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Teaching about Human Rights in a Social Work Undergraduate Curriculum: The Taiwan Experience
This study was designed to investigate the transformation in attitude of social work undergraduate students following the completion of a human rights module near the end of their academic programme in Taiwan. Twenty-five students who enrolled in the 'Human Rights, Gender and Social Work' module at a university in central Taiwan were evaluated by means of self-reported change in attitude towards human rights before and after participation in this semester-long module. Their attitude towards human rights was measured using a twenty-four-item, four-point Likert scale that was developed and previously validated by Xie and Dan (2003). Quantitative analysis was applied. Following an educational intervention of one semester's duration, the participants self-reported a statistically significant change in their attitude towards human rights. The linkage of human rights with social work practice can be facilitated by adopting a specific teaching methodology.
tags: newjournalarticles
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Taylor & Francis Online
The "forced migration" concept can obscure how some people who migrate in this mode exercise a key form of agency. Some refugee flows occur when people reasonably reject options that might obviate the need to flee (e.g., abandoning their religious beliefs). A similar form of agency must be recognized regarding forced migration of other types: people facing severe economic difficulties sometimes become migrants by rejecting options that might secure their subsistence, and when that choice is reasonable because the alternatives amount to human rights violations, we should then describe their migration as "forced" even if it is not wholly involuntary.
tags: newjournalarticles
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Taylor & Francis Online
This article applies the notion of "neighborhood effects" to compare the resettlement experiences of three newly arrived refugee groups in two urban neighborhoods of the same American city. In light of limited case management support at the city level, refugees' access to neighborhood institutions becomes increasingly critical. We suggest that both the presence and flexibility of refugee-serving institutions, or the ability to respond to the changing demographic composition of newer populations and their needs at the neighborhood level, contribute to refugees' enhanced ability to transition to and navigate their new milieu.
tags: newjournalarticles
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Taylor & Francis Online
The aim of this article is to analyze the motivations for return migrations to Bolivia from Spain in a context of economic crisis. From the analysis of in-depth interviews with men and women in the areas of Cochabamba and La Paz, the decision to return home is proven to be embedded within relational gender dynamics. It is argued that the latter is the reflection of a patriarchal ideology that makes the difference when it comes to participation of both sexes in the economic and reproductive responsibilities taking place within the home in the societies of origin.
tags: newjournalarticles
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Taylor & Francis Online
This article investigates the links between economic integration and remittances sending behavior through the cases of Afghan, Burundian, Ethiopian, and Moroccan first generation migrants in the Netherlands. The analysis demonstrates that economically-better-integrated migrants, especially those with secure employment, are significantly more likely to remit, remit more, and remit more for investment purposes rather than consumption. Consequently, I challenge the assimilationist perspective on the links between economic integration and homeland engagement, emphasize the significance of dual-engagement, and discuss the implications of this research for integration and development policy.
tags: newjournalarticles
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Taylor & Francis Online
This study asks whether framing asylum seekers in Israel as "infiltrators" posing threats to the country amplifies exclusion toward them. The term "infiltrators" associates asylum seekers with the anti-infiltration law passed in the 1950s to fight terrorists and dissociates asylum seekers from their unique position as holders of special rights. The term "infiltrators" may thus influence the attitudes of the Israeli public regarding the treatment of asylum seekers. Findings demonstrate that respondents presented with the "infiltrators" frame were more likely to show exclusionary attitudes. Findings additionally show that the framing effect mediates the relation between perceived socioeconomic threat and exclusion.
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Structure of Human Trafficking: Lifting the Bonnet on a Nigerian Transnational Network
"Contrary to widespread belief, human trafficking operations are characterized by significant costs, particularly monitoring costs, and diseconomies of scale. How do traffickers achieve high capacity in their operations? This paper is an empirical in-depth study of the structure and activities of a large-scale human trafficking ring operating between Nigeria and Europe. It is based on a set of novel data sets that was manually coded and analyzed using network analysis techniques, and it shows that high trafficking capacity is associated with a high level of externalization of activities. Offenders mostly act as independent agents, in a similar way to contractors. The trafficking ring does not appear to be run along ethnic or family lines, but what does emerge is a rather clear division of labour and role specialization. Finally, this paper contributes to the broader debate on coordination in illegal settings and puts into question the idea that transnational crime is invariably best fought transnationally. "
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Paradox of Discretion: Customs and the Changing Occupational Identity of Canadian Border Officers
"This article challenges the assumption that border officers enjoy a high level of discretion. By studying customs, it provides insight into how the policing of goods and transport workers is less concerned with 'risky' individuals than it is with promoting international trade flows. In this context, border officer discretion may be seen as a hindrance that must be channeled or curtailed. Interviews with Canadian customs officers demonstrate that technologies facilitate the redistribution of compliance and risk management responsibilities among border policing actors. Such alterations in customs operations have reconfigured discretion in paradoxical ways, both extending and reducing officers' hold on decision-making. This article considers the effects of these changes on officers' use, experience and perception of discretion as well as on their occupational identity. "
tags: newjournalarticles
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Beyond Space of Exception? Reflections on the Camp through the Prism of Refugee Schools
"This article takes as a starting point an ordinary scene—boys and girls, in uniforms, hurrying as a school bell rings—that takes place in a less ordinary setting: a refugee camp. This scene is one we have seen almost every time we have visited a refugee camp across the African continent over the past 10 years. Anyone who arrives there early enough in the morning may actually witness it. Some may not even pay attention to it: children going to school every day has become, after all, such a widespread norm everywhere in the world that it might not surprise us anymore, even in a camp setting. On the contrary, others may see it as a surprising spectacle, for the camp is generally associated with an imaginary of humanitarian emergency, physical and mental suffering that both the media and, to a certain extent, academic research have contributed to build.
