Edited by Sally Baker

Welcome to this open access annotated bibliography, which has been curated by a collective of scholars who share an interest in the impacts of forced migration on people from refugee, asylum seeking and Culturally and Linguistically Marginalised (CALM) migrant backgrounds. These resources are intended to be shared with the international community of researchers, students, educators, and practitioners who work with, or are interested in, forced migration, education, employment, and resettlement. This bibliography offers a snapshot of some of the available literature that relates to the following areas of scholarly and practitioner interest:

• Refugees and access to, participation in, and transition out of higher education.

• Schooling and refugee youth.

• Adult Education (including learning host language and literacies).

• Resettlement of refugees and CALM migrants.

• Employment of refugees and CALM migrants in resettlement contexts.

• People seeking asylum in Australia.

• Discourses and media narratives relating to forced migration.

• Methodological and ethical discussions relating to research with refugees.

• Citizenship and refugees.

• Complementary pathways, including education pathways.

In this library, you will find summaries and annotated bibliographies of literature with a common focus on refugees and asylum seekers (and to a lesser extent CALM migrants more broadly). This literature has been organised thematically according to patterns that have emerged from a deep and sustained engagement with the various fields that relate to the access to, participation in and ‘success’ of people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds in resettlement, education and employment. The thematic organisation of the bibliography does not reflect the intersecting and complex overlaps of the various foci in the literature, so please keep in mind that this is an interpretive exercise and one that could easily be reworked by another set of authors.

Sydney: Refugee Education Special Interest Group. 2024. 764p.

By Jukka Könönen

Notwithstanding claims about the emergence of ‘crimmigration’ systems, immigration law and criminal law entail two different sets of instruments for authorities to control foreign nationals. Drawing on an analysis of removal orders for foreign offenders in Finland, this article demonstrates that significant administrative powers in immigration enforcement are employed largely autonomously from the criminal justice system. Immigration law enables the police and immigration officials to issue removal orders based on fines or penal orders for (suspected) minor offences, without obtaining criminal convictions. In addition to disproportionate administrative sanctions for foreign nationals, removal orders involve a preventive rationale targeting future risks for the society based on the assumed continuation of criminal activities. While criminal courts adjudicate all severe offences, punitive application of immigration law enables authorities to bypass criminal justice procedures and safeguards, resulting in a distinct, administrative punitive system for visiting third-country nationals.

Theoretical Criminology Volume 28, Issue 1, February 2024, Pages 70-87

By W. David Bradford and Felipe Lozano-Rojas

Alcohol and drug overdoses have multiple complex causes. In this article we contribute to the literature that links homelessness, the most extreme form of housing disruption, to accidental SUD-related poisonings. Using plausibly exogenous variation from a state’s landlord-tenant policies that influence evictions, we estimated the causal impact of homelessness on SUD-related mortality. We found large effects of homelessness on SUD-related poisonings (for example, a 10 percent increase in homelessness led to a 3.2 percent increase in opioid poisonings in metropolitan areas). Our findings indicate that reducing local homelessness rates from the seventy-fifth to the fiftieth percentile levels could have saved more than 1,900 lives from opioid overdoses across all metropolitan localities in the final year of our study data. We conclude that strengthening the social safety net in terms of housing security could help curb the ongoing SUD-related poisoning epidemic in the US.

Health Affairs V. 43(2): February 2024

By Milena Belloni

Tens of thousands of Eritreans make perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea every year. Why do they risk their lives to reach European countries where so many more hardships await them? By visiting family homes in Eritrea and living with refugees in camps and urban peripheries across Ethiopia, Sudan, and Italy, Milena Belloni untangles the reasons behind one of the most under-researched refugee populations today. Balancing encounters with refugees and their families, smugglers, and visa officers, The Big Gamble contributes to ongoing debates about blurred boundaries between forced and voluntary migration, the complications of transnational marriages, the social matrix of smuggling, and the role of family expectations, emotions, and values in migrants’ choices of destinations. 

Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2019, 242pg

By Vinh Nguyen

In a world increasingly shaped by displacement and migration, refuge is both a coveted right and an elusive promise for millions. While conventionally understood as legal protection, it also transcends judicial definitions. In Lived Refuge, Vinh Nguyen reconceptualizes refuge as an ongoing affective experience and lived relation rather than a fixed category with legitimacy derived from the state.

