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Abstract
Throughout history, people in fear of persecution, violence, war, and other serious harm had to abandon their property and livelihoods to relocate to safer places. The most widely used term to refer to such persons is “refugees”. History abounds with stories of forced migration. One key element explaining the changed scope and nature of both conflict and persecution related displacement and at the same time shaping our very understanding of “refugeehood” is the emergence of citizenship as the primary social, economic, and political status marker in the nineteenth century across Western Europe, replacing earlier statuses and affiliations. Since the establishment of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) some 70 years ago, UNHCR has offered protection and assistance to tens of millions of refugees and internally displaced persons, the latter mostly in cooperation with other agencies.
... Alexander Betts (2013) has proposed the term 'survival migration' to describe different types of migrants in precarious situations who have a human rights-based entitlement not to return to their countries of origin but do not fit the legal category of refugee. In this book, depending on the context, 'forced migrant' or 'refugee' may refer either to a legal and policy category that is normative in nature, or to a more descriptive and empirical understanding of refugees and the drivers of migration (see Czaika & Kraler, 2020). Our focus on forced migrants refines and adds to the previous literature on transnational families and shows how migrants' legal and social positioning impacts their opportunities to conduct transnational family life. ...
This chapter introduces the central conceptual and theoretical framework of the volume, which is the nexus between everyday security, forced migration and family separation. We discuss the problems with the term ‘refugee’ and justify everyday security as an approach. We then present the global and transnational scope of the book, which enables us to rebalance previous scholarship on families and migration. Finally, we provide a brief roadmap of the contents of the book.KeywordsForced migrantRefugeeEveryday securityFamily separationTransnational family
As children with refugee backgrounds continue to enroll in schools worldwide, attention to their educational needs and experiences has increased. In this study, we analyze the extent that schools and classrooms provide refugee students with equitable educational opportunities compared to students who are not refugees, and whether their teachers feel prepared for and engaged in culturally responsive instructional practices. Using survey data on 130,803 teachers and 8,054 schools sampled from 41 predominantly distant resettlement host countries in the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey, we find lower levels of resources, safety, and social inclusion for refugee students but higher levels of preparation and instructional practices in multicultural education among their teachers. The results have policy implications for supporting students with refugee backgrounds in different school contexts.
In the first part of the chapter, we review the main historical stages and turning points in the use of the forced/voluntary dyad in the global governance of mobility. We approach the development of the international refugee regime and its connection to migration politics critically across space and time. We look at the emergence of a global forced migration regime and, in particular, the category of forced migration as a regulatory tool, examining its status as a category arising from specific circumstances and systematically enmeshed with ad hoc migration management tools. In the second part, we focus on more recent developments, and the ways in which contemporary global governance of migration has contributed to the proliferation of new categories of management and interpretation which reflect the increasing importance of forced migration but have nevertheless further blurred these distinctions. In the third part, we focus on Western democracies and the way in which, in recent decades, governance of both forced and non-forced migration has worked together to produce forced mobility and migrant immobilization. These recent policy developments in Europe and beyond reflect an increasingly clear change in the global governance of mobility. Forcedness is no longer, or no longer simply, the condition under which people leave, or the result of pressures encountered during the journey. It characterises the policy objectives of most destination states, as well as a number of other governments which have partnered with them to contain mobility globally (Landau 2019). These bodies increasingly use coercion to immobilise or displace people, and as a result governments and international organizations contribute, de facto, to the blurring of the already fragile distinction between forced and voluntary mobility.
In this chapter we provide a critical appraisal of data collection and statistical data production on migrants and migration, indicators used to identify migrants, and the different uses of migration statistics for political and scientific purposes. We will start off by a brief review of the politics of statistical data and then provide a short review of the history of data collection on migration and international efforts to harmonise migration statistics on the international level. We will then present different ways to measure migration, core concepts, and definitions used to measure migration. In the subsequent section, we will describe different data collection methods and sources used to produce statistics on migration, including possible ‘new’ data sources for measuring migration, often referred to as ‘big data’. In the last section, we will briefly demonstrate different ways of analysing aggregate migration data.
TRAFIG aims to contribute to the development of alternative solutions to protracted displacement that are tailored to the needs and capacities of displaced persons. This working paper contains our central concepts and key terms. We make use of the concept of social figurations as the theoretical foundation for our research. We understand figurations as dynamic social constellations between interdependent individuals that are produced in and through interactions and transactions. On this basis, we redefine protracted displacement as a figuration, in which displaced people's capabilities and opportunities are severely limited for prolonged periods of time. Multiple structural forces constrain them from using their capacities and making free choices: enduring displacing forces hinder return; marginalising forces prevent local integration; immobi-lising forces block chances to seek a future elsewhere. Protracted displacement is, however, much less static and fixed than commonly perceived. Displaced persons do have agency. They develop diverse strategies to cope with difficult situations and navigate through governance regimes of aid and asylum-and thereby change them. To comprehend the dynamics of protracted displacement a deeper understanding of displaced people's perspectives, capacities and practices and an acknowledgement of their everyday lives that often transgress places and territories is necessary. Translocal connectivity and human mobility can serve as resources to cope with and move out of protracted displacement. Developing new approaches to protracted displacement requires a move beyond the narrow frame of the conventional durable solutions (return, local integration , resettlement). A first step towards formulating alternatives, we suggest, is to recognise and effectively build upon displaced people's own preferences as well as their local and translocal networks. A key question then is, how they use multiple interconnected pathways to enhance their protection and livelihood security.
The study expands on the outcomes of the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) and the 2016 call by the UN General Assembly for humanitarian and development actors to work towards collective outcomes. It examines in more detail why the New Way of Working is critical to reverse the trend of more and more IDPs living in protracted displacement and what needs to be done to achieve this outcome. It conceptualizes the notion of protracted internal displacement; describes the impacts of such displacement; identifies key reasons why internal displacement may become protracted; describes in detail what is needed to achieve collective outcomes that prevent or address and reduce protracted displacement; and ends with a series of recommendations. Case studies on Colombia, DRC, Philippines; Somalia and Ukraine are annexed.
The global refugee population in 2003 is more than 12 million. Over the last 15 years, Europe has seen the arrival of millions of individuals who have sought asylum within individual Member States. Despite the fact that the top ten nationalities arriving in European countries are from countries which have seen high levels of violence, oppression and conflict, asylum seekers have been treated with increasingly contempt and disdain by policy makers and the public alike.
States of Conflict undertakes for the first time an empirical analysis of the overall conditions in the countries from which asylum seekers originate. It asks some critical questions about the causes of forced migration and its consequences for patterns of migration to Europe. It also assesses the role of the European Commission in reducing the number of asylum seekers arriving at its borders.
With more than a million migrants reaching Europe, 2015 has become known as the year of Europe’s migration crisis. The persistence and intensification of crises in other parts of the world fuelled the largest movement of migrants and refugees into Europe since World War II. With some exceptions, the European response has been guided by strategies of containment, restriction and deterrence. Rather than welcoming, settling and integrating the new arrivals, many EU member states have tried to drive them away from their borders through an escalation of restrictive migration policies designed to stop people coming in the first place.
This report and policy briefing aims to increase understanding of the journeys made by migrants. Based on in-depth interviews with more than 50 migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who have recently arrived in four European cities (Berlin, London, Madrid and Manchester), it explores: the journeys migrants take; the factors that drive them; and the capacity of destination country migration policies to influence people’s decisions, both before their journey begins and along the way.
Based on these findings, the authors make policy recommendations that could lead to the better management of, and a more effective and positive response to, the current migration crisis in Europe.
This paper explores the corruption-migration aspirations nexus in Ukraine. The article demonstrates that corruption continues to pervade all levels of Ukraine’s political and socio-economic system, and provides evidence from the findings of EUMAGINE project. The study reveals robust evidence that apart from the traditional migration driver – income differentials between source and destination countries – corruption is also a driver of migration aspirations. In summary, our analysis draws attention to the fact that Ukraine does not only suffer from a broad variety of negative externalities, diverse institutional inefficiencies and structural problems, but may also lose - as a consequence of the negative socio-economic and political effects of corruption – the human capital necessary for sustainable economic development.
Despite great accomplishments in the migration literature, the determinants of South-South migration remain poorly understood. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper formulates and tests an empirical model for intraregional migration in sub-Saharan Africa within an extended human capital framework, taking into account spatial interaction. Using bilateral panel data between 1980 and 2000, we find that intraregional migration on the subcontinent is predominantly driven by economic opportunities and sociopolitics in the host country, facilitated by geographical proximity. The role played by network effects and environmental conditions is also apparent. Finally, origin and destination spatial dependence should definitely not be ignored.
As with other social processes, forms, scale and directions of migration are heavily influenced by the political, economic, cultural, ecological and the social context in which migration occurs. Yet, not only are actual processes of migration shaped by broader historical forces; also the way migration is perceived, represented, and thus, socially (re-)constructed is similarly subject to history, or more precisely, historically, geographically and culturally variable "paradigms" of thought as well as specific "traditions" of thought within particular societies or social formations (e.g. science). Often, however, discourses on migration are more than just about migration; rather than employed as a factual reference to a particular more or less well defined social phenomenon, references to migration are also made to make sense of the world one lives in, to make political claims, claims over property, claims over one's social status, and to express one's own and others' identities. Thus, neither "mobility" nor "migration" are just empirical categories: they are always also part of wider processes of the production of meaning and thus have important imaginary and symbolical dimensions that neat sociological definitions may ignore, but never entirely dispose of. Current discourses over autochthony and citizenship in various African contexts are a powerful reminder of how narratives over migration and mobility have recently moved to the centre of political discourse and how claims over past or present migrations have turned into a pretext for exclusion. Migration Research are not left unaffected from these wider social processes and similarly engage in the "construction of mobility" - and have done so in the past. Thus, scientific discourses on migration in Africa are closely correlated to wider social discourses about Africa in general, and about processes of economic and social development in Africa in particular. Because research is so closely tied to general images, conceptions, assumptions and perceptions of the continent, the history of “migration research” on Africa displays several idiosyncrasies that put Africanist research on migration somewhat apart from migration research elsewhere.
This article examines what explains the relative attractiveness of West European countries as a destination for asylum seekers. Individuals coming to Western Europe in order to lodge an asylum application are modelled as utility maximizers who choose the destination country that offers the highest net benefit. This benefit is seen as a function of economic attractiveness, generosity of welfare provisions, deterrent policy measures, hostility towards foreigners and asylum seekers, existing asylum communities, colonial and language links as well as geographical proximity. Results from a large dyadic panel over the time period from 1982 to 1999 demonstrate the impact that these fundamental determinants have on asylum destination choice. The implications of the results for the ongoing debates over fair burden-sharing are complex because they provide arguments for two conflicting interpretations of burden-sharing as either financial side payments or the physical reallocation of asylum seekers.
Macrocomparative analysis of trends in governance, conflict, and state fragility, including annual publication of the unique State Fragility Index & Matrix, a cross-national time-series measure of state fragility.
Against the backdrop of push-pull and social network theories on migration and criminological theory on human smuggling, this article tries to answer the questions of why and how Angolan asylum-seekers migrated to the Netherlands since the end of the 1990s. The study shows that the migrants can be described as opportunity seeking migrants, rather than survival migrants. Most migrants made no use of typical human smugglers during their travel. They rather used assistance from their social network and made use of the services of middlemen, called esquemas, on an ad-hoc basis. In this article it is argued that “archetypal” large smuggling organisations in Angola have not evolved because of the existence of these highly informal networks. Support is found that both push-pull and social network theories can contribute to explaining irregular, asylum migration.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created over 50 years ago to be a human rights and advocacy organization. But governments also created the agency to promote regional and international stability and to serve the interest of states. Consequently, the UNHCR has always trod a perilous path between its mandate to protect refugees and asylum seekers and the demands placed upon it by states to be a relevant actor in international relations. A key focus is to examine the extent to which the evolution of the UNHCR has been framed by the crucial events of international politics and international security during the past half century and how, in turn, the actions of the first eight High Commissioners have helped shape the course of world history. A central objective is to analyse the development of national and international refugee policies and actions, placing these within the broader contexts of the changing global political and security environments in the Cold War and post–Cold War eras. One of the core findings is that UNHCR has over‐stretched itself in recent decades and has strayed from its central human rights protection role.
The desire to improve the quality of life and to avoid environmental degradation has prompted human beings to migrate across the world over time. Through a survey regarding the contribution of different drivers on migration out of the shrinking cities of Khuzestan province, the study shows that climate changes and environmental degradation have a considerable influence on out-migration. Overall, these environmental factors exert both direct and indirect effects. The former, which is proven through a quantitative analysis, implies that the climate and environmental changes are so influential that they have compromised the human habitability in this area of the Middle East. Therefore, having reached the risk threshold, people are increasingly persuaded to leave the shrinking cities. Besides, the extent to which environmental changes contribute to the intensification of the economic downturn, unemployment, addiction, corruption, violence, crimes, and the disruption in the urban infrastructures in this region, underscores the importance of the indirect effects of climate and environment changes in migration from the shrinking cities of Khuzestan province.
There is considerable interest among European politicians and policymakers in the factors influencing the destination preferences of refugees and other migrants. Drawing on in‐depth qualitative interviews with more than 250 Syrians, Eritreans and Nigerians, this article examines the destination preferences of those crossing the Mediterranean in 2015 and the extent to which they were aware of, and/or influenced by, policies intended to control and manage their arrival. Our findings question the extent to which deterrence policies have their intended or assumed effects. Preferred destinations are rarely identified solely, or even primarily, on the basis of migration policies devised by different governments with the explicit aim of reducing the number of arrivals. Rather they reflect the “coming together” of a wide range of factors, including access to protection and family reunification, the availability/accuracy of information, the overall economic environment and social networks. Moreover perceptions of migration policies may be more significant than their content as the implications are often not known or misunderstood.
The academic literature largely attributes causes for migration to economic disparities between sending and receiving countries as well as to social networks and the presence family or friends overseas. Studies on political migration motives are mostly related to so-called forced migration, i.e. migration in the case of life-threatening situations, such as civil war and ethnic cleansing. Less attention has been paid to the political circumstances of voluntary migration. The paper at hand investigates this gap in the literature and examines the effect of several political indicators on young people’s intention to move abroad. The quantitative analysis is based on a unique survey data set from four Arab Mediterranean countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia), comprising information on about 8000 respondents aged between 15 and 29. Applying a multinomial logistic regression model, we show that political discontent significantly increases the intentions of young people to migrate. Among others, the perception of democracy and the ability to shape government policies are important determinants of migration intentions. Moreover, we find that the perception of corruption and the experience of violence in everyday life are particularly important in young people’s decision-making process.
By 2015, approximately 2.8 million refugees had arrived in Turkey: approximately 2.5 million from Syria and about 300,000 from other countries. By the end of the year, an estimated 850,000 had moved on to Greece and from there on to other E.U. countries. This onward flow represents a sudden change from 2014 when only 51,000 people exited Turkey for the E.U. This article investigates events in Turkey in 2015 in order to explain these processes. The theoretical framework analyses the interplay of what I describe as secondary root causes for flight. It examines conditions in Turkey as first country of arrival and considers the migration infrastructure as well as political opportunities and constraints. This paper is based on findings from two research projects conducted in 2014 and 2015 which included qualitative interviews with refugees and stakeholders, as well as field observations. It considers the main patterns emerging during this period of both inward and secondary migration, as well as changes over time from 2014 to 2016.
This article examines voluntariness in migration decisions by promoting the acknowledgement of forced and voluntary migration as a continuum of experience, not a dichotomy. Studies on conflict-related migration and migration, in general, remain poorly connected, despite calls for interaction. This reflects the forced–voluntary dichotomy's stickiness within and beyond academia, which is closely connected to the political implications of unsettling it and potentially undermining migrants’ protection rights. We delve into notions of the ‘voluntariness’ of migration and argue for the analytical need to relate evaluations of voluntariness to available alternatives. Drawing on qualitative research with people from Afghanistan and Pakistan coming to Europe, we hone in on three particular renderings of migration: migrants’ own experiences, scholarly qualitative observations and labelling by immigration authorities. Analysing migration as stages in a process: leaving – journey (and transit) – arrival and settlement – return or onward migration, we highlight the specific effects of migration being described as being forced or voluntary. Labelling as ‘forced’ (or not) matters to migrants and states when asylum status is on the line. For migration scholars, it remains challenging to decouple these descriptions from state systems of migration management; though doing so enhances our understanding of the role voluntariness plays in migration decisions.
This book argues that the international refugee regime and its ‘temporary’ humanitarian interventions have failed. Most refugees across the global live in ‘protracted’ conditions that extend from years to decades, without legal status that allows them to work and establish a home. It is contended that they become largely invisible to people based in the global North, and cease to remain fully human subjects with access to their political lives. Shifting the conversation away from the salient discourse of ‘solutions’ and technical fixes within state-centric international relations, the authors recover the subjectivity lost for those stuck in extended exile. The book first argues that humanitarian assistance to refugees remains vital to people’s survival, even after the emergency phase is over. It then connects asylum politics in the global North with the intransigence of extended exile in the global South. By placing the urgent crises of protracted exile within a broader constellation of power relations, both historical and geographical, the authors present research and empirical findings gleaned from refugees in Iran, Kenya and Canada and from humanitarian and government workers. Each chapter reveals patterns of power circulating through the ‘colonial present’, Cold War legacies, and the global ‘war on terror”. Seeking to render legible the more quotidian struggles and livelihoods of people who find themselves defined as refugees, this book will be of great interest to international humanitarian agencies, as well as migration and refugee researchers, including scholars in refugee studies and human displacement, human security, globalization, immigration, and human rights.
