By R. J. B. Bosworth

From the Preface: “My task… has been to unveil the lives of Italians under a generation of dictatorship, be they men, women or children, party officials and party intellectuals or anti-Fascists, landowners and industrialists or workers and peasants, all coming from the many and varied regions of Italy or, on occasion, emigrants passed beyond the national border. It is, of course, an impossible protect. Aspiring to write the tout history of a totalitarian society is a delusion. Yet any reader who consults the book’s pages will find that a vast array of people rum up »n my tale and that it spans from Sardinia to Sicily, from Tumi to Reggio Calabria, from Trieste to Bari and beyond. There are many stories in the pages that follow and my hope must be that readers will find them emblematic and will draw a general picture from their impressionist detail.”

London. Penguin. 2005. 689p.

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

Sabrina Marchetti

This open access short reader offers a systematic overview of the scholarly debate on the experiences of migrant domestic workers at a global level, in the past as well as in present time. It tackles the nexus between migration and domestic work with a multi-layered approach. The book looks into the issue of (paid) domestic work in migratory contexts by investigating the feminization of migration, thereby considering the larger framework within which this specific phenomenon takes place. The author explains notions such as the “international division of reproductive labor” or “global care chains” which emphasize the inequality in the way care and domestic tasks are distributed today between middle-class women in receiving nations and migrant domestic workers. Moreover, the book shows how women migrating to work in the domestic work and private care sector are facing a complex landscape of migration and labor regulations that are extremely difficult to navigate. At the same time, this issue also addresses employers’ households who cannot find appropriate or affordable care among declining welfare states and national workers reluctant to take the job, whilst legal regulations make difficult to hire a domestic worker who is a third country national. As such this book offers an interesting read to academics, policy makers and all those working in the field.

Springer Cham

Edited by Robert T. Chase

This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which citizens and migrants alike have been caged, detained, deported, and incarcerated, and what these practices tell us about state building, converging and coercive legal powers, and national sovereignty. As these studies depict the institutional development and state scaffolding of overlapping carceral regimes, they also consider how prisoners and immigrants resisted such oppression and violence by drawing on the transnational politics of human rights and liberation, transcending the isolation of incarceration, detention, deportation and the boundaries of domestic law.

Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 440p.

Jill Ahrens, Russell King

This open access book brings novel perspectives to the scholarship on transnational migration. The book stresses the complexity of migration trajectories and proposes multi-sited field studies to capture this complexity. Its constituent chapters offer examples of onward migration spanning all major world regions. The contents exemplify a range of interdisciplinary approaches, including both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The result is an impressive remapping and reconceptualisation of global migration and mobility, of interest to students and policy-makers alike.

Springer Cham

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.

Springer Cham

By Nichola Cadet  

There is a limited evidence base on the needs and experiences of older people who are on probation. Despite increased recognition of the impact of age on the prison population, this has not yet translated into probation policy and practice. Research is also complicated by a lack of agreement regarding what is meant by ‘older’ in the criminal justice context, with the majority of research conflating ‘offender’ and ‘prisoner’. A systematic review (Merkt et al., 2020) identified that ages 45-65 have been used in research studies for ‘older offenders’, but advocated age 50 as an appropriate age cut off. This is because of ‘accelerated ageing’ experienced by virtue of the prison environment and the lived experiences of many people prior to coming into custody. Cumulative disadvantage across the life course means that, for people in prison, their age can be viewed as ten years older than their chronological age. HM Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) and HM Inspectorate of Prisons now cite 50 as the age at which people should be defined as older. Despite policy think tanks, campaigning organisations, researchers and the Justice Committee repeatedly calling for a strategy for older offenders, this was only accepted by HM Government in 2020. While the strategy has been prepared by the Ministry of Justice, the emphasis remains on those in custody rather than people across prison and probation, and has yet to be published. This is a missed opportunity. Of course, older people in prison, if released, will be subject to licence supervision, so there are some direct parallels between the prison experiences of older people and those on probation. Age is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, however the issue has faced less attention than other diversity characteristics, such as gender, race and ethnicity, and the intersections across diverse populations. Probation services do have a long history of considering the needs of younger people in the probation system, particularly in terms of their transition from youth to adult services. Therefore, the service is well placed to ensure that measures can be put in place to meet the needs of older people on probation too, and the transitions they may face as they age. We are living in an ageing society, which means that probation services increasingly need to not only consider the needs of people on probation, but the needs of the professional workforce. This paper provides an overview of what the research literature tells us about the needs and experiences of older people in the criminal justice system. Statistics around age/ageing and the numbers of older people on probation are considered, highlighting links with reducing reoffending pathways and how they may be experienced differently by older people. Practical suggestions are made to support practitioners, policymakers and commissioners to develop services to ensure that they are age-inclusive against a backdrop of an ageing workforce and an ageist society.  

