"Alien WindS" presents the first critical analysis of U.S. refugee processing centers in Southeast Asia. Based on twenty months of work in refugee camps from 1983-1986 and an analysis of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this book challenges the widely held view that the refugee education program results in successful resettlement. The author contends that in its zeal to Americanize Southeast Asians, this program seeks to replace ties to their traditional community with a commitment to the myths of American success ideology and the moral principle of self-sufficiency. He concludes that the program actually disempowers the refugees by robbing them of their sense of community, and often their dignity. Without regard to skills or education, it prepares refugees for long term employment in dead end minimum wage jobs. Of particular interest to teachers of English as a second language and scholars in the fields of education, sociology, anthropology, and Southeast Asian studies, Alien Winds concludes with recommendations for overseas centers and domestic resettlement programs.

From its inception the U.S. refugee resettlement program faced difficult questions: What are the main difficulties facing Southeast Asians in the United States? What do refugees need to know in order to resettle successfully? How should successful resettlement be defined? Should there be different notions of success for different groups of people? What values do Americans share? Must newcomers adopt these values? Alien Winds examines the American answers to these questions as they are formulated and conveyed to the refugees. It also explores the sources of these answers. To this end it examines important assumptions about immigrants that originated in educational programs during the early part of this century. It further explores the aims and structures of the organizations which created and operate the processing centers. Finally, "Alien WindS" analyzes the role of the refugee program in America's shared memory of Vietnam.

Spurred by wars and a drive to urbanize, Africans are crossing borders and overwhelming cities in unprecedented numbers. At the center of this development are young refugee men who migrate to urban areas. This volume, the first full-length study of urban refugees in hiding, tells the story of Burundi refugee youth who escaped from remote camps in central Tanzania to work in one of Africa's fastest-growing cities, Dar es Salaam. This steamy, rundown capital would seem uninviting to many, particularly for second generation survivors of genocide whose lives are ridden with fear. But these young men nonetheless join migrants in "Bongoland" (meaning "Brainland") where, as the nickname suggests, only the shrewdest and most cunning can survive. Mixing lyrics from church hymns and street vernacular, descriptions of city living in cartoons and popular novels and original photographs, this book creates an ethnographic portrait of urban refugee life, where survival strategies spring from street smarts and pastors' warnings of urban sin, and mastery of popular youth culture is highly valued. Pentecostalism and a secret rift within the seemingly impenetrable Hutu ethnic group are part of the rich texture of this contemporary African story. Written in accessible prose, this book offers an intimate picture of how Africa is changing and how refugee youth are helping to drive that change.

Refugees have moved into the spotlight of public debate in Europe and North America, where they are targeted by multiple welfare state interventions. This volume analyses the tensions that emerge within the strong welfare states of Northern Europe when faced with an increased immigration of protection-seeking people. Examining the encounter between refugees and the welfare states, this book explores the daily strategies and experiences of newly settled groups and the role of media discourses and welfare policies in shaping those experiences. Building on both textual analyses and ethnographic fieldwork in welfare institutions, asylum centres, and refugee communities, this volume provides an in-depth understanding of the complex realities faced by refugees: deterrence and categorisation, struggle and success, mobility and stagnation. As social phenomena, Northern Europe's asylum systems and integration programmes must be understood in the context of the bureaucratisation of everyday life. -- .

Kirsty Carpenter puts a human face on the victims of revolutionary legislation. London had the largest community of emigres. It had the most evolved social structure and was the most politically-active community. It was in London that two cultures came face-to-face with their prejudices and were forced to confront them.