Focusing on Southeast Asian diasporas in the wake of the Vietnam War, Nguyen examines three affective experiences—gratitude, resentment, and resilience—to reveal the actively lived dimensions of refuge. Through multifaceted analyses of literary and cultural productions, Nguyen argues that the meaning of refuge emerges from how displaced people negotiate the kinds of safety and protection that are offered to (and withheld from) them. In so doing, he lays the framework for an original and compelling understanding of contemporary refugee subjectivity.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2023, 186pg

By Julia Neusner and Kennji Kizuka. Eleanor Acer, Robyn Barnard, Licha Nyiendo, and Sydney Randall

On August 8, 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the end of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” (RMX) policy. The announcement came after a federal district court, following a Supreme Court ruling in June 2022, lifted an injunction that had blocked the Biden administration’s termination of the policy and had compelled its reimplementation.

While the district court order was in effect, thousands more asylum seekers were returned by DHS to dangerous regions of Mexico. There they were forced to wait for immigration court hearings despite being almost entirely cut off from lawyers who could represent them in their requests for refugee protection. In December 2021, DHS stated that in reimplementing RMX it had taken steps to “enhance[] protections” and “protect[] individuals’ rights to a full and fair hearing.”

But the RMX policy—and others like it that would force asylum seekers to wait outside the United States for their cases to be heard—simply cannot be implemented lawfully, safely, fairly, or humanely. During the court-ordered reimplementation of RMX (or RMX 2.0), asylum seekers reported horrific kidnappings, rapes, and other violent attacks after DHS returned them to Mexico. RMX hearings also remained a due process farce. Only a tiny percentage of the individuals whose cases were decided under RMX 2.0 managed to find attorneys to represent them. A vanishingly small number of the mainly Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans subjected to the policy were granted asylum—just 63 people out of more than 1,600 completed cases. This slow winddown process comes as state politicians aligned with the former Trump administration are, yet again, seeking to force the return of RMX. After the Supreme Court rejected their initial case, they amended their lawsuit to challenge the memoranda DHS issued to re-terminate the policy. In early September 2022, the same district court that ordered the Biden administration to restart RMX will consider this latest cynical ploy to force the policy’s continuation—an attempt to again block asylum seekers from safety and subject them to the horrifying human rights abuses detailed in this report. At the same time, the similarly harmful Title 42 policy remains in effect. A court order blocking its termination has resulted in the continued shutdown of normal asylum processing at ports of entry and continued expulsions to highly dangerous places, which at the moment overwhelmingly target asylum seekers and migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Working closely with many other organizations, Human Rights First has monitored and reported on the Remain in Mexico policy since its inception in January 2019, conducting in-depth research and issuing a series of reports in February 2019, August 2019, October 2019, December 2019, January 2020, May 2020, December 2020, December 2021, and January 2022. This report is based on in-person interviews Human Rights First conducted with attorneys and RMX enrollees in Tijuana in April and September 2022; remote interviews held between April and September 2022 with attorneys and asylum seekers returned to Mexico under RMX 2.0; a review of anonymized notes from nearly 2,700 interviews conducted by pro bono law firms and non-governmental organizations providing legal information to individuals placed in RMX 2.0 (representing approximately one quarter of all people enrolled in RMX during the Biden administration); government data, media accounts, and other human rights reports.

New York: Human Rights First, 2022. 26p.

By Karolina Sobczak-Szelc, Marta Pachocka, Konrad Pędziwiatr, Justyna Szałańska, Monika Szulecka

This book sheds light on the complex experiences of asylum seekers and refugees in Poland, against a local backdrop of openly anti-refugee political narratives and strong opposition to sharing the responsibility for, and burden of, asylum seekers arriving in the EU. Through a multidimensional analysis, it highlights the processes of forced migrant admission, reception and integration in a key EU frontier country that has undergone a rapid migration status change from a transit to a host country. The book examines rich qualitative material drawn from interviews conducted with forced migrants with different legal statuses and with experts from public administration at the central and local levels, NGOs, and other institutions involved in migration governance in Poland. It discusses both opportunities for and limitations on forced migrants’ adaptation in the social, economic, and political dimensions, as well as their access to healthcare, education, the labour market, and social assistance. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, policymakers, and practitioners in migration and asylum studies, social policy, public policy, international relations, EU studies/European integration, law, economics, and sociology.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 256p

