By Flore Berger

Mali has long been an important origin and transit country for West African migrants travelling to North Africa. Its role has expanded in recent years as preferred migration routes have shifted westwards from Libya into Algeria. In 2023, however, the political and security situation in northern Mali changed significantly. MINUSMA (the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali) withdrew from Mali after nearly a decade on the ground. This in turn contributed to the outbreak of hostilities between the Cadre Stratégique Permanent (Permanent Strategic Framework – CSP) and the Forces Armées Maliennes (Malian Armed Forces – FAMa), operating with the support of Russia’s Wagner Group, marking the de facto end of the 2015 Algiers Peace Agreement. The Malian transitional military government officially terminated this accord on 25 January 2024. Taking advantage of Mali’s international isolation and internal turmoil, violent extremist groups – including the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (Group to Support Islam and Muslims – JNIM) and Islamic State Sahel Province (IS Sahel) – stepped up their activities, notably by imposing blockades on major northern towns, most notably Timbuktu by JNIM and Ménaka by IS Sahel. These events altered the security equilibrium that, in recent years, had allowed migrants to travel through large parts of northern Mali, particularly Timbuktu, with little difficulty. While none of the developments, individually or collectively, drastically disrupted the movement of migrants and the functioning of human smuggling networks, they did have localized and short- to medium-term effects on flows, route safety, methods and means of transport, and prices. Timbuktu was by far the most significantly affected hub. A blockade was imposed by JNIM at the beginning of August, bringing movement to an immediate halt. Later, however, even as the blockade continued, flows resumed, with migrants using the river to get to Timbuktu rather than overland travel. The safety of movement in and around the city, including on the route to Algeria, deteriorated sharply, and the cost of the journey for migrants almost doubled. Gao was similarly affected by the resumption of hostilities between the CSP and FAMa. This region has always been much more volatile, however, with migratory flows through the city fluctuating greatly depending on the season and the security situation.

Mali’s third major migration route, through the western Kayes region and into Mauritania and Senegal, is a key area to watch. Movements through the south-west have not been directly affected by the upheaval in the north, and a growing number of Malians and West Africans are using this option. This is the latest Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) monitoring report on human smuggling in Mali. It builds on the series of annual reports that has been issued by the GI-TOC since 2019, tracking the evolution of human smuggling in Mali, as well as the political, security and economic dynamics that influence it.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC)’s Observatory of Illicit Economies in North Africa and the Sahel. 2024. 30p.

Edited by Sally Baker

Welcome to this open access annotated bibliography, which has been curated by a collective of scholars who share an interest in the impacts of forced migration on people from refugee, asylum seeking and Culturally and Linguistically Marginalised (CALM) migrant backgrounds. These resources are intended to be shared with the international community of researchers, students, educators, and practitioners who work with, or are interested in, forced migration, education, employment, and resettlement. This bibliography offers a snapshot of some of the available literature that relates to the following areas of scholarly and practitioner interest:

• Refugees and access to, participation in, and transition out of higher education.

• Schooling and refugee youth.

• Adult Education (including learning host language and literacies).

• Resettlement of refugees and CALM migrants.

• Employment of refugees and CALM migrants in resettlement contexts.

• People seeking asylum in Australia.

• Discourses and media narratives relating to forced migration.

• Methodological and ethical discussions relating to research with refugees.

• Citizenship and refugees.

• Complementary pathways, including education pathways.

In this library, you will find summaries and annotated bibliographies of literature with a common focus on refugees and asylum seekers (and to a lesser extent CALM migrants more broadly). This literature has been organised thematically according to patterns that have emerged from a deep and sustained engagement with the various fields that relate to the access to, participation in and ‘success’ of people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds in resettlement, education and employment. The thematic organisation of the bibliography does not reflect the intersecting and complex overlaps of the various foci in the literature, so please keep in mind that this is an interpretive exercise and one that could easily be reworked by another set of authors.

Sydney: Refugee Education Special Interest Group. 2024. 764p.

By Karolina Sobczak-Szelc, Marta Pachocka, Konrad Pędziwiatr, Justyna Szałańska, Monika Szulecka

This book sheds light on the complex experiences of asylum seekers and refugees in Poland, against a local backdrop of openly anti-refugee political narratives and strong opposition to sharing the responsibility for, and burden of, asylum seekers arriving in the EU. Through a multidimensional analysis, it highlights the processes of forced migrant admission, reception and integration in a key EU frontier country that has undergone a rapid migration status change from a transit to a host country. The book examines rich qualitative material drawn from interviews conducted with forced migrants with different legal statuses and with experts from public administration at the central and local levels, NGOs, and other institutions involved in migration governance in Poland. It discusses both opportunities for and limitations on forced migrants’ adaptation in the social, economic, and political dimensions, as well as their access to healthcare, education, the labour market, and social assistance. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, policymakers, and practitioners in migration and asylum studies, social policy, public policy, international relations, EU studies/European integration, law, economics, and sociology.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 256p

Edited by Kimberly Gauderman

This multidisciplinary volume brings together experienced expert witnesses and immigration attorneys to highlight best practices and strategies for giving expert testimony in asylum cases. As the scale and severity of violence in Latin America has grown in the last decade, scholars and attorneys have collaborated to defend the rights of immigrant women, children, and LGBTQ+ persons who are threatened by gender-based, sexual, and gang violence in their home countries. Researchers in anthropology, history, political science, and sociology have regularly supported the work of immigration lawyers and contributed to public debates on immigration reform, but the academy contains untapped scholarly expertise that, guided by the resources provided in this handbook, can aid asylum seekers and refugees and promote the fair adjudication of asylum claims in US courts. As the recent refugee crisis of immigrant mothers and children and unaccompanied minors has made clear, there is an urgent need for academics to work with other professionals to build a legal framework and national network that can respond effectively to this human rights crisis.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 211p.

Edited by Irina Isaakyan, Anna Triandafyllidou, Simone Baglioni

Through an inter-subjective lens, this open access book investigates the initial labour market integration experiences of these migrants, refugees or asylum seekers, who are characterised by different biographies and migration/asylum trajectories. The book gives voice to the migrants and seeks to highlight their own experiences and understandings of the labour market integration process, in the first years of immigration. It adopts a critical, qualitative perspective but does not remain ethnographic. The book rather refers the migrants’ own voice and experience to their own expert knowledge of the policy and socio-economic context that is navigated. Each chapter brings into dialogue the migrant’s intersubjective experiences with the relevant policies and practices, as well as with the relevant stakeholders, whether local government, national services, civil society or migrant organisations. The book concludes with relevant critical insights as to how labour market integration is lived on the ground and on what migrants ‘do’ with labour market policies rather than on what labour market policies ‘do’ to or for migrants.

Cham: Springer, 2023. 231p.

By Haodong Qi and Tuba Bircan

Google Trends (GT) collate the volumes of search keywords over time and by geographical location. Such data could, in theory, provide insights into people’s ex ante intentions to migrate, and hence be useful for predictive analysis of future migration. Empirically, however, the predictive power of GT is sensitive, it may vary depending on geographical context, the search keywords selected for analysis, as well as Google’s market share and its users’ characteristics and search behavior, among others. Unlike most previous studies attempting to demonstrate the benefit of using GT for forecasting migration flows, this article addresses a critical but less discussed issue: when GT cannot enhance the performances of migration models. Using EUROSTAT statistics on first-time asylum applications and a set of push-pull indicators gathered from various data sources, we train three classes of gravity models that are commonly used in the migration literature, and examine how the inclusion of GT may affect models’ abilities to predict refugees’ destination choices. The results suggest that the effects of including GT are highly contingent on the complexity of different models. Specifically, GT can only improve the performance of relatively simple models, but not of those augmented by flow Fixed-Effects or by Auto-Regressive effects. These findings call for a more comprehensive analysis of the strengths and limitations of using GT, as well as other digital trace data, in the context of modeling and forecasting migration. It is our hope that this nuanced perspective can spur further innovations in the field, and ultimately bring us closer to a comprehensive modeling framework of human migration.

EPJ Data Science (2023) 12:41

By Christina Asencio and Rebecca Gendelman

Five months after the Biden administration initiated its new bar on asylum, the policy continues to strand vulnerable people in places where they are targets of widespread kidnapping, torture, and violent assaults. People seeking asylum are forced to risk their lives waiting in danger in Mexico for one of the limited CBP One appointments or risk suffering the ban’s punitive asylum denials or wrongful returns to harm and persecution if they attempt to seek protection at a port of entry or cross outside ports of entry without a CBP One appointment. The targeting of migrants and asylum seekers waiting for these appointments has risen sharply recently, driving many people to cross the border in urgent search of safety. Humanitarian workers assisting asylum seekers forced to wait in Mexico are also facing alarming—and increasing—risks as well.

