Edited by Damian A. Pargas, Juliane Schiel

This open access handbook takes a comparative and global approach to analyse the practice of slavery throughout history. To understand slavery - why it developed, and how it functioned in various societies – is to understand an important and widespread practice in world civilisations. With research traditionally being dominated by the Atlantic world, this collection aims to illuminate slavery that existed in not only the Americas but also ancient, medieval, North and sub-Saharan African, Near Eastern, and Asian societies. Connecting civilisations through migration, warfare, trade routes and economic expansion, the practice of slavery integrated countries and regions through power-based relationships, whilst simultaneously dividing societies by class, race, ethnicity and cultural group. Uncovering slavery as a globalising phenomenon, the authors highlight the slave-trading routes that crisscrossed Africa, helped integrate the Mediterranean world, connected Indian Ocean societies and fused the Atlantic world. Split into five parts, the handbook portrays the evolution of slavery from antiquity to the contemporary era and encourages readers to realise similarities and differences between various manifestations of slavery throughout history. Providing a truly global coverage of slavery, and including thematic injections within each chronological part, this handbook is a comprehensive and transnational resource for all researchers interested in slavery, the history of labour, and anthropology.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. 716p.

By Stephan Conermann, Claudia Rauhut, Ulrike Schmieder and Michael Zeuske

In the recent cultural heritage boom, community-based and national identity projects are intertwined with interest in cultural tourism and sites of the memory of enslavement. Questions of historical guilt and present responsibility have become a source of social conflict, particularly in multicultural societies with an enslaving past. This became apparent in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, when statues of enslavers and colonizers were toppled, controversial debates about streets and places named after them re-ignited, and the European Union apologized for slavery after the racist murder of George Floyd. Related debates focus on museums, on artworks acquired unjustly in societies under colonial rule, the question of whether and how museums should narrate the hidden past of enslavement and colonialism, including their own colonial origins with respect to narratives about presumed European supremacy, and the need to establish new monuments for the enslaved, their resistance, and abolitionists of African descent.

Berlin/Boston:DeGruyter, 2024, 352p.

by Stephan Conermann, Mariana Dias Paes, Roberto Hofmeister Pich and Paulo Cruz Terra

Slavery Studies are one of the most consolidated fields in Brazilian historiography with various discussions on issues like slave agency, slavery and law, slavery and capitalism, slave families, demography of slavery, transatlantic slave trade, abolition etc. Taking into consideration these new trends of Brazilian slavery studies, this volume of collected articles allows leading scholars to present their research to a broader academic community.

Berlin/Boston, DeGruyter, 2023. 347p.

By The Writers’ Workshop

From the introduction: The Writing Workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility has been hard at work since 1989. This is our second book; the first, More In Than Out, was published in 1992 and well received. I think this one is even better. We meet every Wednesday evening, and, as members are fond of saying, for three hours we're no longer at Bedford but at a place of unlimited freedom. It isn't always easy to get there but we always give it a try. Some of the women in this anthology are regulars, others show up once in a while, still others have come and gone, leaving us a few inspired mementos. The Workshop is an outlet for feelings, of course, but it doesn't stop there.

By Maggie Brady

In Teaching ‘Proper’ Drinking?, the author brings together three fields of scholarship: socio-historical studies of alcohol, Australian Indigenous policy history and social enterprise studies. The case studies in the book offer the first detailed surveys of efforts to teach responsible drinking practices to Aboriginal people by installing canteens in remote communities, and of the purchase of public hotels by Indigenous groups in attempts both to control sales of alcohol and to create social enterprises by redistributing profits for the community good. Ethnographies of the hotels are examined through the analytical lens of the Swedish ‘Gothenburg’ system of municipal hotel ownership.

The research reveals that the community governance of such social enterprises is not purely a matter of good administration or compliance with the relevant liquor legislation. Their administration is imbued with the additional challenges posed by political contestation, both within and beyond the communities concerned.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2017. 344p.

Edited by Patricia G. Steinhoff

"Going to Court to Change Japan takes us inside movements dealing with causes as disparate as death by overwork, the rights of the deaf, access to prisoners on death row, consumer product safety, workers whose companies go bankrupt, and persons convicted of crimes they did not commit. Each of the six fascinating case studies stands on its own as a detailed account of how a social movement has persisted against heavy odds to pursue a cause through the use of the courts. The studies pay particular attention to the relationship between the social movement and the lawyers who handle their cases, usually pro bono or for minimal fees. Through these case studies we learn much about how the law operates in Japan as well as how social movements mobilize and innovate to pursue their goals using legal channels. The book also provides a general introduction to the Japanese legal system and a look at how recent legal reforms are working.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 196p.

