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HUMAN RIGHTS

HUMAN RIGHTS-MIGRATION-TRAFFICKING-SLAVERY-CIVIL RIGHTS

Current and Future Research on Labor Trafficking in the United States

by Joe EyermanMelissa M. LabriolaBella González

Reducing the prevalence of all forms of human trafficking, including sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and child sexual exploitation, is a national priority that puts the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a prominent role. Given the scale, evolving nature, and complexity of labor trafficking, combating the problem poses a significant challenge. The DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) anti–human trafficking program is assessing the current state of and future needs for labor trafficking research in the United States. This effort will serve as a starting point for future social science–based S&T anti–human trafficking research and actions focused on labor trafficking.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023. 

Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking: Present-day News Media, True Crime, and Fiction

Edited by  Christiana Gregoriou

This open access edited collection examines representations of human trafficking in media ranging from British and Serbian newspapers, British and Scandinavian crime novels, and a documentary series, and questions the extent to which these portrayals reflect the realities of trafficking. It tackles the problematic tendency to under-report particular types of victim and forms of trafficking, and seeks to explore both dominant and marginalised points of view. The authors take a cross-disciplinary approach, utilising analytical tools from across the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics, literary and media studies, and cultural criminology. It will appeal to students, academics and policy-makers with an interest in human trafficking and its depiction in the modern day.

Cham:  Springer Nature, 2018. 160p.

Refugee protection, human smuggling, and trafficking in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia

By Bruce Ravesloot, Tanay Amirapu, Chandler Smith, Sehdia Mansaray ; TANGO International, Inc.

This research report critically assesses the risks and needs of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia across three thematic domains: refugee protection, human trafficking, and human smuggling. The research draws from three national contexts: Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The research explores the following questions: What is the regional and national policy landscape for refugee protection, anti-smuggling, and anti-trafficking? What are the risks and opportunities in these domains?

Denmark: Mixed Migration Centre, 2022. 97p.

Rohingya in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand: Refugee protection, human smuggling and trafficking\

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.

Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration

Edited by Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen and Shahram Khosravi  

"This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more theoretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal structures. This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power. 

New York: London: Routledge, 2021. 229p.

Regularisations of Irregularly Staying Migrants in the EU: A Comparative Legal Analysis of Austria, Germany and Spain

By Kevin Fredy Hinterberge

‘Combatting’ irregular migration is one of the key challenges to migration management at EU level. The present book addresses one of the most pressing structural problems regarding the EU’s return policy: the low return rate of irregularly staying migrants. In this regard the EU Return Directive obliges Member States to issue a return decision, yet only 40% of such decisions are enforced annually. Moreover, despite the political and legal efforts, the EU is not making any significant progress in enforcing the rules it has laid down in the Return Directive. The legislation of EU Member States may, however, serve as a source for possible solutions to ‘combat’ the problem of irregularly staying migrants. This is why the book compares the system of regularisations in Austria, Germany and Spain. Regularisations constitute an effective alternative to returns because they terminate the irregular residence of migrants, not through deportation, but rather by granting a right of residence. Regularisation is therefore understood as each legal decision that awards legal residency to irregularly staying migrants. As is shown by the examination and comparison of regularisations in Austria, Germany and Spain, differentiated systems of regularisation exist at national level. However, EU regularisations supplementing the present return policy would be more effective at ‘combatting’ irregular migration at EU level.

 Baden-Baden: NomosHart Publishing, 2023. 398p.

(Re) Figuring Human Enslavement: Images of Power, Violence and Resistance

Edited by Ulrich Pallua, Adrian Knapp and Andreas Exenberger

"The publications of the interdisciplinary and internationally networked Research Platform “World Order – Religion – Violence” seek to improve our understanding of the relationship between religion, politics and violence. It therefore deals especially with the return of religious themes and symbols into politics, with the analysis of the link between political theory and religion, and finally with the critical discussion of the secularization thesis. At the centre of the research are questions concerning the causes of violent conflict, the possibilities for a just world order and the conditions for peaceful coexistence on a local, regional, national and international/worldwide scale between communities in the face of divergent religious and ideological convictions. Its task is to initiate and coordinate thematically related research-efforts from various disciplinary backgrounds at the University of Innsbruck. It creates a network between departments, research-teams and single researchers working on topics of religion, politics and violence. The overall aim of the research platform World Order-Religion-Violence is to promote excellence in social and human science research on religion and politics at the University of Innsbruck and to guarantee the diffusion of this particular competence on a national and international level."

Innsbruck: innsbruck university press, 2009. 256p.

Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics

Edited by  Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires

Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call “transcultural societal studies,” an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 458p.

Interrogating the Morality of Human Rights

 By Michael J. Perry

This forward-thinking book illustrates the complexities of the morality of human rights. Emphasising the role of human rights as the only true global political morality to arise since the Second World War, chapters explore its role as applied to often controversial issues, such as capital punishment, the exclusion of same-sex couples from civil marriage and criminal abortion bans.

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2023. 172p.  

