By Amalia Campos-Delgado & Karine Côté-Boucher

By focusing on the externalisation of US bordering into Mexico, we consider the institutional setting that both limits and channels gestures of care and empathy in migrant detention. Working within a framework that highlights the connections between the global and the intimate, and by proposing to read these connections as they unfold into an intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork, we unpack the effects of Mexico’s recent shift towards humanitarian border politics on the interactions between detained migrants and border agents. Together with the material scarcity in which border officers operate, horrendous detention conditions and increased investments in detention facilities, this shift produces care-control dynamics that are specific to bordering in transit countries. We identify three ‘tactics of empathy’ deployed by Mexican border officers as they attempt to morally legitimise border control in this new environment, while concurrently avoiding legal liabilities and taming migrants under their custody. We argue that these tactics are less a manifestation of an ethics of care than a response to situations occurring in transit migrant detention where morality and instrumental rationality become entangled.

Geopolitics, Feb. 2022.

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 Rebecca L. Feldmann

An inherent tension underlies the duty to prevent trafficking. On the one hand, nation-states are required to take border control measures aimed at preventing trafficking. At the same time, such measures must respect international obligations toward asylum-seekers and other migrants relating to the free movement of people. In the past twenty years, countries such as the United States have developed increasingly sophisticated systems designed to regulate and restrict the movement of people across borders. However, the same period has seen an increasing disregard for the human rights of the very people who are crossing those borders. In order to fully meet the duty to prevent trafficking, states must come to recognize the importance of involving victims of this crime in the solution, which will never happen if countries demonize all migrants as criminals and traffickers. In short, states that seek to lead the fight against human trafficking need to work with victims (including foreign national victims in the state’s territory) and other partners (such as non-governmental organizations and victims’ attorneys) to ensure that their rhetoric more closely matches reality.

Utah Law Review, 659 (2023)

By  Hui Yin Chuah

This briefing paper highlights the key findings from the Research Report, “Refugee Protection, Human Smuggling, and Trafficking in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia”. The research aims to assess the risks and needs of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia across three thematic domains, with particular focus on the national contexts of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The three domains are: protection; human trafficking; and human smuggling.

Denmark: Mixed Migration Centre, 2023. 9p.

Edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen

This Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. Analyzing novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography, the individual chapters counter dominant representations of refugees as voiceless victims. Addressing key characteristics and thematics of refugee narratives, this Handbook examines how refugee cultural productions are shaped by and in turn shape socio-political landscapes. It will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners committed to engaging refugee narratives in the contemporary moment.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 528p. 

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 Serena Parekh

This book is a philosophical analysis of the ethical treatment of refugees and stateless people, a group of people who, though extremely important politically, have been greatly under theorized philosophically. The limited philosophical discussion of refugees by philosophers focuses narrowly on the question of whether or not we, as members of Western states, have moral obligations to admit refugees into our countries. This book reframes this debate and shows why it is important to think ethically about people who will never be resettled and who live for prolonged periods outside of all political communities. Parekh shows why philosophers ought to be concerned with ethical norms that will help stateless people mitigate the harms of statelessness even while they remain formally excluded from states.

New York; London: Routledge, 2017. 171p.

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 Peter Higgins

What moral standards ought nation-states abide by when selecting immigration policies? Peter Higgins argues that immigration policies can only be judged by considering the inequalities that are produced by the institutions - such as gender, race and class - that constitute our social world.Higgins challenges conventional positions on immigration justice, including the view that states have a right to choose whatever immigration policies they like, or that all immigration restrictions ought to be eliminated and borders opened. Rather than suggesting one absolute solution, he argues that a unique set of immigration policies will be just for each country. He concludes with concrete recommendations for policy-making.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. 281p.