Migration
Towards a Child Rights-Based Assessment Tool to Evaluate National Responses to Migrant and Refugee Children
This paper examines a range of tools, guidelines and formats available to monitor and evaluate various aspects of national responses to migrant children and argues for the need to integrate them into a single coherent, child focused, rights-based framework. Their current disparate application leaves gaps in the child’s protective environment and is not consistent with a holistic, child rights-based approach. Building on an analytical framework adopted by the Council of Europe in March 2018 to support a child-rights based approach by local and regional authorities to migrant and asylum-seeking children, the paper puts forward for consideration an integrated evaluation framework that incorporates and links existing practice models in order to ensure quality child-centred monitoring at each and every stage of the migration process.
COVID-19 and People on the Move
COVID-19 (coronavirus) leaves few lives and places untouched. But its impact is harshest for those groups who were already in vulnerable situations before the crisis. This is particularly true for many people on the move, such as migrants in irregular situations, migrant workers with precarious livelihoods, or working in the informal economy, victims of trafficking in persons as well as people fleeing their homes because of persecution, war, violence, human rights violations or disaster, whether within their own countries — internally displaced persons (IDPs) — or across international borders — refugees and asylum-seekers. The e-book for this policy brief has been converted into an accessible format for the visually impaired and people with print reading disabilities. It is fully compatible with leading screen-reader technologies such as JAWS and NVDA.
Love is Not a Passport to Sweden
This paper investigates how women’s right to live free from violence operates in the context of insecure immigration status. It is based on qualitative research addressing intimate partner violence against women with insecure immigration status in England and Sweden, analysed within a human rights theoretical framework. Empirical data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 31 survivors from 14 different non–European Union countries and 57 professional stakeholders from local, national, and international organizations. The paper identifies a tension between human rights and immigration control that is present in theory, policy frameworks, and migrant women’s lived experiences. It contends that this tension has led to a proliferation of rights’ statuses for migrant women who are exposed to intimate partner violence. A solution is offered in the form of an expansionist model of human rights whereby presence in a territory is the basis for recognition as a rights-bearing subject.
Reconfiguring Care Relationships
Migration reconfigures care relationships as people adapt to employment, entitlements and care practices in a new context. While a rich genre of analysis of “global care chains” draws attention to how disadvantaged female migrant care workers from the global South fill the “care deficit” in high-income countries, these analyses tend to privilege care services and arrangements in the global North and the migrant as the provider of care. In contrast, there is little research on how migrants from developing countries meet their own and their families’ care needs, irrespective of whether they are paid care workers in the destination. In particular, we know little about the care needs of unskilled or semi-skilled migrant workers and refugees who occupy the less privileged circuits of contemporary global mobility and who are often marginalized from state social policies that address care needs. This paper offers an analysis of the effects of migration on the care needs and relationships of Ethiopian migrant mothers and their families and their access to childcare in destination countries. Specifically, it draws on empirical research on the experiences of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers who have children while in Lebanon and the experiences of Ethiopian women refugees with children who have resettled in Australia.
Neither Heroines nor Victims
Circular labour migration is frequently portrayed as a gender-neutral phenomenon. Despite the growing literature on the feminization of migration, scholarly and policy literature is often gender-blind. In Nepal, over the last decade, the share of women migrant workers has significantly increased. The National Population Census 2011 shows that about 13 per cent of the absentee population is composed of women. Due to prevailing patriarchal norms and values and skewed policy, female labour migration is traditionally stigmatized and associated with sex work or equated to trafficking. However, with rising demands for cheap labour (particularly domestic work) in destination countries (for example, the Persian Gulf), continued inadequacy of rural employment opportunities and changing aspirations, women are increasingly migrating independently. Pourakhi, an organization established by women returnees in 2003, has collected more than 1,700 case studies on returnee women migrant workers in Nepal. This paper delves into 307 of these, as well as a consultation with 14 returnee migrant women from 14 districts, to better understand the reintegration process. Rather than focusing on a (necessary) critique of labour markets and on the high human, social and financial costs of migration, this study aims at giving voice to the subjectivities of migrant women in Nepal, as less attention has been paid to this aspect. It unpacks their reasons for undertaking international migration and their struggle for capability to secure a livelihood in the context of globalization.