Why do decision-makers in similar liberal democracies interpret the same legal definition in very different ways? International law provides states with a common definition of a 'refugee' as well as guidelines outlining how asylum claims should be decided. Yet, the processes by which countries determine who should be granted refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with many political, cultural, geographical, and institutional commonalities. This book compares the refugee status determination (RSD) regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations - the United States, Canada, and Australia. Despite similarly high levels of political resistance to accepting asylum seekers across these three states, once asylum seekers cross their borders, they access three very different systems. These differences are significant both in terms of asylum seekers' experience of the process and in terms of their likelihood of being found to be a refugee.
The book moves beyond the claim by some scholars that asylum seeker destinations are uniformly becoming more exclusionary, and the contrary assertions of other scholars that the same destinations are converging on a new inclusive internationalism leading to the decline of state sovereignty. Instead, Hamlin finds these states to be running on three distinct trajectories, none of which are totally restrictive or expansive. Based on a multi-method analysis of all three countries, including a year of fieldwork with in-depth interviews of policy-makers and asylum-seeker advocates, observations of refugee status determination hearings, and a large-scale case analysis, Hamlin finds that cross-national differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy than with the level of insulation the administrative decision-making agency enjoys from either political interference or judicial review. Administrative justice is conceptualized and organized differently in every state, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and non-refugee.

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the survivors of the Holocaust contended with life after the darkest night in Jewish history. They include the Earl Harrison mission and significant report, the effort to keep Europe's borders open to refugee infiltration, the murder of the first Jew in Germany after V-E Day and its aftermath, and the iconic sculptures of Nathan Rapoport and Poland's landscape of Holocaust memory up to the present day. Joining extensive archival research and a limpid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

As a boy in Rwanda, Pie-Pacifique Kabalira-Uwase survived war atrocities, but he had to leave home if he wanted to stay safe. Pie-Pacifique now recounts his childhood and his experiences of the genocide.

He prepares to flee and ends up in South Africa. He works as a car guard in Durban, dreaming of university. Despite obstacles, he enrols at university and receives the Mandela-Rhodes Scholarship.

In this rewarding journey of self-discovery, we witness Pie-Pacifique reach for his dreams.

After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinian refugees fled over the border into Jordan, which in 1950 formally annexed the West Bank. In the wake of the 1967 War, another wave of Palestinians sought refuge in the Hashemite kingdom. Today, 42 per cent of registered Palestinian refugees live in Jordan. As a result of this historical context, one might expect Palestinian refugee camps to be highly politicised spaces. Yet Luigi Achilli argues in this book that there is in fact a relative absence of political activity. Instead, what is prevalent is a desire to live an 'ordinary life'. It is within the framework of the performing and creating everyday life - working, praying, relaxing, watching football matches, surfing the internet, or idling in barber shops - that Achilli examines nationalism and identity. Palestinian refugees have been traditionally depicted by the Western media as inherently political beings, ready to fight and resist all attempts to quash their nationalist struggle. But except for occasional political demonstrations and events, neither the political turmoil in Gaza and the West Bank, nor the uprisings throughout the Middle East of 2011, have roused refugees out of what they described as the ordinary course of daily life in the camp. Achilli argues instead that refugee daily life in many ways revolves around the practice of suspending the political. The performative and reiterative dimensions of ordinary activities have not, however, precluded refugees from feeling an affinity for many of the meanings, ideals, and values of Palestinian nationalism. Achilli holds that it is through the desire for an 'ordinary life' that these Palestinian refugees are able to assert their own meanings and understandings of national identity against the more inflexible interpretations provided by the political systems in Gaza and the West Bank. Examining the concepts of 'everyday' Islam as well as the construction of masculine identity in the camps, Achilli offers vital analysis of the complexities and ambiguities of camp-dwellers' experience of the political in ordinary times.

In 1996, powerful anti-immigrant forces in New Gingrich's 104th Congress worked hard to pass the most restrictive immigration law in decades. This law changed virtually every aspect of immigration policy, including the rules for political and religious refugees. It is not, however, as harsh a law as the chairmen of the committees wanted. A fascinating case study of the legislative process and the author's experience as a public lobbyist, A Well-Founded Fear tells how a coalition of human rights and refugee organisations fought to preserve the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.

This is a study of the history of global refugee movements over the 20th century, ranging from east European Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression at the turn of the century to asylum seekers from the former Zaire and Yugoslavia. Recognizing that the problem of refugees is a universal one, the authors emphasize the human element which should be at the forefront of both the study of refugees and responses to them.

