Final Post

What I learned...

Today I write my final post in summary of the last month and what I have learned throughout this experience. First and foremost, I have learned that research takes much patience and hard work. It is a game of trial an error. I have learned the trickiness of selecting a research topic. This entails seeking balance between wanting a unique topic and selecting a topic with enough information on it. This means, one should seek to have a topic where not many conclusion have been drawn. At the same time, there has to be enough data and information to back up your claim, or else the conclusion becomes abstract and irrelevant. I also learned different ways of searching information such as cross referencing, and looking for relevant authors in the bibliography of useful articles and books. Research involves a component of creativity that I enjoy while seeking information. In my case, this consisted searching articles from a certain time period after a conflict to learn about the repercussions. Learning what different types of research databases exist has been one of the most useful components of this course. After some time of getting familiar with them, I was able to access which ones were most useful to me and why. If I continue to research similar topics, I will certainly have many outlets for information.

My Favorite Part...
I really enjoyed wrapping my head around all that goes into research. While seeking information and skimming and scanning articles, I learned so much on the subject of refugees, immigration, and policies related to all of those topics. My knowledge on the subject has really increased. 


What I Disliked...
At the beginning, I did not realize that sometimes you may not always find what you are looking for. I think this experience would be different the second time, having more realistic expectations. 


What I Hope to Do in the Future...
Having now explored archival research and enjoying it, my desire to involve myself in field research has increased immensely. I would like to try research that requires me to interact with people to get results.

Religious Repression

Just as for the terms "political repression," "forced migration." and "voluntary migration," I have dedicated a significant amount of time toward defining and providing examples of "religious repression." I also searched for "religious persecution" and "religious oppression," to get a well-rounded view of the definition. After hours of searching, I realized that finding it actually defined in an academic paper is not as obvious as you think it may be. I was surprised that so many papers just delved right into the subject without first defining it.

Definitions:
The following text provide definitions of religious repression:

Article title: "Religious Persecution in Cross-National Context: Clashing Civilizations or Regulated Religious Economies?"
Author: Brian Grim

On page 20 Grim defines religious persecution as “physical abuse or physical displacement due to one’s religious practices, profession, or affiliation”

and religious regulation as“the legal and social restrictions that inhibit the practice, profession, or selection of religion.”

Grim uses the United States State Department list of countries that are characterized by religious repression, as well as the International Repression Report (IRR). The IRR's second index measures the following: "the social regulation of religion and is defined as the restrictions placed on the practice, profession, or selection of religion by other religious groups, associations, or the culture at large” (page 23)


The following article is from the Encyclopedia of Religion. First Article Title: "Persecution: Jewish Experience"
The first page defines religious persecution, as well as why it is so hard to define religious persecution.



Examples:
The following text provide examples of religious repression:

Article title: "Freedom, law, and prophecy: A brief history of Native American religious resistance"
Author: Lee Irwin

This article refers to religious repression from the United States government towards the Native Americans. When researching, I noticed this example come up a lot. Even though I of course knew this happened, the United States of America is not the first country that comes to mind when I think of governments guilty of religious repression. The paragraph below is an exert from the text:

“These laws not only abrogate First Amendment rights in a conscious and well documented policy of religious oppression, they also reveal a systematic attempt on the part of highly placed government officials to stamp out Native American religious practices. They also represent a determined policy to reconstruct Native religions in conformity with dominant Protestant majority values in a myopic vision of what constitutes "civilized" religious behavior. Such policy is found consistently in the Annual Reports of many commissioners of Indian Affairs from the creation of the office in 1832 through the appointment of John Collier in 1934.”


My next example incorporates modern day policy in the United States. This was by far the most interesting article to me. The article discusses an unusual topic, how “non-believers” are discriminated against in terms of accepting asylum applications. Dolance explains that the US has a history of turning away atheists by claiming that they do not fit the refugee category of religious repression. Article Title: "U.S. Asylum Law as a Path to Religious Persecution" by: Jack C. Dolance II 

Political Repression

Jubilee Partners

Today I returned from having spent 3 days at Jubilee Partners. Jubilee Partners is a refugee resettlement organization located in Comer, Georgia. Comer is a very small town and is about two hours driving distance from Atlanta. On the property live a mixture of families: a few that live there full time and run the organization, and between 3 to 5 refugee families that live there for two and a half months before relocating to Atlanta. 

