European Refugees Research Articles

Voice of the Silenced Peoples in the Global Cold War: The Assembly of Captive European Nations, 1954–1972

Voice of the Silenced Peoples in the Global Cold War: The Assembly of Captive European Nations, 1954–1972

Japanese and Jews in Shanghai

Abstract The actions of the Japanese government and military before and during the Holocaust saved tens of thousands of Jews in Shanghai from murder by Japan’s Nazi allies. Because the Japanese were brutal aggressors in East Asia, because their treatment of the Chinese population was genocidal, because the details and organization of Japanese sexual abuse of Korean women are still matters of international dispute, approaches to the Japanese treatment of European Jewish refugees begin from a negative standpoint. Japanese authorities have not investigated or revealed these actions, and Japanese academics have only just begun to consider this issue worthy of study. Discussion of Japanese policy in Shanghai is often dominated by evidence of antisemitism in Japan, the creation of the Designated Area in 1943 to confine Jewish refugees, and the brutally officious behavior of Kanoh Ghoya. The issuance of life-saving visas by Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul in Kovno, is treated as exceptional humanitarianism. This study focuses on the decisions and behavior of Japanese authorities toward European Jewish refugees in Japan and in Shanghai which allowed them to survive.

Rethinking the Postwar International Migration Regime from the Global South: Venezuela in a Global History of White Immigration

AbstractBetween 1947 and early 1952, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was established within the framework of the United Nations to “solve” the so-called European refugee problem after the end of the Second World War, resettled one million European refugees—victims of Nazism as well as East European refugees who escaped the Red Army—all over the world. The IRO's resettlement project is regarded as a blueprint for the establishment of the postwar international migration regime, and it was the predecessor of later initiatives such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).In this article I argue that the IRO's history as well as the history of the migration regime after the Second World War has, thus far, mainly been written from the perspective of U.S. American and European history. Northern nations are considered agents in this history, while southern countries are considered as passive “destinations.” In the case of Venezuela, the article argues that the Global South's active role in the migration regime must be taken into consideration to understand postwar migration. From the perspective of a connective approach to global history, it shows how Venezuela, as a political agent, was involved in shaping the migration regime; how it perceived itself as an agent within that regime; and how it intervened on a small scale to shape its form and function.

Regional Framework on Refugee Protection: An Appraisal

There is no doubt that till today the 1951 Refugee Convention is considered as the key legal document meant for the protection of refugees. The convention discusses not only who is a refugee but also the social, economic and legal rights a refugee has from the states who have signed the convention. Though initially the Convention of 1951 was narrow in scope as the definition of refugee was limited to protecting European refugees but this shortcoming was removed by the 1967. Protocol which expanded the scope and removed the geographical limitations given in the definition of refugee under 1951 Convention a refugee is in a general sense disfranchised human rights casualty, as well as is, by definition, somebody who has figured out how to get outside of his or her own particular nation. Having left their nation of inception, refugees are inside the unqualified defensive capability of the worldwide group. All things considered, the unique moral obligation towards evacuees takes after from the gravity of their dilemma, as well as from the way that it is constantly conceivable to address their predicament in ways that, tragically, regardless we can't for the individuals who stay inside their own particular nation.

Imperial Refugee Management. Moving Greek Refugees Through the British Empire and into the Belgian Congo (1942–1945)

ABSTRACT During the Second World War, 2,700 Greek refugees lived in camps in Eastern Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. They had escaped from the German Nazi occupation and famine conditions on the Aegean Islands. Their movement through Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda was part of a more extensive network of refugee hosting and transfer, orchestrated by British officials in Cairo and guided by strategic interests in London. This article uncovers this overlooked episode and situates it in the broader history of the thousands of European refugees who found refuge in the Middle East and Africa. It argues that this was part of a more extensive system of imperial refugee management with implications for the history of the British Empire and the international refugee regime. Adding to the historiography of the empire’s war effort, it uncovers the contribution of Africans to hosting distressed European refugees. It further highlights the importance of imperial rule in the emergence of the post-war international refugee regime. Due to the racism of the colonial division of labour and society, European refugees in Africa enjoyed a comparably comfortable situation. The imperial refugee regime cared well for its white subjects, housing them in some of the most privileged refugee camps of the world.

Contagion effect of migration fear in pre and European refugee’s crisis period: evidence from multivariate GARCH and wavelet empirical analysis

To test the contagion effect of fear migration between countries, and to show its causality direction, our paper contributes to the economic literature by providing a new study based on migration fear indices quarterly data of France, Germany, United Kingdom and United States spanning period 1990–2019. Our empirical strategy is based on dynamic conditional correlation GARCH model and continuous wavelet transform analysis. Our results show a significant contagion effect of fear migration between the selected countries in pre and at the European Refugees crisis. The main findings of this work are changes level of conditional correlation in the two subsample periods, and changes in the arrow’s directions in red space of the phase difference between each two fear migration series. These findings indicate that European Refugees crisis changes the relationship between European Union countries and USA, and the Brexit changes the European people behavior towards migrants and refugees. Our findings offer a new directions and tracks in the international relations to the policy makers, moreover it calls into question the various studies examining economic interdependence and the contagion effect of financial crises and policies events on the different markets.

