The story that is inspiring the world. Read about Nujeen who escaped the hell of war in Aleppo and travelled to Europe in a wheelchair. 'She is our hero. Everyone must read her story. She will inspire you' MALALA YOUSAFZAI Nujeen Mustafa has cerebral palsy and cannot walk. This did not stop her braving inconceivable odds to travel in her wheelchair from Syria in search of a new life. Sharing her full story for the first time, Nujeen recounts the details of her childhood and disability, as well as the specifics of her harrowing journey across the Mediterranean to Greece and finally to Germany to seek an education and the medical treatment she needs. Nujeen's story has already touched millions and in this book written with Christina Lamb, bestselling co-author of 'I Am Malala', she helps to put a human face on a global emergency. Trapped in a fifth floor apartment in Aleppo and unable to go to school, she taught herself to speak English by watching US television. As civil war between Assad's forces and ISIS militants broke out around them, Nujeen and her family fled first to her native Kobane, then Turkey before they joined thousands of displaced persons in a journey to Europe and asylum. She wanted to come to Europe, she said, to become an astronaut, to meet the Queen and to learn how to walk. In her strong, positive voice, Nujeen tells the story of what it is really like to be a refugee, to have grown up in a dictatorship only for your life to be blighted by war; to have left a beloved homeland to become dependent on others. It is the story of our times told through the incredible bravery of one remarkable girl determined to keep smiling.

Today, Australia's response to asylum-seeking 'boat people' is a hot-button issue that feeds the political news cycle. But the daily reports and political promises lack the historical context that would allow for informed debate. Have we ever taken our fair share of refugees? Have our past responses been motivated by humanitarian concerns or economic self-interest? Is the influx of 'boat people' over the last fifteen years really unprecedented? In this eloquent and informative book, historian Klaus Neumann examines both government policy and public attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers since Federation. He places the Australian story in the context of global refugee movements, and international responses to them. Neumann examines many case studies, including the resettlement of displaced persons from European refugee camps in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the panic generated by the arrival of Vietnamese asylum seekers during the 1977 federal election campaign. By exploring the ways in which politicians have approached asylum-seeker issues in the past, Neumann aims to inspire more creative thinking about current refugee and asylum-seeker policy. 'Klaus Neumann has written a humane, engrossing book imbued with the awareness that in telling the history of Australia, one tells the story of immigration. Immigrants - always resisted, always blasted by invective and ever essential to our society and polity - show us ourselves through the heroic journeys of ancestors, the recurrent frenzies of resistance, right up to our present parlous state as the most supposedly tolerant intolerant society on earth. But if you think you've read all this before, you should know Neumann has brought to this book a novelty of approach, a freshness of perception, that means all the others have been mere preparation.' Tom Keneally 'Across the Seas is a call to remember, to rethink, and regenerate. And to overcome our culture of forgetting ...it's a fine and vital book - a work of highly accessible and gripping historical scholarship, which must be read by as many people in this country, and abroad, as possible.' David Manne

The Islamic threat is possibly the most disturbing political issue of our time, as it impacts on the fears of so many ordinary people. The propagation of puritanical Wahabism, through the oil 'wealth of the Gulf States, ensures that its ideology is spread worldwide as the most influential force in the world today. The entire thinking and life-style of Muslims is dictated by religious demands to the exclusion of anything regarded as profane. Such a mind-set established by the Prophet Mohammed and his followers, is long enshrined in tradition, and remains to the present day. Hence God is the single authority and his commands are interpreted through holy text alone. It is the exclusion of a secular dimension, with its appeal to independent reason that defines Islam as a totalitarian movement. The problem in the non-Islamic world, especially in Western Europe, is the penetration of nation states by a proselytising religious totalitarianism on democratic societies. The variety of means in attempting to achieve this, and the subtlety of the methods, is the subject of this book. The main objection of non-Muslims to the penetration of their culture is the creation of pseudo-legal structures, or a state within the state, e.g., their own parliament," or the announcement of no-go zones, or the establishment of Sharia courts with no legal authority. The resistance of Muslims to the idea of integration leaves them with two alternatives only: either they must create their own mini-states within the state, or else they must attempt by subtler means to seize control of leading administrative institutions. Muslims in Britain are engaged in both the above alternatives, as witnessed by their numbers and close cooperation in both Houses of Parliament, and their power in local government councils nationwide. Through a sociological and objective approach that appreciates the religious priorities of Islamic people, this book attempts to find a harmonious middle path to ensure a lasting concord between two contrasting civilisations.

What has happened on Nauru and Manus since Australia began its most recent offshore processing regime in 2012? This essential book provides a comprehensive and uncompromising overview of the first three years of offshore processing since it recommenced in 2012. It explains why offshore processing was re-established, what life is like for asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus, what asylum seekers, refugees and staff in the offshore detention centres have to say about what goes on there, and why the truth has been so hard to find. In doing so, it goes behind the rumours and allegations to reveal what is known - and what still is not known - about Australia's offshore detention centres.

In these Gasson Lectures, Frank Brennan addresses various contested contemporary issues such as church-state relations, physician assisted suicide and national border protection. He writes, 'I hope that these lectures can help persons of all faiths and none maintain what Pope John Paul II, when addressing the Italian Parliament, called "a convinced and pondered trust in the heritage of virtues and values handed down by your forebears". In these lectures I have drawn much inspiration from Pope Francis who travelled to the island of Lampedusa to speak boldly and prophetically about the plight of asylum seekers coming across the Mediterranean Sea in search of new life. Before offering his blessing and casting a wreath on the waters, Francis asked, "Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters of ours?" In these lectures, I seek to draw on my own religious tradition to answer that question to the satisfaction of persons of all faiths and none, and in the many precarious situations in which people find themselves, especially at the borders of life and of nation states.'

A remarkably warm-hearted, uplifting and inspiring story of one boy's survival against the odds. Abdi's world fell apart when he was only fifteen and Somalia's vicious civil war hit Mogadishu. Unable to find his family and effectively an orphan, he fled with some sixty others,heading to Kenya. On the way, death squads hunted them and they daily faced violence, danger and starvation. After almost four months, they arrived in at refugee camps in Kenya - of the group he'd set out with, only five had survived. All alone in the world and desperate to find his family, Abdi couldn't stay in Kenya, so he turned around and undertook the dangerous journey back to Mogadishu. But the search was fruitless, and eventually Abdi made his way - alone, with no money in his pockets - to Romania, then to Germany, completely dependent on the kindess of strangers. He was just seventeen years old when he arrived in Melbourne. He had no English, no family or friends, no money, no home. Yet, against the odds, he not only survived, he thrived. Abdi went on to complete secondary education and later university. He became a youth worker, was acknowledged with the 2007 Victorian Refugee Recognition Award and was featured in the SBS second series of Go Back to Where You Came From. Despite what he has gone through, Abdi is a most inspiring man, who is constantly thankful for his life and what he has. Everything he has endured and achieved is testament to his quiet strength and courage, his resilience and most of all, his warm-hearted, shining and enduring optimism. 'Powerful and uplifting' Bookseller + Publisher 'Aden's odyssey belongs to our time ...Here is a man who counts his blessings and has an inspiring story to tell.' Sydney Morning Herald

The Forgotten Kindertransportees offers a compelling new exploration of the Kindertransport episode in Britain. The Kindertransport brought close to 10,000 unaccompanied children and young people to Britain on a trans-migrant basis between 1938 and 1939, with an estimated 70% of these children being of the Jewish faith. The outbreak of the Second World War turned this short-term initiative into a longer-term episode and Britain became home to the thousands that had been forced to migrate across the continent to flee the Nazis and the tragic Holocaust that would take place. This book re-evaluates and challenges misconceptions about the Kindertransportees' experiences in Britain - misconceptions that currently pervade Kindertransport scholarship. It focuses on the particularity of the Scottish experience, scrutinising misleading national pictures, which have dominated existing literature and excluded this important part of the Kindertransport episode. An estimated 8% of Kindertransportees were cared for in Scotland for the duration of the war years and this book demonstrates how national agendas were put into practice in a region that was far removed from the administrative and bureaucratic hub of London. The Forgotten Kindertransportees provides original interpretations as it considers a number of important aspects of the Kindertransportees' experiences in Scotland, including those of a social, political and religious nature.This includes an examination of Scotland's philanthropic welfare solutions for the dependent trans-migrant minor, the role of Zionism and the impact of Scottish-Jewry's particular approach to Judaism and a Jewish lifestyle upon broader life stories of Kindertransportees. Using a vast body of new research material, Frances Williams provides a fascinating and detailed examination of the Kindertransport that is region-specific and one that is all the more important because of its specificity. This is an important text for anyone interested in the Holocaust and the social history of those involved.