Edited by Douglas Edlin

Are judges supposed to be objective? Citizens, scholars, and legal professionals commonly assume that subjectivity and objectivity are opposites, with the corollary that subjectivity is a vice and objectivity is a virtue. These assumptions underlie passionate debates over adherence to original intent and judicial activism.

In Common Law Judging, Douglas Edlin challenges these widely held assumptions by reorienting the entire discussion. Rather than analyze judging in terms of objectivity and truth, he argues that we should instead approach the role of a judge's individual perspective in terms of intersubjectivity and validity. Drawing upon Kantian aesthetic theory as well as case law, legal theory, and constitutional theory, Edlin develops a new conceptual framework for the respective roles of the individual judge and of the judiciary as an institution, as well as the relationship between them, as integral parts of the broader legal and political community. Specifically, Edlin situates a judge's subjective responses within a form of legal reasoning and reflective judgment that must be communicated to different audiences.

Edlin concludes that the individual values and perspectives of judges are indispensable both to their judgments in specific cases and to the independence of the courts. According to the common law tradition, judicial subjectivity is a virtue, not a vice.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 281p.

By Sirje Laurel Weldon

A must-read for scholars across a broad sweep of disciplines. Laurel Weldon weaves together skillfully the theoretical strands of gender equality policy, intersectionality, social movements, and representation in a multimethod/level comparative study that unequivocally places women's movements at the center of our understanding of democracy and social change."" ---Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University "Laurel Weldon's When Protest Makes Policy expands and enriches our understanding of representation by stressing social movements as a primary avenue for the representation of marginalized groups. With powerful theory backed by persuasive analysis, it is a must-read for anyone interested in democracy and the representation of marginalized groups." ---Pamela Paxton, University of Texas at Austin ""This is a bold and exciting book. There are many fine scholars who look at women's movements, political theorists who make claims about democracy, and policy analysts who do longitudinal treatments or cross-sectional evaluations of various policies. I know of no one, aside from Weldon, who is comfortable with all three of these roles."" ---David Meyer, University of California, Irvine What role do social movements play in a democracy? Political theorist S. Laurel Weldon demonstrates that social movements provide a hitherto unrecognized form of democratic representation, and thus offer a significant potential for deepening democracy and overcoming social conflict. Through a series of case studies of movements conducted by women, women of color, and workers in the United States and other member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Weldon examines processes of representation at the local, state, and national levels. She concludes that, for systematically disadvantaged groups, social movements can be as important---sometimes more important---for the effective articulation of a group perspective as political parties, interest groups, or the physical presence of group members in legislatures. When Protest Makes Policy contributes to the emerging scholarship on civil society as well as the traditional scholarship on representation. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with advancing social cohesion and deepening democracy and inclusion as well as those concerned with advancing equality for women, ethnic and racial minorities, the working class, and poor people.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 244p.

By Gilberto Rosas &Virginia Raymond

The Covid-19 emergency only deepens the crisis of inhumanity in the U.S. carceral immigration system. The only way to truly protect migrant lives is to abolish detention.

North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) — Fall 2020 . 289-295, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2020.1809086

By Richard H. Donohue, John S. Hollywood, Samuel Peterson, Bob Harrison, Daniel Tapia, Sunny D. Bhatt, Candace Strickland

Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) researchers conducted an independent assessment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE's) pilot body-worn camera (BWC) program for personnel assigned to Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations.

This report summarizes the findings from a mixed-methods analysis, in which researchers collected and analyzed data from BWCs and observed BWCs in training and operational environments with pilot participants. The analysis was supplemented by data and observations collected by ICE and analyzed by the authors. Researchers studied the BWC pilot program to better understand issues related to (1) trust and transparency, (2) user adoption and effectiveness, (3) implementation of BWCs, and (4) efficacy of the technology.

The resulting findings and recommendations cover a comprehensive variety of topics, including benefits and risks, human factors, policy and training considerations, and considerations for future ICE BWC procurement.

This research was sponsored by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of Regulatory Affairs and Policy and conducted in the Management, Technology, and Capabilities Program of the RAND Homeland Security Research Division (HSRD). 2023. 18p.

By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres

Combining full-count Census data with Census/ACS samples, the researchers provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the U.S.-born. As a group, immigrants had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for the last 150 years. Moreover, relative to the U.S.-born, immigrants’ incarceration rates have declined since 1960: Immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated (30% relative to U.S.-born whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in immigrants’ observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline likely reflects immigrants’ resilience to economic shocks.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, Institute for Policy Research, 2023. 62p.

