INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW, 2001, Vol. 35, No. 1
Special Issue: UNHCR at 50: Past, Present and Future of Refugee Assistance
From refugees to forced migration: The UNHCR and human security.
Within UNHCR, there has been a shift in the emphasis on the meaning of protection. Protection of refugees is now primarily defined as security of refugees and refugee operations rather than in terms of the legal asylum process. The article examines the significance of UNHCR placing the refugee issue within both the larger context of forced migration as well as within the context of human security. The paper clarifies and documents a current and general focus of forced migration that includes the internally displaced as well as refugees and offers a framework for comprehending and dealing with the refugee problem that has shifted focus to the security dimension.
(UN, UNHCR, REFUGEES, FORCED MIGRATION, DISPLACED PERSONS, POLITICAL ASYLUM, HUMAN RIGHTS, INTERNATIONAL LAW, MIGRANT STATUS).
English - pp. 7-32.
H. Adelman, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University, Canada.
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The UNHCR and world politics: State interests vs. institutional autonomy.
This article situates the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) within the context of world politics. States remain the predominant actors in the international political system. But this does not mean that international organizations like the UNHCR are completely without power or influence. Tracing the evolution of the agency over the past half century, this article argues that while the UNHCR has been constrained by states, the notion that it is a passive mechanism with no independent agenda of its own is not borne out by the empirical evidence of the past 50 years. Rather UNHCR policy and practice have been driven both by state interests and by the office acting independently or evolving in ways not expected nor necessarily sanctioned by states.
(UN, UNHCR, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, POLITICS, STATE, GOVERNMENT POLICY).
English - pp. 33-56.
G. Loescher, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, U.S.A.
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Fifty years of refugee studies: From theory to policy.
This article reviews the growth of the field of refugee studies, focusing on its links with, and impact on, refugee policy. The last fifty years, and especially the last two decades, have witnessed both a dramatic increase in academic work on refugees and significant institutional development in the field. It is argued that these institutions have developed strong links with policymakers, although this has often failed to translate into significant policy impacts. Areas in which future policy-orientated work might be developed are considered.
(REFUGEES, POLITICS, DECISION MAKING, INTERNATIONAL LAW, IMMIGRATION LEGISLATION, IMMIGRATION POLICY, METHODOLOGY).
English - pp. 57-78.
R. Black, University of Sussex, Sussex, U.K.
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The protection-neutrality dilemma in humanitarian emergencies: Why the need for military intervention?
For humanitarian organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the recent evolution of military engagement in Complex Humanitarian Emergencies has been a mixed blessing. This article examines the protection-neutrality dilemma confronting UNCHR in the face of increased military humanitarian action. The conceptual framework presented here suggests that military forces may in fact act as an important "norms entrepreneur", influencing how protection norms affect international responses to humanitarian emergencies. The linking of forced migration and security has generated a host of challenges for civil-military relations and raises a number of concerns for UNHCR regarding the legitimacy, ethics and operational viability of military interventions in such crises.
(UN, UNHCR, ARMED FORCES, FORCED MIGRATION, CONFLICTS, HUMAN RIGHTS, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS).
English - pp. 79-116.
C. Weil, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A.
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The need for military intervention in humanitarian emergencies.
I have been a keen student of international intervention since long before my command of the United Nations forces in Cambodia. My military career has spanned much of the Cold War years and has taken me to places like Malaysia during the period of confrontation over its formation, Vietnam, Europe at the height of the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, and most of Southeast Asia. I was an instructor at the British Army Staff College at the time of the establishment of UNIFIL - the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon - a serious aberration in the determinedly passive international peacekeeping approach to that time. The earlier intervention in the Congo in the 1960s seemed to have warned the UN off anything forceful in disrupted states, leaving it to former colonial powers to extract themselves from their former areas of engagement with as much saving grace as they could muster. Many of them did not do this very well.
(UN, ARMED FORCES, CONFLICTS, WAR, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS).
English - pp. 117-123.
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Why is humanitarian action often a substitute for a lack of political will?.
No summary.
(CONFLICTS, POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, STATE, GOVERNMENT POLICY).
English - pp. 124-129.
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Refugees: Challenges to protection.
By the end of the year 2000, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees will have been in existence for 50 years - which is probably some sort of record for an organization originally set up with just a three-year mandate.
There were many reasons for so limiting the successor agency to the International Refugee Organization, but it is doubtful whether anyone seriously thought that refugee problems would be resolved so quickly, or indeed that UNHCR would develop into the highly operational, visible and extensively funded entity that we see today. Fifty years of experience nevertheless suggests that it is high time for an audit, for an evaluation of strengths, weaknesses and achievements, and a little strategic thinking about the future.
