By George Fishman

Summary

• The Immigration Act of 1924 ushered in a four-decade-long Great Pause in mass immigration. This allowed the United States to assimilate the 20-plus million immigrants who arrived during the “Great Wave” that had begun in the 1880s. And the Act fostered a national economic climate conducive to the flowering of the American Dream, especially for Black Americans. Economists have concluded that from 1940 to 1970, largely paralleling the Great Pause, the average real earnings of white men rose by 210 percent and those of Black men rose by 406 percent.

• Not only “progressives”, “liberals”, “conservatives”, and “racists” supported restrictionist policies. So did many Black leaders. A leading Black newspaper concluded that the dramatic decrease in immigration during the First World War “gave [Blacks] the opportunity to get a foothold in the economic world”, but that “there have been many grave doubts about their ability to keep this foothold when fierce competition set in again”. Another proclaimed that the war “showed us just how keen a competitor cheap European labor had been for” Black workers.

• Roy Beck, founder of NumbersUSA, recently set forth an audacious hypothesis that the 1924 Act “was the greatest federal action in U.S. history — other than the Civil War Constitutional Amendments — in advancing the economic interests of the descendants of American slavery, and perhaps of all American workers”. The Act led to a tighter labor market, resulting in an openness and even a desire by employers both North and South to recruit Black workers. This, in turn, opened the door for the Great Migration of millions of Blacks out of the South and helped pave the way for the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. And it turned America into a middle-class society for whites and for Blacks. Beck’s hypothesis is not only plausible, it is the most compelling reading of the historical evidence.

• But not only did the 1924 Act dramatically reduce immigration, it also established country-by-country immigration quotas in reaction to the vast increase in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe since the 1880s. Sen. David Reed argued that “[i]t was natural that the[ new immigrants] should not understand our institutions” and that they were “wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans … untrained in self-government”. Thus, “it was best for America that our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here”. The debate over the 1924 Act focused to a large extent on often ugly racial rationales for restriction.

• In 1965, Congress, in its zeal to remove the demon of national origins quotas, restarted mass immigration. Congress could have easily accomplished the former without the latter, but it did not do so. The results have been disastrous for our country, with a 19 percent drop in the average real earnings of white men (from 1970 to 2014) and a 32 percent drop for Black men.

Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, 2024.

By Elizabeth Such and Habiba Aminu

This report, titled “The prevention of Adult Exploitation and Trafficking: A Synthesis of Research Commissioned by the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC)”, offers a comprehensive synthesis of studies commissioned by the Centre on adult exploitation and trafficking, identifying the profile of prevention in its research, the characteristics of studies, the themes of prevention-relevant research and the gaps in the evidence base.

The synthesis draws on research conducted between 2020 and 2024, organised into a public health model with prevention strategies at multiple stages: primary (before harm occurs), secondary (early intervention), and tertiary (after harm occurs) and preventing re-trafficking). This framework, known as the BETR continuum, serves as a guiding structure for categorising research findings and gaps across various studies in the PEC portfolio. The report emphasises the need for a multi-agency, system-level approach and highlights areas where prevention is under-researched, notably in primary and secondary prevention and systemic responses to prevent re-trafficking.

Nottingham, UK: Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, 2024. 32p.

By American Immigration Council

In recent months, leading politicians and policymakers have renewed calls for mass deportations of immigrants from the United States. While similar promises have been made in the past without coming to fruition—during the 2016 presidential campaign, for example, Donald Trump pledged to create a “deportation force” to round up undocumented immigrants —mass deportation now occupies a standing role in the rhetoric of leading immigration hawks. To cite just one example, former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Tom Homan has promised “a historic deportation operation” should a hawkish administration return to power.While some plans have envisioned a one-time, massive operation designed to round up, detain, and deport the undocumented population en masse, others have envisioned starting from a baseline of one million deportations per year.

Given that in the modern immigration enforcement era the United States has never deported more than half a million immigrants per year—and many of those have been migrants apprehended trying to enter the U.S., not just those already living here—any mass deportation proposal raises obvious questions: how, exactly, would the United States possibly carry out the largest law enforcement operation in world history? And at what cost?

Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) along with publicly-available data about the current costs of immigration enforcement, this report aims to provide an estimation of what the fiscal and economic cost to the United States would be should the government deport a population of roughly 11 million people who as of 2022 lacked permanent legal status and faced the possibility of removal. We consider this both in terms of the direct budgetary costs—the expenses associated with arrest, detention, legal processing, and removal—that the federal government would have to pay, and in terms of the impact on the United States economy and tax base should these people be removed from the labor force and consumer market.

In terms of fiscal costs, we also include an estimate of the impact of deporting an additional 2.3 million people who have crossed the U.S. southern border without legal immigration status and were released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from January 2023 through April 2024. We consider these fiscal costs separately because we don’t have more recent ACS data necessary to estimate the total net changes in the undocumented population past 2022, or the larger impact on the economy and tax base of removing those people, an impact that is therefore not reflected in this report.

In total, we find that the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation aimed at both those populations—an estimated total of is at least $315 billion. We wish to emphasize that this figure is a highly conservative estimate. It does not take into account the long-term costs of a sustained mass deportation operation or the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to remove over 13 million people in a short period of time—incalculable because there is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible. For one thing, there would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step. To put the scale of detaining over 13 million undocumented immigrants into context, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people.

In order to estimate the costs of a longer-term mass deportation operation, we calculated the cost of a program aiming to arrest, detain, process, and deport one million people per year—paralleling the more conservative proposals made by mass-deportation proponents. Even assuming that 20 percent of the undocumented population would “self-deport” under a yearslong mass-deportation regime, we estimate the ultimate cost of such a longer operation would average out to $88 billion annually, for a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade. This is a much higher sum than the one-time estimate, given the long-term costs of establishing and maintaining detention facilities and temporary camps to eventually be able to detain one million people at a time—costs that could not be modeled in a short-term analysis. This would require the United States to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists. The government would also be required to establish and maintain over 1,000 new immigration courtrooms to process people at such a rate.

Even this estimate is likely quite conservative, as we were unable to estimate the additional hiring costs for the tens of thousands of agents needed to carry out one million arrests per year, the additional capital investments necessary to increase the ICE Air Operations fleet of charter aircraft to carry out one million annual deportations, and a myriad of other ancillary costs necessary to ramp up federal immigration enforcement operations to the scale necessary.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• A multi-year mass deportation campaign, which would expand the infrastructure needed to arrest, detain, process, and remove one million undocumented immigrants per year, would cost $88 billion on average per year or a total of $967.9 billion.

• This operation would take over 10 years. For the same costs, the U.S. government could build 2.9 million new homes, pay full tuition and expenses for 8.9 million people to attend an in-state public college for four years or even increase annual worldwide funding for cancer research 18-fold for every year of the operation.

• Mass deportation would also deal a devastating blow to the U.S. economy, shrinking our GDP between 4.2 to 6.8%, and hit key industries already struggling with chronic labor shortages.

Washington, DC> American Immigration Council, 2024. 54p.

By Alexandre Bish, Hervé Borrion, Ella Cockbain, Sonia Toubaline,

Since the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ in 2015, there has been intense policy interest around irregular migration along the Central Mediterranean Route to Europe. Despite increased research focus on this route, the details and geographical intricacies of these migration journeys have scarcely been examined. In this study, we investigate the what, where, and how of the journeys of 71 people who traveled from Libya across the Mediterranean Sea to Malta. To do so, we break down their journeys into scripts (i.e. sequences of activities) and represent them as a composite script graph. We find that journeys were long – 18 months on average – and circuitous, involving diverse and complex geographical paths. Smuggling, brokerage, and working during transit were key aspects of most journeys. Worryingly, two-thirds of participants experienced detention and/or forced labor before reaching Malta. By pinpointing where and how harm occurs, the composite script graph can support policymakers in reducing harm, including by accounting for the possible harm that interventions may cause, directly or as a result of displacement.

Criminology & Criminal Justice, Oct. 2024.  Online first.