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 Amalia Campos-Delgado and Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa

On 3 September 2015, Mexican immigration authorities detained four Indigenous Tzeltal Mexicans who were travelling by bus to the northern state of Sonora. Despite identifying themselves as Mexican citizens, the authorities considered their documents false, and they were detained for nine days until their identities were certified. The Mexican State took four years to acknowledge publicly and apologise for this arbitrary detention. Similarly, in 2017, a 39-year-old man born in Oaxaca, living in the streets of Puebla after being deported by the United States Government, was detained for being ‘identified’ as a Salvadorian citizen by Mexican authorities. However, it would be a mistake to consider these cases an exception or anomaly in the Mexican Transit Control Regime. Drawing on statistical and archival information from 2010 to 2020, as well as semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021, in this article, we examine the arbitrary detention of Mexican citizens by Mexican immigration authorities. We highlight the multiple rights violated, question how these detentions have been framed in the official discourse and examine the outcome of these detentions. Our analysis sheds light on the racialisation of migration control in Mexico

International Journal For Crime, Justice And Social Democracy, 12(2), 47-58. doi:10.5204/ijcjsd.2890

By Hannah Jones , Yasmin Gunaratnam , Gargi Bhattacharyya , William Davies , Sukhwant Dhaliwal , Kirsten Forkert , Emma Jackson and Roiyah Saltus

The 2013 Go Home vans marked a turning point in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate control and toughness on immigration. In this study, the authors explore the effects of this toughness: on policy, public debate, pro-migrant and anti-racist activism, and on the everyday lives of people in Britain. Bringing together an authorial team of eight respected social researchers, alongside the voices of community organisations, policy makers, migrants and citizens, and with an afterword by journalist Kiri Kankhwende, this is an important intervention in one of the most heated social issues of our time."

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017. 204p.

Edited by Dêlidji Eric Degila and Valeria Marina Valle

The 14th thematic volume of International Development Policy provides perspectives through case studies from the global Souths focusing on the challenges and opportunities of governing migration on the subnational, national, regional and international levels. Bringing together some thirty authors from Africa, Latin America and Asia, the book explores existing and new policies and frameworks in terms of their successes and best practices, and looks at them through the lens of additional challenges, such as those brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of nationalisms and an increase in xenophobia. The chapters also take the ‘5 Ps’ approach to sustainable development (people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnerships) and assess how migration policies serve sustainable development in a rapidly evolving context.

Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2022. 399p.

Edited by Walter Schweidler

It was in ancient Greek philosophy where the idea arose that there is a supreme law before which any civil law created by human societies has to be justified. Since then the concept of natural law not only remained one of the paradigms of Western civilization but has shaped the development of international legislation in general. The understanding of the significance of the idea of a natural law for the philosophical presuppositions of our current concepts of human rights and human dignity is still dependent on the analysis of its relation to the different cultures and civilizations on earth.

Germany: Academia Verlag, 2012, 327p.

By Angela Müller

This book combines legal and philosophical perspectives to address the question of whether states are bound by human rights when they act with effects on people abroad—states’ extraterritorial human rights obligations. Taking an innovative approach, it begins with a profound legal analysis of the issue at national, supranational, and international levels and then engages in depth with counterarguments against extraterritorially applying human rights, on the basis of which it develops its own ethical justificatory theory of extraterritorial human rights obligations. The book closes the circle by showing what the practical implications of this theory for the interpretation (and possible evolvement) of human rights law would be. In a world where critiques of, and resistance to, the general idea of universal human rights are on rise, the book contributes to closing the gap between judicial and normative perspectives on extraterritorial human rights obligations by inquiring into the ethical underpinnings of this topical legal challenge. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in human rights, international law, and more broadly in political philosophy, philosophy of law, and international relations.

London; New York:Taylor & Francis, 2024.373p.

Edited byAnna Triandafyllidou

This open access book discusses the socio-political context of the COVID-19 crisis and questions the management of the pandemic emergency with special reference to how this affected the governance of migration and asylum. The book offers critical insights on the impact of the pandemic on migrant workers in different world regions including North America, Europe and Asia. The book addresses several categories of migrants including medical staff, farm labourers, construction workers, care and domestic workers and international students. It looks at border closures for non-citizens, disruption for temporary migrants as well as at special arrangements made for essential (migrant) workers such as doctors or nurses as well as farmworkers, ‘shipped’ to destination with special flights to make sure emergency wards are staffed, and harvests are picked up and the food processing chain continues to function. The book illustrates how the pandemic forces us to rethink notions like membership, citizenship, belonging, but also solidarity, human rights, community, essential services or ‘essential’ workers alongside an intersectional perspective including ethnicity, gender and race.

