Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was formerly a staff writer for The Washington Post, among other prominent publications. In a 2011 New York Times Magazine essay, he revealed himself to be an undocumented immigrant to promote public dialogue about immigration issues in the United States. He went on to produce a documentary, Documented, about his family history and launched the organization Define American with the goal of changing the conversation about immigration reform in the United States. Vargas spoke with the Journal from Los Angeles, California…
Dr. Kelly Greenhill is an associate professor at Tufts University and a research fellow in the Belfer Center's International Security Program at Harvard University. She studies the security of migration change. Her work focuses on new security challenges, including forced migrations, and how these may be used as a political weapon or a tool for diplomacy. Her recent book, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy, won the 2011 International Studies Association's Best Book of the Year award. Greenhill also was a co-author and co-editor (with Peter Andreas)…
Created by a team of researchers at the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna, this visualization explores bilateral migration fows between 196 countries. The project used stock data from the United Nations (the number of people living in a country other than where they were born) to estimate these flows over five-year blocks of time. Rather than calculating the net flow, the color of the line represents the country that the migrants left, and it points to the new country where they settled. The thickness of the line represent how many people followed that path of…
This paper seeks to examine the role of diaspora populations in the perpetuation or resolution of violent conflict in their homelands. The goal is to demonstrate the increasingly significant role diasporas play in international affairs and the importance of viewing diaspora groups as separate actors in a conflict, often with different motivations. Diaspora groups are capable of exerting disproportionate influence over events in their countries of origin, due to disparities in economic wealth, freedom of expression, and influence on governments in their adopted homelands. Concurrently, the conflict-related…
Measuring and mapping human trafficking are challenging for several reasons and therefore do not lead to effective counter-trafficking strategies. Understanding the drivers of human migration, however, is a much more promising approach for developing policies with risk-mitigating strategies. Insofar as the patterns of human migration are intertwined with other aspects of illicit trade, they can serve as an early warning signal of vulnerabilities in the global trade system for criminal activity. Tracking the financial links between human trafficking and other crimes provides various options for…
The central thesis of Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age argues an interesting position. Rather than treating children as subservient dependents of adult migrants, Jacqueline Bhabha makes a compelling case for examining them individually. In many cases, their needs differ starkly from their parents’, and they are especially susceptible to an entirely different collection of dangers. The text is skillfully layered with a legal history of the field, and to maintain its accessibility, the author takes pains to include anecdotes that illustrate…