Shelter from the Storm: Better Options for New York City’s Asylum-Seeker Crisis

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.

Shelter from the Storm: Better Options for New York City’s Asylum-Seeker Crisis

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.

Labor Recruitment and Human Trafficking: Analysis of a Global Trafficking Survivor Database

By Camilla Fabbri https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4692-9646 camilla.fabbri@lshtm.ac.ukHeidi Stöckl, […], and Cathy Zimmerman

Over the past decade, third-party labor recruiters who facilitate employment for migrant workers across low- and middle-income countries have often been considered by the counter-trafficking community as one of the main entry points into human trafficking. In response, anti-trafficking prevention programs have increasingly focused on addressing exploitative recruitment in migrants’ origin countries. Such programs may advocate for increased regulation of migration, greater enforcement actions against unlicensed recruiters, stricter ethical codes of conduct for recruiters and employers, and more pre-departure information about recruitment for migrants. Yet, there remains limited research about the relationship between prospective migrants, recruiters, and human trafficking, and the relative importance of third-party recruitment in the trafficking process. This Research Note draws on the world's largest database of individual victims of trafficking cases, the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Global Victim of Trafficking Database (VoTD), to examine the role and characteristics of recruitment of trafficked victims. The VoTD contains information on nearly 50,000 trafficking victims who were registered for assistance from 2002 to June 2018. Our analysis shows that 94 percent of trafficked victims were recruited, in a broad sense (i.e., not only by third-party intermediaries). Additionally, the data presented here suggest that the relationship between recruitment and trafficking is complex and that forced labor is embedded within the wider structural issues around low-wage labor migration that lead to exploitative work conditions. Interventions to address human trafficking will benefit from strategies that target systemic issues constraining or harming low-wage labor. Further, these findings highlight the value of large-scale administrative datasets in migration research

  International Migration Review 2023, Vol. 57(2) 629-651  

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Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement

By Alexander Betts

Such threats as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that make possible human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as "refugees," preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection. In this book, Alexander Betts develops the concept of "survival migration" to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres, 2013. 255p.

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives

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. 

Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959: A Forty Years' Crisis?

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.

American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay

By Adele Valeria Messina

Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the “Jewish problem” of sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of the Sociology of the Holocaust. The story of why and how sociologists as well as the schools of sociological thought came to confront the Holocaust has never been entirely told. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust sociology development.

Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. 498p.

Recovering Identity: Criminalized Women’s Fight for Dignity and Freedom

By Cesraéa Rumpf

Recovering Identity examines a critical tension in criminalized women’s identity work. Through in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews, Cesraéa Rumpf shows how formerly incarcerated women engaged recovery and faith-based discourses to craft rehabilitated identities, defined in opposition to past identities as “criminal-addicts.” While these discourses made it possible for women to carve out spaces of personal protection, growth, and joy, they also promoted individualistic understandings of criminalization and the violence and dehumanization that followed. Honoring criminalized women’s stories of personal transformation, Rumpf nevertheless strongly critiques institutions’ promotion of narratives that impose lifelong moral judgment while detracting attention from the structural forces of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to women’s vulnerability to violence.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 234p

The Unintended Consequences of Deportations: Evidence from Firm Behavior in El Salvador

By Antonella Bandiera, Lelys Dinarte, Sandra Rozo, Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, Micaela Sviatschi, Hernan. Winkler    

  Can repatriation inflows impact firm behavior in origin countries? This paper examines this question in the context of repatriation inflows from the United States and Mexico to El Salvador. The paper combines a rich longitudinal data set covering all formal firms in El Salvador with individual-level data on all registered repatriations from 2010 to 2017. The empirical strategy combines variation in the municipality of birth of individuals repatriated over 1995–2002—before a significant change in deportation policies—with annual variation in aggregate inflows of repatriations to El Salvador. The findings show that repatriations have large negative effects on the average wages of formal workers. This is mainly driven by formal firms in sectors that face more intense competition from the informal sector, which deportees are more likely to join. Repatriation inflows also reduce total employment among formal firms in those sectors. Given that most deportees spend less than a month abroad, these findings suggest that the experience of being detained and deported can have strong negative effects not only on the deportees, but also on their receiving communities.  

  Policy Research Working Paper 9521. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2021. 39p.

A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft

Edited by Carol H. Poston

FROM THE PREFACE: “In 1792 a book appeared in London which set out the claim, dramatically and classically, that true freedom necessitates the equality of women and men. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was so provocative and popular that a second edition appearedin the same year, and Dublin, Paris, and American editions soon followed. The history of the subsequent editions of A Vindication of the Rights of Wcman closely parallels the vicissitudes of the women's movement: when feminism as a political cause comes to the fore, as it periodically does, Mary Wollstonecraft's work is one of the first to be reissued. Yet after nearly 175 years of republication and commentary, the book has never been annotated, nor has there been (save in the case of facsimile editions) an attempt to preserve Wollstonecraft's prose exactly as she wrote it…”

Norton. W.W. Norton. 1975. 248p. USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP.