New Journal Research Articles for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies 02/28/2016

• Arrested Truth: Transitional Justice and the Politics of Remembrance in Kosovo

  This article examines the documentation of war crimes and human losses in Kosovo under the conditions of contested transitional justice and ethno-nationalist politics of remembrance. The article argues that the documentation of war crimes in Kosovo was utilized for retributive justice by the international community, for political revenge by former foes, and for power/identity consolidation by local protagonists. Attempting to overcome this suffocation of the past, the new politics of remembrance in Kosovo propagated by civil society groups aspires to liberate the past from ethno-nationalist tendencies by constructing a bottom-up and virtual memorialization. This is deemed to be inclusive for all sides in conflict; indestructible in its virtual and post-material constellation; and distinct with regard to volume and reliability. While civil society-based documentation has the potential to overcome the ethno-nationalist entanglements in Kosovo and to compensate for the inability of international transitional justice mechanisms to deliver justice and truth to victims, its impact on overcoming the past and improving ethnic relations in Kosovo remains questionable. Accordingly, the article illustrates the contextual interplay between material, relational, and virtual forms of remembrance in Kosovo.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• International Politics – Abstract of article: But we don/’t call it /`torture/’! Norm contestation during the US /`War on Terror/’

  International law has become the reference frame that establishes legitimacy for international encounters, but paradoxically and at the same time international law itself has become increasingly contested. This article analyses the relationship between norm acceptance and norm implementation and examines an instance of norm contestation in the context of the US ‘War on Terror’. The focus is on the use of torture or ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ during the Bush Presidency. The so-called ‘torture memos’ that were made public in recent years shed light on different arguments that were used by the government at the time to justify their actions and to show that they were in line with existing international legal obligations. The article seeks to assess the validity of international agreements by analysing compliance and actual meaning (meaning-in-use) of fundamental international human rights norms that are being contested through different interpretations and usages on the domestic level.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• International Politics – Abstract of article: Black sites, /`extraordinary renditions/’ and the legitimacy of the torture taboo

  The revelations the Bush administration employed torture in ‘black sites’ and outsourced torture through the ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme demonstrated how the torture prohibition, or torture taboo, failed to constrain the United States (US) and other complicit states from engaging in torture in the fight against terrorism. Yet despite this violation of the taboo, this article makes the paradoxical argument that studying the taboo’s violation shows the strength of the norm’s legitimacy, not its weakness. The humanitarian pressures from the torture taboo continued to operate on the US even while the norm was being violated, shaping US identity, interests and actions during the ‘war on terror’.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• Unaccompanied minors, migration control and human rights at the EU’s southern border: The role and limits of civil society activism

  Civil society movements can play an important political role in advocating for human rights, including the rights of migrants and migrant children. But successfully asserting their rights is difficult in the domain of migration, even in democracies, and any victories that are achieved can be short-lived. This article examines an initially successful episode of civil society advocacy on behalf of unaccompanied child migrants, drawing on evidence from Spain. We argue that pro-rights civil society organizations were initially able to force the Spanish state to act in accordance with its international human rights obligations in relation to repatriation. But states can learn and adapt. States might seek new venues for migration control and enlist new allies, thereby multiplying the numbers of gate-keepers, for example. In this case, the Spanish state reacted energetically to regain control by working closely with countries of origin, regional governments within Spain, private actors and service delivery NGOs to reassert its authority with regard to repatriation. We use the case to reflect on the difficulties of civil society activism in this issue-area and the obstacles to claiming the legal rights of this community of highly vulnerable children, even in advanced democracies.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• Growth Effects of Remittances in Bangladesh: Is there a U-shaped Relationship? – Hassan – 2016 – International Migration – Wiley Online Library

  This article shows that the effect of remittances on economic growth involves a U-shaped pattern, which is negative initially but later becomes positive. The analysis differs significantly from earlier studies in that it examines important methodological issues on the specification and estimation of the long-run growth effects of remittances by estimating their impact on total factor productivity (TFP) rather than on the growth rate of GDP, using time series data from Bangladesh. The use of single-equation cointegration methods shows that remittances’ effect on long-run growth in Bangladesh is negative and falling until the remittances-to-GDP ratio is roughly eight per cent. The benefits of remittances receipts outweigh their costs and their net effects start to become positive when the ratio exceeds 14 per cent.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• Do asylum seekers and refugees choose destination countries? Evidence from large-scale surveys in Australia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – McAuliffe – 2016 – International Migration – Wiley Online Library

  Abstract

  Some literature depicts refugees as more passive than active when selecting a destination country. We draw on surveys of over 35,000 people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Australia, to show that most potential asylum seekers and refugees of Hazara, Rohingya, Muslim and Tamil backgrounds prefer some destination countries over others and that many refugees from these groups surveyed in Australia specifically had Australia in mind as a destination country. We show how Australia’s asylum seeker policy was a key reason why many refugees chose Australia in 2011 and 2012 and that subsequent restrictive asylum seeker policy changes appear to be reflected in potential asylum seeker considerations in 2014. We find that despite the restrictive asylum seeker policy changes, perceptions of Australia as a highly functioning civil society, relative to other potential destination countries, may explain why Australia remains a country of choice for asylum seekers from west and south Asia.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• Taylor & Francis Online