By Jesús de la Torre 

In September 2023, US and Mexican officials, joined by business leaders from the Mexican train company Ferromex, met in Ciudad Juárez to agree on new measures to curtail irregular migration. “We are continuing to work closely with our partners in Mexico to increase security and address irregular migration along our shared border,” said Troy A. Miller, a top U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official. Considering still increasing encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, the U.S. redoubled its pressure on Mexico to deter asylum seekers. In turn, Mexico implemented more aggressive enforcement measures against people seeking safety, work, and family reunification. In a call to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in February 2024, President Biden “expressed his appreciation for Mexico’s operational support and for taking concrete steps to deter irregular migration while expanding lawful pathways.” In the same vein, CBP touted a decrease in encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border in early 2024 as a success. Too often, the U.S. and other high-income countries measure migration policy success according to the number of migrants arriving at their borders, including asylum seekers. Fewer encounters at borders are often equated to policy success while increasing encounters prompt narratives of “crisis.” However, this reasoning masquerades the conditions leading people to migrate in the first place, migrants’ experiences during transit, and, most importantly, the influence that the U.S. immigration policies exert over those who haven’t crossed its borders yet. One of the most significant policies impacting people on the move is border externalization: the expansion of one country’s migration policy preferences to other third states through a multi-layered web of public and private actors and agreements to prevent migrants and asylum seekers from arriving and staying in its territory. From agreements with Mexico to host asylum seekers (Migrant Protection Protocols, MPP) to policies that forcibly return or expel nationals to countries others than theirs (Title 42, Safe Third Country Agreements) or force countries to deter asylum seekers, the externalization of borders is becoming the option by default when it comes to migration governance This report problematizes the U.S. externalization of its border toward Northern Central America and Mexico (Mesoamerica from now on) from a global critical perspective, highlighting patterns of policy diffusion and grassroots resistance. For that purpose, it conducts a comparative case study with Spain. The U.S. and Spain have been paradigmatic cases of cross-country comparison to find similarities and differences between a long-term net-receiving country and a “latecomer” to net-receiving migration. It would be expected that these two countries, with significant differences in their migration histories, would have developed diverse strategies to manage migration. Based on 21 in-depth semi-structured interviews with practitioners accompanying people on the move in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Morocco, Senegal, and Mauritania,5 6 this report will how both countries have developed similar border externalization strategies with similar impacts on people on the move. The reasons lay in similar securitized and racist perspectives of migration and asylum based on sanitized and reified conceptions of who belongs to the “nation.” Ultimately, this report shows that the U.S. border externalization practices cannot and mustn’t be understood in isolation but rather as about a larger web of global practices that respond to similar policy goals and narratives. Therefore, actions to challenge these policies from below demand transnational solidarity and coordination. The subsequent sections are structured as follows. The first section reviews the dynamics and functioning of the U.S. and Spain’s externalization policies in Mesoamerica and Northern Western Africa through the lived experience of practitioners. The second section explores the impacts of such dynamics on local populations and people on the move in these countries. The final section offers advocacy and policy alternatives based on practitioners’ perspectives. Conclusions are finally drawn.       

El Paso.The Hope Border Institute (HOPE), 2024.  28p.

By Jeremy Slack and Daniel E. Martınez

What happens after deportation? What contexts must Mexican deportees navigate and contend with after removal from the United States? This article explores the challenges for people post-removal in Mexico, particularly by drawing on fieldwork conducted in Tamaulipas, which is home to the Zetas drug trafficking organization and the infamous massacre of seventy-two migrants. We argue that incidental exposure to violence and crime began as an implicit aspect of immigration enforcement and has grown into one of the central tenets of current policy. We take a feminist geopolitical approach to connect the post-deportation experiences of migrants to the policies of deportation, incarceration, and punishment levied against them by the U.S. government. Migrants, particularly those apprehended through the Criminal Alien Program, have been returned to Tamaulipas in concentrated numbers despite its violent reputation. The processes of criminalization have led to a system that prioritizes punishment for migrants, meaning that we cannot extricate experiences that occur after removal from enforcement measures that create those situations. These practices are directly connected to the current wave of policies aimed at stopping asylum seekers, including “metering,” where people are made to wait at the border to apply for asylum at the port of entry, and the Remain in Mexico program (otherwise known as the Migrant Protection Protocols). We argue that enforcement is more complex than “prevention through deterrence” narratives and exposure to nonstate violence in Mexico has slowly become a more integral part of enforcement plans.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020

By Jonathan Miaz · Evelyne Schmid · Matthieu Niederhauser · Constance Kaempfer · Martino Maggetti

Making human rights a reality requires that various types of domestic actors take measures, which is often demanding, all the more so in federal systems. This open access book, Engaging with Human Rights: How Subnational Actors use Human Rights Treaties in Policy Processes, shows that an important part is played at the subnational level, with repeated back-and-forth between and within levels of governance rather than a ‘top-down’ trajectory. The dynamics of implementation at national and sub-national level is an emerging area of study. This book explores how actors use human rights treaties in the policy process, sometimes leading to an engagement that increases human rights implementation, and at other times not. Treaties provide both opportunities and constraints. Switzerland, as a highly decentralized federal state, offers a perfect setting to study the processes at work. Using legal, political, and sociological analyses, the authors draw on over 65 semi-structured interviews and focusses on two topical case studies: violence against women, including domestic violence, and the rights of persons with disabilities. This book provides a blueprint for other researchers and practitioners who wish to study the concrete implementation and impacts of human rights obligations.