This is a study of the history of global refugee movements over the 20th century, ranging from east European Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression at the turn of the century to asylum seekers from the former Zaire and Yugoslavia. Recognizing that the problem of refugees is a universal one, the authors emphasize the human element which should be at the forefront of both the study of refugees and responses to them.

The increase in the number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe has placed the issue of migration high on the policy agendas of national governments and the European Union. This book analyzes the impact of policy on the social and economic settlement of refugees in Britain in that context. The issues explored include: current UK and EU migration policy; the history of migration to Britain and policy responses; theories of migration and migrant settlement; social and economic settlement of refugees in Britain - including language, employment, social networks, the migratory process, community, development and policy recommendations.

The book analyses the management of the internal displacement caused by activities of Boko Haram's terrorist insurgence in Nigeria. With over 3.1m persons displaced, the humanitarian crisis is at teeter ends with acute malnourishment, inadequate wash and non-relief materials, improper hygiene facilities, and lack of access to basic relief aid for displaced persons. The array of humanitarian organisations belies the concrete living conditions of displaced persons and calls to question the huge resources assumed to be expended on managing the humanitarian crisis in the northeast of Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin in general. Based on ethnographic research in IDP camps, the book chronicles the concrete living conditions of displaced persons and argues that IDPs in Northeastern Nigeria have been victimised first by Boko Haram's terrorism, and then victimised again by inefficient, un-coordinated, and unsuitable displacement management programs. This book also explicate the roles played by the Nigerian government and international aid agencies in managing this displacement, vis-a-vis a comparative analysis of similar, but better managed displacement situations in Kenya, Lebanon, and Turkey.

Infrastructure development projects are set to continue into the next century as developing country governments seek to manage population growth, urbanization and industrialization. The contributions in this volume raise many questions about 'development' and 'progress' in the late twentieth century. What is revealed are the enormous problems and disastrous affects which continue to accompany displacement operations in many countries, which raise the ever more urgent question of whether the benefits of infrastructure development justify or outweigh the pain of the radical disruption of peoples lives, exacerbated by the fact that, with some notable exceptions, there has been a lack of official recognition on the part of governments and international agencies that development-induced displacement is a problem at all. This important volume addresses the issues and shows just how serious the situation is.

Currently, there are over 15 million legally designated refugees all over the world and it is documented that 75 percent of those refugees are women, yet most of the existent literature does not focus on this group as women. Most of the literature focuses on political, economic, and social issues with very little reference to the mental health implications of the refugees'experiences as women. Refugee Women and Their Mental Health begins to fill this paucity of information on female refugees'experiences. A book of immediate interest, Refugee Women and Their Mental Health focuses on understanding the plight of women refugees around the world, with an emphasis on mental health. The book adds successful and innovative treatment and recovery models for these women survivors.Some of the chapters are written by women who are therapists/psychologists now and who have been refugees themselves. This adds additional insight into the plight and resulting mental health problems of refugee women. The chapters cover a vast range of topics: torture and sexual abuse as refugees/victims of state violence elderly women refugees immigration law and women refugees first-person narratives the transformation of identity successful creative treatment programsIt becomes clear that women refugees from all over the world under different political events and circumstances share common values and have similar mental health needs. Refugee Women and Their Mental Health explores processes of recovery from the traumas experienced by these women and offers a variety of models for the application of feminist theory to the plight of women refugees. Experienced therapists of women and those in training to be therapists will want to read this book. The topics of refugee women rarely comes up in training programs, so the information in this book is vital for therapists, policy makers, and other service providers and professors of psychology of women, immigration and social work issues, and women and mental health issues.

France and Britain are traditionally perceived as having divergent attitudes to the issue of minority identities. In France the idea that a person can be both a French citizen and have an ethnic or religious identity is unacceptable, while in Britain community cohesion promotes the combining of race or faith with the idea of being British. This volume examines the problems posed by these assumptions and the realities that are forcing them to be revisited.

There are a number of publications which describe the experiences of deportees in the Soviet Union, and a number which consider the culture and role of refugees from the Nazis in this country. There are none which connect the two. None, that is to say, which examine the experiences of the victims of Stalin and Hitler from the onset of the Second World War, when their countries were occupied, until the building of their communities in Britain after the war. This project traces the history of Soviet and Nazi occupation of Poland and the Baltic States from 1939 until 1945 and the immigration of Poles and Balts to Great Britain at the end of the war. It offers a comparison of the experience of the victims of Nazi and Soviet occupation and their afterlives.