Manchester, UK: HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2022. 17p. 

By Alexis A. Aronowitz

From the cover: Virtually every country' in the world is affected by the scourge of human trafficking, either as a source, transit, or destination country, or a combination thereof. While countries have long focused on international trafficking, internal movement and exploitation within countries may be even more prevalent than trans- border trafficking. Patterns of trafficking vary across countries and regions and are in a constant state of flux. Countries have long focused on trafficking solely for the purpose of sexual exploitation, yet exploitation in agriculture, construction, fishing, manufacturing, and the domestic and food service industries is prevalent in many countries. Here, Aronowitz takes a global perspective in examining the nefarious underworld of human trafficking, revealing the nature and extent of the harm caused by this hideous criminal practice. Taking a victims-oriented approach, this book focuses on the different groups of victims, as well as the various forms of and markets for trafficking, many of which have been overlooked due to an emphasis on sex trafficking. The author also examines the criminals and criminal organizations that traffic and exploit their victims and explores less-ffequendy-discussed forms of trafficking— in organs, child soldiers, mail-order brides, and adoption, as well as the use of the Internet in trafficking. Drawing on her own field and research experiences in various parts of the world, the author offers real-life context throughout the book through descriptions of a number of cases with which she was involved or learned about in her travels.

Santa Barbara. PRAEGER. An Imprint of ABC-CLIO. 2009. 290p.

Forward by Condoleezza Rice

The Department of State is required by law to submit a Report each year to the U.S. Congress on foreign governments’ efforts to eliminate severe forms of trafficking in persons. This Report is the eighth annual TIP Report. It is intended to raise global awareness, to highlight efforts of the international community, and to encourage foreign governments to take effective actions to counter all forms of trafficking in persons. The U.S. law that guides anti-human trafficking efforts, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, as amended (TVPA), states that the purpose of combating human trafficking is to punish traffickers, to protect victims, and to prevent trafficking from occurring. Freeing those trapped in slave-like conditions is the ultimate goal of this Report—and of the U.S. government’s anti- human trafficking policy. Human trafficking is a multi-dimensional threat. It deprives people of their human rights and freedoms, it increases global health risks, and it fuels the growth of organized crime.

U.S. Department Of State Publication 11407 Office Of The Under Secretary For Democracy And Global Affairs And Bureau Of Public Affairs. Revised June 2008. 295p.

Speaking of the years since 1945, the writers of this Report on Torture remark: “Never has there been a stronger or more universal consensus on the total inadmissibility of the practice of torture; at the same time the practice of torture has reached epidemic proportions.” On Human Rights Day, 1972, Amnesty International launched a worldwide campaign against the systematic use of torture by governments.

Report on Torture contains authoritative discus­sions of the history of torture, problems of legal definition, the medical and psychological aspects of torture, legal remedies, and a country-by country inventory of the use of torture by many governments as a means of extracting information and exercising political and social control over their citizens. There is information here on sixty- two countries, including the United States, but Report on Torture stresses that "to criticize one government is not to praise another about which Amnesty has no information.”

NY. Farrar, Straus and Giraux.. 1975. 283p.

By The Global Detention Project

Mexico has one of the largest immigration detention systems in the world, employing several dozen detention centres—euphemistically called estaciones migratorias—and detaining tens of thousands of people every year. Intense pressure from the United States and continuing migration from turmoil-wracked Central America have helped drive up detention numbers, which surpassed 180,000 in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic further stressed the country’s migration response. It temporarily released most detainees after the onset of the pandemic even as the United States continued deporting both Mexican and third-country nationals to Mexico. In late 2020, the country adopted reforms to its migration law prohibiting the detention of all children, though many observers expressed scepticism over whether it would be respected.

Geneva: Global Detention Project, 2021. 37p.

By  Christopher Horwood

Just as the world’s governments have, for some decades, waged war on international drug trafficking, there are increasing signals that global authorities have embarked on a major offensive against the growing phenomenon of migrant smuggling in addition to their existing fight against human trafficking.1 One of the most unambiguous of these signals came in April 2015, when Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European Union’s top official for migration,2 told a news conference: “we will take action now. Europe is declaring war on [migrant] smugglers. Europe is united in this effort. We will do this together with our partners outside Europe. We will work together because smuggling is not a European problem — it is a global one.”3 Largely because of its clandestine nature, there is insufficient data available to gauge the global extent of migrant smuggling. Still, existing research offers some hints: according to one recent estimate, some 2.5 million migrants across the world used smugglers in 2016, generating an economic return of at least $5.5 billion dollars.4 ‘Since the migration crisis in 2015 the migrant smuggling business has established itself as a large, lucrative and sophisticated criminal market.’5 This paper, like others before it, argues that the main motivation behind the new offensive against migrant smugglers is not only the much-vaunted concern for the safety and protection of migrants and refugees6 (Avramopoulos prefaced his declaration with the words ‘one more life lost [at sea] is one too many’) but also the fact that migrant smugglers are the main vector and means for irregular migration. Rightly or wrongly, irregular migration is portrayed, even if disingenuously, by governments and many electorates as undesirable from a socio-political, security and economic perspective, and as a potential cause of future social unrest and political disruption.   