(UN, UNHCR, REFUGEES, DISPLACED PERSONS, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS).
English - pp. 130-142.
G. S. Goodwin-Gill, Oxford University, Wellington Square, Oxford. OX1 2JD, U.K.
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Funding dilemmas in refugee assistance: Political interests and institutional reforms in UNHCR.
No summary.
(UN, UNHCR, REFUGEES, POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS).
English - pp. 143-167.
R. Väyrynen, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, U.S.A.
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Mind the gap! UNHCR, humanitarian assistance and the development process.
This article provides a historical critique of the initiatives taken by UNHCR to link its refugee and returnee assistance programs with longer-term development efforts in low-income countries. Such initiatives include the integrated zonal development approach of the 1960s; the refugee aid and development strategy of the 1970s and 1980s; the returnee aid and development strategy of the 1990s; and, most recently, the Brookings process. The article concludes that these initiatives have generally been flawed in their conceptualization and implementation and have consequently failed to meet their intended objectives.
(DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, UN, UNHCR, REFUGEES, DEVELOPMENT, DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY, DEVELOPMENT POLICY, REPATRIATION).
English - pp. 168-191.
J. Crisp, UNHCR.
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Bureaucracy and the quality of mercy.
No summary.
(BUREAUCRACY, ATTITUDE, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION).
English - pp. 192-225.
A. C. Helton, Council on Foreign Relations.
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Forced migration and professionalism.
The complexity of forced migration calls for significant expertise with regard to prevention, responses and solutions. This article describes efforts since the early 1980s to professionalize the field. Professional development requires, at a minimum, that three things be in place: training; standards to govern professional competence; and a process for evaluation and improvement. Professional development must take into account the increasing complexity of humanitarian crises; changing notions of sovereignty that permit new solutions; changing mandates and responsibilities of organizations concerned with forced migration; and technological and communications innovations that enable new approaches to forced migration and professional training.
(FORCED MIGRATION, DISPLACED PERSONS, CONFLICTS, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, TRAINING, COMMUNICATION, INNOVATIONS, TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE).
English - pp. 226-243.
S. F. Martin, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, U.S.A.
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Humanitarianism with a sovereign face: UNHCR in the global undertow.
This article examines the global forces that are responsible for the transformation of the meaning and practice of UNHCR's humanitarianism, and asks whether a transformation that enables the organization to become more deeply involved in the internal affairs of states is welcome or worrisome. I open by reviewing the changing relationship between multilateralism, sovereignty, and humanitarianism, and link that conceptual discussion to the international refugee regime. I then argue that the combination of state pressures and the normative principle of popular sovereignty enabled a more political and pragmatic UNHCR to widen its activities under the humanitarian banner and to become more deeply involved in the circumstances in the refugee-producing country. This expanding humanitarian umbrella, I suggest, might be a stealth agent for a policy of containment and a threat to refugee rights. This possibility is suggested by recent debates over the category of internally displaced peoples; the decided preference for repatriation; and UNHCR's involvement in reintegration activities. These developments generate the worrisome possibility that a more pragmatic UNHCR is potentially (though unwittingly) implicated in a system of containment. I conclude by reflecting on UNHCR's role in global politics and the dangers of a sovereignty-led humanitarianism.
(UN, UNHCR, REFUGEES, DISPLACED PERSONS, REPATRIATION, HUMAN RIGHTS, STATE, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS).
English - pp. 244-277.
M. Barnett, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A.
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From Nansen to Ogata: UNHCR's role in a changing world.
No summary.
(UN, UNHCR, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS).
English - pp. 278-283.
N. Bwakira, UNHCR Liaison Office, New York, U.S.A.
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SUHRKE, Astri; NEWLAND, Kathleen.
UNHCR: Uphill into the future.
No summary.
(UN, UNHCR, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS).
English - pp. 284-302.
A. Suhrke, Michelsen Institute, K. Newland, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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The international refugee regime(s): The end of the Cold War matters.
The purpose of this note is to present a schematic narrative and analysis of the development of the international response to refugees by states during the Cold War. The analysis focuses on the period from the statute creating the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Convention on the Status of Refugees, both in 1951, through the end of the Cold War. The note supplements the analysis contained in an earlier theoretical article published in this journal in 1996 entitled "How Nation-States Create and Respond to Refugee Flows" (Keely, 1996). The views differ sharply from conventional wisdom but provide a better understanding of and an explanation for some contemporary difficulties regarding refugee and asylum policy, especially in the industrial countries, but also more generally globally.
(REFUGEES, DISPLACED PERSONS, POLITICAL ASYLUM, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, STATE).
English - pp. 303-314.
