The legal definition of a refugee as established by the 1951 Refugee Convention (pictured above) in the aftermath of World War II determines who receives humanitarian assistance from international organizations. Although it was intended for the legal definition to expand over time, multilaterals have been operating under the same working definition for nearly 70 years.… Read More Caught in the in-between: Why the legal definition of “refugee” is limiting and why we may not want to change it

The opportunities and challenges of integration and assimilation look very different for children of immigrants as it does for their immigrant families. The contemporary experiences of migrants in the process of integration and assimilation are redolent to those of migrants in the past; immigrants today face opportunities and challenges like those that were faced by… Read More The half-arrival trap: inter-generational impacts government policies have on immigrant integration and assimilation

This article uses three works: one looking at the theoretical reasons for initial and sustained migration patterns; one qualitatively explaining the North African and Eastern European mass migration to France during the country’s reconstruction period following WWII; and the other body of work is a quantitative study examining residential patterns of French neighborhoods between 1968-2007.… Read More Less than human: The human costs of socially labeling migrants

My first of many pieces in the new category on immigration in the United States. I highly recommend the book, On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South, as well as the study,”The rise and fall of a micro-learning region: Mexican immigrants and construction in center-south Philadelphia” by Natasha Iskander, et al. (link… Read More Who are immigrant workers?