By Angeli Romero and Oliver Fisher

This report provides a Blueprint for how to build better visa structures and migration systems. This approach was developed by drawing on the struggles and needs of migrant workers themselves, to build a framework that can work concretely in a variety of contexts.

Vulnerability is not intrinsic to migration; vulnerability is constructed. This can be through factors such as governmental agenda, bureaucratic processes, legislation or reform.

Immigration policies and systems create risks and vulnerabilities to exploitation through complex processes, ineffective safeguards, and restrictive visa conditions imposed on migrant workers. We need to deconstruct the policies that create these risks, and redesign them to enable migrant workers to access rights and enjoy decent standards of work and living conditions.

Policy-makers, employers, sponsors, unions and others can take this framework and apply it, to help bring about a safer, fairer visa structure and migration system into practice.

  London: Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX). 2025. 32p.

By Chris van der Borgh and Wim Savenije

This paper analyses a government-facilitated truce, begun in 2012, between El Salvador’s three principal street gangs. Using field theory and securitisation theory, it maps the evolution of the truce, distinguishing between the three related processes of making the deal, keeping the truce, and resisting it. It analyses the complex and intriguing political processes in which various actors, such as gang leaders, government officials and international organisations, interacted with each other and made deals about the use and visibility of violence and ways of diminishing, preventing or hiding it.  

  Journal of Latin American Studies (2019), 51, 905–928 doi:1

By Michael Rempel, Olive Lu, & Sarah Monaghan

In January 2020, New York’s landmark bail reform law went into effect. This report provides a definitive examination of how bail reform reshaped the pretrial landscape after five full years of implementation. Covering all regions of the state, and drawing on court data from 2018 to 2024 (spanning pre- and post-reform timeframes), the report examines bail reform’s impact on:

• Pretrial Decision-Making at Arraignment: Rates of release on recognizance, supervised release, bail, and pretrial detention; and estimated numbers of cases not resulting in pretrial detention due to changing practices under bail reform.

• Affordability of Bail: For cases that continue to be assigned bail, median bail amounts, bail posting rates, and judges’ use of “alternative” payment methods (partially secured bonds and unsecured bonds) that legislators intended to ease people’s ability to pay.

• Racial and Ethnic Disparities: Disparities among Black, Hispanic, and white people in judges’ rates of continuing to set bail or remand people directly to jail.

• Three Rounds of Bail Amendments: Effects of amendments respectively put into effect in July 2020, May 2022, and June 2023 (entailing a first-ever analysis of the 2022 and 2023 amendments).

New York: Data Collaborative for Justice, 2026. 47p.