By  Jane Linekar, Jennifer Vallentine

This paper on “children and youth in mixed migration” summarizes some key messages on the topic, and with an aim to provoke thoughts on how to address information gaps and take into account the specific dynamics, needs and vulnerabilities of children and youth travelling on mixed migration routes. The annex brings together in one resource all our research publications on children and youth.

London/Denmark: Mixed Migration Centre, 2023. 8p

By  Ana-Maria Murphy-Teixidor and Flannery Dyon

There is limited research on mixed migration in Tunisia, and there is a particular dearth of data pertaining to the experiences of migrating and displaced children and youth. To help fill this gap, this study explores the profiles, routes, and vulnerabilities of migrating and displaced children and youth in Tunisia, drawing from more than 1,500 surveys with caregivers and youth, and additional key informant interviews with children, youth, caregivers, and service providers. Through its comprehensive analysis and recommendations, this study seeks to provide a stronger evidence base for practitioners and policy makers working in child protection both in Tunisia, and along mixed migration routes to Tunisia. 

London: Mixed Migration Centre and Save the Children, 2021. 36p

By Mixed Migration Centre

Protracted conflict, instability and underdevelopment has perpetrated longstanding displacement and migration flows out of Afghanistan toward Europe. Irregular migrants from Afghanistan generally take one of two routes to Western Europe, namely the Eastern Mediterranean or the Western Balkans Route. Both of these frequently used routes expose migrants to protection risks ranging from death to physical assault to theft, perpetrated not only by irregular actors such as smugglers, but also by border forces.

London/Denmark: Mixed Migration Centre, 2023. 68p

By Simon Tomasi, Daniely Vicari

This paper explores the use of social media by Venezuelan refugees and migrants as they head north through the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. It is based on an analysis of 4Mi surveys conducted in Honduras, qualitative data obtained through semi-structured interviews conducted in Colombia and Costa Rica, and focus groups held in Colombia and Peru.

This paper details survey respondents’ profiles, their preferred social media and messaging platforms, the reasons they communicate through these networks, and the connectivity challenges they face in accessing them. It also explores respondents’ most trusted sources of information, the persistence of information gaps and the risks associated with the presence of smugglers in digital spaces.

This paper’s findings aim to build a solid evidence base that will strengthen knowledge about Venezuelan refugees’ and migrants’ social media habits and guide humanitarian actors’ engagement with digital platforms.

Denmark: Mixed Migration Centre, 2023. 14p.

By The Mixed Migration Centre

This snapshot examines the use of smuggling among Cambodians and Laotians on their journey to Thailand. It examines respondents’ reasons for leaving their country of origin, access to smuggling services, and protection incidents experienced en route, as well as the involvement of state officials in smuggling between Cambodia-Thailand and Lao PDR-Thailand.

Denmark: Mixed Migration Centre, 2023. 12p.

By Maurizio Ambrosini • Minke H. J. Hajer

International migration is a critical issue in contemporary societies. A well-known textbook calls it “a major theme for public debate” (De Haas et al., 2020: xii). Migration is at the centre of the ‘transnationalized social question’ located at the interstices between the Global South and the Global North, where people seek a better life or fee unsustainable living conditions by migrating abroad (Faist, 2019). International population mobility has moved to the top of political agendas, becoming a ‘hot topic’ for governments and political parties (Spencer & Triandafyllidou, 2020). It has become a matter of controversy in mass media, and in ordinary people’s conversations as well. In most cases, it is depicted as a threat to the social stability of receiving societies. As Anderson effcaciously puts it, “‘Migration’ signifes problematic mobility” (Anderson, 2017: 1532). This perceived threat of migrants provokes increased efforts to halt, restrict, and prevent migration, often by limiting legal migration channels and increasing border controls. The, perhaps unintended, consequence of this is not that migration stops, but instead that a part of migration becomes irregular. Whilst irregular migration is problematised and criminalised especially in the Global North, in sending societies, on the contrary, venturing abroad is often viewed as a dream or a hope, regardless of the legal framework in which this mobility and subsequent settlement occur (Alpes, 2013). It gives the impression that migrants take the time spent in an irregular condition while waiting for a residence permit for granted. Migration, especially unwanted international migration, is a vital concern for contemporary societies worldwide, be they sending, receiving or transit countries. This form of migration will be the main focus of this Reader. Throughout it, we hope to provide ample insight into the contentious theme of irregular migration by elaborating on its origins, the policies devised to deal with it, possible responses to it, the actors involved, and the agency of irregular migrants themselves. This introduction highlights the issue of irregular migration, discusses terminology, provides some estimates of the population involved, and presents the book’s structure.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. 154p.