A Place in the Empire: Gibraltar Camp in Jamaica and the British Imperial Order, 1940–1947

ABSTRACT In July 1940 the British Government erected a camp in Jamaica to house thousands of civilian evacuees from Gibraltar. Only about 1,500 Gibraltarians ended up there – mostly women, children, and elderly. The available space that remained served to intern a few hundred European Jewish refugees, as well as Enemy Aliens and Prisoners of War. About two hundred Jamaicans were employed in the camp, including the Camp Commandant. The little-known Gibraltar Camp created a rather odd encounter between people who occupied different positions within the British imperial global order, and outside of it. My main purpose in this article is to learn about the ways in which people engaged with imperial classifications as they were simultaneously placed and displaced by them. Drawing on official and non-official documents from several archives, and on newspapers, recordings of interviews, and self-published autobiographies, I argue that while the intention of the authorities in sending groups of people to Gibraltar Camp was to ‘put aside’ those who were deemed a disturbance, the constant negotiations about labels indicate that the physical placement of people in a camp did not work to wholly exclude them from the prevailing order of things.

Can Muslims Drink? Rumi Vodka, Persianate Ideals, and the Anthropology of Islam

AbstractShahab Ahmed’sWhat Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic(2016) challenges Islamic Studies scholars, (art) historians, and anthropologists to reconsider theoretical frameworks underpinning historical and ethnographic research. This article addresses Ahmed’s concerns that studies of Islam often conceptually privilege orthodoxy, by including drinking and intoxication as worthy of close attention in examining the history and the anthropology of Islam. The case of Wine Shop the Philosopher, run by a former Afghan refugee in The Hague and Amsterdam, is presented after establishing the comparative and interdisciplinary relevance of alcohol consumption in studies of Islam and Muslims. Ahmed’s conceptual framework is used and assessed in comparison with the wine shops’ contemporary pluralist reality by exploring the idealized boundaries of Persianate culture and Islam in dialogues between Persian-speaking interlocutors. It is argued that alcoholic drinks lend themselves to competing gastro-nationalisms and prompt ethnolinguistic tensions between and within groups with Turkish, Moroccan, Iranian, and Afghan backgrounds in the Netherlands. The focus on diverse, coexisting and clashing drink regimes, in conclusion, allows us to deconstruct dichotomies between sober Muslims and European drinkers, African and Asian believers and European unbelievers, and refugees and citizens.

States and Refugee Integration: a Comparative Analysis of France, Germany, and Switzerland

The Syrian civil war led to mass migration and Europe becoming a potential site of refuge. How have Syrians experienced refuge in Europe? Drawing on 58 interviews with Syrian refugees in Germany, France, and Switzerland, we find that refugees continue to experience exclusion in all integration domains including those found as markers and means, social connections, facilitators, and foundations of integration . While our cases demonstrate that Syrian refugees in Europe experience discrimination across all domains, not all conditions are equal. Using narrative analysis, differences were observed within three integration domains. Accessing language programs was more challenging in France, finding housing was more challenging in Germany, and F type residence permits limited refugees’ rights in Switzerland more than in other countries. Discrimination across domains is deepening the socio-cultural-economic divide between autochthonous communities and Syrian refugees, but not all domains are equally divisive across countries. The findings outline that where these states outsourced refugee services, refugees experienced increased barriers to integration.

A Cold War Humanitarian Action: The Western Admission of 1956 Hungarian Refugees

The story of the refugees who fled Hungary following the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Revolution and the coordinated international humanitarian operation launched to receive them is an outstanding chapter in the history of emigration. These refugees received far more favorable treatment than earlier Hungarian expatriates or other European refugees had been given. With a total of 200,000 refugees, their successful transportation to host countries and their subsequent integration represented an exceptional success for international aid efforts. How can this efficiency be explained? Trends in humanitarian sentiment in world public opinion, influenced in part by the horrors of World War II, and the increasingly precise formulation of the rights of the refugees were just as important, as factors, as the supportive attitude of the populations of Western countries, who empathized with the suppressed revolution. The exceptionally favorable composition, from the perspective of the labor market, of the mass of people who fled in 1956 coincided with Western economic prosperity, producing economic “miracles.” However, even these favorable initial conditions would not have led to such a swift and successful settlement in the West of nearly 200,000 Hungarians had it not been for the Cold War rivalry between the Eastern and the Western blocs. As a consequence of the ideological and propaganda conflict with the Soviets, the NATO governments had the necessary political will to give effective support for a resolution to the Hungarian refugee problem, even after emotional support among the public opinion had waned.