In the first half of the 20th century, throughout the Balkans and Middle East, a familiar story of destroyed communities forced to flee war or economic crisis unfolded. Often, these refugees of the Ottoman Empire - Christians, Muslims and Jews - found their way to new continents, forming an Ottoman diaspora that had a remarkable ability to reconstitute, and even expand, the ethnic, religious, and ideological diversity of their homelands. Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 offers a unique study of a transitional period in world history experienced through these refugees living in the Middle East, the Americas, South-East Asia, East Africa and Europe. Isa Blumi explores the tensions emerging between those trying to preserve a world almost entirely destroyed by both the nation-state and global capitalism and the agents of the so-called Modern era.

Tony Abbott promised to stop the boats. With the help of Kevin Rudd's "PNG solution," he has. But at what cost?
In Quarterly Essay 53, Paul Toohey tells the dramatic stories of asylum seekers heading from Java to Australia, investigates people-smuggling and witnesses the aftermath of a sinking at sea.
Toohey also examines Australian attitudes to boat people, and what politicians have made of these. He assesses the diplomatic fall-out from turning back boats and asks: have we missed our chance for an Indonesian solution, a realistic alternative to the brutally effective system we now have? This is an unflinching look at people at their worst and best - and most ruthless and most vulnerable - by one of Australia's finest reporters.
"Any hope for a genuine regional solution rested with Indonesia, the final stepping stone to Australia ... Why did neither Howard, in his better times with Indonesia, or Labor, from 2007, seek a one-on-one solution with Indonesia? 'The Indonesian Solution.' Those words would have been the most convincing political statement any Australian government could ever deliver to Australian voters on asylum seekers." Paul Toohey, That Sinking Feeling
Paul Toohey is a senior reporter for News Corp Australia. He won a Walkley Award for his first Quarterly Essay, Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention. He was previously a senior writer at the Bulletin and the Australian, has won the Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year Award and is the author of three books: God's Little Acre, Rocky Goes West and The Killer Within. He lives in Darwin. final page extent: 120pp]

"We are making little territories in your country, a hostile take-over of your garden sheds, your abandoned houses and your toilets. The occupation has begun "Driven by a desire for belonging, two Romanian immigrants kidnap an Englishman to learn how to be English. Set in a derelict Victorian public toilet, "Occupied "is a darkly comic play about identity in crisis. The play was first performed at Labfest 2012 and received a full production at Theatre503, London, on 1 April 2014, directed by Anna Mors (winner of the Kevin Spacey Award for Emerging Artists).

In this unique volume, leading analysts from the Red Cross, Middle East Institute and Refugee Affairs - many of whom have been actively involved in past negotiations on this issue - provide an overview of the key dimensions of the Palestinian refugee problem. Mindful of the sensitive and contested nature of the subject, none offers a single solution. Instead, each contribution summarises and synthesises the existing scholarly and governmental work on the topic. Each paper develops an array of policy options for resolving various aspects of the refugee issue. From moral acknowledgements of the plight of refugees, to host countries, repatriation and reparations, each policy analysis is written to provide a broad menu of choices rather than a single narrow set of recommendations. No other work on the Palestinian refugee issue has undertaken such a task. The Palestinian Refugee Problem: The Search for a Resolution is likely to be a pre-eminent reference and analytical work on the topic for many years to come.

Between 1945 and 1948, more than a quarter of a million Jews fled countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and began filling hastily erected displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria. As one of the victorious Allies, Britain had to help find a solution for the vast majority of these refugees who refused repatriation. Drawing on extensive research in British, American, and Israeli archives, Arieh Kochavi presents a comprehensive analysis of British policy toward Jewish displaced persons and reveals the crucial role the United States played in undermining that policy. Kochavi argues that political concerns--not human considerations--determined British policy regarding the refugees. Anxious to secure its interests in the Middle East, Britain feared its relations with Arab nations would suffer if it appeared to be too lax in thwarting Zionist efforts to bring Jewish Holocaust survivors to Palestine. In the United States, however, the American Jewish community was able to influence presidential policy by making its vote hinge on a solution to the displaced persons problem. Setting his analysis against the backdrop of the escalating Cold War, Kochavi reveals how, ironically, the Kremlin as well as the White House came to support the Zionists' goals, albeit for entirely different reasons.