  This paper addresses several less-explored dimensions of current scholarship on globalisation, migration and transnationalism: north–south migration streams, the role of second-generation ‘heritage migrants’ and the importance of social capital within unequal transnational social fields. We compare two circuits of second-generation migrants, Turk-Germans and Turk-Americans, engaged in ‘intensive transnationalism’ having independently moved to reside in their parents’ homeland. Istanbul becomes the site of homeland return for these distinct streams of educated heritage migrants. Cross-national comparison of the children of the more stigmatised Turk-German ‘guest workers’ with the socially less salient Turk-Americans of middle-class backgrounds offers insight into the way class networks and national capital are distinctly leveraged by adult children with immigrant parents of distinct contexts of homeland exit.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• Immigrants and gender roles: assimilation vs. culture | IZA Journal of Migration | Full Text

  Abstract

  This paper examines evidence on the role of assimilation versus source country culture in influencing immigrant women’s behavior in the United States—looking both over time with immigrants’ residence in the United States and across immigrant generations. It focuses particularly on labor supply but, for the second generation, also examines fertility and education. We find considerable evidence that immigrant source country gender roles influence immigrant and second generation women’s behavior in the United States. This conclusion is robust to various efforts to rule out the effect of other unobservables and to distinguish the effect of culture from that of social capital. These results support a growing literature that suggests that culture matters for economic behavior. At the same time, the results suggest considerable evidence of assimilation of immigrants. Immigrant women narrow the labor supply gap with native-born women with time in the United States, and, while our results suggest an important role for intergenerational transmission, they also indicate considerable convergence of immigrants to native levels of schooling, fertility, and labor supply across generations.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• Monitoring, endogenous comparative advantage, and immigration | IZA Journal of Migration | Full Text

  Abstract

  We propose a theory of free movement of goods and labor between two economies in the presence of moral hazard. Each country produces two final goods where the productive efforts of workers cannot be perfectly observed, or verified only in the complex industry. We show that national institutional quality and the system of the early childhood care and education determine the pattern of international trade. However, individuals’ decisions to emigrate depend only on the national institutional quality, where the country with more developed institutions serves as the host country of immigrants. We conclude that international labor movement promotes international trade.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• (Why) are immigrants unhappy? | IZA Journal of Migration | Full Text

  Abstract

  Recent studies suggest that migrants may be less satisfied with their ‘new’ lives than members of the host population and worry that this may be driven by cultural factors, such as feelings of not belonging. Motivated by this concern, this paper analyses the life satisfaction of immigrants once settled in the host country. We rely on the German Socio-Economic Panel’s immigrant sample for the years 1984–2010 and find that while immigrants are less satisfied than natives, this difference can be explained by factors related to economic integration, such as the details of their employment conditions, rather than cultural factors such as feelings of not belonging, which often loom large in the public mind.

  JEL codes: J15, K37, O15
  Keywords
  Integration Subjective well-being Segregation Citizenship law

  tags:newjournalarticles

• Kids in the Middle. How Children of Immigrants Negotiate Community Interactions for Their Families: International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care: Vol 11, No 4

  Reviewer(s):

  Sara Bojarczuk (Sara Bojarczuk is PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.)
  Citation:
  Sara Bojarczuk, (2015) “Kids in the Middle. How Children of Immigrants Negotiate Community Interactions for Their Families”, International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care, Vol. 11 Iss: 4, pp.299 – 300
  DOI
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJMHSC-11-2014-0045
  Downloads:
  The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 7 times since 2015

  Review Number:
  2015/1
  Review Subject:
  Kids in the Middle. How Children of Immigrants Negotiate Community Interactions for Their Families Rolando Tomasini and Luk van Wassenhove
  Publisher Name:
  Rutgers University Press
  Place of Publication:
  NJ
  Publication Year:
  2014
  Publisher:
  Emerald Group Publishing Limited

  tags:newjournalarticles

• Border displacements. Challenging the politics of rescue between Mare Nostrum and Triton

  This article deals with this ongoing spatial and political recrafting of the Mediterranean sea as a space of migration governmentality. It retraces the recent political and spatial transformations occurred with the starting of the military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum in the channel of Sicily and then the handover to the Triton operation coordinated by Frontex. The two specific angles from which it tackles this issue are the politics of and over life that is at stake in the government of migration at sea and the politics of visibility that underpins it. In the first section it analyses the politics and the scene of rescue that has been put into place with the start of Mare Nostrum, tacking stock of the re-articulation of military and humanitarian technologies for governing and containing migrant movements. Then, it discusses the recent transformations occurred with Triton operation and the effects on the level of political actions undertaken by activist migrant groups. The article moves on by taking into account the peculiar politics of visibility that is at stake in the government of migration in the Mediterranean.

  tags:newjournalarticles

• (Re)placing migrants’ mobility: A multi-method approach to integrating space and mobility in the study of migration

  In recent years, studies of migration have given greater attention to spatiality, yet its influence on migrants’ identities and forms of attachment remain underexplored. Drawing on research conducted with migrants in Chinese cities, this paper proposes a new methodological strategy to explore migrants’ everyday spatial experiences. The strategy combines cognitive mapping, walking interviews, and self-photography, bringing together three interrelated fields of qualitative inquiry—the visual, the verbal, and the representative. The multi-method approach seeks to capture the growing complexity of migration-related spatial references, and the growing heterogeneity of the migrant population and the environments they encounter. This combination also provides access to elements of spatial experience previously missing, subdued, or socially internalized within traditional narratives; while the inherent mobility of the methods highlight meanings, representations, and identities that are themselves mobile and dynamic. The understandings of migration that result better incorporate migrants’ spatial practices and challenge the omnipresent categorization of migrants and the places associated with migration in dominant development discourse and policies.

  tags:newjournalarticles

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