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 144p.

Edited by Ingrid Muenstermann

This book demonstrates the tide of change of immigration and emigration. Societies of the northern part of the globe, which had previously sent people to developing countries in the southern hemisphere, are experiencing a never-ceasing influx of registered and unregistered people from the southern part of the globe. In thirteen chapters written by experts from all over the world, this book explores emigration and immigration during the last three centuries.

London: InTechOpen, 2023. 223p.

Edited by  Maria Pohn-Lauggas, Steve Tonah, Arne Worm

Experiences, processes and constellations of exile, flight, and persecution have deeply shaped global history and are still widespread aspects of human existence today. People are persecuted, incarcerated, tortured or deported on the basis of their political beliefs, gender, ethnic or ethno-national belonging, religious affiliation, and other socio-political categories. People flee or are displaced in the context of collective violence such as wars, rebellions, coups, environmental disasters or armed conflicts. After migrating, but not exclusively in this context, people find themselves suddenly isolated, cut off from their networks of belonging, their biographical projects and their collective histories. The articles in this volume are concerned with the challenges of navigating through multiple paradoxes and contradictions when it comes to grasping these phenomena sociologically, on the levels of self-reflection, theorizing, and especially doing empirical research.

Göttingen : Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2023. 267p.

Edited by Sabine Bauer-Amin, Leonardo Schiocchet, Maria Six-Hohenbalken

Multiple refugee regimes govern the lives of forced migrants simultaneously but in an often conflicting way. As a mechanism of inclusion/exclusion, they tend to engender the violence they sought to dissipate. Protection and control channel agency through mechanisms of either tutelage and victimisation or criminalisation. This book contrasts multiple groups of refugees and refugee regimes, revealing the inherent coercive violence of refugee regimes, from displacement and expulsion, to stereotypification and exclusion in host countries, and academic knowledge essentialisation. This violence is international, national, society-based, internalised, and embodied - and it urgently needs due scholarly attention.

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022. 289p.

By Ray Jureidini and Said Fares Hassan

Migration and Islamic Ethics, Issues of Residence, Naturalization and Citizenship contains various cases of migration movements in the Muslim world from ethical and legal perspectives to argue that Muslim migration experiences can offer a new paradigm of how the religious and the moral can play a significant role in addressing forced migration and displacement Readership: All interested in migration movements including residence, naturalization, and citizenship; Islamic Ethics and Islamic legal debates on movements in and out of the Muslim world, including asylum seekers and refugees.

Leiden: Brill, 2019. 240p.

By Anna Ball

Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination explores how feminist acts of imaginative expression, community-building, scholarship, and activism create new possibilities for women experiencing forced migration in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literature, film, and art from a range of transnational contexts including Europe, the Middle East, Central America, Australia, and the Caribbean, this volume reveals the hitherto unrecognised networks of feminist alliance being formulated across borders, while reflecting carefully on the complex politics of cross-cultural feminist solidarity. The book presents a variety of cultural case-studies that each reveal a different context in which the transcultural feminist imagination can be seen to operate – from the ‘maternal feminism’ of literary journalism confronting the European ‘refugee crisis’ to Iran’s female film directors building creative collaborations with displaced Afghan women; and from artists employing sonic creativities in order to listen to women in U.K. and Australian detention, to LGBTQ+ poets and video artists articulating new forms of queer feminist community against the backdrop of the hostile environment. This is an essential read for scholars in Women’s and Gender Studies, Feminist and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literary Studies, as well as for those operating in the fields of Gender and Development Studies and Forced Migration Studies.

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2021. 223p.

Edited by Christina R. Clark-Kazak

Forced migration shaped the creation of Canada as a settler state and is a defining feature of our contemporary national and global contexts. Many people in Canada have direct or indirect experiences of refugee resettlement and protection, trafficking, and environmental displacement. Offering a comprehensive resource in the growing field of migration studies, Forced Migration in/to Canada is a critical primer from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Researchers, practitioners, and knowledge keepers draw on documentary evidence and analysis to foreground lived experiences of displacement and migration policies at the municipal, provincial, territorial, and federal levels. From the earliest instances of Indigenous displacement and settler colonialism, through Black enslavement, to statelessness, trafficking, and climate migration in today’s world, contributors show how migration, as a human phenomenon, is differentially shaped by intersecting identities and structures. Particularly novel are the specific insights into disability, race, class, social age, and gender identity.  

