by Lily Tierney and Ernesto Castañeda* edited by Makenna Lindsay November 29, 2023

On Wednesday, November 15, 2023, the Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative (RAFDI) at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. hosted a roundtable discussion on forced migration. The panel of experts analyzed the effectiveness of the current refugee systems to address the predicaments refugees around the world face, and the underlying causes and drivers of forced displacement. James Hollifield, professor and director of the Tower Center for Public Policy and International Affairs at SMU introduced the program. Rina Agarwala, Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, moderated the conversation. 

David Scott FitzGerald, co-chair for the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and Professor of Sociology at UCSD, emphasized the limitations of silos within the academic bodies of knowledge that tend to think separately about migration, refugees, and conflict. FitzGerald recommends a systems approach that would look at all forms of migration and forced displacement within the same system and at the path dependencies and feedback loops that armed interventions and previous migration have on future population moves. 

Pieter Bevelander, director of Studies of Migration, Diversity, and Welfare at Malmö University, offered a European perspective to the discussion. Bevelander spoke of a new migration and asylum pact within the European Union (EU) that will hopefully be finalized next year. This pact will create new asylum and migration management regulations that will streamline procedures, create mandatory solidarity in the relocation process, and increase financial contribution to countries with many refugees. EU member states that do not wish to sign on have the option of paying 20,000 pounds per person due to solidarity reasons, however, this is still being negotiated. Bevelander also noted that the attitude towards Ukrainian refugees is more widely accepted than refugees from the “outside,” implying that refugees from non-western countries are less likely to be embraced by the EU governments.

Gerasimos Tsourapas, professor of International Relations at the University of Glasgow, works on the politics of migrants and refugees in the Middle East and the Global South. Tsourapas claims that an overlooked aspect of these discussions is how labor migration and forced migration flows are much more common in the Global South than in the Global North. Those who are forced to migrate are more likely to go from one part of the Global South to another than migrate from the Global South to the Global North. Tsourpas mentioned that it is critical to understand this point to decolonize the conversation of forced migration. He distinguishes two paradoxes: states that hosts most refugees are in the Global South and are not responsible for creating the refugee crisis because of the unwillingness of wealthy countries in the Global North, who often are the cause of the refugee crisis, Global North to accept refugees. The second paradox lies in the fact that most of the refugee-hosting states in the Global South are struggling financially and open their borders to the detriment of their economy and for the betterment of their diplomacy, most refugees are in the Global South. 

Kamal Sadiq, director at the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine, shared a shocking fact: confirmed that while “a majority of the signatories to the 1951 refugee convention are located in the Global North, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of the worlds refugees are located in states in the Global South, many of whom are not signatories to the refugee convention.” Sadiq states that the refugee regime is broken for several reasons: the first is policy uncertainty. Funding is limited, and short-term funds provide short-term services. Another flaw that Sadiq pointed out is that the refugee regime does not cooperate with non-state actors. This is highly problematic for internally displaced people living within corrupt domestic law and governance. The final weak spot of the refugee regime is documentation. Displaced persons need documentation to access formal work and services but getting documentation needed can be arduous. As a result, displaced persons have multiple documents and are uncertain as to which are legitimate. It is incredibly difficult to adjudicate between real and fake documentation because of how ubiquitous the identification paperwork has become for displaced persons. In a context where states deny documents, a market for false documents appears. 

The discussion closed out with a Q&A session where all speakers agreed on the issue of working in silos, the necessity for each state to host refugees, and the need for equitable responsibility in financing the cost of welcoming large numbers of newcomers. While some panelists and many in the media often mention that welcoming immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees entails large expenditures in terms of providing initial housing and food, we argue that this is one of the few ways that states can engage in creating economic development in the middle and long-term.

The panelists discussed the importance of differentiating refugees from economic migrants. Our view is that refugees should continue to have special protections and rights because of persecution from the state for political reasons or for belonging to a targeted social group or category. But analytically speaking, scholars should not reify these legal distinctions as they are not the most useful in terms of subjective integration, feelings of belonging, and public sentiment. Xenophobes in the streets do not care if one is a refugee, a documented, or an undocumented migrant when there is a climate of exclusion or racial profiling by the police.