C. B. Keely, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, U.S.A.
***
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW, 2001, Vol. 35, No. 2
FIX, Michael; ZIMMERMANN, Wendy.
All under one roof: Mixed-status families in an era of reform.
In this paper we document the prevalence of mixed immigration status families and discuss some of the immigration and citizenship policies that drive their formation. Using the 1998 Current Population Survey, we find that nearly one in ten families with children is a mixed status family: that is a family in which one or both parents is a noncitizen and one or more children is a citizen. We also find that 75% of children in immigrant families are citizens. We identify a number of the challenges that mixed status families pose for achieving the goals of recent welfare and illegal immigration reforms.
(UNITED STATES, IMMIGRANTS, MIGRANT STATUS, NATURALIZATION, IMMIGRANT POLICY, ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, SOCIAL WELFARE).
English - pp. 397-419.
M. Fix, W. Zimmermann, The Urban Institute.
***
HEIN, Jeremy; BEGER, Randall R.
Legal adaptation among Vietnamese refugees in the United States: How international migrants litigate civil grievances during the resettlement process.
This article examines an overlooked dimension of adaptation among international migrants: how they use the host society's legal system to seek redress for grievances that arise during the resettlement process. The article terms this process legal adaptation and focuses on foreign-born plaintiffs in civil litigation. A sample (N=137) of state and federal civil cases with at least one Vietnamese litigant is used to analyze the temporal patterns in legal adaptation among Vietnamese refugees from 1975 to 1994. Several aspects of Vietnamese litigation match their macro-level resettlement process, such as civil rights and intraethnic litigation occurring later than other types of cases. But civil suits with a Vietnamese plaintiff and a native defendant tended to occur earlier than civil suits with a native plaintiff and a Vietnamese defendant. The article identifies the role of legal organizations and international grievances as the sources of Vietnamese refugees' rapid legal adaptation.
(VIET NAM, UNITED STATES, IMMIGRANTS, RESETTLEMENT, MIGRANT ASSIMILATION, ADJUSTMENT, LEGAL STATUS, CIVIL RIGHTS, LEGISLATION).
English - pp. 420-448.
J. Hein, R. R. Beger, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, USA.
***
Race and place in the adaptation of Mariel exiles.
The influx of lower class émigrés during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift complicates the "success story" image of previous waves of Cuban exiles to the United States. Examination of Mariel exiles in terms of racial variation in adaptation does not exist; nor is analysis of the geographic distribution and internal migration of Mariel Cubans within the United States represented. Mariel exiles maneuver along distinguishable paths of adaptation as evidenced by patterns of settlement and geographical mobility. I argue that place is a necessary ingredient in illuminating diverse adjustment experiences among immigrants and refugees in the United States.
(CUBA, UNITED STATES, IMMIGRANTS, EXILES, REFUGEES, SETTLEMENT PROCESS, RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY, MIGRANT ASSIMILATION).
English - pp. 449-471
E. H. Skoop, Arizona State University, USA.
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The economic adjustment of recently arrived Bosnian, Afghan and Iraqi refugees in Sydney, Australia.
Research on the early settlement experience of refugees from Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan is absent, both in Australia and overseas. The current study, based on questionnaire results and the application of SPSS results, explores the impact that pre-migration and post-arrival experiences have on the initial post-arrival economic adjustment in Sydney, Australia of recently arrived refugees from these three countries. Guided by a summary of previous findings and surveyed results of key service providers in Sydney, two propositions based on pre-migration and post-migration background variables have been developed and tested with mixed results. As expected, there was a significant relationship between English language competency and the likelihood of being gainfully employed. However, there was, for example, no significant association between current employment status and the time spent in detention camp or the extent of negative exit conditions experienced, and there were no significant differences in employment outcomes for those with or without qualifications. This study concludes with a number of recommendations, in particular, the need for early intervention with adequate English language tuition, employment skills training and career counselling which could greatly assist humanitarian entrants in finding employment and reducing welfare dependence.
(AUSTRALIA, YUGOSLAVIA, AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, CITIES, REFUGEES, ADJUSTMENT, MIGRANT ASSIMILATION, LANGUAGES, EMPLOYMENT, OCCUPATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS, DEPENDENCY).
English - pp. 472-505.
P. Waxman, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
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DÁVILA, Alberto; MORA, Marie T.
The marital status of recent Mexican immigrants in the United States in 1980 and 1990.
Using Public Use Microdata Samples, we analyze the temporal marriage patterns of recent Mexican immigrants in the United States, and relate these patterns to socioeconomic and political events, such as U.S. immigration reform, increasing returns to skill, and rising incentives for unattached Mexicans to migrate during the 1980s. Our findings indicate that recent Mexican immigrants (particularly men) were less likely to be married within five years of migrating in 1990 than their counterparts had been in 1980. An empirical extension further suggests that the relative endogamy odds among Mexican immigrants who migrated to the United States by 1980 increased during the next decade. Such demographic changes may affect policies involving issues such as education, welfare and retirement.