2024.

By  Jennifer Eno Louden

The project is comprised of two studies that together sought to compare criminal histories and victimization experiences for immigrants compared to U.S.-born citizens in the U.S.-Mexico border region. The study found that immigrants had less extensive criminal records than U.S.-born citizens and that undocumented immigrants were less likely to have past violent offenses or property offenses compared to U.S.-born citizens and documented immigrants. Study 1 involved analysis of secondary data, whereas Study 2 involved interviews with inmates in a jail. In Study 1, which examined booking data for more than 5,000 people booked into El Paso County jails, the researchers found that immigrants, especially those who came from Mexico, had less extensive criminal histories than U.S.-born citizens. In Study 2, the researchers examined criminal risk and immigration status for 273 individuals booked into El Paso County jails and found that undocumented immigrants were less likely to have past violent offenses or property offenses compared to U.S.-born citizens and documented immigrants. In addition, documented immigrants were more likely to have past DUI offenses than U.S.-born citizens or undocumented immigrants. Researchers found similar levels of past victimization across the citizens and immigrants, though the researchers note that there likely was under-reporting of these experiences.

By Jessica L. Decker Sparks 

Year-on-year, the number of migrant fishers crewing United Kingdom-flagged fishing vessels is seemingly increasing. Primarily from European states, the Philippines, and Ghana with fewer numbers of fishers from Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka, there have long been concerns and reports of systemic pay and wage inequalities, pervasive labour abuses, and exploitative immigration schemes. In January 2020, the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) (2007) Work in Fishing Convention (C188) came into force in the United Kingdom (UK). In conjunction with the Modern Slavery Act, on paper, the UK has one of the most stringent fisheries labour regulation environments; yet the abuse of migrants continues. From June 2021 through October 2021, the University of Nottingham Rights Lab conducted an independent baseline study of working conditions across the UK fishing fleet (108 surveys and 16 interviews covering England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were collected). Several key findings confirmed the concerns long raised by other stakeholders. First, despite fishing crew being eligible for skilled-worker visas, there is no evidence of non-European (non-EEA) migrants working on these skilled-worker visas. Instead, non-EEA migrants continue to enter the UK through the use of transit visas which exploits a lack of legal clarity in UK immigration law. As a result, migrant fishers are required to work a “majority” of their time beyond the 12 nautical mile boundary (although this is not quantified or explained and is therefore open to interpretation, which makes enforcement difficult) and have no legal authority to “enter” the UK when returning to port following their 1st fishing trip and repeatedly thereafter during their 10- 12 month contract. As a result, they are forced to live on board the vessels, creating multiple employment dependencies that can be readily exploited by vessel owners. Additionally, vessel owners and recruitment agencies are issuing fishermen’s work agreements (FWAs) that are non-complaint with ILO C188. In practice this means migrant fishers are unduly treated as violators of UK immigration law even when other parties are responsible for the illegal nature of their migration, recruitment, and work. As a result, they are intimidated and prevented from seeking help, can be denied access to medical care and insurance if injured or compensation for the family if killed, and can be denied the right to repatriation if “caught.” Furthermore, 18% of migrant fishers reported being forced to work on a vessel not named in their contract. Because the transit visa scheme ties them to the one vessel named in their contract, when this situation occurs, migrant fishers are again in violation of immigration laws through no fault of their own 

Nottingham, UK: University of Nottingham Rights Lab, 2022. 51p. 

By Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX) 

In order to drive down labour costs, there has been an increasing reliance on non-European Economic Area (EEA) migrant fishers in the UK fishing industry. Lack of worker protections and oversight, poor conditions, and a significant power imbalance between worker and employer has meant that we are now seeing systemic exploitation of migrant fishers. This briefing explores how the current system facilitates this exploitation and sets out key recommendations on how to address this situation.

London: Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), 2024. 4p.