Edited by Kimberly Gauderman

This multidisciplinary volume brings together experienced expert witnesses and immigration attorneys to highlight best practices and strategies for giving expert testimony in asylum cases. As the scale and severity of violence in Latin America has grown in the last decade, scholars and attorneys have collaborated to defend the rights of immigrant women, children, and LGBTQ+ persons who are threatened by gender-based, sexual, and gang violence in their home countries. Researchers in anthropology, history, political science, and sociology have regularly supported the work of immigration lawyers and contributed to public debates on immigration reform, but the academy contains untapped scholarly expertise that, guided by the resources provided in this handbook, can aid asylum seekers and refugees and promote the fair adjudication of asylum claims in US courts. As the recent refugee crisis of immigrant mothers and children and unaccompanied minors has made clear, there is an urgent need for academics to work with other professionals to build a legal framework and national network that can respond effectively to this human rights crisis.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 211p.

Edited by 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.

Cham: Springer, 2023. 231p.

By Tom K. Wong 

On May 13th, 2023, the U.S. Immigration Policy Center (USIPC) at UC San Diego interviewed asylum seekers detained by Border Patrol (BP) in the Jacumba desert. Over 1,000 people seeking asylum and refuge from nearly every part of the world were held in three makeshift encampments on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border without adequate food, water, or shelter. Under the hot desert sun, the USIPC donated supplies and joined volunteers as they brought food, baby food, water, hygiene kits, clothes, blankets, diapers, and other supplies to these migrants. Using stratified random sampling during aid distribution in Camp 2, USIPC conducted fifteen structured interviews with asylum seekers. With approximately 150 people in Camp 2, these interviews represent a 10 percent sample. These data make clear that despite assertions by Border Patrol that the migrants were not being detained, they were surrounded by Border Patrol agents and would be apprehended if they tried to leave. This is consequential because those in Border Patrol custody, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention, and Search (TEDS), are entitled to basic humane treatment. The asylum seekers that we interviewed were only given one water bottle each day in the morning, were not given any food, were not given any shelter to protect themselves from the sun, and were not given blankets to keep themselves warm at night. Lastly, the data show that those seeking asylum have been ignored by Border Patrol agents, have been unable to formally request asylum, and have been denied due process.   

La Jolla, CA:  US Immigration Policy Center University of California San Diego (UCSD), 2023. 8p.

By Daniela Alulema and Jacquelyn Pavilon

New York City is a “welcoming city” that encourages “all New Yorkers regardless of immigration status” to access the public benefits and services for which they qualify (NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs or “MOIA” 2021a). Moreover, it invests significant resources in educating immigrant communities on this core commitment and its lack of participation in federal immigration enforcement activities. However, this report by the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) finds that immigrants in New York City still face significant barriers to accessing public benefits and services.

The report is based on CMS research that examined immigrant fear and other barriers in three general areas: the use of public benefits, with a particular focus on the public charge rule; the use of public health services; and access to law enforcement and the courts. The report documents how Trump-era immigration policies perpetuated fear among immigrant communities, in the context of other barriers to accessing services and benefits, and why its detrimental impacts have persisted and outlived the Trump administration.

The research included semi-structured interviews with 75 immigrants across all five boroughs of New York City and two focus groups with immigrants in both English and Spanish. The interviews documented the prevalence and impact of fear and other factors that impede (and facilitate) immigrants’ use of public benefits and services. The respondents were from 30 countries across all regions of the world and had varied legal statuses and lengths of stay in the United States. The CMS research team also interviewed 16 social service providers from community-based organizations (CBOs) and New York City agencies, including the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH) and the Human Resources Administration/Department of Social Services (HRA), and eight healthcare providers and social workers from the city’s public hospital system, NYC Health + Hospitals, who worked with immigrants across the city.

The project ran from January 2020 through October 2021, spanning most of the last year of the Trump administration and most of the first year of the Biden administration. Data collection started in November 2020 and extended through the COVID-19 vaccine rollout starting in spring 2021. The report finds that Trump-era anti-immigrant rhetoric and immigration policies, including aggressive enforcement tactics and a new rule on the public charge ground of inadmissibility, exacerbated long-standing fear pertaining to lack of status, family separation, detention, and deportation. The COVID-19 pandemic has further increased the need for services and assistance for all New Yorkers, including immigrants.

