Displacement is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity, and it will become more so in the coming years as climate change and the impact of the coronavirus increase the extent of forced migration. The author confronts this head on with a set of realistic policy recommendations.
Refugees from the violence of wars and the brutality of famished lives have knocked on other people's doors since the beginning of time. For the people behind the doors, these uninvited guests were always strangers, and strangers tend to generate fear and anxiety precisely because they are unknown. Today we find ourselves confronted with an extreme form of this historical dynamic, as our TV screens and newspapers are filled with accounts of a 'migration crisis', ostensibly overwhelming Europe and portending the collapse of our way of life. This anxious debate has given rise to a veritable 'moral panic' - a feeling of fear spreading among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. In this short book Zygmunt Bauman analyses the origins, contours and impact of this moral panic - he dissects, in short, the present-day migration panic. He shows how politicians have exploited fears and anxieties that have become widespread, especially among those who have already lost so much - the disinherited and the poor. But he argues that the policy of mutual separation, of building walls rather than bridges, is misguided. It may bring some short-term reassurance but it is doomed to fail in the long run. We are faced with a crisis of humanity, and the only exit from this crisis is to recognize our growing interdependence as a species and to find new ways to live together in solidarity and cooperation, amidst strangers who may hold opinions and preferences different from our own.
This book explores the economic lives of refugees. It looks at what shapes the production, consumption, finance, and exchange activities of refugees, to explain variation in economic outcomes for refugees themselves.
At the start of the 1990s, there was great optimism that the end of the Cold War might also mean the end of the "refugee cycle" - both a breaking of the cycle of violence, persecution and flight, and the completion of the cycle for those able to return to their homes. The 1990s, it was hoped, would become the "decade of repatriation." However, although over nine million refugees were repatriated worldwide between 1991 and 1995, there are reasons to believe that it will not necessarily be a durable solution for refugees. It certainly has become clear that "the end of the refugee cycle" has been much more complex, and ultimately more elusive, than expected. The changing constructions and realities of refugee repatriation provide the backdrop for this book which presents new empirical research on examples of refugee repatriation and reconstruction. Apart from providing up-to-date material, it also fills a more fundamental gap in the literature which has tended to be based on pedagogical reasoning rather than actual field research. Adopting a global perspective, this volume draws together conclusions from highly varied experiences of refugee repatriation and defines repatriation and reconstruction as part of a wider and interrelated refugee cycle of displacement, exile and return. The contributions come from authors with a wealth of relevant practical and academic experience, spanning the continents of Africa, Asia, Central America, and Europe.
The book focuses on the largest refugee crisis of our time: the Syrian refugee crisis. It exploits a wealth of survey and registry data on Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon to assess their poverty and vulnerability status, understand the predictors of these statuses, evaluate the performance of existing policies toward refugees, and determine the potential for alternative policies. Findings point to a complex situation. In the absence of humanitarian assistance, poverty is extremely high among refugees. Current policies including cash transfers and food vouchers are effective in reducing poverty but they remain short of providing economic inclusion and self-reliance of refugees. A shift toward economic inclusion and self-reliance would require a different humanitarian and development paradigm, one that focuses on growth policies for areas affected by refugees where the target population is constituted by refugees and hosting populations alike. This joint study by the World Bank Group and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees helps bridge the historical divide between humanitarian and development work by providing practical solutions for assisting refugees in the short, medium and long-term and to prevent the irreversible loss of social and human capital typically associated with prolonged refugee crises.
The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.
This engaging analysis of the refugee crisis explores how borders are formed, policed—and used to inflict violence on the poor. “In an era of terrorism, global inequality, and rising political tension over migration, Jones argues that tight border controls make the world worse, not better.” —Boston Globe Forty thousand people have died trying to cross between countries in the past decade, and yet international borders only continue to harden. The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union; the United States elected a president who campaigned on building a wall; while elsewhere, the popularity of right-wing antimigrant nationalist political parties is surging. Reece Jones argues that the West has helped bring about the deaths of countless migrants, as states attempt to contain populations and limit access to resources and opportunities. “We may live in an era of globalization,” he writes, “but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movement of people.” In Violent Borders, Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and the dire consequences for countless millions. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slum dwellings in the ailing decolonized world, the wealthy travel without constraint, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. With the growth of borders and resource enclosures, the deaths of migrants in search of a better life are intimately connected to climate change, environmental degradation, and the growth of global wealth inequality.
Throughout human history people have been driven from their homes by wars, unjust treatment, earthquakes, and hurricanes. The reality of forced migration is not new, nor is awareness of the suffering of the displaced a recent discovery. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that at the end of 2007 there were 67 million persons in the world who had been forcibly displaced from their homes—including more than 16 million people who had to flee across an international border for fear of being persecuted due to race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. Driven from Home advances the discussion on how best to protect and assist the growing number of persons who have been forced from their homes and proposes a human rights framework to guide political and policy responses to forced migration. This thought-provoking volume brings together contributors from several disciplines, including international affairs, law, ethics, economics, and theology, to advocate for better responses to protect the global community’s most vulnerable citizens.
Recipient of Christianity Today's Award of Merit in Politics and Public Life, 2016 ------ What will rule our hearts: fear or compassion? We can’t ignore the refugee crisis—arguably the greatest geo-political issue of our time—but how do we even begin to respond to something so massive and complex? In Seeking Refuge, three experts from World Relief, a global organization serving refugees, offer a practical, well-rounded, well-researched guide to the issue. Who are refugees and other displaced peoples? What are the real risks and benefits of receiving them? How do we balance compassion and security? Drawing from history, public policy, psychology, many personal stories, and their own unique Christian worldview, the authors offer a nuanced and compelling portrayal of the plight of refugees and the extraordinary opportunity we have to love our neighbors as ourselves.
An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.