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This chapter looks at immigration as a battlefield in the struggle over the future. It considers how international law can be reinterpreted to limit the rights of refugees and otherwise to constrain immigration, as well as the harms these changes likely would bring about.
Chapter 7 investigates the reception of, and approach to, new speakers in Catalonia and Galicia. There is considerable evidence of a buy-in to the need to integrate new speakers and thus not only boost the profile of the respective language but also add to social cohesion in an increasingly multicultural and multilingual context. Particular attention is paid to the role of the Voluntariat per la Llengua programme in Catalonia. This pairs indigenous speakers with Catalan learners, several of whom migrated to Catalonia from Africa and Asia. Not only are the linguistic skills of the migrants improved by the programme but so also is the level of social cohesion and integration into the host community. Neofalantes in Galicia offer a quite distinct version of the new speaker phenomenon involving dual or mixed identities, ideological tension and challenges to official policies as to how best to represent the needs and demands of this small but very active section of society.
Refugees experience a greater rate of common mental disorders relative to most other populations, and there remains a need to address these needs. However, most refugees are hosted in low-and-middle-income countries, where there is a lack of resources and mental health providers who can deliver mainstream mental health services. This situation has led to the emergence of scalable mental health interventions that can deliver evidence-based programs to refugees in need. Many countries hosting refugees have implemented programs that train local lay providers in interventions that can be delivered at scale. This review provides a narrative overview of these scalable interventions and critiques the evidence for their efficacy. It is noted that there are limitations to currently available scalable interventions, and there is a need for greater attention to determining the longer-term benefits of interventions, addressing the mental health needs of refugees who do not respond to these interventions, assisting refugees with more severe psychological disorders, and understanding the specific mechanisms that underpin observed benefits of these interventions.
The Burmese population is one of the fast-growing refugee populations in the US. This study investigated behavioral and environmental factors associated with fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption among Burmese refugees.
Design:
We conducted a cross-sectional interview survey in 2018-2019. The 24-hour recall was used to assess dietary behavior. Multivariable logistic regression models were constructed with meeting the daily FV consumption recommendation (2 or more servings of fruits and 3 or more servings of vegetables) as the outcome variable. We selected socioeconomics, nutritional knowledge, food shopping frequency, ethnicity of preferred food store owners, perceived neighborhood food environment, and network distance to preferred food stores as potential explanatory variables.
Setting:
Two Upstate New York counties.
Participants:
Burmese refugees (n=173) aged ≥18 years.
Results:
Forty-five percent of respondents met the daily FV consumption recommendation, and nearly all respondents identified ethnic (Burmese, Chinese/pan-Asian, or South Asian/halal) stores as their preferred stores to purchase FVs. In the best-fit model, age [OR=1.08, 95%CI 1.04, 1.12] and shopping frequency [OR=1.51, 95%CI 1.01, 2.26] were positively associated, and network distance to preferred stores in kilometers [OR =0.81, 95%CI 0.73, 0.90] was negatively associated with meeting the daily FV consumption recommendation. No significant effect modifications by car ownership, poverty, length of stay in the US, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participation were detected.
Conclusions:
The findings suggested that having Asian ethnic food stores within a short, walkable distance from home and shopping at these stores often can promote healthy dietary behavior among Burmese refugees.
More than three in 10 people living in Jordan are immigrants, with the majority being Palestinian and Syrian refugees, who have a very similar non-communicable diseases (NCDs) profile to the hosting Jordanian community. We conducted a rapid review of the literature of studies, reports, and documents on the evidence of the impact of COVID-19 on vulnerable populations in Jordan with regard to NCD during the first year of the pandemic. COVID-19-related mobility constraints and often lack of awareness of NCDs put additional burden on vulnerable populations like refugees and migrants, in particular on non-registered migrants. COVID-19 pandemic and associated mitigation measures led to disruption in routine health services, significantly impacting people living with NCDs. Ensuring to deliver a people-centered and inclusive approach that works well during COVID-19 is of paramount importance toward Universal Health Coverage (all people have access to the health services they need, when and where they need them, without financial hardship).