The report also finds that the change in administration, the widespread recognition of the essential work of immigrants in response to COVID-19, and the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on immigrant and minority communities did not eliminate immigrants’ fear or other barriers to accessing public benefits and protection in one of the most immigrant-welcoming communities in the country. Misinformation, language barriers, culturally-rooted concerns, and discrimination continued to impede immigrants from coming forward for needed services and benefits for which they or their family members are qualified. As one immigrant explained: Yes, I’m aware the public charge act has been rescinded by the Biden administration, but people still think it is not safe. People will tell you, ‘Yes, but you never know when [the rule could] come back.’ They say they don’t want to jeopardize their chances of bringing their children, so they want to focus on the bigger picture as opposed to some money.

The report finds that while government agencies, hospitals, and CBOs have all taken steps to minimize gaps in service provision and to mitigate immigrants’ fear, more can and should be done. It offers the following top-line findings, supplemented by additional findings in the body of the report:

The Public Charge Rule and Immigrants’ Concerns on the Use of Public Benefits

Many respondents underutilized benefits for which they were eligible due to fears pertaining to immigration status, family separation, detention, and deportation. For example, a service provider recounted a case in which a mother feared that her US citizen children would be negatively impacted in the future for having used food stamps: She’s an immigrant. It’s her husband and her, and [her] two American citizen [children]. The husband died due to COVID. When she applied [for food stamps,] she really didn’t want to apply. She was under the impression that also her kids are going to be penalized and they’re going to have to pay this back when they grow up. Because she doesn’t have any status, she was afraid. If she want[ed] to apply, she could, for the kids. … I had mentioned to her [what] the requirements [were], which [were] proof of income and address, and she said that she will get a letter from the employer, because that’s part of the requirements. When she asked for the letter, she got fired. She was just so devastated, because she was at her wit’s end. I called her, and she said, no, she didn’t want to be bothered. She was just so frustrated and devastated, and she just let it go.

Trump administration policies and rhetoric led immigrants to increase their efforts to secure a safer immigration status, including citizenship, and obtain identification documents for themselves and their children. The study found that service providers had to step out of their regular roles to provide the services that the immigrant community needed. In the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis, for example, hospital workers were also helping to fill out patients’ citizenship applications.

Context and location strongly influenced the comfort level of immigrants in sharing information which would allow them to access benefits and services. Many immigrants feared sharing identifying information in government buildings, but not as much in other settings or online.

Large numbers of respondents feared the use of public benefits, including by their US citizen children, due to misinformation about the impact of the new public charge rule on their ability and the ability of family members to secure legal status or permanent residence. Social media has made it easier to spread incomplete information or misinformation about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in local neighborhoods, as well as about the details of the public charge rule........

New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2022. 69p.

By James Rochlin

The near collapse of the Venezuelan economy since 2015 and the concomitant erosion of public order have led to an exodus of over seven million people by mid-2023, the largest forced migrant flow in recent Latin American history and the second largest globally after Syria. It occurs against a global backdrop of a 400 percent increase in persons displaced across borders between 2010 and 2021. Colombia hosts the largest number of Venezuelan refugees — with about 2.5 million officially recorded by the government. This has occurred during a politically tumultuous period in Colombia, which has featured the reconfiguration of competing illegal armed groups since the signing of the 2016 Peace Accord between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a major COVID-19 outbreak in 2020–2021, and a crippling and protracted national strike in 2021.

Within the hemispheric context, Colombia serves as a stop-gap to stem the flow of Venezuelan refugees northward, roughly similar to the role played by Mexico to intercept and diminish migration to the United States. This has especially been the case since the January 5, 2023 announcement by US President Biden, which specified that refugees cannot declare asylum in the US if they attempt to cross the US border without first seeking asylum in their initial transit country. For Venezuelan refugees, the first country they enter is typically Colombia. Further, in May 2023, the Biden administration announced it was considering sending US troops to the Darien Peninsula in Panama, and will perhaps train Colombian forces, to diminish the “trafficking” of Venezuelan refugees and other refugees passing through Colombia and headed north. The result, according to leaders of NGOs and other who work directly with refugees, has been more pressure on Colombia to retain them.