This harmful bar on asylum (the “asylum ban”) is a new iteration of similar transit and entry bans promulgated by the Trump administration that federal courts repeatedly struck down because they violated U.S. law. A federal district court ruled in July that the Biden asylum ban is unlawful, but it remains in place while on appeal. The asylum ban renders nearly all asylum seekers who traveled through another country on their way to the U.S. southern border ineligible for asylum due to their transit routes and/or manner of entry unless they (1) applied for and were denied asylum in one of those countries (regardless of their safety there), or (2) managed to secure one of the asylum ban’s limited “pre-scheduled” appointments to enter at an official port of entry. To try to get a U.S. port of entry appointment, people seeking asylum (as well as other migrants who are not seeking asylum) are left to struggle to obtain an appointment via CBP One, a smartphone app that operates much like a daily lottery and is plagued by deficiencies that impede equitable access.

Not only does the asylum ban violate both U.S. and international law, but it has generated strong and diverse opposition from faith groups, Holocaust survivors, major unions, civil rights organizations, members of the president’s political party and other key Biden administration allies. President Biden should honor his campaign promise to end such restrictions by bringing this harmful policy—which his administration has pledged is only temporary—to its end now. Every day that it is left in place, it endangers refugees’ lives and subverts refugee law.

Instead, the Biden administration should double down on some of the effective, humane, and legal policies that it has already initiated or announced, and reject those that punish, ban, and block people seeking asylum, contrary to core tenets of international refugee protection. Key steps include to: quickly ramp up plans to expand regional refugee resettlement, strengthen the administration’s pivotal parole initiatives, increase critical aid to address regional protection gaps driving many to flee north, urgently increase support for safe shelter and other dire needs of people waiting in Mexico, uphold fundamental human rights in regional migration coordination, maximize access to asylum at ports of entry, properly staff asylum and immigration court adjudications, and improve and restart use of the Biden administration’s new asylum processing rule to help adjudicate a greater number of asylum cases more efficiently.

New York: Human Rights First, 2023. 67p.

By John Ketcham and Daniel Di Martino

Since the summer of 2022, more than 70,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, stretching public resources to their limit. The massive influx has been particularly challenging given the city’s “right to shelter,” the result of a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, and corresponding consent decree, which required the city to provide immediate shelter to those who request it, regardless of the number of applicants or the availability of resources. In order to comply with this requirement, the city has housed some 40,000 migrants in shelters—which has led to an approximately 70% spike in the shelter population in a single year. NYC is currently supporting more than 170 emergency shelters and 10 additional large-scale humanitarian relief centers. Shelters and relief centers simply cannot house all the newly arrived migrants, which has forced the city to procure approximately 4,500 hotel rooms in unionized facilities, often through expensive contracts …

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 19p.

By Rakib Ehsan

This paper argues that the ongoing small-boats emergency on the English south coast involves two injustices – a dysfunctional asylum system which is overburdened as a result of illegal unauthorised migration and increasingly leaves some of the world’s most persecuted peoples by the wayside, along with the unfairness of the UK’s most deprived local authorities disproportionately bearing the load of accommodating such arrivals. The report issues a stark warning over the mounting costs of the small-boats emergency and the risk of it fuelling public resentment – especially in post-industrial areas and left-behind coastal towns. The mid-estimate of hotel accommodation alone – at £2.2bn – exceeds the entirety of the Government funding allocated for Round 2 of the Levelling Up Fund (£2.1 billion) and is three and a half times the £630 million government investment to tackle homelessness in the UK.Recommendations include the introduction of an annual cap on refugees which is democratically determined by the UK Parliament and prioritises women and children in conflict-affected territories and insecure displacement camps. The report also calls for the curbing of the power of judicial interventions – both foreign and domestic – which is thwarting the UK Government’s efforts to tackle the small-boats emergency.

London: Policy Exchange, 2023. 58p.