This essay looks at the acts of saving that unfold in the maritime spaces of the Mediterranean as they are represented in Helon Habila’s 2018 novel Travellers. Habila’s radical proposition links the sea crossings undertaken by refugees to slavery. But rather than positing violence against black people as what structurally ties the refugees to the slaves, Habila’s novel suggests it is saving and its politics that establish continuities between slavery and the so-called refugee crisis. Probing eighteenth-century insurance discourses, I argue that the paradigm of saving that emerged from those discourses, can be found and operates in the Mediterranean scenes of rescue. Looking at what happens in the Mediterranean through the lens of the logic of slavery derived from the eighteenth century allows not only to discern how contemporary acts of saving thrive, politically and economically, on the utility of the refugees’ life rather than death but also to reveal a set of other significant and related claims: that refugee deaths in the Mediterranean are not exceptional; that structural unsaveability is a form of border control; and that the maritime borders redefine refugees as those who fail to arrive.
Refugees and asylum seekers present with high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), whilst little research has been conducted to assess the effectiveness or acceptability of psychological interventions for this group. Imagery rescripting is effective in reducing distressing intrusive memories within a range of conditions. The current study evaluates this approach for the treatment of PTSD in refugees and asylum seekers within a UK NHS service.
Aims:
To evaluate the clinical outcomes of using imagery rescripting for the treatment of PTSD in UK-based refugees and asylum seekers.
Method:
Ten adult service-users from an NHS specialist service with a primary diagnosis of PTSD were recruited as part of routine service delivery. A multiple baseline design was used with participants randomly allocated to a baseline varying from 5 to 9 weeks. A baseline wait-period was followed by up to five sessions of psychoeducation and treatment preparation, in turn followed by up to 10 sessions of imagery rescripting. The Post-traumatic Symptom Scale (PSS) and Physical Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) were collected every week during baseline, at end of treatment and weekly for 5 weeks after treatment, and again at 12-week follow-up. Data were analysed with mixed regression.
Results:
Results indicate a significant improvement both in PTSD symptoms and mood, and that this was attributable to the imagery rescripting phase of the intervention, and not the passage of time or non-specific therapy factors.
Conclusions:
Evidence indicates imagery rescripting to be a safe and effective treatment choice for PTSD in refugees and asylum seekers.
This chapter examines the ways in which people with mental health conditions who also belong to other excluded groups may be particularly disadvantaged, in general and by mental health services. People with mental health conditions are at risk of social exclusion, but many from certain social identity groups are particularly at risk: for example, women, people from black and minority ethnic groups, and those from sexual minorities. In addition, certain groups of people are defined by their exclusion from society, such as refugees and asylum seekers, prisoners, and the homeless. The occurrence of mental health conditions in these groups is much higher than in the general population and they will often face barriers to accessing essential material resources and adequate healthcare. The presence of mental health conditions and group characteristics intersect to exacerbate the degree of exclusion experienced by the people in these groups. Some combinations may result in particularly profound states of deprivation and destitution. These severe and multiple forms of exclusion have been named ‘deep social exclusion’ or ‘people with multiple and complex needs’, two examples of which are seen in ‘multiple exclusion homelessness’ and people with multiple diagnoses.
This chapter recovers the performances of Saint Domingue’s refugees who fled the slave uprisings and acted out their relationship to Haiti on professional American stages. The Haitian Revolution’s refugees also appeared as stage characters in original plays such as John Murdock’s 1795 The Triumphs of Love, which reimagined refugees as refined but unfortunate figures, integrating them into American culture by differentiating them from comic but rebellious slaves.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Latin America was a region of immigration, where people moved from one country to another and/or people came from other continents, mostly from Europe. But by the 1960s, when many Latin American countries were suffering economic downturns, and the 1970s and 1980s, when state repression intensified, immigration turned to emigration, and many began making their way to the United States. Today, Latin Americans continue to migrate to the United States; people from all over the globe migrate to Latin America; and people move within the region. It is one of the most complex challenges confronting the United States and Latin America, and remains a very divisive issue in most countries of the region, especially the United States. This chapter looks at the push and pull factors that lead people to move from their home countries to resettle elsewhere.
This chapter addresses the role of culture in the making of political mobilisations around race and migration. Taking its cue from debates about convivial culture, it focuses in particular on how music has provided a medium of connections that network across community campaigns, popular culture, and specific moments in the cultural history of the United Kingdom in the 1990s and 2000s. We argue that as the strange becomes familiar, expressive cultures open new ways of making the politics of race visible, alternative cultures that can have longer-term impacts on how racial politics may cross boundaries and explore and address modes of intolerance.