We propose a methodology to look at violence in particular, and other aspects of quantitative historiography in general, in a way compatible with statistical inference, which needs to accommodate the fat-tailedness of the data and the unreliability of the reports of conflicts. We investigate the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, incompatible with fat tails and non-robust to minor changes in data formatting and methodologies. There is no statistical basis to claim that “times are different” owing to the long inter-arrival times between conflicts; there is no basis to discuss any “trend”, and no scientific basis for narratives about change in risk. We describe naive empiricism under fat tails. We also establish that violence has a “true mean” that is underestimated in the track record. This is a historiographical adaptation of the results in Cirillo and Taleb (2016).
This book fills a significant lacuna in our understanding of the refugee crisis by analyzing the dynamics that lie behind fifteen years of asylum policies in the European Union. It sheds light on why cooperation has led to reinforced refugee protection on paper but has failed to provide it in practice. Offering innovative empirical, theoretical and methodological research on this crucial topic, it argues that the different asylum systems and priorities of the various Member States explain the EU's lack of initiative in responding to this humanitarian emergency. The author demonstrates that the strong regulators of North-Western Europe have used their powerful bargaining positions to shape EU asylum policies decisively, which has allowed them to impose their will on Member States in South-Eastern Europe. These latter countries, having barely made a mark on EU policies, are now facing significant difficulties in implementing them. The EU will only identify potential solutions to the crisis, the author concludes, when it takes these disparities into account and establishes a functioning common refugee policy. This novel work will appeal to students and scholars of politics, immigration and asylum in the EU.
This book explores the determinants of forced migration and its political implications from an economic perspective. It describes the distribution of burdens from forced migration across countries, and analyzes the strategic interaction of national refugee policies to control refugee flows.
Protracted refugee populations not only constitute over 70% of the world's refugees but are also a principal source of many of the irregular movements of people around the world today. The long-term presence of refugee populations in much of the developing world has come to be seen by many host states in these regions as a source of insecurity.
Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees' needs and rights.
This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world. The 52 state-of-the-art chapters, written by leading academics, practitioners, and policymakers working in universities, research centres, think tanks, NGOs and international organizations, provide a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. The chapters vividly illustrate the vibrant and engaging debates that characterize this rapidly expanding field of research and practice.
Objective. This paper (1) develops a theoretical model of refugee migration that builds on existing research in early warning and preventive diplomacy, and (2) empirically tests this model in order to assess the role played by generalized structural factors in the formation of forced migration. Methods. I regress the number of refugees on several political, economic, and intervening variables, using pooled time-series analysis over a twenty-year period (1971-1990). Refugee data come from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR). Results. The results suggest that, first, measures of institutional human rights violations have weaker predictive power than do measures of generalized violence. Second, civil wars with foreign military interventions are more important in producing large refugee populations and prolonged migrations than are civil wars without outside influence. Third, ethnic rebellion is important as a cause of small refugee migrations, but cannot significantly predict mass exodus. Finally, economic and intervening variables have little impact on predicting refugee migration. Conclusions. These findings contradict the argument that economic hardship is a very important cause of refugee migration. In addition, they support the argument that the level and type of violence determine the likelihood and size of refugee displacement.
Uncertainty and risk perceptions are important elements in the decision-making process about migration. This study outlines a ‘migration prospect theory’, which aims to explain rather short-term fluctuations of migration flows as a consequence of expectation-based adjustment about future economic prospects. I argue that individuals with migration intentions continuously assess general economic prospects, including the labour market situation, at home and abroad in order to form reference points and updates for their migration-related expectations. Consequently, deviations from reference points generate expectation-based utility gains or losses for potential migrants, which affect the value of the migration option. This can lead to a cancellation or procrastination of the individual migration project. Based on an analysis of intra-European migration inflows to Germany between 2001 and 2010, supportive empirical evidence about some key implications of this migration prospect theory is found: first, migration flows respond more strongly to negative than to equal-sized positive economic prospects, indicating loss aversion of potential migrants; second, expectation-based prospects about the future economic situations in the home and potential destination country can both counterbalance or reinforce structural economic incentives based on real economic aggregates and third, migration flows show a diminishing sensitivity for larger fluctuations in expectation-based adjustments of economic prospects.