Striking and yet ordinary, the image of hundreds of refugee children on their way provides an interesting entry point to engage in social sciences debates on the nature of refugee camps, which have long been dominated by Giorgio Agamben's (1998) language of exception. First, it invites us to think of the camp as something more than merely a device of bare life and relegation that supposedly excludes refugees from any form of meaningful social existence. Indeed, the very presence of school systems in camp settings suggests that (re)including refugees in the social realm and addressing some of their social rights may also preoccupy humanitarian actors along with keeping bodies alive. Besides, this picture forces us to look at camp institutions in their articulation with other global concerns than the mere control of human mobility: if the formalization of school systems in camp settings is closely linked to the globalization of encampment policies … "
tags: newjournalarticles
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Night-Time and Refugees: Evidence from the Thai-Myanmar Border
"The impact of night-time on the social life of refugees is under-researched. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with refugees from Myanmar in Thailand, this article argues that researching refugees' lives after dark is essential for a comprehensive understanding of refugees' social relations, education and economic activities as well as health and safety concerns. Findings of this article provide food for thought for researchers and practitioners working with refugees and internally displaced persons around the world and are likely to entice more research on the subject of night-time in refugee settings. "
tags: newjournalarticles
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'Digging Aid': The Camp as an Option in East and the Horn of Africa
"The 22-year-old Kenyan refugee camp of Kakuma has in many ways developed into an accidental city, and challenges the imagery of refugee camps as seclusion sites and warehouses of wasted lives. Conceptually, the camp is not only a physical structure, but also indicates a relation between humanitarian actors and beneficiaries of aid. In the camp, this relation is intimate, but the relation between refugees and aid actors does not stop at the camp's boundaries. Increasingly, humanitarian and other actors are recognizing that the refugee camps in Kenya are becoming a 'normal' part of the regional socio-economic landscape. People strategize and/or find themselves, as individuals or as part of social networks, in different proximities to humanitarian action. This is a fluid process. People are sometimes in the camp, sometimes in the city and sometimes in South Sudan, Uganda or the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they relate in different ways to aid. This article explores the ways in which people seek and maintain access to the camp and how the Kenyan camps become a part of livelihood options available in the region. "
tags: newjournalarticles
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Goals without Means: A Mertonian Critique of Australia's Resettlement Policy for South Sudanese Refugees
"The increased demand for refugee admissions and services in developed countries like Australia makes it important for host countries to understand the refugee resettlement and integration process. Yet, the literature on pathways and processes facilitating and driving integration is under-theorized (Black 2001) and poorly understood (Spencer 2006; Ager and Strang 2008; Phillimore and Goodson 2008; Strang and Ager 2010). This article aims to explore the structures and pathways facilitating the integration of resettled refugees. Using data collected from recently settled South Sudanese refugees and Merton's typology of modes of adaptation as a theoretical framework, the article demonstrates that Australian Government institutions failed to provide accessible pathways and support to Sudanese refugees to navigate institutional means for achieving economic and social inclusion. At a broader level, the article argues that current Australian resettlement policies are dominated by an emphasis on refugees' adopting their new country's cultural goals without ensuring that there are effective processes and facilitators to achieve these goals. "
tags: newjournalarticles
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Between the Public and the State: The Shipping Lobby's Strategies against US Immigration Restrictions 1882–1917 - Feys - 2015 - International Migration Review - Wiley Online Library
"Based on Freeman's model of interest group-driven migration policies, the article gives a qualitative inside look on a neglected actor during the formative years of US immigration reform. It analyzes the central role of the shipping companies in coordinating the pro-immigration campaign with and against other interest groups. Their lobbying is divided into two complementary sections: inside top-down efforts (lobbyists) to influence legislators and outside bottom-up efforts (migrant communities and the press) to mobilize the public. It assesses the importance of public opinion in their lobby campaigns and the shipping companies' success in delaying far-reaching restrictions until 1917."
