By distinguishing between refugees and migrants, international law underestimates the plight of people displaced by poverty and climate change.
Tag: migrants
There are now 1.2 million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. How they are treated may help determine a post-Maduro future.
From films to photography, artwork can help arouse the empathy we need to counter these dark days of border walls and White nationalist terrorism, not yet extinct, and art foments it.
French companies in need of workers are focusing on integration through employment.
-Analysis- Venezuela has arrived at a dead end. It is mired in misrule, socio-economic chaos, unchecked crime and a spiraling humanitarian catastrophe that is leading to steady exodus of its population. The immediate causes of these were shortages in food, water, electricity and medicine, as well as hyperinflation (3 million percent per year) in an […]
-Editorial- BOGOTÁ — As the world recently watched humanitarian supply trucks burn on a bridge between the Colombian town of Cúcuta and the Venezuelan border, locals anxiously wondered if aid would ever arrive in a region plagued with years of economic crisis. Colombian Attorney General Fernando Carrillo echoed these sentiments after visiting Cúcuta and meeting […]
An Israeli law enacted in mid-2017 amounts to a de facto salary cut for African asylum seekers, plunging the community into a financial crisis.
As Turkey takes sole responsibility from UNHCR for processing the asylum claims of Afghans and other non-Syrians, it must register them and allow them to access their basic rights.
Since this summer, Morocco is the theater of an unprecedented wave of arrests and forced displacements of Sub-Saharan Africans forced to hide.
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Do Anti-Xenophobia Campaigns Work?
At best, pro-migrant advocacy raises awareness. At worst, it reinforces tensions, new research shows.
PARIS — Human migration is the story of our times. Victims of conflict and climate change, pushed by poverty at home and pulled toward opportunity abroad, people on the move are both a catalyst and consequence of globalization. Yes, immigration is a polarizing political issue, but also a keen reminder of the shared circumstances that […]
A forensic expert heads a dedicated team working to try to identify those who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean. It is often to simply close the wounds of broken-hearted loved ones back at home.
Nemesis of Italy’s anti-immigrant Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, Mayor Domenico Lucano of Riace was placed under house arrest for his pro-refugee policies.
It’s time to recognize refugee women for what they are: intrepid organizers and providers, argues Liberian peace activist and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee.
AGADEZ — Mahamane Ousmane is an unrepentant people smuggler. He makes no effort to deny having transported migrants “countless times’ across the Sahara into Libya. When he is released from prison in Niger’s desert city of Agadez, he intends to return to the same work. The 32-year-old is even more adamant he has done nothing wrong. “I don’t like criminals. I am no thief. I have killed no one,” he says. As Ousmane speaks, a small circle of fellow inmates in filthy football shirts and flip-flops murmur in agreement. The prison at Agadez, where the French once stabled their horses […]
As nationalism and anti-immigration campaigns shake and split Europe, photojournalist Tommaso Bonaventura went last winter to a small village in southern Italy where immigrants had given new life to the town emptied of its young inhabitants seeking jobs elsewhere.
The do-nothing approach to migration being taken by the new Spanish government and others in Europe is untenable, and plays right into the hands of racist far right.
Meet the Italians driven by a sense of history and humanity to identify the refugees and migrants who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean.
BERLIN — Angela Merkel has yielded. It was just this past Saturday that the chancellor’s sticking to her guns had brought her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to the threat of resignation over the government’s migration policy, the issue that has created a deep wedge between the pair. For her relentlessly tough stance on the matter, […]
Migrants have begun to live in an informal camp 70 miles from Belgrade, hoping to start a new life westward in Europe.
BEIRUT — Lebanon appears to be mobilizing for the mass return of Syrian refugees, disregarding warnings that conditions in their home country are not conducive to voluntary returns in safety and dignity. Last week, ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Lebanese President Michel Aoun asked the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to help secure the return of refugees. After the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR) stated that it was not involved in last month’s return of around 500 Syrians from Lebanon due to conditions in Syria, the UNHCR’s representative to Lebanon, Mireille Girard, was summoned by the foreign ministry […]
New restrictions in Chile effectively target poorer migrants, many of whom are Afro-Caribbeans from Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They also coincide with a rightward shift in opinion.