The refugees that come here before starting their lives in Atlanta have a significant advantage to the others. Here, they have very personalized one-on-one attention, and English classes 6 days a week, as well as other practical activities that help prepare them for life in America. I helped with a teaching class, child care, farming, and translating. Although my stay was short, it was immensely eye-opening. At the time I was there, there were three Burmese families and two Central African families. Spending time with them and the people who run the organization gave me a deeper, more personalized understanding of the struggle of refugees and everything I have read on the subject. Below is an interesting image I found that summarizes the migration of the Burmese to Comer, Georgia. 

Political Repression 

A refugee is someone who has crossed their countries borders in fear of persecution for their political or religious beliefs. My latest assignment was to define the difference between political repression and religious repression. Because I was unable to find anything specific to comparing the two, I decided to divide up the tasks and search for comprehensive definitions, as well as examples on both.

Political Intolerance and Political Repression During the McCarthy Red Scare
James L. Gibson

“Conceptually, I define repressive public policy as statutory restriction on oppositionist political activity (by which I mean activities through which citizens, individually or in groups, compete for political power [cf. Dahl 1971]) upon some, but not all, competitors for political power.3 For example, policy outlawing a political party would be considered repressive, just as would policy that requires the members of some political parties to register with the government while not placing similar requirements on members of other political parties”

Political repression : courts and the law
Linda Camp Keith

Keith describes problems such as: citizens not being able to criticize their governments openly, being arrested without rightful charge, and not having a truly independent judiciary. The book is very useful because it provides examples of contemporary political repression.

La légalité socialiste et les dilemmes de la répression politique

Corneliu Pintilescu

Pintiescu discusses German American political theorist Hannah Arendt’s definition of one of the fundamental elements of totalitarianism: when the judiciary branch dissolves and the law comes systematically violated. She uses the state of Romania in the early 50’s to demonstrate this by explaining the political repression that went on during that time.  The law forebode certain most political parties from forming unless they fit strict criteria.  It was changed to this way, to annihilate competition from the start.

Economic Sanctions and Political Repression: Assessing the Impact of Coercive Diplomacy on Political Freedoms

Dursun Peksen & A. Cooper Drury

It was deefined quite differently in this article:

“level of the government respect for democratic freedoms and human rights.”

Article describes how placing sanctions on a country makes that government more likely to politically repress their people. Peksen and Drury use the example of when the UN placed sanctions against Iraq to illustrate their point: “by diverting shrinking public resources to his supporters in the government and military (Reuther 1995). While Hussein’s regime used public goods to pay off supporters prior to the embargo, the sanctions were meant to weaken his hold on power. Instead, it increased his importance as a supplier of those resources and allowed the Iraqi regime to consolidate its repressive authority over the society.”

During my searches, I noticed a lot of articles came up on communist countries during the cold war used as examples of politically repressive states. I also noticed that the majority of articles, papers, or even books, dove right into the subject, without actually defining it first. 

My latest assignment was to find the technical difference between forced migration and voluntary migration. Even though they have already been defined in the first post, there are various cases that may seem hard to neatly categorize into one or the other. Therefore, we dive deeper into the definitions of each term.

Definitions:

As a review, the UNHCR defines forced migration as…” a general term that refers to the movements of refugees, internally displaced people (those displaced by conflicts, within their country of origin) as well as people displaced by natural or environmental disaster, chemical or nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects.”

The Forced Migration Review has the same definition: 
"What is forced migration? ‘Forced migration’ refers to the movements of refugees and internally displaced people (displaced by conflict) as well as people displaced by natural or environmental disasters, chemical or nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects."Note: Both the UNHCR and the Forced Migration Review do not specifically address the plight of those displaced by environmental reasons other than natural disaster or economic issues. However, I think it is reasonable to say that some people may assume it to be included, some not.


Journal of Refugee Studies:
The environmental side of this is explored in the following text - 

 

IASFM 11 CONFERENCE REPORT

Refugees and Forced Migrants at the crossroads: Forced Migration in a Changing World.

By: John Nassari

I stubbled onto this article in the Journal of Refugee Studies which summarizes a conference hosted by the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program of the American University in Cairo with 280 attendees.

