Edited by Santino Regilme, Salvador F.

More than three decades have passed since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, yet children's rights and dignity still confront profound challenges worldwide. This book delves deep into this complex issue, meticulously examining the causes and consequences of contemporary crises in children's rights and welfare. Distinguishing itself from conventional literature and public discourse on human rights, this multidisciplinary volume offers an unparalleled global and interdisciplinary perspective. It defies traditional disciplinary boundaries, embracing an analytically eclectic and interdisciplinary approach to comprehending the intricate challenges faced by children today. This book wholeheartedly acknowledges that the issues affecting children are intricately interwoven within an intricate web of social, cultural, and historical factors, thereby requiring a holistic and problem-centric viewpoint. Far from the mainstream narrative, this anthology spotlights the frequently overlooked crises in children's rights, bringing to light those thematic and policy blind spots that have languished in obscurity. It champions an unyielding global and transnational outlook, recognizing that the contemporary predicaments confronting children are not solely products of local or national influences but are profoundly shaped by the forces and interactions of a global scale. This book uniquely contributes to children's rights scholarship by exploring children's rights and dignity through a broader lens, emphasizing the impact of politics, culture, social conflicts, and geographic variations. This timely and indispensable work serves as an invaluable resource for scholars, policymakers, and advocates dedicated to advancing the cause of children's rights on the grand stage of global governance.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2024.

By Michael Krennerich

The book offers a comprehensive and clear introduction for students and those interested in human rights, written by a renowned human rights expert. It not only provides an introduction to the diversity of issues, actors, and institutions in human rights policy and politics but also offers assistance and suggestions on how the complex reality of human rights politics can be described and analyzed with the help of political science and related disciplines. It deals with civil society engagement in human rights as well as state obligations and international efforts to protect human rights. This is an open-access book.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2024. 180p.

By Sotoudeh, Nasrin

The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal, presented by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. Nasrin Sotoudeh is an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who has been called "Iran's Nelson Mandela." Sotoudeh is a longtime opponent of the death penalty, an advocate of improving imprisonment health conditions, and an activist dedicated to fighting for the rights of women, children, religious and ethnic minorities, journalists and artists, and those facing execution. As a result of her advocacy, Sotoudeh has been repeatedly imprisoned by the Iranian government for crimes against the state; she served one sentence from 2010 to 2013 and was sentenced again in 2018 to thirty-eight years and six months in prison and 148 lashes. Her work has been featured in the 2020 documentary Nasrin, by filmmakers Jeff Kaufman and Marcia S. Ross. For this important work, she is the recipient of the 2023 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, marking the award's tenth year.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023. 83p.

By U.S. Department of Justice,  Office of Justice Programs,  Bureau of Justice Statistics

This report details ongoing and completed efforts to measure and analyze the nationwide incidence of human trafficking, to describe characteristics of human trafficking victims and offenders, and to describe criminal justice responses to human trafficking offenses. The report provides information on human trafficking investigated and prosecuted by U.S. attorneys, human trafficking defendants convicted and sentenced to federal prison, and admissions to state prison for human trafficking.

Highlights

• A total of 1,912 persons were referred to U.S. attorneys for human trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2022, a 26% increase from the 1,519 persons referred in 2012.  

• The number of persons prosecuted for human trafficking more than doubled from 2012 to 2022 (from 805 to 1,656 persons). The number of persons convicted of a human trafficking offense increased from 578 persons in 2012 to 1,118 persons in 2022. 

• Of the 1,070 defendants charged with any of the three types of human trafficking offenses in U.S. district court in fiscal year 2022, 91% were male, 58% were white, 20% were black, 18% were Hispanic, 95% were U.S. citizens, and 71% had no prior convictions. 

• Of the 203 defendants charged with peonage, slavery, forced labor, and sex trafficking, 69% were male and 53% were black. In comparison, of the 523 defendants charged with sexual exploitation and other abuse of children, 94% were male and 71% were white.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics 2024. 7p.   