Women in conflict zones face a wide range of violence from a variety of sources: from physical and psychological trauma to political, economic and social disadvantage. Maria Holt uses her research gathered in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon and in the West Bank to look at the forms and effects of violence suffered by women in the context of the wider conflict around them. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinian refugees fled over the border into Lebanon, and in the wake of tumult in other host states, such as Jordan, many more sought refuge there. Today more than 400,000 Palestinians reside in Lebanon, and the theme of violence is one that informs their daily life. Holt explores these varying forms of violence, including physical personal violence and the violence of war as well as the more symbolic violence of the disintegration of daily life and erasure of homeland, furthermore highlighting ongoing exclusion and isolation Palestinians are subjected to by the Lebanese state. Nevertheless, this condition of being - but not belonging - in Lebanon has influenced refugees' perceptions of themselves. Holt therefore analyses the daily life of Palestinians, recognising the unique community that has emerged in response to exile. In an atmosphere of violence, these refugees find coping mechanisms and appropriate strategies to counter the pressures of conflict. Adherence to religious belief and valued traditional practices, as well as involvement in political and welfare activities and, on occasion, militant activism, are some of the methods employed by women. With its systematic examination of forms of violence as well as an appreciation of daily life in the refugee camps, Women and Conflict in the Middle East makes essential reading for students of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as those interested in the gender dimension of violence.

International treaties, conventions, and organizations to protect refugees were established in the aftermath of World War II to protect people escaping targeted persecution by their own governments. However, the nature of cross-border displacement has transformed dramatically since then. Such threats as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that make possible human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as "refugees," preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection.

In this book, Alexander Betts develops the concept of "survival migration" to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves. Examining flight from three of the most fragile states in Africa Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia Betts explains variation in institutional responses across the neighboring host states. There is massive inconsistency. Some survival migrants are offered asylum as refugees; others are rounded up, detained, and deported, often in brutal conditions. The inadequacies of the current refugee regime are a disaster for human rights and gravely threaten international security. In Survival Migration, Betts outlines these failings, illustrates the enormous human suffering that results, and argues strongly for an expansion of protected categories."

Bad News for Refugees analyses the political, economic and environmental contexts of migration and looks specifically at how refugees and asylum seekers have been stigmatised in political rhetoric and in media coverage. Through forensic research, conducted through interviews and analysis of media accounts, a history of contemporary migration and asylum is written. The authors examine the various catalysts for migration, in doing so reveal how economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are often conflated by the media. They explain negative reactions to new arrivals, describing the benefit cheat, criminals and job stealing narratives that dominate anti-migrant discourse. Case studies reveal how hysterical and inaccurate media accounts act to legitimise political action can have terrible consequences both on the lives of refugees and also on established migrant communities. Based on new research by the renowned Glasgow Media Group, this book is essential reading for those concerned with the negative effects of media on public understanding and for the safety of vulnerable groups and communities in our society.

This book tells the story of how families separated across borders write-and learn new ways of writing-in pursuit of love and money. According to the UN, 244 million people currently live outside their countries of birth. The human drama behind these numbers is that parents are often separated from children, brothers from sisters, lovers from each other. Migration, undertaken in response to problems of the wallet, also poses problems for the heart. Writing for Love and Money shows how families separated across borders turn to writing to address these problems. Based on research with transnational families in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and North America, it describes how people write to sustain meaningful relationships across distance and to better their often impoverished circumstances. Despite policy makers' concerns about "brain drain," the book reveals that immigrants' departures do not leave homelands wholly educationally hobbled. Instead, migration promotes experiences of literacy learning in transnational families as they write to reach the two life goals that globalization consistently threatens: economic solvency and familial intimacy.

Allentown, Pennsylvania, is a small city located along the Lehigh River in the eastern part of the state. Once the hiding place of the Liberty Bell, Allentown has become a popular destination for Latino immigrants. These Latinos, mostly from Puerto Rico, now make up about a quarter of the city's population, and their numbers continue to grow. The thirty-one stories collected in The New Face of Small-Town America do not reflect the reality of Allentown alone. With U.S. Census figures showing the arrival of Latinos in more small American cities than ever before, Allentown will continue to serve as an example.