Algerian authorities have been accused of harsh treatment of asylum seekers.
ROSARNO — A shantytown of tents and shacks stretches out across an abandoned industrial district halfway between the towns of Rosarno and San Ferdinando, deep in the southern Italian region of Calabria. Some 2,500 farm workers from at least 16 different countries live in deplorable conditions surrounded by waste, with no access to running water […]
For Afghan asylum seekers arriving in cold Sweden, the transition isn’t always simple — but a new project is aiming to ease the way.
ABIDJAN — Jumping and dancing to the rhythm of the popular urban music zouglou, they snap pictures on their smartphones of their idols performing onstage. Always smiling and never sitting still, Ivory Coast’s millennials have been nicknamed the “génération pressée pressée,” the generation that is always in a rush. Young Ivorians are dynamic and curious, […]
The government’s placement of migrants could increase the population of Vaccarozzi di Erbezzo, a miniscule mountain village above Verona, more than tenfold.
-Analysis- A boat is drifting along the coast. There’s no captain manning it, no visible passengers on the derelict wooden vessel. The “ghost ship” is missing its rotor blade, making it look like it’s facing the choppy waters on its own. Eventually, it washes up on a Japanese beach. In its hull, eight bodies — […]
SFAX — Plastic bags litter the fields that separate the highway from the Mediterranean Sea. Tunisian fishermen sail their boats in the Gulf of Gabes, between the cities of Sfax and Zarzis — and just 120 kilometers from the Italian island of Lampedusa. Indeed, recently the fishermen’s haul has begun to include migrants picked up […]
In the south of Tunisia, near the Libyan border, an ancient dump serves as a cemetery for immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean illegally. But the living remain undeterred.
A Syrian family granted asylum in Argentina has opted to go back home in spite of its calamitous state of their hometown of Aleppo. But things seemed even worse in Cordoba.
CATANIA — On the horizon, the Libyan coast is still visible — perhaps it’s the area around Zuwarah along the border with Tunisia — suggesting that the small wooden boat carrying migrants across the Mediterranean departed in plain daylight. Compared to the decrepit inflatable dinghies that often sink in these waters, this one is barely […]
MUNICH — On Oct. 5, German doctor Alexander Haase* opened his web browser and dropped merchandise he wanted to purchase into a checkout basket. He paid 590,99 euros — money that went into a Hungarian bank account. A few weeks later, an inconspicuous brown package arrived by DHL delivery. He opened it. There was a […]
The Turkish president is using Europe to stoke nationalist sentiment back at home before a referendum to expand his own powers. Enough is enough.
-Analysis- More than 4,500 people lost their lives off the Libyan coast last year. And yet, there have never been so many vessels carrying out rescue missions in the area — from Italian coast guard ships and European operation Eunavfor vessels to those from the border control agency Frontex and others chartered by NGOs. This […]
ORISTANO — Club scouts and retired players from across Italy have come to this town on the Italian island of Sardinia to find new soccer talent among recently arrived African migrants. They offer their services to the migrants so that one day they might have a shot at Italy’s top professional league, the Serie A. […]
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When The World Arrives At Your Border
This is the face of civil disobedience, circa 2017. Cédric Herrou, a 37-year-old farmer from southeastern France, appeared in court yesterday in Nice for having illegally helped undocumented African migrants cross the Italian-French border. “I do it because it has to be done,” Le Monde quotes him as saying. An olive and egg farmer and […]
-OpEd- PARIS — “The era of multiculturalism is over …” This was the proud declaration of Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, back in the summer of 2015. One year later, Theresa May, the new British prime minister, took it one step further: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re […]
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Calais To Lampedusa, And Back Again
Following weeks of planning, the operation finally began this morning before daybreak: It was time to dismantle the infamous Calais “Jungle.” Again. The Jungle is home to an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 migrants, most of them are young men from Africa and the Middle East, living in squalid conditions who wish to cross the Channel […]
Nujeen Mustafa didn’t realize fleeing from Syria to Europe in a wheelchair would be considered extraordinary. Now in Germany, she has written a book about her journey.