By Stephen Bronars i Edgeworth Economics

To the surprise of many, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution includes an exception to the abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude for criminal punishment. This “punishment clause” allows hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people to be forced to work for little to no pay — a central characteristic of enslavement — today. This study documents the fiscal costs and benefits of ending slavery and involuntary servitude in prisons and mandating fair wages for incarcerated workers. As this study shows, doing so will benefit not only incarcerated workers, but also their families, victims, and ultimately, society at large. Today, roughly 800,000 incarcerated people are forced to work for little — generally less than one dollar per hour — to no pay in federal and state prisons. About 80% are employed in facility maintenance and operations, with most of the remainder, or about 17%, employed in governmentrun businesses and public projects, and just 3% in private sector jobs. Given the low wages, these jobs are often designed to keep people busy rather than convey marketable employment skills. Yet, under the current system it is possible for incarcerated people who refuse to work to be denied family calls and visits, put in solitary confinement, and denied parole.This study assumes that after abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, legislators will pass additional laws establishing the labor rights of incarceration, namely wage laws. Ending slavery and involuntary servitude and paying incarcerated workers fair wages is expected to change the job composition to reflect 60% of jobs in facility operations and maintenance at minimum wage, 20% in government-run businesses and public projects at prevailing wages, and 20% in the private sector also at prevailing wages. This study anticipates that the marginal fiscal costs to governments and taxpayers of this policy change, factoring in wages and other payroll costs, is between $8.5 billion to $14.5 billion per year.These new costs would be money very well invested, as the fiscal and social benefits of ending slavery and involuntary servitude and paying incarcerated workers a fair wage will far outstrip them. These new benefits from paying incarcerated workers will take time to develop fully. This study anticipates that once the adjustments to paying incarcerated workers are achieved the total fiscal benefits to incarcerated workers, their families and children, crime victims, and society at large is between $26.8 billion and $34.7 billion per year, or a net benefit of $18.3 billion and $20.3 billion per year, implying benefit cost ratios between 2.40 and 3.16.More specifically, this study projects the following benefits:• Impact on Incarcerated Workers: Incarcerated workers will directly benefit from between $11.6 billion and $18.8 billion in annual income, compared to the estimated $847 million they earn today. They will be able to meet their own basic food, hygiene, and communication needs. The valuable work experience they receive will also translate into a present value of $11.3 billion to $11.7 billion per year in additional earnings based on increased employment and earnings expectations after release.• Impact on Families and Children: Families and children will save the money they spend supporting their incarcerated loved ones, as well as receive additional financial support, through child support payments and other income, to the tune of $4.5 billion to $5.8 billion per year.• Impact on Crime Victims: The most significant impact on victims of crime will be incarcerated workers’ increased ability to pay restitution, estimated here to be $89 million per year for robberies.• Impact on Governments and Taxpayers: The federal and state governments and taxpayers will receive tax payments between $1.5 billion and $3.2 billion per year and between $308 million and $431 million per year in payments to the welfare system through child support payments from incarcerated workers. They will also receive $2.1 billion per year in additional tax payments after their release based on increased employment and earnings expectations. Finally, they are estimated to benefit from a 5% reduction in the recidivism and reincarceration rates of incarcerated workers, which will save $1.3 billion in annual incarceration costs in just the short run and $3.7 billion in annual crime costs for the U.S. economy.This study also measures the lifetime benefits, in present value, from the first ten years after ending slavery and involuntary servitude in prisons and paying incarcerated workers a fair wage, and finds that the net fiscal benefits to incarcerated workers, their families and children, crime victims, and society at large is between $171.3 billion and $189.6 billion over the first ten years after this policy is implemented.This study projects that while society overall will benefit from abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in prison, and from paying fair wages for prison labor, those gains will fall disproportionately to groups and communities that have been most impacted by mass incarceration, specifically Black and Brown people, low-income people, and women.Finally, while this study focuses on the quantifiable fiscal benefits of prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishment and paying incarcerated workers fair wages, it is important to note that there are many other benefits that are difficult to quantify or for which there is little economic data but are as important as the specific ones outlined above — many which could broadly change society. Some of these benefits omitted from the fiscal analysis in this study include:• The increased physical and mental health of incarcerated people, and associated costs, from a recognition of their humanity and dignity with the granting of the basic human right to be protected from slavery and the ability to meet one’s own basic needs.• The increased physical and mental health of incarcerated people and corrections officers, and associated costs, from the reduced reliance on informal “hustles” and increased connection with 4 | Edgeworth Economics loved ones that together lower related violence and victimization in prisons.The financial relief for families and children of communication costs beyond just phone calls, namely video calls and electronic messages.• The increased economic mobility, and related physical and mental health, of incarcerated workers and their families and children stemming from increases in earnings during and after release that can have generational impacts.• The increased payment of fines and fees to governments.• The increased payment of local taxes during and after incarceration. • The reduced financial burden of formerly incarcerated workers on government welfare programs in retirement.