Edited by  Dêlidji Eric Degila  and  Valeria Marina Valle

The 14th thematic volume of International Development Policy provides perspectives through case studies from the global Souths focusing on the challenges and opportunities of governing migration on the subnational, national, regional and international levels. Bringing together some thirty authors from Africa, Latin America and Asia, the book explores existing and new policies and frameworks in terms of their successes and best practices, and looks at them through the lens of additional challenges, such as those brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of nationalisms and an increase in xenophobia. The chapters also take the ‘5 Ps’ approach to sustainable development (people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnerships) and assess how migration policies serve sustainable development in a rapidly evolving context.

Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2022. 399p.

By the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Inspector General

The report contains five recommendations aimed at improving management of, and conditions in, CBP short-term holding facilities in the El Paso area of western Texas and New Mexico. Your office concurred with all five recommendations. Based on information provided in your response to the draft report, we consider these recommendations open and resolved. Once your office has fully implemented the recommendations, please submit a formal closeout letter to us within 30 days so that we may close the recommendations. The memorandum should be accompanied by evidence of completion of agreed upon corrective actions and of the disposition of any monetary amounts.

Washington DC: DHS, 2023. 40p.

By Massimo Anelli Bocconi, Tommaso Colussi and Andrea Ichino

Using census data, we study false birth-date registrations in Italy, a phenomenon well known to demographers, in a setting that allows us to separate honesty from the benefits of cheating and deterrence. By comparing migrants leaving a locality with those who remain in it, we illustrate the tendency of Italians to sort themselves across geographic areas according to their honesty levels. Over time, this tendency has modified the average honesty level in each locality, with relevant consequences for the distribution across geographic areas of outcomes like human capital, productivity, earnings growth, and the quality of local politicians and government

The Journal of Law and Economics. Volume 66, Number 2. May 2023

By Michael A. Clemens

A recent surge in child migration to the U.S. from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala has occurred in the context of high rates of regional violence. But little quantitative evidence exists on the causal relationship between violence and international emigration in this or any other region. This paper studies the relationship between violence in the Northern Triangle and child migration to the United States using novel, individual-level, anonymized data on all 178,825 U.S. apprehensions of unaccompanied child migrants from these countries between 2011 and 2016. It finds that one additional homicide per year in the region, sustained over the whole period – that is, a cumulative total of six additional homicides – caused a cumulative total of 3.7 additional unaccompanied child apprehensions in the United States. The explanatory power of short-term increases in violence is roughly equal to the explanatory power of long-term economic characteristics like average income and poverty. Due to diffusion of migration experience and assistance through social networks, violence can cause waves of migration that snowball over time, continuing to rise even when violence levels do not.

published in: Journal of Urban Economics, 2021, 124, 103355. Bonn: Center for Global Development & IZA Institute of Labor Economics, 2021. 56p.

By Elaine K. Denny, David Dow, Gabriella Levy Mateo, Villamizar-Chaparro

How does extortion experienced during the migration journey affect the civic engagement of deported migrants returned to their home country? More broadly, how does extortion affect political participation? Little is known about either the political behavior of returnees or about how coercive economic shocks experienced during migration affect subsequent levels of political participation. More broadly, existing literature on how victimization affects political participation is inconclusive, particularly when combined with existing work on economic insecurity. Studying deported migrants and the quasi-random experience of extortion helps address the endogeneity that often confounds these analyses. This approach isolates the impact of extortion on political action from potentially confounding factors related to local security or corruption. Using a novel dataset concerning Guatemalan migrants returned to Guatemala by the U.S. government, this paper finds that extortion has a direct, positive relationship with multiple forms of civic action, and that, at least in this context, the mobilizing effects of economic hardship outweigh the potentially demobilizing effects of fear of crime

Policy Research Working Paper 10020 . Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022. 36p.

Edited by Ulrich Pallua, Adrian Knapp and Andreas Exenberger

"The publications of the interdisciplinary and internationally networked Research Platform “World Order – Religion – Violence” seek to improve our understanding of the relationship between religion, politics and violence. It therefore deals especially with the return of religious themes and symbols into politics, with the analysis of the link between political theory and religion, and finally with the critical discussion of the secularization thesis. At the centre of the research are questions concerning the causes of violent conflict, the possibilities for a just world order and the conditions for peaceful coexistence on a local, regional, national and international/worldwide scale between communities in the face of divergent religious and ideological convictions. Its task is to initiate and coordinate thematically related research-efforts from various disciplinary backgrounds at the University of Innsbruck. It creates a network between departments, research-teams and single researchers working on topics of religion, politics and violence. The overall aim of the research platform World Order-Religion-Violence is to promote excellence in social and human science research on religion and politics at the University of Innsbruck and to guarantee the diffusion of this particular competence on a national and international level."

Innsbruck: innsbruck university press, 2009. 256p.

Edited by  Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires

Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call “transcultural societal studies,” an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 458p.