IMISCOE Research Series. Cham: Springer, 2022. 264p.

By Robert Warren

In 2021, the undocumented population residing in the United States (US) increased slightly to 10.3 million, compared to 10.2 million the previous year. The gradual decline or near-zero growth of this population has continued for more than a decade. However, the large increases in apprehensions at the southern border in recent years, along with continued legislative gridlock in Congress, could portend a new era of growth of this population. Unfortunately, the data needed to determine whether the population will enter a period of growth after 2021 — or whether the era of near-zero growth will continue — will not be available for at least a year or two. The most accurate demographic estimates of the undocumented population are derived from data collected in the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Estimates of the size of the undocumented population in 2022 will not be available until early 2024.

This report focuses on the most significant trend in the undocumented population in the past decade — the remarkable decline of 1.9 million in the undocumented population from Mexico from 2011 to 2021. The decline for Mexico in this period was 600,000 more than the total population increase from the seven countries (in order) with the fastest growing US undocumented populations: Guatemala, Honduras, India, Venezuela, El Salvador, Brazil, and China. This paper finds that:

• The long-term decline, or near-zero growth, of the total undocumented population that began in 2008 continued in 2021.

• The percent of undocumented residents in the total US population declined from 3.8 percent in 2011 to 3.1 percent in 2021.

• The undocumented population from Mexico declined from 6.4 million in 2011 to 4.4 million in 2021, a drop of 1.9 million in 10 years.

• A total of 2.9 million, or 47 percent, of the US undocumented population from Mexico in 2011 had left the undocumented population by 2021.

• The drop in the undocumented population from Mexico from 2011 to 2021 occurred nationwide, and the decline affected the undocumented population in nearly every state.

• The fastest growing undocumented populations by country in the last 10 years were from Guatemala, Honduras, India, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Brazil. The combined undocumented populations from these six countries grew by 1.2 million.

• Countries that had declining populations after 2011 included Poland, Peru, Ecuador, Korea, and Philippines, in addition to the large drop for Mexico.

• California had the largest decline in undocumented residents — 665,000 from 2011 to 2021. The undocumented population from Mexico living in California during this period declined by 720,000.

• The combined undocumented population in California, New York, and Illinois fell by more than one million from 2021 to 2011.

Journal on Migration and Human Security Volume 0: Ahead of Print, 2023.

By Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, Luis Argueta and Randy Capps

As U.S. deportations to Mexico continue at substantial levels and the numbers returned by both the U.S. and Mexican governments to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are increasing, it has become more urgent for countries in the region to develop successful reception and reintegration programs that meet the diverse needs of returning migrants.

Between fiscal years 2012-18, the United States carried out approximately 1.8 million repatriations of Mexican migrants, and the United States and Mexico together accomplished 1.4 million returns of migrants from the three Northern Triangle countries.

Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with government officials, researchers, representatives of civil-society and international organizations, as well as returning migrants, this report highlights promising reintegration strategies and pressing challenges. Mexico and the three Northern Triangle countries exhibit different levels of capacity and degrees of implementation in their reception and reintegration programs. While most deported migrants now receive basic reception services, their access to reintegration services is somewhat more mixed. Among the challenges: Difficulty obtaining the official ID that allows returning migrants to access these services, limited awareness and geographic distribution of services, difficulty matching returning migrants’ skills with labor-market needs, and barriers to reintegration posed by social stigmatization and employment discrimination.

The report offers a range of recommendations to governments and others, including: Prepare migrants for reintegration prior to their return, even before deportation; issue primary ID documents from abroad or upon reception; and ensure reintegration services tap into returning migrants' cultural roots. Improving reception and reintegration services represents a long-term investment for both destination and origin countries, the authors conclude, holding the potential to reduce re-migration while enabling countries of origin to benefit from the skills and assets migrants have acquired abroad.

Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2019. 43p.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/MPI-ReceptionReintegration-FinalWeb.pdf

At the Breaking Point: Rethinking the U.S. Immigration Court System

By Muzaffar Chishti, Doris Meissner, Stephen Yale-Loehr, Kathleen Bush-Joseph and Christopher Levesque

With a backlog of nearly 2 million cases, the U.S. immigration court system is in crisis. Many cases now take years to adjudicate, with asylum seekers, for example, waiting four years on average for their initial hearing and longer for a final decision. Serious concerns have also been raised about the quality of court decisions.