By John Power,  Sean Phillips, Stuart Carroll

The scale and volume of challenges facing the new ministerial team at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) necessitates a significant turnaround operation to enhance NHS productivity and performance. Indeed, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care used his first public statement to reflect that “the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken”. Amid operational pressures (including long waits for care), poor patient satisfaction (at its lowest levels since the early 1980s), high-profile cases of abuse and anaemic productivity growth since the pandemic, the way that the NHS is managed and led is back firmly in the spotlight. The work of managers – particularly non-clinical, operational managers – working across the NHS is often invisible to the public, but touches almost every aspect of health and care delivery from the implementation of electronic patient records and upgrading the hospital estate to planning rotas for doctors and nurses. Yet the present debate concerning health and care management is often driven by a weak or anecdotal evidential basis. In a recent interview, the Health Secretary reflected he was “unconvinced by the majority of research…which suggests the NHS is under-managed”. A recent study concludes that “there is little existing evidence to support either this narrative or counterclaims.” As the 2015 Smith Review noted, management capacity and capability is “under examined” in healthcare planning. Politicians (of all stripes) alongside commentators in the media have in recent years blamed poor performance on “NHS managers”, whilst holding more positive opinions about “front line” staff. A recent analysis from the Policy Unit at King’s College London reveals half of the public believe there are “too many managers in the NHS”.. Some healthcare professionals also reflect this view, perceiving non-clinical managers to be a challenge to professional autonomy and authority. In the public policy debate, too much emphasis is placed on discussion about the volume of managers working in the NHS: the narrative that either simply expanding the headline numbers of ‘managers’ or in scaling back a ‘bloated bureaucracy’ will deliver the necessary service improvement and efficiency gains. A greater focus on management capability is needed, as is a deeper understanding of the permissions and incentives which enable or inhibit improved performance and productivity. We also need to re are employed between NHS England (NHSE) and DHSC. In addition to this, the recently-published Independent Review of NHS Performance, authored by Lord Darzi, finds that “regulatory type organisations now employ some 7,000 staff, or 35 per provider trust, having doubled in size over the past 20 years”. The “right balance of management resources in different parts of the structure” is needed, he concludes. Such an assessment must not fix its attention solely upon the management of hospitals (as important as this is) but must also consider the requirements of the healthcare system as a whole – particularly primary and community healthcare services whose management and leadership requirements are less frequently discussed in policy debates, but where expectations for the transformation of services are great and there are unique challenges and circumstances to be addressed given these are far more devolved and dispersed care settings. Moreover, we should not solely investigate roles, but must also consider the architecture and “organisational culture” which influences activity within the NHS as well as the NHS’s interaction with Government departments and arms-length bodies. The focus and purpose of this report, therefore, is two-fold: 1. Firstly, to present a more detailed portrait of the state of NHS management today to inform the discussion around about future reform. How is management distributed across the country and across organisations? Would a greater volume of managers overall deliver improved performance? Are there particular skillsets we are lacking? 2. Secondly, to set out the case for change and to make a series of recommendations for reform.  

London: Policy Exchange, 2024. 62p.

By Vinícius Venancio

Inspired by Lélia Gonzalez’s essay “Racism and Sexism in Brazilian Culture”, this working paper turns to another post-colonial nation, Cape Verde, and analyzes two case studies that shed light upon how the intersection between race and gender produces specific forms of violence in the bodies and souls of men and women from continental Africa living in the capital, Praia. The first case examines personal stories of young women who are exploited for their domestic labor; while their relationship with their employer is presented using the discourse of kinship, their situation is more akin to slavery. The second case looks at attacks on and murder of Bissau-Guinean men; the brutality of the violence and the lack of public attention demonstrate how some lives are considered more valuable than others. Both cases illustrate the degree to which race and gender continue to operate as social markers of domination in the lives of immigrant populations who are seen as blacker than the locals in Cape Verde.