The ‘Brazilian Connection’ in the History of American Linguistics

Summary When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), who had come from Brazil where he had done ethnological work, met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, of which, the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) was much more consequential, at least as far as the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America generally during the 1950s and the 1960s is concerned. Mattoso Câmara came to the United States and spent most of his time in New York City (September 1943 till April 1944), where he got exposure to Praguean type structuralism, notably through Jakobson’s lectures he attended at Columbia University and at the École Libre of New York, which had been established by European refugees at the time. He also participated in the first meetings of the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as one of its co-founders. Following his return to Rio de Janeiro, Mattoso Câmara proposed, in 1949, as his doctoral thesis a phonemic description of Brazilian Portuguese. The work was published a few years later, in 1953. His most influential work, Princípios de Lingüística Gerai, first published in 1954, had two more revised and updated editions (1958, 1967) and served to introduce several generations of Brazilian as well as other South American students to structural linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s.

Making democracy work in a refugee camp: social capital and the emergence of empowerment

ABSTRACT Since 2015, over one million refugees sought refuge in Europe and around 70,000 refugees have been hosted in refugee camps in Greece. Refugees’ empowerment is threatened in these camps as they have restricted access to resources and decision making. This research argues that social capital plays an important role in refugees’ sense of empowerment. The research uses a mixed-methods case study of a refugee camp in Greece, including 20 interviews and 38 surveys to assess refugees’ sense of empowerment and social capital. The results showed that bridging and linking social capital enhances a sense of empowerment while bonding does not.

Marseille, city of refuge: international solidarity, American humanitarianism, and Vichy France (1940-1942)

Anchored in the port of Marseille, this article studies encounters between international solidarity, American humanitarianism, and Vichy France’s nationalism in times of war and exile. Being the main free harbour in France after the country’s defeat against Germany in the spring of 1940, Marseille saw hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking refuge and exile on its shores. This massive flux gave rise to a local internationalism of humanitarian and solidarity networks bonded by an anti-fascist ideology. American humanitarians, diplomats, and radical leftist militants shaped this eclectic internationalism by providing crucial support for European refugees escaping the Nazi-backed state repression in France. Using the local archives of the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, this paper analyses how these actors and their ideologies met in Marseille and interacted with or against Vichy France’s nationalism. In the end, the extended historiography on refugees, American humanitarianism, solidarity networks, and French nationalism will be used to analyse global ideologies in a local context during the Second World War.

Direct Democracy and the Rights of Cultural Minorities in Swiss

The minorities in Switzerland are in the first place ethno-linguistic minorities, whose are unified by a common language. Therefore, since the foundation of the Confederation in 1848 the Helvetic state has been considered a multilingual country. The confederation and cantons are obliged to protect linguistic minorities. The grounds of the Swiss social structure, with traditional multiculturalism and four national languages are two principles: language freedom (Sprachenfreiheit) and territoriality (Territorialitätsprinzip). Switzerland has no official state religion. Predominant religion is Christianity, the largest religious minorities is established by Islam. The largest Christian denominations are Catholic Church (37.7%) and Swiss Reformed Church (25.5%). The influx of new cultural minorities to Switzerland began after the Second World War and was directly connected with economic migration, with the large influx of gastarbeiters from southern European countries and refugees from the Third World and from the former Yugoslavia.International law includes the protection of national, yet not cultural minorities. In Switzerland the protection of national minorities is also based on international standards. Is the Swiss multiculturalism an example for other countries?

A paradise without people. Ambivalence in representations of migration and its outcomes when Syrian refugees talk about secondary migration to Europe

ABSTRACT This article investigates perceptions of secondary migration to Europe and North America among Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon. Building on Ann Swidler's (1986) theory of cultural repertoires, I approach migration as one of several strategies that refugees may choose from, and ask which kinds of life goals they link to a strategy of secondary migration. The refugees' narratives reflect ambivalence in their perceptions of what secondary migration to Europe may entail; the economic security of refuge in Europe is tempting for many, but migration to Europe is also negatively associated with aid dependence. Although some think access to education and European labour markets can secure the future for their children, many talk of Western individualism as a negative influence that may lead to family dissolution. While some thirst for the liberal rights available in Western democracies, there is also fear that moving to Europe will limit their opportunities to practise their Muslim faith. The article demonstrates that secondary migration is not only associated with positive outcomes and suggests that there may be self-selection effects in what subgroups of refugees seek migration to Europe. The article draws on qualitative interviews among Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon conducted in 2019.