The argument here is twofold. First, human security threats for Venezuelan refugees should be viewed intersectionally in the particular spaces through which they pass — from the collapse of order in their home countries (which qualifies them as refugees), through the borderlands with Colombia that pose specific threats to their safety and wellbeing, and to their destinations within Colombia that offer their own peculiar array of opportunities and human security challenges. Second, regularization programs such as the Estatuto Temporal de Protección de Migrantes Venezolanos (ETPMV) are the best way to promote human security for refugees in Colombia in the short and medium terms, but this process needs to be more inclusive.1 The first half of this paper discusses the conceptual underpinnings that link power/mobility/space to human security for refugees. The second part brings those concepts to life through interviews with an assortment of refugees.

The paper draws from a database of interviews with 72 Venezuelan refugees in Colombia in 2022 and 2023 regarding the intersectional nuances of human security. It also relies on interviews with dozens of security, migration, and human rights experts in Colombia since 1997. A unique conceptual perspective is developed regarding critical human security for Venezuelan refugees. Journal on Migration and Human SecurityVolume 11, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 333-355

By Susan Schmidt

While gang violence, community violence, and domestic violence have been recognized as contributing factors to Central American migration, less is known about the intersection between child maltreatment and migration. This article uses secondary data from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) interviews with unaccompanied minors from Central America and Mexico to examine child maltreatment. It provides information on the abused children, their abusers, and the questions that led to their disclosure of maltreatment. It finds that girls reported maltreatment at higher rates than boys; only girls in this sample reported sexual abuse and intimate partner violence; and boys experienced physical abuse more than any other form of maltreatment. Overall, girls experienced all forms of abuse at higher rate than boys. Fewer than half of this sample described maltreatment as an explicit reason for migration, even those who viewed it as a type of suffering, harm or danger. In addition, some disclosures suggest that childhood transitions, such as in housing, schooling, or work status, warrant further inquiry as a potential consequence of or contributor to maltreatment. The article recommends that professionals engaged with migrant children in social services, legal services, or migration protection and status adjudications should inquire about maltreatment, recognizing that children may reveal abuse in complex and indirect ways. Protection risks within the home or family environment may provide the grounds for US legal immigration protections, such as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) or asylum. Practitioners working with unaccompanied migrant children should use varied approaches to inquire about home country maltreatment experiences. Maltreatment may be part of the context of child migration, whether or not it is explicitly mentioned by children as a reason for migration. Policy Recommendations • US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) should update SIJS regulations to reflect changes in the law, and modify application procedures to incorporate research knowledge on the impact of trauma on children. • The US Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Justice (DOJ), and Health and Human Services (HHS), should ensure that all children in immigration proceedings receive legal representation through public-private partnerships overseen by the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement  (ORR). Passage of Senate Bill 3108, the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act of 2021,1 would at least guarantee legal representation for unaccompanied minors. • Codify legal standards (via USCIS regulation, or Congressional statute) for granting asylum based on gender and gender-based violence, and include standards for children and youth. • Adjudicators from USCIS, Asylum Offices, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) should consider new information about painful, traumatic, or shame-inducing experiences—such as child maltreatment—as part of the gradual process of disclosure, rather than negatively reflecting on the credibility of the applicant. • Federal agencies with immigration responsibilities such as USCIS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and ORR, should be included in the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Interagency Task Force for Trauma-Informed Care. These agencies should require new trainings for immigration adjudicators, including immigration judges, asylum officers, Border Patrol agents, and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers, on interviewing and making decisions related to children. • Legal service providers should adopt a holistic approach to service provision that includes social workers as part of the child’s legal team. 

  Journal on Migration and Human Security 2022, Vol. 10(1) 77-92  

By Michele Waslin

This article examines presidential immigration policy making through executive orders (EOs) and proclamations. Donald Trump’s overall volume of EOs has been remarkably similar to that of other presidents, while his number of proclamations has been relatively high. His immigration-related EOs and proclamations, however, diverge from those of his predecessors in several ways. Of the 56 immigration-related EOs and 64 proclamations issued since 1945, Trump has issued 10 and nine, respectively. Overall, about 1 percent of all EOs and proclamations during this period have been immigration related, compared to 8 percent of Trump’s EOs and 2.4 percent of Trump’s proclamations.