Geneva: Mixed Migration Centre, 2019. 78p.

Over the last 30 years, thousands of dead Latino migrant bodies have been found along the United States-Mexico boundary. These casualties are directly related to the Border Patrol’s “prevention through deterrence” (PTD) policing strategy, which funnels crossing migrants into remote and deadly deserts, mountains, and waterways. In response, local residents have created various formal and informal organizations to help provide life-saving aid to vulnerable crossing migrants. However, President Trump and Border Patrol agents have sought to criminalize and stop the work of humanitarian aid volunteers at the border. The data presented in this brief reveal that the American public overwhelmingly (87%) opposes—including the vast majority of Republicans (71%)—the criminalization of humanitarian aid workers at the border. 

Los Angeles: UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative, 2020. 6p.

By Kathleen O’Connor, Claire Thomas-Duckwitz, and  Guillermina Gina Nuñez-Mchiri  

The 1951 Refugee Convention of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) defines a refugee as someone who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." Further, the UNHCR is particularly concerned with refugees in Latin America and the Caribbean and uses the term refugee to describe persons fleeing from violence in Central America (U.N. High Commission for Refugees 2014). Thus, in this document, we refer to immigrants detained in the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (“Dilley”), as refugees because they have been persecuted by virtue of their membership in a social group, are outside their country of origin, are fleeing extreme violence, and fear returning to their countries of origin, which provided no protection from violence and persecution. Throughout the report, refugees who agreed to speak with the team and to an assessment of mental health outcomes are also referred to as study participants, participants, or respondents. During fieldwork from July 22 to July 24, 2015, a team of mental and behavioral health specialists collected the following data at Dilley, at the Greyhound Bus Station in San Antonio, and at the Hospitality House, a shelter in San Antonio where refugees are housed temporarily en route to resettlement areas throughout the United States  

 Cambridge, MA: Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), 2015. 82p.

By The Global Human Rights Clinic (GHRC) of the University of Chicago Law School and  United Stateless (USL) 

  Statelessness — the condition of lacking citizenship or nationality in any country of the world — affects more than 10 million people globally. In the United States, conservative estimates put the number of stateless persons at over 200,000. Given that the U.S. provides citizenship to people born on the territory, nearly all stateless persons within the U.S. were born elsewhere. However, the U.S. immigration framework is silent with respect to statelessness, in effect leaving stateless people unrecognized, unprotected and invisible before the law. As persons relegated to a life without legal status, stateless people in the United States are subject to being detained by immigration officials. Because they do not have a country of nationality where they can be deported to, stateless detainees have remained in immigration detention for months or years without any prospect of release, in violation of the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law. In some cases, after undergoing prolonged detention, stateless detainees have been forcibly deported to “third countries” (countries where they are not citizens), thereby perpetuating their condition of legal limbo and further depriving them of protection as required by international law. This report by the Global Human Rights Clinic (GHRC) of the University of Chicago Law School, in partnership with the non-profit organization United Stateless (USL), documents how the U.S. government violates international law by subjecting stateless persons to prolonged, repeated and arbitrary detention. Drawing from interviews with impacted stateless individuals and experts on statelessness, the report sets out specific recommendations for the U.S. government to bring its laws and policies in compliance with international human rights law.  

Chicago: The Global Human Rights Clinic (GHRC) of the University of Chicago Law School,    2022. 88p.