tags: newjournalarticles
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Mother Tongue, Host Country Earnings, and Return Migration: Evidence from Cross-National Administrative Records - Saarela - 2015 - International Migration Review - Wiley Online Library
"Using a unique database constructed through the merging of administrative records from Sweden and Finland, we provide the first detailed examination of differential return migration risks by people's mother tongue within a given nationality. We analyze whether the divergence in return migration risk between Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking Finns in Sweden relates to host country earnings, considering that the former group are in parity with native Swedes. Host country earnings and other background variables are found to explain only a modest part of the difference in return migration risk. Variation in the return migration risk of labor migrants is consequently not solely a result of earnings differentials."
tags: newjournalarticles
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Reparations for 'Guilty Victims': Navigating Complex Identities of Victim–Perpetrators in Reparation Mechanisms
"Reparations are often declared victim-centred, but in transitional societies defining who is a victim and eligible for reparations can be politically charged and controversial. The messy reality of conflict means that perpetrators and victims do not always fall into two separate categories. In certain circumstances, perpetrators can be victimized and victims can be responsible for victimizing others – this article explores these complex victims. Looking in particular at the 1993 Shankill bombing in Northern Ireland, as well as at Colombia and Peru, such victims are often seen as 'guilty' or 'bad' victims undeserving of reparations. I argue that complex victims need to be included in reparation mechanisms to ensure accountability and to prevent their exclusion becoming a source of victimization and future violence. I consider the alternative avenues of human rights courts, development aid, services and community reparations to navigate complex identities of victim–perpetrators. I conclude that complex identities can be accommodated in transitional societies' reparation programmes through nuanced rules of eligibility and forms of reparations. "
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Pervasive Presence of the Discourse of White Civility in Early Canadian Social Work in Immigration Services (1900–30)
"The first half of the twentieth century was formative for the Canadian social work profession. White settler Canada was at an intersection between the social forces of capitalism, socialism, feminism, nationalism, imperialism and social reform ( Cohen, 1996; Gaudet, 2001). A discourse of British imperial ideas was in wide circulation, although there was contestation and diverging ideas. Through the osmotic transmission process of cultural imperialism, many of these imperial ideas became part of the fabric of social work. Using a comparative historical archival approach, I examine two politically different social work organisations—the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and Toronto University Settlement—in order to show that this discourse crossed the political spectrum. I consider the influence of imperial discourses on the formation of Canadian social work and the legacy this has left us with. "
tags: newjournalarticles
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Becoming Overweight without Gaining a Pound: Weight Evaluations and the Social Integration of Mexicans in the United States - Altman - 2015 - International Migration Review - Wiley Online Library
"Mexican women gain weight with increasing duration in the United States. In the United States, body dissatisfaction tends to be associated with depression, disordered eating, and incongruent weight evaluations, particularly among white women and women of higher socioeconomic status. However, it remains unclear how being overweight and obesity are interpreted by Mexican women. Using comparable data of women aged 20–64 from both Mexico (the 2006 Encuesta Nacional de Salud y Nutricion; N = 17,012) and the United States (the 1999–2009 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys; N = 8,487), we compare weight status evaluations among Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, US-born Mexicans, US-born non-Hispanic whites, and US-born non-Hispanic blacks. Logistic regression analyses, which control for demographic and socioeconomic variables and measured body mass index and adjust for the likelihood of migration for Mexican nationals, indicate that the tendency to self-evaluate as overweight among Mexicans converges with levels among non-Hispanic whites and diverges from blacks over time in the United States. Overall, the results suggest a US integration process in which Mexican-American women's less critical self-evaluations originate in Mexico but fade with time in the United States as they gradually adopt US white norms for thinner body sizes. These results are discussed in light of prior research about social comparison and negative health assimilation."
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Political Effects of Immigrant Naturalization - Street - 2015 - International Migration Review - Wiley Online Library
"Immigration is transforming the societies of Europe and North America. Yet the political implications of these changes remain unclear. In particular, we lack credible evidence on whether, and how, becoming a citizen of the country of residence prompts immigrants to engage with the political system. This paper used panel data from Germany to test theories of citizenship and immigrant politics. I found that naturalization can promote political integration, but that this is more likely if new citizens have the chance to pick up habits of political engagement during the formative years of early adulthood."
tags: newjournalarticles
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Securitization of migration and the far right: the case of Greek security professionals - Lazaridis - 2015 - International Migration - Wiley Online Library
"Since the events of 9/11, security concerns have gained unprecedented dominance on western governments' national and international political agendas; Greece has been no exception. The success or failure of a far right party, like Golden Dawn, depends on the effectiveness of the government to regulate immigration and to develop policies aimed at combating the racism which pervades the political culture of society at this particular juncture, when the country is experiencing severe crisis. The aim is to provide an account of the rationale of the securitization of migration from the perspective of Greek security professionals. We argue that the extreme securitizing perceptions of security professionals have been exploited and assisted by far-right extremist groups, which instilled racial violence, hate speech/crime into society, resulting in patterned, unreflective, and routinized security practices and discourses which are more in line with the beliefs and values advocated by the extreme right."
tags: newjournalarticles
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