In a sharp departure from previous presidents, a greater share of his EOs and proclamations have been substantive policy-making documents intended to restrict admissions of legal immigrants and increase enforcement along the border and in the interior of the United States. This article explores Trump’s unorthodox use of executive tools to make immigration policy, circumventing Congress and even members of his own administration. It recommends that:

• Congress should hold oversight hearings and should consider revoking or modifying EOs and proclamations that have been issued pursuant to the authority provided to the president by Congress, as opposed to those based on the executive’s constitutional authority.

• Advocacy organizations should continue to challenge the president’s executive actions, the insufficient process and consultation leading to them, their statutory or constitutional justification, and their impact.

• Congress should take an inventory of the immigration authorities it has delegated, both explicitly and implicitly, to the executive branch and determine when this authority can and should be limited.

• Congress should pass legislation to update and reform the US immigration system, and thus clarify its intentions regarding US immigration law, policy, and executive authority in this area.

Journal on Migration and Human SecurityVolume 8, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 54-67

By  Ricardo D. Martínez-Schuldt and Ricardo D. Martínez

Sanctuary jurisdictions have existed in the United States since the 1980s. They have recently reentered U.S. politics and engendered contentious debates regarding their legality and influence on public safety. Critics argue that sanctuary jurisdictions create conditions that threaten local communities by impeding federal immigration enforcement efforts. Proponents maintain that the policies improve public safety by fostering institutional trust among immigrant communities and by increasing the willingness of immigrant community members to notify the police after they are victimized. In this study, we situate expectations from the immigrant sanctuary literature within a multilevel, contextualized help-seeking framework to assess how crime-reporting behavior varies across immigrant sanctuary contexts. We find that Latinos are more likely to report violent crime victimization to law enforcement after sanctuary policies have been adopted within their metropolitan areas of residence. We argue that social policy contexts can shift the nature of help-seeking experiences and eliminate barriers that undermine crime victims’ willingness to mobilize the law. Overall, this study highlights the unique role social policy contexts can serve in structuring victims’ help-seeking decisions.

 American Sociological Review 86(1):154–85. 2021

By David Hausman

The US government maintains that local sanctuary policies prevent deportations of violent criminals and increase crime. This report tests those claims by combining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation data and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) crime data with data on the implementation dates of sanctuary policies between 2010 and 2015. Sanctuary policies reduced deportations of people who were fingerprinted by states or counties by about one-third. Those policies also changed the composition of deportations, reducing deportations of people with no criminal convictions by half—without affecting deportations of people with violent convictions. Sanctuary policies also had no detectable effect on crime rates. These findings suggest that sanctuary policies, although effective at reducing deportations, do not threaten public safety.

PNAS,  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 117(44):27262–7.  2020.

By the American Civil Liberties Associations of New Mexico and Texas

Vehicle pursuits make for exciting movie scenes and capture the interest of reality TV viewers, but police chases are dangerous and often deadly.1 Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly restricting when such pursuits may be undertaken. Many have issued policies authorizing chases only when the public faces immediate danger. 2 The United States Border Patrol, the largest law enforcement agency in the country, has taken no such steps. In fact, the agency is increasingly engaged in high-speed chases throughout the Southwest border region, with deadly results. The number of fatalities resulting from Border Patrol vehicle pursuits has skyrocketed in recent years, from just 2 deaths in 2019 to 22 in 2021. Despite this trend, Border Patrol does not provide statistics on the number of car chases conducted by its agents unless the agency itself deems it a “use of force” incident, such as when a Border Patrol unit intentionally collides with a vehicle to cause it to crash or agents deploy spike strips to stop a vehicle.3 Senator Dianne Feinstein demanded in 2019 that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reevaluate its vehicle pursuit policy, stating: “CBP’s pursuit policy does not follow the Justice Department guidelines for vehicle pursuits, but instead offers insufficient protection against possible injuries and fatalities, either to bystander members of the public or occupants of a pursued vehicle. This has led to catastrophic and unwarranted results.   

Albuquerque, NM: ACLU, 2022. 13p.

