The Australian government's appalling treatment of asylum-seekers has shocked people around the world. Refugees desperate to escape oppression and misery in their homelands have not found shelter and comfort here but instead have been subjected to soul-destroying incarceration and loss of all hope. They have been made scapegoats for a racist campaign to boost the Coalition's stocks and enable it to retain power. -- Back cover.
Singled out by Foreign Affairs for its reporting on “the brutal frontiers of new Europe,” Fortress Europe is the story of how the world's most affluent region—and history's greatest experiment with globalization—has become an immigration war zone, where tens of thousands have died in a humanitarian crisis that has galvanized the world's attention. Journalist Matthew Carr brings to life remarkable human dramas, based on ex- tensive interviews and firsthand reporting from the hot zones of Europe's immigration battles, in a narrative that moves from the desperate immigrant camps at the mouth of the Channel Tunnel in Calais, France, to the chaotic Mediterranean sea, where African migrants have drowned by the thousands. Speaking with key European policy makers, police, soldiers on the front lines, immigrant rights activists, and an astonishing range of migrants themselves, Carr offers a lucid account both of the broad issues at stake in the crisis and its exorbitant human costs. The paperback edition includes a new afterword by the author, which offers an up-to-the-minute assessment of the 2015 crisis and a searing critique of Europe's response to the new waves of refugees.
Revised and updated for 2015, Matthew Carr provides an urgent investigation into Europe's militarised borders. In a series of searing dispatches, he speaks to border officers and police, officials, migrants, asylum-seekers and activists from across the continent in a ground-breaking critique of an epic political, institutional and humanitarian failure that now threatens the future of the European Union itself.
Documentary journalism! Part one reports on the influx of refugees to Europe coming from Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, North Africa and part two gives an overview of the European asylum debate by looking at the situation of the growing numbers of illegal immigrants.
"Immigrant and Refugee Families: Global Perspectives on Displacement and Resettlement Experiences uses a family systems lens to discuss challenges and strengths of immigrant and refugee families in the United States. Chapters address immigration policy, human rights issues, economic stress, mental health and traumatic stress, domestic violence, substance abuse, family resilience, and methods of integration."--Open Textbook Library.
The remarkable first-hand account of Vinh Chung, a Vietnamese refugee, and his family’s daring escape from communist oppression for the chance of a better life in America. Discover a story of personal sacrifice, redemption, endurance against almost insurmountable odds, and what it truly means to be American. Vinh Chung was born in South Vietnam, just eight months after it fell to the communists in 1975. His family was wealthy, controlling a rice-milling empire worth millions; but within months of the communist takeover, the Chungs lost everything and were reduced to abject poverty. Knowing that their children would have no future under the new government, the Chungs decided to flee the country. In 1979, they joined the legendary “boat people” and sailed into the South China Sea, despite knowing that an estimated two hundred thousand of their countrymen had already perished at the hands of brutal pirates and violent seas. Where the Wind Leads follows Vinh Chung and his family on their desperate journey from pre-war Vietnam. Vinh shares: The family’s perilous journey through pirate attacks on a lawless sea Their miraculous rescue and a new home in the unlikely town of Fort Smith, Arkansas Vinh’s struggled against poverty, discrimination, and a bewildering language barrier His graduation from Harvard Medical School Where the Wind Leads is Vinh’s tribute to the courage and sacrifice of his parents, a testimony to his family’s faith, and a reminder to people everywhere that the American dream, while still possible, carries with it a greater responsibility.
?Today, humanity faces a fundamentally different challenge ? that of managing a planet and a global human civilization in ways that will sustain both indefinitely. What makes this task less than easy are the pace and complexity of change. Over the next half century, human society will undergo a profound demographic transformation, experience fundamental shifts in the global balance of economic and political power, and cope with nearly continuous technological change. These transformations are inevitable ? the forces that compel them are already in place ? but their outcomes are far from fixed? This book is about the future, but not in the sense of making predictions. Rather it suggests how to think about the future. Because human destiny is not predetermined, this book explores not just one but several possible worlds, each embodying a very different vision of the future. Implicit in these contrasting visions is a choice: which world do we prefer; which world do we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren?? From chapter 1
Based on fieldwork among undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers Illegal Traveller offers a narrative of the polysemic nature of borders, border politics, and rituals and performances of border-crossing. Interjecting personal experiences into ethnographic writing it is 'a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context'.
This book explores the significance of human behaviour to understanding the causes and impacts of changing climates and to assessing varied ways of responding to such changes. So far the discipline that has represented and modelled such human behaviour is economics. By contrast Climate Change and Society tries to place the ‘social’ at the heart of both the analysis of climates and of the assessment of alternative futures. It demonstrates the importance of social practices organised into systems. In the fateful twentieth century various interlocking high carbon systems were established. This sedimented high carbon social practices, engendering huge population growth, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the potentially declining availability of oil that made this world go round. Especially important in stabilising this pattern was the ‘carbon military-industrial complex’ around the world. The book goes on to examine how in this new century it is systems that have to change, to move from growing high carbon systems to those that are low carbon. Many suggestions are made as to how to innovate such low carbon systems. It is shown that such a transition has to happen fast so as to create positive feedbacks of each low carbon system upon each other. Various scenarios are elaborated of differing futures for the middle of this century, futures that all contain significant costs for the scale, extent and richness of social life. Climate Change and Society thus attempts to replace economics with sociology as the dominant discipline in climate change analysis. Sociology has spent much time examining the nature of modern societies, of modernity, but mostly failed to analyse the carbon resource base of such societies. This book seeks to remedy that failing. It should appeal to teachers and students in sociology, economics, environmental studies, geography, planning, politics and science studies, as well as to the public concerned with the long term future of carbon and society.
Official figures classify some fifty million of the world’s people as 'victims of forced displacement'. Refugees, asylum seekers, disaster victims, the internally displaced and the temporarily tolerated - categories of the excluded proliferate, but many more are left out of count. In the face of this tragedy, humanitarian action increasingly seems the only possible response. On the ground, however, the 'facilities' put in place are more reminiscent of the logic of totalitarianism. In a situation of permanent catastrophe and endless emergency, 'undesirables' are kept apart and out of sight, while the care dispensed is designed to control, filter and confine. How should we interpret the disturbing symbiosis between the hand that cares and the hand that strikes? After seven years of study in the refugee camps, Michel Agier reveals their 'disquieting ambiguity' and stresses the imperative need to take into account forms of improvisation and challenge that are currently transforming the camps, sometimes making them into towns and heralding the emergence of political subjects. A radical critique of the foundations, contexts, and political effects of humanitarian action.