The legacy and memory of wartime South Vietnam through the eyes of Vietnamese refugees In 1975, South Vietnam fell to communism, marking a stunning conclusion to the Vietnam War. Although this former ally of the United States has vanished from the world map, Long T. Bui maintains that its memory endures for refugees with a strong attachment to this ghost country. Blending ethnography with oral history, archival research, and cultural analysis, Returns of War considers Returns of War argues that Vietnamization--as Richard Nixon termed it in 1969--and the end of South Vietnam signals more than an example of flawed American military strategy, but a larger allegory of power, providing cover for U.S. imperial losses while denoting the inability of the (South) Vietnamese and other colonized nations to become independent, modern liberal subjects. Bui argues that the collapse of South Vietnam under Vietnamization complicates the already difficult memory of the Vietnam War, pushing for a critical understanding of South Vietnamese agency beyond their status as the war's ultimate "losers." Examining the lasting impact of Cold War military policy and culture upon the "Vietnamized" afterlife of war, this book weaves questions of national identity, sovereignty, and self-determination to consider the generative possibilities of theorizing South Vietnam as an incomplete, ongoing search for political and personal freedom.

Focusing on Georgia, this book presents a theoretical and empirical study on the implementation of durable solutions for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Building on extensive field research, it describes and explains the considerable problems which Georgia faces in establishing global norms, as well as the ongoing hardship that IDPs experience. Importantly, the book reveals the simultaneous progress and setbacks in implementing durable solutions. Successfully combining approaches from humanistic studies, international relations, and organizational sociology, this book explains the interaction of norms and actors at and among three societal levels: the international, national, and local.

This book examines convergent trends in asylum regimes around the world. It covers the main regions of the world where asylum is a critical problem: Europe, Africa, and Central America. It also looks at the major issues: human rights, non-governmental organization involvement, gender, return, comprehensive policy, EU harmonization, international intervention, and temporary protection.

Refugees on the Move highlights and explores the profound complexities of the current refugee issue by focusing specifically on Syrian refugees in Turkey and other European countries and responses from the host countries involved. It examines the causes of the movement of refugee populations, the difficulties they face during their journeys, the daily challenges and obstacles they experience, and host governments' attempts to manage and overcome the so-called "refugee crisis."

This powerful book explicates the many ways in which colonial encounters continue to shape forced migration, ever evolving with times and various geographical contexts. Bringing historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and criminologists together, the book presents examples of forced migration events and politics ranging from the 18th century to the practices and geopolitics of the present day. These case studies, covering Europe, Africa, North America, Asia and South America, are then put in dialogue with each other to propose new theoretical and real-world agendas for the field. As the pervasive legacies of colonialism continue to shape global politics, this unprecedented book moves beyond critique, ahistoricity and Eurocentrism in refugee and forced migration studies and establishes postcoloniality and forced migration as an important field of migration research.

What if my own multilingualism is simply that of one who is fluent in way too many colonial languages? If we are going to do this, if we are going to decolonise multilingualism, let's do it as an attempt at a way of doing it. If we are going to do this, let's cite with an eye to decolonising. If we are going to do this then let's improvise and devise. This is how we might learn the arts of decolonising. If we are going to do this then we need different companions. If we are going to do this we will need artists and poetic activists. If we are going to do this, let's do it in a way which is as local as it is global; which affirms the granulations of the way peoples name their worlds. Finally, if we are going to do this, let's do it multilingually.

This volume brings together research on the forms, genres, media and histories of refugee migration. Chapters come from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches, including literature, film studies, performance studies and postcolonial studies. The goal is to bring together chapters that use the perspectives of the arts and humanities to study representations of refugee migration. The chapters of the anthology are organized around specific forms and genres: life-writing and memoir, the graphic novel, theater and music, film and documentary, coming-of-age stories, street literature, and the literary novel.