By Tom Jawetz

The Biden administration’s parole programs are successfully reducing both illegal immigration and total immigration into the U.S., and they are shifting the composition of immigrants so that they are more self-sufficient and reliant on their existing social networks, rather than dependent on government assistance. Maintaining and improving parole will be even more important now that Title 42 has expired and the U.S. government has lost another tool for reducing illegal immigration. The parole program for migrants from Venezuela began in October 2022 and expanded to Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua in January 2023. Approximately 102,000 people were paroled into the U.S. from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) from October 2022 until April 2023, the most recent numbers available. Through March 2023, the program has prevented the entry of more than 380,000 illegal immigrants into the United States. Without the CHNV program, these migrants would have otherwise been processed under Title 8 immigration law and likely admitted into the country. Potential illegal immigrants wait in their home countries instead of crossing the southern border, since this parole program requires that migrants have a U.S. sponsor, obtain a passport, and pass security and health vetting. This high barrier to entry successfully reduces total immigration and shifts the composition of immigrants toward those who can more easily support themselves or rely on their social and family networks rather than on government welfare. 

New York: Manhattan Institute,  2025. 23p.

By A. S. M. Shakil Haider

  In the United States, immigration policies are politically debated when the concern is about the effect of such policies on crime and labor market outcomes. Even though the concern for crime exists for a long time, such concern is intensified due to rise in crime and the contagious behavior of crime in United Sates. Therefore, the primary objective of this dissertation is to investigate the causal effect of different immigration policies on crime and labor market outcomes in the context of United States. In addition, contagious behavior of crime along with the effects of different socio-economic and socio-demographic factors on crime are also examined in the context of US by allowing for county-level spatial dependence. The first chapter investigates statistically, the sanctuary policy (implemented on different US counties) effect on broad categories (i.e., violent and non-violent crime) and subcategories (i.e., murder, rape, burglary, motor vehicle (MV) theft) of crime from the lens of different causal methods. The analysis is conducted considering US county-level panel data and by applying different variations of difference in differences (DID) and synthetic control methods. A further analysis of sanctuary policy effects on crime is conducted by applying both the methods in a staggered treatment adoption setting. The results found that, even though there are few significant rises in crime categories due to sanctuary policy implementation, most of the results indicate that there is no evidence of statistically significant effect of sanctuary policy on different crime categories.....

  Chapter two of the dissertation focuses on the contagious/spilling behavior of crime along with investigating the linkages in between violent and non-violent crime in United States. methods. The key findings suggest positive causal effect of DACA on DACA-eligible individual’s labor market outcomes where DACA-ineligibles face bigger detrimental effects on their labor market outcomes due to DACA induced labor supply shock.   

Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 2021. 191p.

By Annika Lindberg

Deportation limbo traces the efforts of two Nordic welfare states, Denmark and Sweden, to address the so-called implementation gap in deportation enforcement. It offers an original, empirically grounded account of how often-futile, injurious policy measures devoted to pressuring non-deported people to leave are implemented and contested in practice. In doing so, it presents a critique of the widespread, normalised use of detention, encampment, and destitution, which routinely fail to enhance deportations while exposing deportable people to conditions that cause their premature death. The book takes the ‘deportation limbo’ as a starting point for exploring the violent nature of borders, the racial boundaries of welfare states, and the limits of state control over cross-border mobility. Building on unprecedented access to detention and deportation camps and migration offices in both countries, it presents ethnographic material capturing frontline officials’ tension-ridden efforts to regulate non-deported people using forced deportation, incarceration, encampment, and destitution. Using a continuum of state violence as the analytical lens, the book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of how the borders of Nordic welfare states are drawn through practices that subject racialised ‘others’ to expulsion, incarceration, and destitution. The book is the first to systematically document the renewed deportation turn in Denmark and Sweden, and to critically examine its implications: for the people targeted by intensified deportation measures, and for the individual officials, institutions, and societies enforcing them. It offers an important, critical contribution to current debates on the violence of deportation regimes, the politico-bureaucratic structures and practices that sustain them, and their human costs.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2023. 205p.

Edited by Jeremiah O. Asaka and Alice A. Oluoko-Odingo

This book investigates contemporary human security issues in East Africa, setting forth policy recommendations and a research agenda for future studies. Human security takes a people-centered rather than state-centered approach to security issues, focusing on whether people feel safe, free from fear, want and indignity. This book investigates human security in East Africa, encompassing issues as diverse as migration, housing, climate change, displacement, food security, aflatoxins, land rights, and peace and conflict resolution. In particular, the book showcases innovative original research from African scholars based on the continent and abroad, and together the contributors provide policy recommendations and set forth a human security research agenda for East Africa, which encompasses Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti. As well as being useful for policy makers and practitioners, this book will interest researchers across African Studies, Security Studies, Environmental Studies, Political Science, Global Governance, International Relations, and Human Geography.