Working Papers v. 213 (2024): 1-24.

By Andrea Nichols and  Erin Heil

The current academic discourse examining human trafficking is lacking in focus on survivors with a disability. The increased likelihood of abuse experienced by people with a disability is well documented in the research literature, and a small body of research indicates heightened sex trafficking victimization of minor girls with a disability. Yet, very little research specifically examines sex and/or labor trafficking of people with a disability, and no systematic research analyzes prosecuted cases of trafficking with disability as the focal point of analysis. Drawing from a content analysis of 18 federal and 17 state cases of human trafficking, the current study specifically aimed to increase our understandings of sex and labor trafficking involving survivors with a disability. The findings revealed the following patterns and themes: 1) the type of trafficking experienced (sex, labor, or both), 2) whether state level or federal cases 3) the types of disabilities identified among trafficking survivors, 4) the nature of the relationship between traffickers and survivors, 5) methods of recruitment, 6) case outcomes; and 7) demographic characteristics of traffickers and survivors (e.g., gender/citizenship). Implications include prevention efforts in the form of developmentally grounded sex education and healthy relationships curriculum for survivors with an intellectual disability, as well as specialized anti-trafficking training for those in legal, healthcare, and social services that is inclusive of people with a disability  

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence: Vol. 7: Iss. 1, Article 1.

By American Immigration Council

Under United States law, any person who is physically present in the United States or who “arrives” at the border must be given an opportunity to seek asylum. Despite this clear command, in recent years U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) officers stationed at the southern border have turned away thousands of people who come to ports of entry seeking protection, including through a practice known as “metering” (or “queue management”). This has occurred even as officials issued pleas to asylum seekers to go to ports of entry and request asylum, rather than crossing the border between the ports of entry to ask for asylum. Under metering, CBP officers assert a lack of capacity to refuse to inspect and process asylum seekers, requiring them to wait for weeks or months in Mexico just for the opportunity to start the asylum process. This practice began as early as 2016 at certain ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border but its use expanded significantly border-wide during the Trump administration. Metered individuals followed the U.S. government’s instructions to wait to seek asylum without crossing the border between ports of entry but have been left to languish in Mexico indefinitely or return home and abandon their hopes of applying for asylum in the United States.

Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, 2021. 5 p.

By The Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, September 2024

This report is authored by the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project (Florence Project) a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that was founded in 1989 and provides free legal and social services to adults and unaccompanied children facing immigration removal in Arizona. In 2023, the Florence Project served 17,514 unaccompanied immigrant children detained in federal facilities referred to as shelters in Arizona. This report summarizes 314 complaints made by unaccompanied immigrant children ages 5 to 17 in the span of 15 months about conditions they experienced while in U.S. Border Patrol custody, a subagency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Children reported experiencing a broad range of abuse and mistreatment, including verbal and physical abuse, hunger, a lack of hygiene products and lack of access to medical care. The report makes concerning findings, including a continuation of severe verbal and physical abuse of children. Nearly 4 in 10 children in this report experienced verbal abuse and 1 in 10 experienced physical abuse. Children reported they were subjected to vile language, derogatory names, and threatened with deportation or jail. Children also reported being pushed, kicked, and punched, and that some agents brandished weapons to instill fear. U.S. law defines unaccompanied immigrant children as persons under 18 who lack lawful immigration status and who do not have a parent or legal guardian in the U.S. available to provide care and physical custody.ii In our decades of experience, unaccompanied immigrant children leave their homes and travel to the U.S. for a variety of reasons, including to seek protection from gang or government warfare, violence within their own home, extreme poverty, and/or to reunify with family. Unaccompanied children are generally apprehended by CBP near the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2002, Congress charged the U.S. Department of Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) with the care and custody of unaccompanied immigrant children in order to comply the Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA).iii The FSA requires that unaccompanied children not be placed in adult detention centers and instead must be held in the less restrictive ORR shelters with a prompt process to be placed in the least restrictive setting through reunification with sponsors. In 2008, Congress expanded and codified the rights, including that CBP “shall transfer” an unaccompanied immigrant child to ORR custody “no later than 72 hours” after identifying them.iv Congress understood that CBP, a law enforcement agency, is not equipped to care for children. The Florence Project has long been alarmed by reports of abuse and mistreatment while in Border Patrol custody. We have assisted children in filing hundreds of individual complaints and authored three prior extensive reports in 2009, 2014, and 2022. vi Despite hundreds of complaints about this abuse, the agencies charged with  oversight of CBP have failed to make meaningful change and to stop the ongoing abuse.