‘A welcoming refuge?’ The experiences of European Jewish refugees in the Dutch East Indies, set against other Asian destinations, 1933-1965

ABSTRACT Historians have often studied European Jews in connection with the Second World War. However, their experiences as refugees in Asian colonies are less examined. In this article I examine European Jewish refugees in the Dutch East Indies, with British India, Singapore and Shanghai as counterpoints. The focus is on the way European Jewish refugees were received and how that impacted their identity, as well as the role of international organisations. By using ego documents and articles from local newspapers I assess the meaning of the Dutch East Indies as a place of refuge for European Jewish refugees among other Asian destinations.

Were they a shock or an opportunity?: The heterogeneous impacts of the 9/11 attacks on refugees as job seekers—a nonlinear multi-level approach

This study investigates whether the September 11 terrorist attacks had any impacts on the labor market outcomes of refugees resettled in the United States, who should be distinguished from economic migrants or usual nonnatives. Furthermore, this paper sheds unprecedented light on whether those impacts were heterogeneous depending on a refugee’s ethnicity or religion. In terms of econometric methods, this research attempts to allow for the violation of the conventional condition of independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) observations and control for cluster-specific unobservables by using nonlinear multi-level models, considering that refugees form unique networks in their resettlement regions and actively interact with one another within their clusters. Due to the binary dependent variable of this study, the incidental parameters problem is also taken into account. The multi-level estimates of this paper suggest that the September 11 attacks did not uniformly shock all sub-populations of refugees: rather, they presented a unique, substantial opportunity for Asian refugees and a serious threat to African and Arab refugees. One unanticipated finding is that the employment probability of European refugees remained stable, whereas that of Asian refugees markedly increased after the attacks. However, in terms of employment quality, measured by real wages, European refugees were the only ones who benefited from the attacks. Possible explanations for such heterogeneous impacts and different patterns of benefits are discussed, including positive versus negative selection into employment.

Experiences of Intergenerational Trauma in Second-Generation Refugees: Healing Through Occupation.

Trauma experienced in one generation can affect the health and well-being of subsequent generations, such as impairing life skills, personal contentment, behaviour patterns and sense of self. This phenomenon has predominantly been explored with descendants of European refugees and is not fully understood from an occupational perspective. This research explores how intergenerational trauma manifests in the occupational lives of second-generation Ilankai Tamil and Vietnamese refugees. Using qualitative narrative inquiry, 12 adult children of Tamil and Vietnamese refugees residing in the Greater Toronto Area participated in semi-structured interviews. Narratives were thematically analysed. Findings illustrate how sociohistorical, cultural and familial contexts influence the way second-generation refugees view what they can and should do. Many healing responses to intergenerational trauma include occupations focused on communal care. Findings from this study reveal the unique struggles and needs of two understudied populations and the possibilities for healing through occupation.

Hierarchies of deservingness and the limits of hospitality in the ‘refugee crisis’

This paper discusses the concept of hospitality as a metaphor for thinking about the relationship between European publics and refugees. In particular, it explores how audiences in Greece discuss the European ‘refugee crisis’ and how, in doing so, construct hierarchies of deservingness of hospitality among different migrant groups reaching the Greek borders. Drawing upon empirical material from focus group discussions, the paper argues that these hierarchies of migrants draw upon media narratives, broader political discourses and cultural beliefs about religion, gender and class. Hospitality, as a metaphor for engaging with the stranger, is illustrated as embedded in national sociohistorical contexts, underlined by stereotypes both about the ‘other’ as well as the national self, and ultimately limited in constructing relations of solidarity between hosts and newcomers.

Determinants of Refugee and Migrant Health Status in 10 European Countries: The Mig-HealthCare Project.

In this study, we collect and synthesize information on the health status of the refugee/migrant population in ten European countries in order to map refugee/migrant health needs. With this information, we identify areas of intervention and healthcare system strengthening to provide the basis for future health planning and effective healthcare provision to migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees in the European Union (EU). Methods: 1407 migrants in ten European Union countries (consortium members of the Mig-HealthCare project) were surveyed on general health, mental health, and specific diseases using an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and multivariable linear regression analyses were conducted to investigate the risk factors on general quality of life for migrants and refugees in the EU. Results: Mean age was 31.9 (±11.05) years and 889 (63.1%) participants were males. The majority came from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, and Iran. Having a mental health disorder or a chronic disease such as a heart or respiratory disease was associated with worse general health. On the other hand, having permission to stay in the country of interview and being interviewed in the country of final destination was associated with better general health. Access to health care services was fragmented or unavailable for some interviewees because of linguistic, cultural, or administrative barriers. Conclusions: The management of chronic diseases and mental health conditions in European migrants and refugees is a key priority for health service provision. Further efforts should be made to guarantee healthcare access for migrant and refugee populations.