By Lilana Keith

Across Europe, people live and work while having irregular migration status, economically, socially and culturally enriching their communities and countries of residence. Undocumented migrants contribute directly and indirectly to social protection systems, as taxpayers, workers and informal carers. Undocumented workers are a key part of the domestic work and care workforce, caring for children, elderly and people with long-term social support and care needs, and enabling labour market participation and work-life balance.1 Nonetheless, states severely restrict access to social protection for people with temporary, precarious or irregular residence status. Although undocumented migrants face various economic and social risks and vulnerabilities, they are excluded from many of the basic mechanisms of social protection put in place to address vulnerabilities and provide a minimum social safety net, including access to subsidised housing and income security. Such exclusion compounds the risks of in-work poverty, destitution, homelessness, violence and exploitation – all of which undocumented migrants face due to discrimination linked to their residence status. Restrictions on access to social protection associated with a person’s residence permit can also be a major reason for people not being able to renew their permit, if the conditions of their permit require them to be financially independent without recourse to public social assistance. The European Commission notes that housing “has a major influence on immigrants’ employment options, educational opportunities, social interactions, residence situation, family reunification and citizenship rights”.2 Income security is scarce among undocumented migrants due to their precarious employment situations, which can include unsafe working conditions, low pay, long hours, job insecurity, and lack of sick leave.3

Brussels: PICUM, 2022. 38p.  

By Clara Long

A US Border Patrol agent kneed a woman in the lower pelvis, leaving bruises and pain days later, according to her statement to a government official screening her asylum claim. A CBP officer hit another asylum applicant so hard he was knocked unconscious and suffered brain swelling. An officer wearing a green uniform, consistent with those of the Border Patrol, tried to coerce a different asylum applicant into giving him oral sex in exchange for being released from custody. In another incident, a Border Patrol agent or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer forced a girl to undress and then inappropriately touched her. Another asylum applicant was bitten in the testicle by a Border Patrol service dog, denied medical treatment for about one month and ultimately had to have his testicle surgically removed. CBP officials appeared to withhold food from a different man in a freezing cold holding facility until he agreed to sign a paper in a language he did not understand. These are just some of the over 160 allegations of abuse catalogued in internal US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports received by Human Rights Watch under the Freedom of Information Act. The records, though heavily redacted, demonstrate that asylum officers within US Citizenship and Immigration Services, another component of DHS, have repeatedly provided internal reports on allegations of assault, sexual abuse, harsh detention conditions, denial of medical care, discriminatory and dehumanizing treatment and due process violations at the border. The US should take urgent and sustained action to stop

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  such abuses by transforming migrant border reception and DHS accountability practices, including ensuring redress for migrants and asylum seekers who have been harmed.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2021. 83p.

By Elizabeth G. Kennedy and Alison Parker,, et al.

The US is deporting Salvadorans to death and abuse. Deported to Danger identifies 138 cases of Salvadorans who, since 2013, were killed after deportation from the United States and more than 70 others who were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted, or tortured. People deported to El Salvador are sometimes targeted by the same abusers they originally fled—such as gangs or former intimate partners—or are targeted for reasons, such as their status as a deportee, their neighborhood of origin, or perceived wealth, that US government officials should take into account when deciding their eligibility for asylum or other protection from deportation. US authorities should strengthen, not further weaken, asylum protections, ensuring that all asylum-seekers receive dignified treatment via procedures that ensure full and fair consideration of their claims. Human Rights Watch also urges the United States to take a step further and offer “complementary protection” to anyone, including Salvadorans, facing a real risk of serious harm upon return. Instead of closing the door on Salvadorans and others fleeing their homelands, the US should ensure their protection.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2020. 123p.

By Ceres Policy Research Institute

As detention capacity increases, so do ICE apprehensions. This link illuminates certain truths for the immigrant rights movement. If the existence of an immigration detention center brings the harms of ICE’s enforcement presence to a community, the inverse tells us that immigrant community members become safer when a detention facility shuts down. Moreover, it sheds light on how eliminating detention capacity is crucial to scaling back ICE’s enforcement regime. Because immigration detention is the crux of ICE’s deportation pipeline and a driving force behind enforcement activity patterns, shrinking and ultimately abolishing the detention system must be a priority in the fight for immigrant justice. ICE has built and expanded a massive infrastructure of immigration jails, surveillance programs, and enforcement agents. The current enforcement-centered response to migration, supported by ever-increasing Congressional appropriations, has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deportations each year. Over the last two decades, the budget for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which includes its account for immigration detention, has quadrupled. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, detention levels hit historic peaks of more than 50,000 people per day.

Detention Watch Network and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, 2022. 10p.

By Anna O. Law

This book assesses the role of the federal judiciary in immigration and the institutional evolution of the Supreme Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Neither court has played a static role across time. By the turn of the century, a division of labor had developed between the two courts whereby the Courts of Appeals retained their original function as error-correction courts, while the Supreme Court was reserved for the most important policy and political questions. Anna O. Law explores the consequences of this division for immigrant litigants, who are more likely to prevail in the Courts of Appeals because of advantageous institutional incentives that increase the likelihood of a favorable outcome. As this book proves, it is inaccurate to speak of an undifferentiated institution called "the federal courts" or "the courts," for such characterizations elide important differences in mission and function of the two highest courts in the federal judicial hierarchy.

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 282p.