Considering population growth, we are not necessarily seeing record numbers of either economic migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. We must normalize international migration and protection. Less than 4% of the world’s population lives in a country different from the one they were born in. The countries with the largest number of foreign-born people are among the wealthiest nations. People may move to rich countries because they have more job opportunities, but in doing so, they also make those countries even richer. Supporting newcomers is a good investment.

You can watch the full panel here: Driven Out: Global Response to the Plight of Forcibly Displaced People 

* Lily Tierney is a student in the School of Communications ’24 at American University.

Ernesto Castañeda is the Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, Immigration Lab, and the MA in Sociology Research & Practice.

Editing by Makenna Lindsay.

by Andréia Fressatti Cardoso and Ernesto Castañeda*

November 15, 2023

Once again, the future of DACA is in question. On September 13, 2023, Judge Andrew Hanen from the Southern District of Texas declared the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to be illegal in the case, Texas v. United States (2021). He addressed two items in his decision, the 2012 DACA Memorandum and the 2022 Final Rule. Andréia Fressatti Cardoso has been conducting interviews with DACA recipients, organizers, and some attorneys as part of an on-going research, and we dive in on their views on the impacts of this and previous court decisions on the program. All names used here are pseudonyms, protecting the anonymity of the interviews in this research. 

Since 2018, the Department of Homeland Security cannot process any new DACA applications. The DACA protection for individuals who applied before then has been kept in a legal and political limbo for quite some time, and as the future of DACA seems more uncertain, the age restrictions and the impossibility of processing new applications has gradually diminished the number of beneficiaries of the policy. It is estimated that around 579,000 people benefit from DACA now – a much smaller number than the 800 thousand people estimated to have benefitted from DACA at its peak, which in turn is less that the people how could have potentially benefited from it but decided not to apply due to fear of future deportation.  

The September 13 decision is part of an effort to end DACA. An attempt to end the program in 2017 by the Trump administration was unsuccessful due to the lack of observance of due procedure to do so according to a Supreme Court’s 2020 decision. The strategy of conservative opponents then shifted towards forcing DACA to gradually die out by not allowing new applications to be accepted. This strategy has created a new group of subjects in the struggle for immigrant rights, which are the DACA-eligible, those who could have DACA if the courts had not continuously forced the program to pause for new applicants. 

Also, the language used when discussing immigration is of paramount importance, as it draws the borders of belonging and membership. It is noteworthy that the September 13 decision insists on calling people who immigrate “illegal aliens,” even sparing a long footnote to defend such terminology. More than being offensive, the “illegal alien” reifies an us and them, an Other (the alien, the foreigner) whose belonging, and membership is not recognized due to the lack of authorization to cross a border, their undocumentedness. Such dehumanizing language has been part of the vocabulary of people who want to keep the U.S. white when referring to undocumented immigrants in the United States. 

DACA was never meant as a permanent solution, but as a temporary fix for people who immigrated to the U.S. when minors. Nonetheless, the lack of legislative action for the many years that the program has been in place turned the DACA into a buoy for many migrants. But, as pointed out in an interview with Maria*, a DACA recipient in her late-twenties, “DACA was a Band-Aid to Obama not being able to pass actual immigration reform.” The on-going legal battle over DACA has reinforced the limbo into which young migrants have been pushed to: a status that is neither of undocumented nor of belonging, an uncertain in-between.  

One of the consequences of such a legal battle is on the impacted people’s mental health, as fear and stigma come back as defining factors in their lives, similarly to what happened when the Trump administration tried to rescind DACA, as pointed by Ana*, a  DACA recipient at her mid-twenties: “and when Trump came and had an opportunity to strike DACA down, it felt very scary. I felt like I was losing hope, and I was like, I was going to lose a lot, like, everything that I’ve done for myself.” And, for those who could not apply for DACA before, Judge Hanen’s decision is even more disheartening, as pointed out by Rosa*, who meets all the criteria for DACA but cannot apply: “it’s horrible because, like, you have this hope, that there’s going to be something good coming out of it, but then it just gets worse and worse. So, honestly, that makes me not even want to hope for it anymore.”  

When talking to people who are beneficiaries of DACA, words such as “tiring,” “stressful,” and “uncertain” are not uncommon, especially from those who are or were activists:  The two-year time frame of the program was already a factor to limit long-term planning, but the limbo to which they have been pushed reactivates a “survival mode” in which much of the undocumented population in the United States lives. 