Washington, DC: Pasadena, CA: Edgeworth Economics, 2024. 71p.

By Sarah A. Jolie, Ogechi Cynthia Onyeka, Stephanie Torres, Cara DiClemente, Maryse Richards, and Catherine DeCarlo Santiago 

Latinx immigrant families are greatly impacted by US policies and practices that limit immigrant families’ and children’s rights. This article reviews the effects of such policies and the growing literature examining migration experiences. Latinx immigrant youth and parents may encounter multiple stressors across the stages of migration, including physical and structural violence, fear, poverty, and discrimination, which contribute to higher rates of mental health problems in this population. Despite significant trauma exposure, immigrants demonstrate incredible resilience within themselves, their families, and their communities and through movements and policies aimed at protecting their rights. Numerous culturally relevant universal, targeted, and intensive interventions were developed to magnify these protective factors to promote healing, advance immigration reform, and provide trauma-informed training and psychoeducation. Psychologists play a crucial role in implementing, evaluating, and advocating for accessible and collaborative approaches to care so that Latinx immigrant families have the resources to combat the harmful sequelae of immigration stress. 

Annu. Rev. Clin. Psychol. 2021. 17:127–51 

By Rachel M. Perera

Using newly available data on all civil rights complaints submitted to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights related to racial discrimination in discipline between 1999 and 2018, I provide the first systematic evidence on how modern federal civil rights enforcement is used to address racial discrimination in discipline. I find that less than 50 percent of complaints received each year result in a federal investigation. I also find that 70 to 80 percent of investigations are closed due to insufficient evidence of a civil rights violation. Results also suggest that districts with higher shares of minoritized students, higher levels of segregation, and districts with larger racial educational gaps are more likely to receive a civil rights complaint after controlling for other district factors.

Annenberg Institute at Brown University: EdWorkingPaper No. 21-413 

By Robin E. Klabbers, Andrea Hughes, Meredith Dank, Kelli N. O’Laughlin, Mutaawe Rogers & Hanni Stoklosa 

Human trafficking is a global public health issue that is associated with serious short- and long-term morbidity. To address and prevent human trafficking, vulnerabilities to human trafficking and forces sustaining it need to be better understood among specific subpopulations. We aimed to explore risk and protective factors for human trafficking, the health impact of exploitation, and barriers and facilitators of seeking help throughout the human trafficking trajectory among forced labor and sex trafficking victims in Kampala, Uganda.

Methods

Between March and November 2020, in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 108 victims of forced labor and sex trafficking who had completed a human trafficking survey conducted by the Uganda Youth Development Link (UYDEL). Participants who experienced various forms of exploitation were purposively invited for qualitative interviews and a convenience sample was interviewed. Interviews explored personal history, trafficking recruitment, experiences of exploitation and abuse, and experiences seeking help. Interviews were analyzed using a combination of deductive and inductive thematic analysis. Themes and subthemes were organized using an adapted conceptual framework of human trafficking.

Results

Poverty and an abusive home life, frequently triggered by the death of a caretaker, underpinned vulnerability to human trafficking recruitment. Limited education, lack of social support, and survival needs pushed victims into exploitative situations. Victims of human trafficking were systematically exploited and exposed to dangerous working conditions. Victims suffered from sexually transmitted diseases, incontinence, traumatic fistulae, musculoskeletal injuries, and mental health symptoms. Lack of awareness of resources, fear of negative consequences, restrictions on movement, and dependence on the trafficker and exploitation income prevented victims from seeking help. The police and healthcare workers were the few professionals that they interacted with, but these interactions were oftentimes negative experiences.

Conclusions

To address and prevent human trafficking, localized interventions are needed at all stages of the human trafficking trajectory. Health impacts of human trafficking are severe. As some of the few professionals trafficking victims interact with, police and healthcare workers are important targets for anti-trafficking training. Improved understanding of human trafficking drivers and barriers and facilitators to seeking help can inform the design of necessary interventions.

  Global Health Research and Policy (2023) 8:52 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41256-023-00332-z