Articles
6/20/19, The Guardian: Snapshot of hope: child refugees share their dreams through Polaroids – in pictures
6/20/19, New York Times: ‘These People Aren’t Coming From Norway’: Refugees in a Minnesota City Face a Backlash
“In this predominantly white region of central Minnesota, the influx of Somalis, most of whom are Muslim, has spurred the sort of demographic and cultural shifts that President Trump and right-wing conservatives have stoked fears about for years. The resettlement has divided many politically active residents of St. Cloud, with some saying they welcome the migrants.
But for others, the changes have fueled talk about “white replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory tied to the declining birthrates of white Americans that has spread in far-right circles and online chat rooms and is now surfacing in some communities.”
6/19/19, Voice of America: ‘One Journey’ Aims to Shift Narrative About Refugees – One Heart at a Time
6/19/19, BoingBoing: Multilingual “red cards” to help immigrants assert their rights during ICE shakedowns
6/19/19, KearneyHub: Immigrants sue over wait for files to fight deportation
6/19/19, New York Times: Immigration Agency Says It Plans Deportation Operation Aimed at Undocumented Families
6/19/19, The Guardian: More than 70 million people now fleeing conflict and oppression worldwide
“An estimated 13.6 million people were newly displaced in 2018, according to the report. Last year was marked by sharp increases in people fleeing the economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.
More than 4 million Venezuelans have now fled their country, according to the UN, with many travelling towards Latin America and the Caribbean. This marks a huge rise on 2015, when the number stood at about 695,000. It is the biggest exodus in the region’s recent history, and has left asylum procedures completely overwhelmed.”
6/18/19, New York Times: As Trump Threatens Deportations, Immigrant Communities Brace for New Arrests
6/18/19, New York Times: What It Looks Like to Care for Separated Migrant Children
6/17/19, Vox: Democrats don’t need to tack right on immigration to win
6/17/19, Guernica: Viet Thanh Nguyen: Writing to Re-member
6/17/19, New York Times: Landlords Oppose Trump Plan to Evict Undocumented Immigrants
6/16/19, PBS NewsHour: Ahead of World Refugee Day, Chobani founder appeals to CEOs
6/16/19, New York Times: A New Migrant Surge at the Border, This One From Central Africa
6/16,19, CNN: Why Trump’s immigration plans are bad for America’s elderly and disabled
6/13/19, Portland Press Herald: Portland’s new asylum seekers settle in as community offers help
6/13/19, The New Republic: Asylum Seekers Struggle to Navigate Trump’s Broken Border Policy
Opinion
6/19/19, New York Times: ‘If You’ve Built a Chaos Factory, You Can’t Dodge Responsibility for the Chaos’
6/17/19, The Guardian: Is showing compassion to migrants a crime?
6/17/19, The Hill: Children at southern border are facing a public health crisis
6/15/19, The Guardian: Are only certain kinds of people deemed worthy of our compassion?
“The authorities are deliberately seeking to erase the distinction between people trafficking, human smuggling and acts of solidarity; to suggest that providing food and water, or rescuing someone from drowning, is of the same character as coercing people across borders to exploit them as forced labour or sex workers. It’s a perversion of the legal system and a warping of our moral sensibility.
It’s an approach that suggests that only certain kinds of people are deserving of humanitarian aid. Had Warren been helping Americans or Klemp rescuing Europeans, they would have been hailed as heroes. Their crime was to help the wrong kind of human beings – those wearing the wrong colour skin, believing in the wrong God, possessing the wrong passport or no passport at all.”
Publications
The Guardian Books Podcast: What is it like being a refugee? with Pajtim Statovci and Dina Nayeri
National Geographic Society: Remembering Refuge
“How might a history of the Canada-US border, as recounted by people crossing it to seek refuge, change the ways we see and understand migration and borders today? At a time when the public is inundated with alarmist narratives about migrants and borders, it is more urgent than ever to focus on the experiences of people who have been displaced multiple times.
Remembering Refuge is an archive and multimedia site that centres the experiences of refugees as narrators of key periods of this border’s history. Through oral history interviews with Haitians, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who crossed the US-Canada border between 1980 and 2018, we seek to draw out the “unofficial” stories of the border, ones not found in official archives such as government documents, media accounts, or the accounts of humanitarian workers.”
Refugee Studies Centre: New ‘Rethinking Refuge’ platform launched today
“With global displacement receiving increased attention, robust relevant research and new perspectives on refugees and forced migration are needed. The new Rethinking Refuge platform from the Refugee Studies Centre provides short, research-based articles aimed at rethinking refugee issues from a variety of angles, such as politics, international relations, ethics, law, history, and anthropology. The platform seeks to bridge the gap between scholarly research, policy-making, and public understanding, and in so doing develop a research agenda able to engage meaningfully with the challenge of forced displacement in the 21st century. The articles fall under six core themes, each hugely relevant to the international refugee regime today: refugee protection, emergency and crisis, mobility, refugee agency, humanitarianism, and refugees’ economic lives.”