By Rachel Feldman

This study was undertaken because generally available information about local government policy regarding inquiry about immigration status, use of this information, and interaction with federal immigration authorities was limited to a few New Mexico jurisdictions and was not upto-date or complete. The study identifies the variation and reasons for variation in these policies across the state, including the lack of any formal policy, and the function of informal policy. The study introduces the term “policy infrastructure” to refer to the function of written policy, procedure, monitoring and enforcement systems in directing local government employees and contractors, regarding their obligations to use public resources as directed by any policy that exists1 . A study assumption is that where no formal policy exists and where policy infrastructure is incomplete, public employees and contractors may use public resources at their discretion, regardless of consequences for affected persons. The problem motivating the study is the apparent situation in which residents and visitors to New Mexico experience different practices regarding the identification of and treatment related to their immigration status across the state, including within overlapping jurisdictions (e.g., city and county). Such variation in treatment raises questions regarding the extent to which immigrant rights (legal and undocumented) are respected across the state. It raises the question as to whether such variation is consistent with the intent of state and federal civil and human rights. The study was conducted between September and December in 2018, and inquiries were made by phone and formal requests for public records to all 33 counties and the 10 largest cities in the state. Contacts focused on county and city managers, sheriff and police departments and detention facilities operated by local governments. Some level of information was provided by all 33 counties and all cities contacted. A summary of results is shown in Table 1. Analysis of all documents and interview notes is provided below as study findings.   

Albuquerque, NM: ACLU of New Mexico, 2019. 51p.

By Melanie Gower, Georgina Sturge 

The Home Secretary has a duty to make a deportation order in respect of nonBritish or Irish citizens who have been convicted of an offence in the UK and sentenced to at least 12 months’ imprisonment, unless certain exceptions apply. He also has discretionary powers to deport non-British citizens if he considers it to be “conducive to the public good”. Deportation of foreign national offenders is a longstanding government priority. The Home Office considers for deportation all foreign nationals convicted of a crime in the UK and given a prison sentence. Foreign national offenders can be removed from the country before the end of their prison sentence by way of a prisoner transfer agreement, or through the Early Removal Scheme or Tariff-Expired Removal Scheme. They can receive money to help them to resettle in their home country through the Facilitated Return Scheme. As of the end of June 2023, there were at least 10,321 foreign nationals in prison in England and Wales, out of a total prison population of 85,851. Over half of foreign prisoners were European and, overall, the most common nationalities were Albanian, Polish, Romanian, Irish, and Jamaican. There were 11,769 foreign national offenders subject to deportation action living in the community, as of 30 September 2022.

A report of an inspection by the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration published in June 2023 was critical of the Home Office’s handling of foreign national offender cases. It found that the Early Removal Scheme and the Facilitated Return Scheme were not being administered effectively. The Government says it has made good progress removing foreign national offenders from prisons and the community, pointing to a 19% increase in overall foreign national offender returns in the 12-month period to September 2023 (3,577 people). Up until that point, the number of foreign national offenders returned on an annual basis had been falling since 2016, when 6,437 individuals were returned. 

London: UK Parliament, The House of Commons Library , 2024. 11p

By Cecilia Esterline  

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is the policy playbook for a second Trump administration, and its impacts on immigration would be far more complex and destructive than previously reported. It isn’t simply a refresh of first-term ideas, dusted off and ready to be re-implemented. Rather, it reflects a meticulously orchestrated, comprehensive plan to drive immigration levels to unprecedented lows and increase the federal government’s power to the states’ detriment. These proposals circumvent Congress and the courts and are specifically engineered to dismantle the foundations of our immigration system. The most troubling proposals include plans to: • Block federal financial aid for up to two-thirds of all American college students if their state permits certain immigrant groups, including Dreamers with legal status, to access in-state tuition. • Terminate the legal status of 500,000 Dreamers by eliminating staff time for reviewing and processing renewal applications. • Use backlog numbers to trigger the automatic suspension of application intake for large categories of legal immigration. • Suspend updates to the annual eligible country lists for H-2A and H-2B temporary worker visas, thereby excluding most populations from filling critical gaps in the agricultural, construction, hospitality, and forestry sectors. • Bar U.S. citizens from qualifying for federal housing subsidies if they live with anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. • Force states to share driver’s licenses and taxpayer identification information with federal authorities or risk critical funding. These proposals, along with the others discussed herein, mark a significant divergence from traditional conservative immigration priorities like promoting merit-based immigration, fostering assimilation, and enhancing interior enforcement. Instead, they are designed to cripple the existing immigration system without regard for the extraordinarily harmful effects on the health and wealth of our country. They would weaken our nation’s prosperity and security and undermine the vitality of our workforce, with far-reaching consequences for future generations of Americans. 

New York: The Niskanen Center, 2024. 17p.