Journalism and The Greek Refugee Crisis

An Interview with Kate Schoenbach & Dr. Noemi Mena Montes

Kate Schoenbach and Dr. Noemi Mena Montes have covered a wide array of cultural phenomena throughout the globe. Schoenbach’s most recent piece depicts Moria, a Greek refugee camp on the island of Lesbos. With the increasingly restrictive immigration policies of European Union countries, tens of thousands of refugees have limited ...
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Journalism and The Greek Refugee Crisis

As We Contemplate Change

We look at what’s possible, who makes it possible, and how people move policy

So let’s start with how change happens. Economist James K. Galbraith leads off our politics section this week with an analysis of Bernie Sanders’ economic platform: can Bernie do all these things? Read it and find out. Next, we turn to a reflection on activism, as Nick Estes interviews Native American ...
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Trump’s War on Asylum

In the summer of 2019, the Administration put in place a policy that denies asylum to any person who has traveled through another country and failed to request asylum in the transit state. It has announced a reduction of refugee admissions to 18,000, a more than 80% cut from the ...
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How Shakespeare Helps Us Challenge the Far-Right in Europe

His works prove that migration has always been central to European society

Shakespeare’s England was also full of migrants, many refugees from the European wars of religion. He lived near and worked with people of many different backgrounds, and maybe this is why he asked his audience to “imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs and their ...
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Corpus Nullius: How Europe Recast the Migrant Body

Narratives of the migrant-refugee crisis reflect the interests they serve

After a record number of refugees arrived in Europe in 2015 following the Syrian collapse, Europe’s reaction provided the conditions for an even more fundamental change. As the fences went up at each boundary within a previously borderless Schengen Europe -- almost as an act of self-reproach following Angela Merkel’s acceptance ...
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Corpus Nullius: How Europe Recast the Migrant Body

Border Crisis?

How American Policies Have Produced a Generation of Refugees 

On October 18, 2018 President Donald J. Trump continued his detrimental practice of using Twitter to fuel the already hot immigration debate. He said, in part, “I am watching the Democrat Party led (because they want Open Borders and existing weak laws) assault on our country by Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, ...
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Behrouz Boochani and the Biopolitics of the Camp

The New Primo Levi? 

 Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, a literary sensation upon its publication in Australia in August 2018, and soon to be released in the United States, deserves a place alongside classics of the prison writing genre. [1] At the same time, it contains important lessons for everyone thinking about power in the ...
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Crossing Borders with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

A personal history of what HIAS really stands for

Shortly before his murderous rampage against Jews and migrants, Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh shooter, posted online: “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t stand by and watch my people get slaughtered.” Reading this, I was astonished and profoundly disturbed. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society -- ...
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Crossing Borders with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

Not Knowing What We’ve Got Til It’s Gone

We need to both defend liberal democratic norms and institutions and address their fault lines

In my contribution to the Dissent Magazine discussion of the “Crisis of Democracy” which provided the inspiration for our reflections in this symposium, I put forward the argument that attacks on the citizenship rights of racialized ‘others’ are central to Trumpism and other variants of the populist authoritarianism of the far right that have taken ...
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Not Knowing What We’ve Got Til It’s Gone

Security in Mobility: A response to Arc of Protection

Addressing Protracted Displacement

Mobility as protection for people: this is a powerful, provocative, and promising premise advanced by Alex Aleinikoff and Leah Zamore in their book, The Arc of Protection: Toward a New International Refugee Regime. Moreover, their contribution decidedly focuses on the volition and voice of those forced to move from their homes, ...
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Security in Mobility: A response to Arc of Protection

Northern Questions About Global Protection Dilemmas

A response to Arc of Protection

Arc of Protection: Toward a New International Refugee Regime by Alex Aleinikoff and Leah Zamore is a statement about refugee protection that goes back to basics and spells out a coherent and innovative perspective. After reading the manuscript, I changed my view on many points. I found particularly compelling the argument ...
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Northern Questions About Global Protection Dilemmas

Disturbing our Dogmatic Slumber

The welcome provocations of Aleinikoff and Zamore

The international approach to refugees and asylum seekers needs to be radically altered, just one of the themes taken up by Arc of Protection: Toward a New International Refugee Regime by Alex Aleinikoff and Leah Zamore. The book is both thought-provoking and engaging and I very much welcome its renewed stress on ...
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Disturbing our Dogmatic Slumber