States and refugee advocates often insist that ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ are separate distinct categories, despite ample evidence
that these labels blur in practice. However, little attention is paid to the fact that in the past refugees were considered
as migrants, with international attention focusing on securing their access to existing migration channels. This article traces
this tangled history of refugee and migrant identities through the 1920s to the 1950s, when ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ categories
were separated. The article argues that treating refugees as migrants in the 1920s and 1930s failed to ensure their protection
from persecution because their admission was entirely dependent upon economic criteria. Separating refugees from migrants
in the 1950s—by providing refugees with an exceptional right to cross borders and claim asylum—helped to address this protection
gap. However, the article shows that in creating a special route for admission deliberately set apart from migration, the
humanitarian discourse that protects refugees from harm actually prevents refugees from finding durable solutions, which depend
upon securing an economic livelihood and not just receiving humanitarian assistance. The article concludes that, in the interests
of refugee solutions, the extent of separation between refugee protection and access to migration should be reversed. Refugee
advocates should reconsider the many innovative lessons both from the Nansen era and the decade of experimentation that preceded
the establishment of today’s contemporary refugee protection framework in 1951. While asylum and the ‘refugee’ category perform
essential roles in admitting those in need of international protection, asylum alone—unlike migration—cannot meet long-term
needs. Reconfiguring understandings of on-going refugee protection to facilitate movement and prioritize the securing of sustainable
livelihoods would both better reflect the reality of people’s movements in conflict and crisis and offer more opportunities
for durable solutions to protracted crises.
Drawing on the rational choice approach and the economic sociology of migration, this article discusses the role of social networks in terms of location-specific social capital. It discusses relations between sociological and economic aspects of migration and outlines the influence of social capital on migration decision-making and chain migration processes. There have been various attempts to measure these effects through empirical migration research, and this article focuses on two such studies. The first example concerns an investigation of migration intentions among Bulgarians in the 2001 Bulgarian census. The second is return migration in the household context of Italian migrants in Germany, based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The main finding is that social capital at the place of destination has positive impacts on emigration intentions and return migration, whereas social capital at the place of residence has negative impacts on return migration.
This paper explores the complex relationship between structure and agency and the way it has been incorporated into migration theory. It argues that attempts to develop a coherent and robust body of migration theory have been thwarted by a structure– agency impasse: some approaches lean too close to functionalism while others veer into structuralism. Those who search for middle ground have tended to draw on Giddens' notion of structuration as a way of articulating the balance between structure and agency in migration processes. The article shows that while structuration is beguiling, it has failed to offer any significant advances for migration theory. This is a result of theoretical weaknesses in structuration theory rather than a failure of its application; this argument is based on a critical realist critique of the dualism inherent in structuration. It is suggested that critical realism offers a fruitful avenue for a more sophisticated analysis of structure and agency in migration processes. The article ends with a brief outline of a critical realist approach to migration theory and argues that this may offer a way around the structure–agency impasse.
In this study we explore why persons flee their homes to become refugees and inter-nally displaced persons. We contend that individuals will tend to flee when the in-tegrity of their person is threatened. Further, we argue that they will flee toward countries where they expect conditions to be better. We conduct statistical analyses using fixed effects least squares, on a pooled cross-sectional time-series data set, consisting of data from 129 countries for the years 1964–1989. Our findings support the conclusion that threats to personal integrity are of primary importance in leading people to abandon their homes. Measures of state threats to personal integrity, dis-sident threats to personal integrity, and joint state–dissident threats each have statis-tically significant and substantively important effects on migrant production. We also find that countries making moves toward democracy tend to have greater num-ber of forced migrants, once other factors are considered. We conclude the analysis by identifying several lucrative areas for further investigation.
The article presents the contribution of Nansen to the international protection of refugees.
A common public perception in OECD countries suggests that refugees are mostly “economic migrants” in search of a better standard of living. Does the empirical record belie this belief? The authors explore that question within a rationalist approach using aggregate-level data that allow them to explore a variety of other covariates of the choice to seek refuge in one country relative to another. In addition to wages, they consider fear of persecution, culture, and the costs of relocation. The results are at odds with the “bogus refugees” image: the effect of average wages is mediated by proximity such that higher average wages are associated with fewer refugees, except among bordering countries. In addition, refugees seek asylum in neighboring countries, especially those at war with their own country or those experiencing a civil war. Those who seek refuge in countries other than their neighbors follow colonial ties.