The uncertainty that people live under is clear. It is hard to fathom for people who are not in this situation; but other situations might convey similar feelings, such as when one remembers the uncertainty felt in the middle of the pandemic when people wondered when vaccines would become available, when schools would open, and when the pandemic would subside. DACA recipients have been living with this uncertainty for 11 years plus the years before the program existed. Jose*, a 28-year-old DACA recipient, explained the feeling: 

“And so, all of these maneuvers are very much like, ‘OK, I have this platform not for long, so what can I get out of it?’ And that to me seems like it’s playing the short game, playing as if there is not going to be longevity for DACA. And there hasn’t. And I think that ever since 2017, right, like, the majority of my existence under DACA has been now under the assumption that DACA is going to end at some point, or that DACA is under danger.” 

DACA still survives but it is unclear for how long. The conservative members of the Supreme Court could unilaterally kill DACA, despite the popularity of the program and how favorably Americans of all political perceptions see Dreamers. It is hard to think of an alternative to such a scenario. Both DACA recipients and organizers have been assessing what other alternatives they have, while keeping up with the news and decisions on the program and hoping for the best. 

*All names used here are pseudonyms, protecting the anonymity of the interviews in this research. 

* Andréia Fresssatti Cardoso, Research Fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, and PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her project, “Rights Subjectivity in Immigrant Struggles for Rights in the United States: The Struggle for DACA,” has a grant from the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP, process n. 2022/04176-5). The opinions, hypotheses, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this material are the full responsibility of the author and do not represent FAPESP’s views. 

*Ernesto Castañeda, PhD is the Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, the Immigration Lab, and the MA Program in Sociology, Research, and Practice. He is also a member of the Im/migrant Well-being Scholar Collaborative.  

by Lily Tierney* November 8, 2023

In 2022 American University’s Immigration Lab began conducting interviews in the DMV (D.C., Maryland, and Virginia) area to better understand the experience of migrants and refugees. All migrants and refugees have vastly different experiences due to their place of origin, economic status, and or racial identity. However, there are common threads within these experiences. 

Many participants found employment outside of their educational training because there were more opportunities to earn a higher income elsewhere. This does not deviate from what many people must do to support themselves, but the reasoning differed. A Colombian woman shared that she went into sales rather than film, her field of study, because she knows that one day she will have to support her mother and siblings. Many noted remittances as the reason why they had to seek a higher-paying job and depart from their original discipline.

On the other hand, some participants were unable to use their degrees to seek employment because they were obtained outside of the United States. This circumstance almost always resulted in that individual having to accept a lower-paying job and having to learn a new set of skills. Participants who have yet to work toward higher education tend to pursue employment in the informal labor market, which is defined as work that is not taxed or recorded by the government. 

Many participants in the study reported that they do not have the opportunity to use their first language in the workplace. When there is opportunity to speak their native language, interviewees disclosed feeling uncomfortable. A Salvadoran woman in her late twenties mentioned that she chose not to work in a regionally specific office where Spanish was spoken due to feeling, “pigeonhole(d) into doing this role.”

Almost all participants who have yet to achieve a higher education plan to return to school at some point. Time and money are the most frequently cited hinderances of achieving this goal. Many migrants feel that they are overqualified for the profession they are in but are stuck until they can obtain a degree from an accredited institution in the United States. However, many find themselves in a catch 22: it is almost impossible to dedicate oneself to work, school and family full time. As an Afghan male in his mid-twenties noted, “Life is all about work.” 

The main earning priorities indicated by participants were rent, bills, and family. This is strikingly different to the financial goals of U.S. citizens recorded from 2020 to 2021, which revealed the main priorities as increasing emergency savings and paying down debt. The primary financial concerns among immigrants and refugees are dealt with day to day. Many immigrants and refugees do not have the luxury to pay off debt or accrue savings when they are worried about whether their income will cover basic living needs, bills, and sending remittances to their family in a country that may be in a state of unrest. 

A Colombian woman in her mid-twenties expressed that discrimination has grown to be an expected part of the workplace experience, and she has had to file complaints with Human Resources to create a paper trail. This should not be part of the workplace environment, and she should not have to keep a paper trail in case of something more severe than verbal discrimination. Attaining a U.S. education and being a member of the workforce is challenging, but those challenges are escalated for immigrants and refugees traveling to the DMV region due to racial, social, and economic divisions. 

* Lily Tierney- student in the School of Communications ’24 at American University.

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