These twin issues of caseload quantity and decision quality have wide-ranging roots, from long-standing operational challenges in the courts to new crises in the Americas that have intensified humanitarian protection needs and other migration pressures. The courts' dysfunction has had severe knock-on effects for other parts of the nation’s immigration infrastructure, including notably the immigration enforcement and asylum systems.

This report takes stock of the many challenges facing the immigration courts and outlines recommendations that would advance the goal of delivering decisions that are both timely and fair. It explores issues including court caseload and personnel levels, docket management strategies, the use of technology in the courts, and access to representation. Importantly, the report focuses on changes that can be accomplished administratively—a necessity in a time when Congress has proven itself unlikely to tackle significant immigration matters.

Washington, DC:Migration Policy Institute, 2023. 51p.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/mpi-courts-report-2023_final.pdf

Betting on Legality: Latin American and Caribbean Responses to the Venezuelan Displacement Crisis

By Luciana Gandini and Andrew Selee

More than half, and as many as two-thirds, of the estimated 6.4 million displaced Venezuelans who have settled in Latin America and the Caribbean since 2016 have been granted legal status in their host country. Most of the receiving countries in the region have responded with pragmatic measures that offer some form of legal status as well as the right to access the labor market, basic education, and emergency health care. The measures implemented are uneven and often not fully institutionalized, but they have been surprisingly generalized for a region with limited experience with large-scale immigration.

This report explores the response to Venezuelan displacement in the 15 principal host countries in Latin America and the Caribbean between 2016 and 2022. It examines the reach of different mechanisms for providing legal status and humanitarian protection—asylum systems, mobility and residence agreements, regular visas, and regularization campaigns that offer temporary status—and offers estimates of the share of Venezuelans in each country who have obtained legal status.

The report also considers the trend of governments coupling measures to provide legal status with new visa requirements that have made it increasingly difficult for more Venezuelans to arrive, pushing some into irregular migration channels. Finally, the report looks at variations in Venezuelans’ access to education and health care across the 15 countries.

Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2023. 55p.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/mpi-venezuelans-legal-status-2023_eng_final.pdf

Migration Narratives in Northern Central America: How Competing Stories Shape Policy and Public Opinion in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador

By Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, Alejandra Lopez and Alejandro Vélez Salas

The stories told within a society about migration and migrants paint a rich picture of how its members view the opportunities and challenges associated with the movement of people, and through what lenses. These migration narratives both inform policymaking and shape the public’s reaction to government policy, affecting the policies’ chances of achieving their goals.

While El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are primarily known for emigration to the United States and Mexico, these northern Central American countries have seen notable changes in migration trends in recent years. The number of migrants from South America and the Caribbean who transit through these countries on their way north has increased, as has the number of Central Americans returning to their countries of origin.

This report presents the findings of research conducted by the Migration Policy Institute, RAND Corporation, Metropolitan Group, and National Immigration Forum, comparing migration narratives within El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—as well as a selection of migration narratives from Mexico and the United States that relate to Central America—over the 2018–22 period. The study explores how these narratives about emigration, transit migration, return, and other issues intersect, how they contradict or compound each other, and how they influence critical policy debates and decisions in the region.

Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2023. 49p.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/CentAm-MigrationNarratives-2023_final.pdf

Inhumane and Counterproductive: Asylum Ban Inflicts Mounting Harm

By

Christina Asencio

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.

https://humanrightsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Inhumane-and-Counterproductive-final-report.pdf

Digital Border Governance: A Human Rights Based Approach

By Lorna McGregor and Petra Molnar

In an era where digital technologies are increasingly integrated into migration processes, these technologies are reshaping border governance in a manner that impacts the human rights of people on the move and communities worldwide. As we navigate these evolving dynamics, it becomes paramount to address the potential harms the use of digital technologies poses to human rights, while also harnessing the opportunities they offer to facilitate safe and dignified migration. This collaborative study, conducted by the UN Human Rights Office and the University of Essex, analyses the human rights implications of specific border technologies. It provides recommendations for States and stakeholders on how to take a human rights-based approach in ensuring the use of digital technologies at borders aligns with international human rights law and standards. The study draws from a collective body of expertise, research, and evidence, as well as extensive interviews and collaborative meetings with experts.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights , 2023. 26p.