“How Hybrid Bureaucracy and Permit Regimes Made Citizenship” tracks the bureaucratic response to the violence of partition, war, and independence in each of the states, focusing on the mobility regimes established to prevent return in Israel and India, where the documents and evidentiary demands of the mobility regimes enabled claims to citizenship. Focusing on the adoption of the colonial bureaucratic toolkit of emergency by the governments of independent India and Israel to restrict the mobility of returning Muslim and Palestinian refugees, the chapter show how mobility restrictions became obstacles to claims to citizenship. Demonstrating how the transfer of bureaucratic practices governing mobility depended on the continuity of emergency laws, this chapter shows the divergent outcome in Cyprus, which relinquished emergency laws at independence.
There is increasing evidence that brief psychological interventions delivered by lay providers can reduce common mental disorders in the short-term. This study evaluates the longer-term impact of a brief, lay provider delivered group psychological intervention (Group Problem Management Plus; gPM+) on the mental health of refugees and their children's mental health.
Methods
This single-blind, parallel, controlled trial randomised 410 adult Syrians in Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan who screened positive for distress and impaired functioning to either five sessions of gPM+ or enhanced usual care (EUC). Primary outcomes were scores on the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25 (HSCL-25; depression and anxiety scales) assessed at baseline, 6 weeks, 3 months and 12 months Secondary outcomes included disability, posttraumatic stress, personally identified problems, prolonged grief, prodromal psychotic symptoms, parenting behaviour and children's mental health.
Results
Between 15 October 2019 and 2 March 2020, 204 participants were assigned to gPM + and 206 to EUC, and 307 (74.9%) were retained at 12 months. Intent-to-treat analyses indicated that although participants in gPM + had greater reductions in depression at 3 months, at 12 months there were no significant differences between treatment arms on depression (mean difference −0.9, 95% CI −3.2 to 1.3; p = 0.39) or anxiety (mean difference −1.7, 95% CI −4.8 to −1.3; p = 0.06). There were no significant differences between conditions for secondary outcomes except that participants in gPM + had greater increases in positive parenting.
Conclusions
The short-term benefits of a brief, psychological programme delivered by lay providers may not be sustained over longer time periods, and there is a need for sustainable programmes that can prolong benefits gained through gPM + .
Among asylum seekers in a high-risk unstable post-displacement context, we aimed to investigate the prevalence of and risk for suicidal ideation (study 1), and then to test whether and how Mindfulness-Based Trauma Recovery for Refugees (MBTR-R) may prevent or treat suicidal ideation (study 2).
Methods
Study 1 was conducted among a community sample of N = 355 (31.8% female) East African asylum seekers in a high-risk urban post-displacement setting in the Middle East (Israel). Study 2 was a secondary analysis of a randomised waitlist-control trial of MBTR-R among 158 asylum-seekers (46.2% female) from the same community and post-displacement setting.
Results
Prevalence of suicidal ideation was elevated (31%). Post-migration living difficulties, as well as posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety and their multi-morbidity were strongly associated with suicidal ideation severity. Likewise, depression and multi-morbidity prospectively predicted the onset of suicidal ideation. Relative to its incidence among waitlist-control (23.1%), MBTR-R prevented the onset of suicidal ideation at post-intervention assessment (15.6%) and 5-week follow-up (9.8%). Preventive effects of MBTR-R on suicidal ideation were mediated by reduced posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety and their multi-morbidity. MBTR-R did not therapeutically reduce current suicidal ideation present at the beginning of the intervention.
Conclusions
Findings warn of a public health crisis of suicidality among forcibly displaced people in high-risk post-displacement settings. Although preliminary, novel randomised waitlist-control evidence for preventive effects of MBTR-R for suicidal ideation is promising. Together, findings indicate the need for scientific, applied and policy attention to mental health post-displacement in order to prevent suicide among forcibly displaced people.
Infectious diseases and war are maleficent comrades. This reality applies equally well to the war in Ukraine and the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Europe is facing a huge refugee crisis and potentially the conflict could worsen the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, 2 major countries of concern are Poland, which has taken the majority of refugees, and Moldova, which has taken a very large number of refugees on a per capita basis. However, the concern extends to the rest of Europe because of the mobility of refugees beyond the first country they enter. Vaccinating, infection control, and boosting refugees should be a priority. However, complete prevention of COVID-19 is very complex because of other issues related to the success of prevention.
