citizenship, by situating new practices of ‘immigrant’ and ‘emigrant’ citizenship and the policies that both facilitate and delimit them in a broader political–economic context and accounts for how new forms of neoliberal governance shape such practices. The essays included here draw from a range of disciplines and inter-disciplinary perspectives that focus on migration between the United States and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean which in recent years have been transformed into ‘emigrant states.’