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Unaccompanied minors are among the most vulnerable undocumented immigrants facing removal proceedings in US immigration court. To avoid being sent back to violence and deprivation in their home countries, unaccompanied minors may apply for asylum or deportation relief for abandoned, abused, or neglected children. The COVID-19 pandemic represented a crisis for American society that also had key impacts on immigrants' lives and their ability to interact with state systems to apply for legal status and claim rights. This paper asks: (1) How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect unaccompanied minors' social vulnerabilities in the US?; and (2) How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact the US immigration bureaucracy and the work of nonprofit advocates who broker unaccompanied minors' interactions with these state systems? Findings show that the pandemic exacerbated unaccompanied minors' social vulnerabilities, with especially adverse effects on indigenous youths, those in legal limbo, unrepresented youths, and those experiencing job loss. The pandemic also disrupted the US immigration bureaucracy and, consequently, the work of advocates who broker immigrants' interactions with these systems, making it more difficult to interact with traumatized youths to obtain necessary information for their cases, meet strict deadlines, and identify their needs. This case study provides lessons on how states and civil society strategically manage a "crisis" and discusses the implications for immigrants' rights and vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media and political discourse in the USA often depict migration as an invasion and people who cross borders as criminals dangerous to the nation. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two places on the USA-Mexico Southern border, we want to analyze how invasion narratives influence practices on-the-ground. We first explore how these narratives inform the views of a border militia who see themselves as protectors of the nation and understand people who cross borders as threats. We then argue that migrant women's presence in areas where the militia operates disrupts the dominant narrative that defines migrants as dangerous, as militia members come to understand migrant women as victims of the Cartel. Despite their innocence, to maintain the narrative's consistency, militia members still consider migrant women criminals for crossing the border "illegally." Finally, we move on to explore the materiality of these xenophobic discourses by examining how migrant women are mistreated at a family immigration detention center. Using the militias as an example, we highlight why political narratives circulate and have meaning for individuals and how discourses have material consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The representation of outsiders is a common theme in Irish drama as a method to interpret and reinterpret Irish national identity. More recently, Irish theatre has explored the meaning and experiences of the "new Irish" (Salis 2010, 43). This paper, through a postcolonial analysis, compares the experiences of the returned Irish migrant in Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) to the fragility of tolerance exhibited toward the "other" by the native Irish in Donal O'Kelly's Asylum! Asylum! (1994) and contrasts asylum to the celebration of Irish residency in The Cambria (2005). The analysis highlights perceptions on migration from Ireland and the complications of immigration to modern-day Ireland. The notions of home, Irishness and citizenship are explored against a backdrop of racism, othering and multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanitarian migration creates, on the one hand, huge benefits for those who are protected from war, persecution and other forms of violence, but, on the other hand, involves also net monetary and social costs for the population in host countries providing protection at the same time. This is the core of the ethical and political problem associated with the governance of humanitarian migration. Against this background, this paper discusses whether the provision of protection can be founded on rational ethical principles. By drawing on a utilitarian approach a simple criterion is derived: Humanitarian migration is welfare improving, as long as the benefits of the marginal humanitarian migrant exceed the marginal costs of providing shelter per refugee. Based on this principle, practical solutions for the admission of humanitarian migrants and the international and European coordination of asylum policies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the capacity of the Administrative Court in Serbia to adjudicate asylum cases, which have been in its jurisdiction since the Court's establishment in 2010. The analysis of its asylum case law is divided into three phases, based on both temporal and substantive criteria. It demonstrates that the best period in handling asylum cases was 2014-2015, during which judgments of the Court significantly improved the decision-making of administrative authorities. Nevertheless, this research has identified several issues that have negatively influenced the work of the Administrative Court in the field of asylum law: the Court's excessive inherited caseload, the influx of new claims, a small number of asylumrelated cases, the insufficient number of judges, the extremely broad jurisdiction of the Court, as well as a lack of specialized panels within the Court. The last problem is identified as the major one and the authors propose concrete steps that should be undertaken in order to increase the capacity of the Administrative Court to deal with asylum cases. Lessons learned from Serbia, as a country in the middle of the Western Balkan migration route, can be useful for all other countries along it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a Department of Health-funded study into the emotional well-being of young people seeking asylum on their own in the UK. It discusses how young people accounted for only partly disclosing information about the circumstances surrounding their quest for asylum and subsequent aspects of their lives since arriving in the UK. Foucault's panoptic mechanism and its focus on the effects of power as dispersed through scrutiny are applied as a theoretical framework to contextualise these experiences. The paper shows that young people's decisions about how much of their current or past lives they share with others are more complex than indicated by earlier research. The paper argues that, for many young people, the predominant impetus for selective disclosure was a desire to retain a degree of agency as they navigated their way through immigration, asylum, social care, health and education systems and simultaneously sought to establish themselves in the social world. These findings have implications for how social care (and other) professionals engage and work with young people seeking asylum alone. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present paper aims at analyzing the Romanian citizens' migration fluxes before and after Romania's joining the European Union. It also focuses on viewing the consolidation process of the institutions that are in charge with immigration issues, with making the European Union Eastern border more secure on the Romanian sector and with the implementation of the community Aquis stipulated in the SCHENGEN Agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the emerging literature on migration studies has demonstrated, migrants who are seeking asylum around the world are increasingly finding that the process is mediated by a variety of new technologies. While the process of digitizing various aspects of migrant protection may promise improvements, new technologies also risk limiting access to asylum for migrants who are unable to overcome these new digital barriers to entry. This article explores the digitization of asylum by examining the context and consequences of the U.S. government's deployment of a smartphone app called CBP One in early 2023 which suddenly became one of the main pathways for migrants to seek asylum along the U.S.–Mexico border. In doing so, this article makes two contributions to the literature on the digitization of asylum. First, the article shows how CBP One, which was not initially designed for asylum seekers, morphed into a tool that took center stage in border enforcement statecraft during a period of exceptional migration policies. Second, this article examines the range of what have been referred to as "glitches" with CBP One, to demonstrate how the app created new digital barriers to asylum. Rather than accepting glitches as mere accidents, this article argues that these glitches are the result of a political decision to force already vulnerable migrants to rely upon experimental technologies that hinder rather than facilitate their asylum-seeking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unaccompanied minors are among the most vulnerable undocumented immigrants facing removal proceedings in US immigration court. To avoid being sent back to violence and deprivation in their home countries, unaccompanied minors may apply for asylum or deportation relief for abandoned, abused, or neglected children. The COVID-19 pandemic represented a crisis for American society that also had key impacts on immigrants’ lives and their ability to interact with state systems to apply for legal status and claim rights. This paper asks: (1) How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect unaccompanied minors’ social vulnerabilities in the US?; and (2) How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact the US immigration bureaucracy and the work of nonprofit advocates who broker unaccompanied minors’ interactions with these state systems? Findings show that the pandemic exacerbated unaccompanied minors’ social vulnerabilities, with especially adverse effects on indigenous youths, those in legal limbo, unrepresented youths, and those experiencing job loss. The pandemic also disrupted the US immigration bureaucracy and, consequently, the work of advocates who broker immigrants’ interactions with these systems, making it more difficult to interact with traumatized youths to obtain necessary information for their cases, meet strict deadlines, and identify their needs. This case study provides lessons on how states and civil society strategically manage a “crisis” and discusses the implications for immigrants’ rights and vulnerabilities.

The representation of outsiders is a common theme in Irish drama as a method to interpret and reinterpret Irish national identity. More recently, Irish theatre has explored the meaning and experiences of the “new Irish” (Salis 2010, 43). This paper, through a postcolonial analysis, compares the experiences of the returned Irish migrant in Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) to the fragility of tolerance exhibited toward the “other” by the native Irish in Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! (1994) and contrasts asylum to the celebration of Irish residency in The Cambria (2005). The analysis highlights perceptions on migration from Ireland and the complications of immigration to modern-day Ireland. The notions of home, Irishness and citizenship are explored against a backdrop of racism, othering and multiculturalism.

During the summer of 2015, 69 Nigerian migrant women intercepted at sea were transferred from Sicily to the detention centre of Rome-Ponte Galeria in view of being deported from Rome-Fiumicino airport. A media campaign denounced the fact that the women were potential victims of trafficking, but only a few were admitted for protection status by Italian authorities while, on 17 September, twenty were forcefully repatriated to Lagos. By drawing on this case, the article will critically discuss the recent gendering of the Italian southern border as well as practices of reclaiming political subjectivity which deconstruct the discursive and normative criteria that hierarchize people's claims to transnational mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey have introduced a novel, and potentially powerful, vision of migration rights, on which European states might respond to the current crisis of migration by conditioning admission on the payment of an entry fee. In this comment, I raise a worry about the morality of a world governed by such a principle. While Osterloh and Frey foresee a world in which migration is made more sustainable, with benefits for all stakeholders as a result, I am worried their program would lead to a lessening of support for the moral principles that gave rise to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This Convention, I argue, ought to be preserved as a public statement of the principle that wealthy states have an obligation to bear some costs in the defense of human rights; Osterloh and Frey, I argue, might be undermining support for those moral principles we currently have the most need to reinforce. Nevertheless, I argue that under emergency circumstances we might have a need for experimentation and political innovation, even if we are confident that what they produce will necessarily involve some degree of political wrongdoing; we might, in short, have a reason to try out proposals of the sort Osterloh and Frey defend, even if the moral worries I defend here are correct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]