(UNITED STATES, MEXICO, IMMIGRANTS, MARITAL STATUS, NUPTIALITY RATE, ENDOGAMY, IMMIGRATION POLICY, EDUCATIONAL POLICY, SOCIAL POLICY).
English ? pp. 506-524.
A. Dávila, University of Texas-Pan American, U.S.A.; M. T. Mora, New Mexico State University, U.S.A.
***
Change in nuptiality patterns among Cuban Americans: Evidence of cultural and structural assimilation?
"Is assimilation dead?" (Glazer, 1993). One group of sociologists argues that the classical assimilation model no longer, if it ever did, serves to facilitate our understanding of immigrant incorporation into American society. Another group contends that it remains a powerful tool. In this paper I test these two alternatives through an analyses of changing patterns of Cuban American nuptiality behavior throughout the 1970-90 period. Based predominantly on PUMS of the 1970, 1980 and 1990 US censuses, I find support for the conjecture that the classical assimilation model, with some modifications, continues to provide us with a viable tool to study contemporary immigrant incorporation in the United States.
(CUBA, UNITED STATES, IMMIGRANTS, NUPTIALITY RATE, NUPTIALITY TABLES, MIGRANT ASSIMILATION, CULTURAL CHANGE).
English - pp. 525-556.
E. Arias, State University of New York at Stony Brook, U.S.A.
***
QIAN, Zhenchao; BLAIR, Sampson Lee; RUF, Stacey, D.
Asian American interracial and interethnic marriages: Differences by education and nativity.
Using the 1990 US census data, we apply log-linear models to examine Asian Americans' interracial marriage with whites and interethnic marriages between Asian ethnic groups. Japanese and Filipino Americans are most likely to marry whites, followed by Chinese and Korean Americans. Southeast Asian and Asian Indian Americans are least likely to marry whites. We further explore how interracial marriage differs by couples' educational and nativity combinations. The impact of educational attainment, generally, is very strong but is modest for Japanese Americans, the most assimilated group, and for Southeast Asian Americans, the least assimilated group. Interracial marriage is more likely for native than for immigrant couples, but immigrants marrying natives are more likely to whites than persons of their own ethnic group. Interethnic marriage between Asian ethnic groups is limited to several ethnic groups, but is much more frequent among natives than among immigrants. Japanese and Chinese Americans, who have lived in the United States for several generations, have the highest rate of interethnic marriage. We have shown two forms of integration for Asian Americans - integration into mainstream society through interracial marriage for both immigrants and natives and integration into Asian American pan-ethnicity through interethnic marriage for later-generation natives.
(UNITED STATES, IMMIGRANTS, NON-MIGRANTS, ETHNIC GROUPS, MIXED MARRIAGE, LEVELS OF EDUCATION, INTEGRATION, METHODOLOGY, REGRESSION ANALYSIS).
English - pp. 557-586.
Z. Qian, S. L. Blair, S. D. Ruf, Arizona State University, U.S.A.
***
CAHAN, Sorel; DAVIS, Daniel; STAUB, Rachel.
Age at immigration and scholastic achievement in school-age children: Is there a vulnerable age?
This study investigates the relationship between age at immigration and educational achievement at age 14 among all the students (about 45,000) who immigrated to Israel between 1952 and 1970. The relationship is examined for verbal and nonverbal components of an achievement test, in subpopulations defined by gender and ethnic background (Western- versus Eastern-born children). The findings indicate a monotonic decrease in achievement as a function of immigration age starting at the age of 7. This decrease is considerably stronger for the Verbal subtest than for the Mathematical subtest, particularly in the Western group. These results refute the vulnerable age hypothesis: They support the view that the foreign language acquisition factor plays a central role in the relationship between age of immigration and scholastic achievement, and are consistent with the expectation of a monotonic decline in achievement as age of immigration increases (and length of residence decreases). Hence, when immigration involves the need to learn a new language, the drop in school achievement is likely to be particularly marked in subject areas requiring higher levels of mastery of the language of instruction. Finally, the results suggest that age 7 may represent a critical age for the scholastic achievement of immigrant students.
(ISRAEL, IMMIGRANTS, EDUCATIONAL DROPOUTS, LEVELS OF EDUCATION, LANGUAGES, SEX ROLES, ETHNIC GROUPS, DURATION OF RESIDENCE).
English - pp. 587-595.
S. Cahan,D. Davis, R. Staub, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
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