Edited by  Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires

Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call “transcultural societal studies,” an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 458p.

Edited by Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch  

 Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe’s mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been ‘solved’ and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a ‘forty years’ crisis’ for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.

London; New York : Bloomsburgy Academic, 2017. 269p.

By The U.S. Civil Rights Commission

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last addressed civil rights and constitutional concerns in connection with the immigration detention of families and children, including conditions of detention centers in its 2015 report, With Liberty and Justice for All: The State of Civil Rights at Immigration Detention Facilities(“2015 Report”).  In 2018, public reports documented worsening conditions at the southern border. Changes in federal policy further resulted in substantially increased law enforcement activity at the southern border and the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents. Recent developments have resulted in serious civil rights implications, including the protection of the physical and mental well-being of both adult and child immigration detainees and their due process rights. In light of these concerns the Commission formed a bipartisan subcommittee and reopened its 2015 Report to update its investigation of the immigration detention of families and children.  The subcommittee ) sought information from the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, ) held a public comment session where it took in testimony from experts, impacted individuals, witnesses to the impacts of family separation, and other interested members of the public, and solicited written comments from the public….

Washington, DC: USCCR, 2019. 208p.

Edited by Hastings Donnan, Madeleine Hurd and Carolin Leutloff-Grandits  

Migrating Borders and Moving Times analyses migrant border crossings in relation to their everyday experiences of time, and connects these to wider social and political structures. Sometimes border crossing takes no more than a moment; sometimes hours; some crossers find themselves in the limbo of detention; for others, the crossing lasts a lifetime to be interrupted only by death. Borders not only define separate spaces, but different temporalities. This book provides both a single interpretative frame and a novel approach to border crossing: an analysis of the reconfiguration of memory, personal and group time that follows the migrants' renegotiation of cross-border space and recalibrations of temporality. Using original field data from Israel and northern and south-eastern Europe, the contributors argue that new insights are generated by approaching border crossing as a process with diverse temporalities whose relationship to space has always to be empirically determined.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017. 201p.

By Damien Spry

This book is about the current state of human rights and the advocacy campaigns to end various abuses to these rights. It challenges views that give authority exclusively to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and reductionist views that take the subsequently framed body of international human rights law as sacrosanct suggesting this this is an incomplete and therefore insufficient view of human rights; that the struggle for human rights exists in historical, political and cultural contexts that may variously challenge or lend support to perspectives on human rights. The author presents three accounts to argue the case: a brief historical overview of human rights; a close reading of a key human rights organisation; and accounts from a recent human rights campaign in Australia. These examples suggest that smaller, nimbler campaign organisations, focused on concrete human rights outcomes, can strategically and successfully employ discourses that are designed to fit with the local political and cultural settings.

Broadway: UTS ePRESS, 2008. 60p.

By Amairini Sanchez, Michele Cadigan, Dayo Abels-Sullivan, Bryan L. Sykes

 Research on crimmigration—the intersection where criminal and immigration law meet—shows that immigrants are increasingly punished and deported as a consequence of a criminal conviction. We investigate how immigration status shapes the imposition of monetary sanctions. By drawing on interview and court observational data from four states, we demonstrate that the legal opaqueness at the intersection of the crimmigration system often results in crimmigration sanctions—enhanced financial and nonfinancial penalties that are the result of an undocumented immigrant’s liminal legality. Findings show that immigrants are financially exploited through gaps in criminal and immigration law that allow for crimmigration sanctions in the form of bail predation and the exchange of higher financial penalties for reduced or no jail time, lessening an undocumented immigrant’s risk of deportation. The implications of these practices for due process are discussed in detail 

: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences January 2022, 8 (2) 76-97;

Gioconda Herrera, Carmen Gómez

This open access regional reader examines emerging issues around new migration patterns in South America and their relationship with changing migration policies over the last twenty years. The first part of the book looks at conceptual discussions on mixed and survival migration, the link between migration and extractivism, and the specific character of transit migration. A second part examines how these debates have led to transformations in state policies, and the shift in government policies from a human rights-based approach towards more restrictive ones. Finally, the third section revisits the relationship between racism, xenophobia and colonialism in contemporary migrations. As such this book makes an interesting read to students, academics, policy makers and all those working in the field.

Springer Cham

Mixed Migration Centre and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

This snapshot focuses on how smugglers and refugees and migrants make contact in West and North Africa. It draws on 3,602 surveys of refugees and migrants who had used a smuggler or smugglers, conducted in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Libya and Tunisia from February 2021 to March 2022. It also draws on 356 smuggler surveys conducted in the same countries over June-October 2021. It provides analysis of the channels and the timing of contact between migrants and smugglers.

Mixed Migration Centre, 2022. 7p.

By Harald Bauder.

International borders have become deadly barriers of a proportion rivaled only by war or natural disaster. Yet despite the damage created by borders, most people can’t – or don’t want to – imagine a world without them. What alternatives do we have to prevent the deadly results of contemporary borders? In today’s world, national citizenship determines a person’s ability to migrate across borders. Migration Borders Freedom questions that premise. Recognizing the magnitude of deaths occurring at contemporary borders worldwide, the book problematizes the concept of the border and develops arguments for open borders and a world without borders. It explores alternative possibilities, ranging from the practical to the utopian, that link migration with ideas of community, citizenship, and belonging. The author calls into question the conventional political imagination that assumes migration and citizenship to be responsibilities of nation states, rather than cities. While the book draws on the theoretical work of thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, David Harvey, and Henry Lefebvre, it also presents international empirical examples of policies and practices on migration and claims of belonging. In this way, the book equips the reader with the practical and conceptual tools for political action, activist practice, and scholarly engagement to achieve greater justice for people who are on the move.

Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2016. 150p.

Edited by Olivier J. Walther and William F.S. Miles.

Addressing Transnational Extremist Organizations. Based on original and cutting edge research and authored by leading scholars in the field, African Border Disorders significantly enriches our understanding of transnational extremist organizations in postcolonial Africa. What makes this volume stand apart in the burgeoning literature on political violence is that its authors clearly locate the spatial patterns of attacks within the social networks underlying rebel movements in the African continent.

Routledge (2018) 231p.