Tucson, AZ:  Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project.,  2024. 13p. 

By Rebecca Nhep and Kate van Doore

Orphanage trafficking is a type of child trafficking that involves the recruitment and/ or transfer of children to residential care institutions, for a purpose of exploitation and/ or profit. It typically takes place in developing countries where child protection services systems are highly privatised, under-regulated, and primarily funded by overseas sources. In such circumstances, residential care is used prolifically and inappropriately as a response to child vulnerability, including lack of access to education.

THE RISE AND FALL OF FRAUDULENT INTERCOUNTRY ADOPTIONS

The trafficking of children into orphanages in Cambodia was originally associated with fraudulent intercountry adoptions in the late 1990s. Orphanages were a transit destination where trafficked infants would be transferred, harboured and represented as orphans eligible for intercountry adoption. Each child would attract fees of up to USD $20,000 paid by adoptive parents. A number of stakeholders profit from this practice, including adoption agencies, brokers, buyers, child recruiters, officials involved in issuing fraudulent documentation and the directors of the institutions where children were harboured. Evidence of the widespread practice of trafficking of Cambodian children for intercountry adoption came to light in 2001. The industry was largely shut down as countries, most notably the US, closed their borders to adoptions from Cambodia. The primary US adoption agency and adoption broker at the centre of the largest racket were prosecuted in the US under visa fraud and money laundering charges. In Cambodia, human trafficking charges were brought against three orphanage staff involved in the trafficking; however, none progressed to prosecution, with charges in all three cases ‘quietly dropped’.

Since then, the Law on Intercountry Adoption and supporting regulations have been introduced in Cambodia to meet its obligations under the Hague Convention aimed at eradicating fraudulent international adoptions. Specific offences were also included in the 2008 Criminal Code to enable the prosecution of prohibited conduct with respect to the facilitation of adoption. Adoption was also included as a specific purpose for trafficking offences in the Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation 2008 (TSE Law). Intercountry adoption from Cambodia remains largely closed whilst critical child protection and care system reforms are implemented. Such reforms are necessary to ensure intercountry adoption is used as an option of last resort for children for whom all domestic possibilities have been genuinely explored and exhausted.

Brisbane: Law Futures Centre, Griffith University , 2021. 67p.

By Anouar Boukhars

Terrorism, weapons smuggling, drug and human trafficking, and migration flows are driving many North African countries to bolster their border defenses. Current tactics include building miles of trenches, barriers, and fences, as well as employing sophisticated drones and surveillance technology. But will they be effective and at what cost? A close study to answer this question is worthwhile, given the number of countries worldwide either contemplating or adopting such measures.

In the Maghreb region, the efforts of Algeria and Morocco—two antagonistic countries that have gone the furthest to seal themselves off from each other—are falling short. They have had some success in stemming illicit cross-border trade, but smugglers have merely learned to adapt, changing what and how they smuggle and exploiting persistent corruption. Moreover, the security fortifications have worsened the economies of already struggling border regions, fueling protests and leading young smugglers to dabble in drug trafficking. Unless both governments take a more coordinated socioeconomic approach to border security, the isolated communities that populate these neglected peripheries will remain a potential incubator for instability.

Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2019. 13p.

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.