This commentary conveys appreciation for a recent review of the rates of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) among refugees, describes the relevance of CPTSD to the refugee experience and discusses implications for assessment and treatment, the effective development of which requires collaboration among researchers, clinicians and individuals with lived experience.
As the pace of climate change accelerates, the impacts of a warming world become more evident and more inevitable. Climate change multiplies and compounds stresses on human and natural systems and amplifies the risk and implications of slow- and sudden-onset disasters worldwide. Some of these risks can be avoided. Some can be alleviated. Some, however, may now or soon be unescapable. The risk continuum is shaped by the degree to which the international community mobilizes to mitigate emissions, to facilitate adaptation, and to prepare for climate-related impacts that cannot be eased or eliminated. The less we do to mitigate, adapt, and prepare, the more acute the risks of climate change become, especially in the global south and especially for already-vulnerable communities. With average global temperatures currently on track to exceed the 2°C target, climate change is expected to multiply the number of people susceptible to poverty, undermine food security, intensify heat and water stress, and increase the risks of fires, storms, flooding, landslides, and infectious and parasitic diseases. In this world of amplified risk, the lines between natural disasters and climate-related disasters blur. Even as these lines blur and the demand for improved coordination grows, critical institutional and legal disjunctions remain. Focusing on the Warsaw Mechanism for Loss & Damage, this chapter examines evolving efforts to construct a more effective and equitable rule of law and institutional framework at the intersection of climate change and disaster law.
What is political about political refugeehood? Theorists have assumed that refugees are special because their specific predicament as those who are persecuted sets them aside from other “necessitous strangers.” Persecution is a special form of wrongful harm that marks the repudiation of a person's political membership and that cannot—contrary to certain other harms—be remedied where they are. It makes asylum necessary as a specific remedial institution. In this article, I argue that this is correct. Yet, the connection between political membership, its repudiation, and persecution is far from clear. Drawing on normative political thought and research on autocracies, repression, and migration studies, I show that it is political oppression that marks the repudiation of political membership and leads to various forms of repression that can equally not be remedied at home. A truly political account moves away from persecution and endorses political oppression as the normative pillar of refugeehood and asylum.
This chapter explores the structure of society and the composition of the Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Belgium and France from the late nineteenth century until 1941 (when the ‘Jewish Councils’ were established). It highlights the similarities and differences between the three countries’ social structures in this period. These include the number and outlook of (Eastern European) Jewish immigrants, the presence of official religious Jewish representation and Jewish integration in non-Jewish society in each case. Central themes are the level of integration of Jews into the non-Jewish communities, the position of immigrant Jews vis-à-vis the longstanding Jewish population, the level of religious adherence, the influence of Zionist thinking, the role of religious institutions and the organisational structure of the Jewish communities. This chapter also examines the institution of Jewish refugee organisations in the 1930s, and the position of the later chairmen of the “Jewish Councils” in Western Europe in these pre-war refugee aid organisations. Moreover, it addresses the establishment of so-called Coordinating Committees in 1940, either by German demand, or by initiative of Jewish community members, which aimed to oversee all Jewish philanthropic work and sought to unite the various Jewish communities. It argues that the supposed failures of these committees served as the springboard for establishing the ‘Jewish Councils’.
This chapter explores the structure of society and the composition of the Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Belgium and France from the late nineteenth century until 1941 (when the ‘Jewish Councils’ were established). It highlights the similarities and differences between the three countries’ social structures in this period. These include the number and outlook of (Eastern European) Jewish immigrants, the presence of official religious Jewish representation and Jewish integration in non-Jewish society in each case. Central themes are the level of integration of Jews into the non-Jewish communities, the position of immigrant Jews vis-à-vis the longstanding Jewish population, the level of religious adherence, the influence of Zionist thinking, the role of religious institutions and the organisational structure of the Jewish communities. This chapter also examines the institution of Jewish refugee organisations in the 1930s, and the position of the later chairmen of the “Jewish Councils” in Western Europe in these pre-war refugee aid organisations. Moreover, it addresses the establishment of so-called Coordinating Committees in 1940, either by German demand, or by initiative of Jewish community members, which aimed to oversee all Jewish philanthropic work and sought to unite the various Jewish communities. It argues that the supposed failures of these committees served as the springboard for establishing the ‘Jewish Councils’.