These small cities have already experienced, or are about to experience, the transformation Allentown saw. Few communities embrace such change. It is only when one becomes familiar with a foreign concept (or foreigners) that fear disappears and understanding begins. Edgar Sandoval's essays show that behind the accents, ethnic customs, and other cultural differences exists a common humanity with universal problems and dreams. The Latinos profiled here want what everybody else wants: to fit in, to prosper, to offer their children a better future, to be recognized as important members of society by the mainstream. They want to coexist. These stories are not just about Latinos in Allentown, after all; they are about Latinos everywhere.

The period of the 'long' Second World War (1936-1948) was marked by mass movements of diverse populations: 60 million people either fled or were forced from their homes. This book considers the Spanish Republicans fleeing Franco's Spain in 1939, the French civilians trying to escape the Nazi invasion in 1940, and the millions of people displaced or expelled by the forces of Hitler's Third Reich. Throughout this period state and voluntary organisations were created to take care of the homeless and the displaced. National organisations dominated until the end of the war; afterwards, international organisations - the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency and the International Refugee Organisation - were formed to deal with what was clearly an international problem.Using case studies of displaced people and of relief workers, this book is unique in placing such crises at the centre rather than the margins of wartime experience, making the work nothing less than an alternative history of the Second World War.>

Environmental migration is not new. Nevertheless, the events and processes accompanying global climate change threaten to increase human movement both within states and across international borders. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted an increased frequency and severity of climate events such as storms, cyclones and hurricanes, as well as longer-term sea level rise and desertification, which will impact upon people's ability to survive in certain parts of the world. This book brings together a variety of disciplinary perspectives on the phenomenon of climate-induced displacement. With chapters by leading scholars in their field, it collects in one place a rigorous, holistic analysis of the phenomenon, which can better inform academic understanding and policy development alike. Governments have not been prepared to take a leading role in developing responses to the issue, in large part due to the absence of strong theoretical frameworks from which sound policy can be constructed. The specialist expertise of the authors in this book means that each chapter identifies key issues that need to be considered in shaping domestic, regional and international responses, including the complex causes of movement, the conceptualisation of migration responses to climate change, the terminology that should be used to describe those who move, and attitudes to migration that may affect decisions to stay or leave. The book will help to facilitate the creation of principled, research-based responses, and establish climate-induced displacement as an important aspect of both the climate change and global migration debates.

As persecution, war, and deportation savaged their communities, Jews tried to flee Nazi Europe through both legal and clandestine routes. In this riveting tale of Jewish refugees during and after the Nazi era, Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt thread together official papers and personal accounts to weave the history of refugees lives into the history of the Holocaust. "

War, revolution and war again. This is the background against which Nina grows up, fleeing her homeland, Latvia, on three separate occasions. With family members tragically caught up in one or other of the terrible conflicts, Nina is thrown between helplessness and a need for normality, or, at least, some kind of control. Although she is surrounded by much hate and violence, there is also love, and she never relinquishes her belief that most people are essentially good.

Foreign nationals seeking asylum must demonstrate a well-founded fear that if returned home, they will be persecuted based upon one of five characteristics: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. This book explores the asylum policy in the United States wherein some assert that asylum has become an alternative pathway for immigration rather than humanitarian protection. Others argue that given the religious, ethnic and political violence in various countries around the world, it has become difficult to differentiate the persecuted from the persecutors and that U.S. sympathies for asylum seekers could inadvertently facilitate the entry of terrorists.

There have always been homeless people, but only in the twentieth century have refugees become an important part of international politics, seriously affecting relations between states. Since the 1880s, the number of displaced persons has climbed astronomically, with people scattered over vaster distances and for longer periods of time than ever before. Tracing the emergence of this new variety of collective alienation, The Unwanted covers everything from the late nineteenth century to the present, encompassing the Armenian refugees, the Jews, the Spanish Civil War emigres, the Cold War refugees in flight from Soviet states, and much more. Marrus shows not only the astounding dimensions of the subject but also depicts the shocking apathy and antipathy of the international community toward the homeless. He also examines the impact of refugee movements on Great Power diplomacy and considers the evolution of agencies designed to assist refugees, noting outstanding successes and failures. Author note: Michael R. Marrus is Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of five books, including, most recently, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945-46: A Documentary History. Aristide R. Zolberg is University-in-Exile Professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City and Director of the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and Citizenship. He is the author or editor of many books, including Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World.