Publications
Daniel G Maxwell and Kirsten Gelsdorf highlight the origins, growth, and specific challenges to, humanitarian action and examine why the contemporary system functions as it does. This book offers a nuanced understanding of the way humanitarian action operates in the 21st century. It will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in international human rights law, disaster management and international relations.
Investment in early childhood programming is increasing in response to convincing evidence on the benefits of supporting the social, emotional, and cognitive development of young children. As countries around the world work to expand access to early learning opportunities, it is critical to ensure the quality of both the services and children’s experiences. Highquality programs can improve outcomes for children and set them on a positive trajectory in life. Low-quality programs, in contrast, are unlikely to generate the desired outcomes and can even be detrimental to children’s development.
The profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of families around the world cannot be underestimated. Many parents and other caregivers are impacted directly by loss of critical income and livelihoods, access to childcare, schools and other family services, an increase in violence in the household, and the heightened stress and uncertainty all these challenges bring.
The aim of this article is to investigate whether or not and how immigration policies affect immigration flows. Such policy impacts have hardly been investigated so far as the necessary data is lacking. For the first time, two new datasets are combined to systematically measure immigration policies and bilateral migration flows for 33 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) destination countries from over 170 countries of origin over the period 1982–2010. The study finds that immigration policies have an important effect on immigration flows and thus that states are able to control their borders. To some extent the control capacities depend on other factors in attracting or deterring immigrants. The article shows that the deterrence effect of restrictive immigration policies increases when unemployment rates are high. It appears that, in these contexts, states start to care more about effectively protecting their national economy. Moreover, policies are more effective for migrant groups from former colonies or when the stock of this group is already high in a destination country. In these circumstances, information on border regulations are more easily disseminated, which in turn makes them more effective.
Discussions of immigration policy and reform in the United States over the last 40 years almost always focus on Congressional gridlock and inaction. Despite the salience of immigration in public opinion polls and despite innumerable legislative proposals, Congress has largely shied away from the issue, passing no comprehensive immigration reform legislation since the early 1990s. With Congress stuck at an immigration impasse for years, presidential administrations from both parties have taken crucial actions that regulate both inflows of new immigrants and the status of immigrants already in the United States. While these actions receive little scholarly attention, executive actions on immigration have a long history, and may have widereaching and unexpected (or unintended) consequences.
A framework to guide the pledging process for the first Global Refugee Forum and subsequent initiatives to meet the 2030 education commitments of the Global Compact on Refugees.
Recent changes to US immigration policy have resulted in a crisis on the US/Mexico border. In January 2019, the Trump administration launched a new immigration policy. The “Migration Protection Protocols” (MPP)—known as the “Remain in Mexico” program—sends asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry on the US-Mexico border back to Mexico to wait for the duration of their US immigration proceedings. Since then, more than 60,000 asylum seekers have been sent back to Mexico, where they live in poor conditions—many in makeshift tent camps, face violent crime and kidnapping, and depend on support from volunteers (Barnes, 2020).
Over 168 million people across 50 countries are estimated to need humanitarian assistance in 2020 [1]. Response to epidemics in complex humanitarian crises—such as the recent cholera epidemic in Yemen and the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo—is a global health challenge of increasing scale [2]. The thousands of Yemeni and Congolese who have died in these years-long epidemics demonstrate the difficulty of combatting even well-known pathogens in humanitarian settings. The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) may represent a still greater threat to those in complex humanitarian crises, which lack the infrastructure, support, and health systems to mount a comprehensive response. Poor governance, public distrust, and political violence may further undermine interventions in these settings.
Existing literature on cross-national variation in violence has paid little attention to the transnational transmission of crime. One such channel is the forced return of migrants with a penal record in their country of temporary residence. Responding to this research gap, we study the effect of US deportations of convicts on levels of violent crime in deportees’ country of origin for a cross-country panel of up to 123 countries covering the years 2003 to 2014. We find a strong and robust effect of the deportation of convicts on homicide rates in countries of origin, which is to a large degree driven by deportations to Latin America and the Caribbean. An additional inflow of ten deportees with a prior criminal history per 100,000 increases expected homicide rates by roughly two. In addition to controlling for country-specific fixed effects, we provide evidence on a causal effect using an instrumental variable approach, which exploits spatial and time variation in migrant populations’ exposure to state-level immigration policies in the United States.
Immigration—especially across the southern border of the United States—is perhaps the dominant political, economic, and cultural issue of Donald Trump’s presidency. While economic incentives to migrate are important factors, widespread violence in migrants’ countries of origin also plays a significant role in explaining the surge in the demand for entry into the United States. In surveys of migrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador— almost 40 percent cited attacks or threats to themselves or family as the reason for leaving home. Violence pushed many to join the Central American migrant caravans that crossed Mexico in autumn 2018 on their way to the United States. This is hardly surprising as these three countries are among the most violent places in the world. In Honduras and El Salvador, homicide rates were at 64 and 109, respectively, per 100,000 in the year 2015, compared with an average rate of 1.2 in high‐income OECD countries. In parallel with increasing violence in these countries, the number of refugees and asylum seekers from the three Northern Triangle countries has increased tenfold between 2011 and 2017. Many of the almost 200,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America apprehended in the United States between 2011 and 2016 were fleeing sustained rises in homicide rates in their communities of origin.