By John Ketchamand Daniel Di Martino   
SSince the summer of 2022, more than 70,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, stretching public resources to their limit. The massive influx has been particularly challenging given the city’s “right to shelter,” the result of a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, and corresponding consent decree, which required the city to provide immediate shelter to those who request it, regardless of the number of applicants or the availability of resources. In order to comply with this requirement, the city has housed some 40,000 migrants in shelters—which has led to an approximately 70% spike in the shelter population in a single year. NYC is currently supporting more than 170 emergency shelters and 10 additional large-scale humanitarian relief centers.

Shelters and relief centers simply cannot house all the newly arrived migrants, which has forced the city to procure approximately 4,500 hotel rooms in unionized facilities,[1] often through expensive contracts that provide bonanzas to owners and the city’s hotel-worker unions. Most notably, on May 13, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the historic 1,025-room Roosevelt Hotel, located in the heart of Midtown East, would become New York City’s central migrant intake center,[2] at a reported cost of $225 million.[3] In addition to hosting hundreds of families and individuals on-site, the location will process all arriving asylum seekers and provide them with a range of city services, including government-issued ID cards, public-school and health-insurance enrollment, mental-health counseling, and more.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 19p.

By John Ketchamand Daniel Di Martino   

Since the summer of 2022, more than 70,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, stretching public resources to their limit. The massive influx has been particularly challenging given the city’s “right to shelter,” the result of a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, and corresponding consent decree, which required the city to provide immediate shelter to those who request it, regardless of the number of applicants or the availability of resources. In order to comply with this requirement, the city has housed some 40,000 migrants in shelters—which has led to an approximately 70% spike in the shelter population in a single year. NYC is currently supporting more than 170 emergency shelters and 10 additional large-scale humanitarian relief centers.

Shelters and relief centers simply cannot house all the newly arrived migrants, which has forced the city to procure approximately 4,500 hotel rooms in unionized facilities,[1] often through expensive contracts that provide bonanzas to owners and the city’s hotel-worker unions. Most notably, on May 13, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the historic 1,025-room Roosevelt Hotel, located in the heart of Midtown East, would become New York City’s central migrant intake center,[2] at a reported cost of $225 million.[3] In addition to hosting hundreds of families and individuals on-site, the location will process all arriving asylum seekers and provide them with a range of city services, including government-issued ID cards, public-school and health-insurance enrollment, mental-health counseling, and more.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 19p.

By Maja Łysienia

Since 2009 two courts have been shaping human rights of asylum seekers in Europe: the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Side by side, the courts examined who is protected from refoulement, when and how asylum seekers can be detained and what remedies they should have access to. Did they seek convergence in their asylum case-law or paid no attention to each other’s jurisprudence? Did they establish a coherent standard of the asylum seekers’ protection in Europe? Judicial dialogue between the ECtHR and CJEU in the area of asylum is at the heart of this study. The book offers also a comprehensive overview of the asylum case-law of the two courts and identifies the main convergences and divergences in their approach to protection against refoulement, immigration detention and effective remedies.

Zurich: sui generis Verlag, 2022. 604p.

By Human Rights Watch

The 29-page report “‘Their Faces Were Covered’: Greece’s Use of Migrants as Police Auxiliaries in Pushbacks,” found that Greek police are detaining asylum seekers at the Greece-Turkey land border at the Evros River, in many cases stripping them of most of their clothing and stealing their money, phones, and other possess

New York: HRW, 2022. 42p.

By Horst Entorf and Martin Lange.

In this article, we examine anti-foreigner hate crime in the wake of the large influx of asylum seekers to Germany in 2014 and 2015. By exploiting the quasi-experimental assignment of asylum seekers to German regions, we estimate the causal effect of an unexpected and sudden change in the share of the foreign-born population on anti-foreigner hate crime. Our county-level analysis shows that not simply the size of regional asylum seeker inflows drives the increase in hate crime, but the rapid compositional change of the residential population: Areas with previously low shares of foreign-born inhabitants that face large-scale immigration of asylum seekers witness the strongest upsurge in hate crime. Economically deprived regions and regions with a legacy of anti-foreigner hate crimes are also found to be prone to hate crime against refugees. However, when we explicitly control for East–West German differences, the predominance of native-born residents at the local level stands out as the single most important factor explaining the sudden increase in hate crime.

Mannheim: ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, 2019. 54p.