London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 255p.

By Amairini Sanchez, Michele Cadigan, Dayo Abels-Sullivan, Bryan L. Sykes

 Research on crimmigration—the intersection where criminal and immigration law meet—shows that immigrants are increasingly punished and deported as a consequence of a criminal conviction. We investigate how immigration status shapes the imposition of monetary sanctions. By drawing on interview and court observational data from four states, we demonstrate that the legal opaqueness at the intersection of the crimmigration system often results in crimmigration sanctions—enhanced financial and nonfinancial penalties that are the result of an undocumented immigrant’s liminal legality. Findings show that immigrants are financially exploited through gaps in criminal and immigration law that allow for crimmigration sanctions in the form of bail predation and the exchange of higher financial penalties for reduced or no jail time, lessening an undocumented immigrant’s risk of deportation. The implications of these practices for due process are discussed in detail 

: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences January 2022, 8 (2) 76-97;

By Rudy Schulkind

The introduction of automatic deportation for so called ‘foreign criminals’ convicted and sentenced to 12 months or more under the UK Borders Act 2007 (unless certain exceptions apply including the right to a private and family life), followed by further provisions in 20121 and 20142 , has led to an increasingly strident regime that makes it mandatory to separate a child from a parent. That is, so long as any harm that is caused to the child, parent or partner is not ‘excessive’. In the case of children, these provisions are relied upon by the Home Office and the courts to override the government’s statutory duty to promote and safeguard the welfare of children. Through our legal casework BID has witnessed first-hand the devastating impact this regime is having on families and communities. We have undertaken this research so that we can shine a light on this cruel and inhuman policy. Our research is primarily based on interviews with fathers facing deportation from the UK. It is the words of those directly affected that form the substance of the report. The testimonies of the fathers we spoke to are powerful and often heart-breaking, and paint a picture of an entirely broken system that cannot be in the public interest. Section 1 of the report examines the sprawling impact of the deportation system, from the individuals punished permanently and given no second chance because they don’t have a British passport, to the children and families treated as collateral damage. Families were placed in extreme practical, financial and emotional hardship by extended periods of uncertainty under the constant threat that family life will be brought to a permanent end. Not only were the fathers we interviewed prevented from working, they faced repeated periods of detention that were traumatic for the entire family and placed an even greater practical burden on the mother. A particular focus of this section is the devastating impact deportation has on children. In the interviews we carried out, fathers facing deportation reported their children developing anxiety; crying constantly; unable to let their dad out of their sight; withdrawing from everything; loss of appetite; difficulty sleeping; having nightmares; and in one particularly serious case self-harm and attempted suicide. In addition to these testimonies we present evidence of recent academic insights about enforced parental separation in a number of different contexts. Somewhat unsurprisingly the evidence  overwhelmingly finds that being forcibly and permanently separated from a parent generally has severe consequences for a child’s wellbeing and long-term development. Section 2 of the report concerns access to justice. The removal of legal aid and successive legislative changes have had a particularly detrimental effect on people seeking to appeal deportation. Interviewees explained the myriad interlocking barriers to justice they had been forced to confront. These include the complexity of immigration law and the prohibitive cost of private representation, as well as practical obstacles for those deprived of their liberty. The frequent and excessive use of detention, itself an injustice, leads to additional practical barriers to challenging deportation, particularly where this takes place in a prison. The first-hand evidence from our interviews reflect a dysfunctional system designed to make it practically impossible to even access a fair hearing. Alongside this we also present evidence from our own Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) project. We have found the ECF scheme to be unnecessarily burdensome and entirely inaccessible to unrepresented individuals. 

London: Bail for Immigration Detainees, 2021. 40p.

By J. Russo ; M. Planty; J. Shaffer; M.N. Parsons; J.D. Roper-Miller

Detecting drug contraband smuggled into correctional facilities through the mail is challenging, because drugs can be sprayed onto paper, incorporated into ink, hidden under stamps, and concealed within a piece of correspondence. The methods used to hide the drugs, coupled with the high volume of mail received daily by inmates, increase the difficulty in detecting all drugs by using physical screening. In attempting to address this threat, some correctional facilities are using strategies that replace physical mail with electronic communication or reproductions of originals. Under this technique, all inmate mail is diverted to an offsite mail-processing vendor, who converts the mail to a digital form and transmits the documents to correctional facilities for distribution to inmates via tablets or kiosks. Adopting such a system is most effective when it is part of a “bundled” approach with other inmate services, such as telephone, messaging, video visitation, and electronic books, which are delivered through kiosks or tablets. In most cases, the digitized mail services can be provided at no cost to the agency as part of a comprehensive inmate services platform. 

Washington, DC: U.S. National Institute of Justice, 2021. 7p.