During the conference, they questioned weather environmental changes such as: environmental degradation, and climate change was in fact part of forced migration.  The article states, “ forced migration usually entails at least one of the following factors: absolute compulsion, threat, and coercion and actual harm.” The article then also included the difficulty of describing a migrant worker, as in many cases he or she maybe experiencing one of these three examples but also pulled by economic benefits. Nassari further explains, "It was acknowledged that the line between voluntary and involuntary migration is rarely clear." I am quickly realizing that as clean as cut as we would like the definitions can be, the people and their stories are not. For example, if someone is living in fear in a war-torn country and hears of a job opportunity in a neighboring near by country, they may choose to migrate because of the situation in their present country. Wouldn't this be the normal response of any suffering human being? It seems that it would be incorrect to categorize this case as strictly either a "economic migration" or "involuntary migration."

Panelists also discussed the possibility of coining the terms “climigrant” or “climigration.” They discussed the importance of including environmental issues in the term of forced migration.


Forced Migration Review

An article in the Forced Migration Review titled "The Pervertibility of Refugee 
Status," brings up an even greater point - if someone or a certain group of people who are living in extreme poverty cross a border in hopes that it will increase their life expectancy, would it be right this as "voluntary migration?" They perhaps are not leaving with fear of persecution, but does this suddenly deem migration caused of fearing of death from starvation "voluntary?" The definitions vary from country to country, They do not account for the gray area, as in, what is not quite defined to be completely voluntary or involuntary. The author goes on to make a bold claim that because these definitions are used in policies, the states will categorize incoming asylum seekers according to their on personal resources, culture, prejudice, and economic need. 

Another Article for the Forced Migration Review, "Forced Migration and HIV/AIDS 
in Asia: Some Observations" illustrates this point with an example of Asian migrant workers. In it the author claims "The severity of the economic and social crises in the region has led thousands to leave their families and homes to go to foreign lands and engage in low-wage labour with little protection from exploitation, no legal rights and inadequate access to even basic social services." He makes a distinct point, that their risk in getting HIV/AIDS massively increases, while their access to protection decreases. Because of this, among other conditions. this type of migration is not a choice, but something forced by a matter of circumstances. 

Forced Migration Review:
The Forced Migration Review (FMR) is likely to be my most favorite discovery throughout this journey. I looked through 15 issues seeking information on highly skilled refugees. While I did find information on this topic, it was not quite what I was looking for. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed going through FMR. As stated on their website:

"MR aims to:
- Contribute to improving policy and practice for people affected by forced migration
- Provide a forum for the voices of displaced people

- Be a bridge between research and practice
- Raise awareness of lesser-known (or little covered) displacement crises
- Promote knowledge of, and respect for, legal and quasi-legal instruments relating to refugees, IDPs and stateless people."

I love their mission and believe that they are doing a wonderful job. 

FMR is dependent on grants and donations and comes from the in-house publication of Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre. FMR is free and is translated into French, Spanish, and Arabic.

I also stumbled upon Refworld during one of my many searches.

Refworld:

This search engine is under the UNHCR. It consists of reports and special features on Refugees and human rights related to refugees and displaced populations. This search engine seems to cover many bases but with primary goal to inform people about migration policies as well as influence this type of policy. 

Today I realized that I may be more successful by taking a different approach in my searches. I am often putting "skilled refugee" or "highly skilled refugee" into while seeking information from various journals. However, using the term "refugee" may be limiting my results. For example, an Iranian doctor that had has applied for a highly-skilled US work visa in the late 70's because he is trying to escape the political turmoil may not have been registered as a refugee if he were accepted. Instead, he or she may have been accepted as a highly skilled person under a work visa, even though their primary reasons for moving were not economic but because they were escaping a dangerous environment. I will be using terms such as "forced migration" and "high skilled work visa" to avoid limiting my results.

Forced Migration

(http://www.tigweb.org/youth-media/panorama/index.html?IssueID=77)

In doing so, I found an article titled: "The International Migration of Skilled Human Capital from Developing Countries," by Kuzvinetsa Peter Dzvimbo

In short, the article describes how some forms of migration are often mislabled as "brain drain." Brain drain is defined as "the emigration of scientists, technologists, academics, etc., for better pay, equipment, or conditions." Dzvimbo sites many other reasons why many people migrate from developing countries aside from lack of adequate career opportunities including: political instability, civil unrest, armed conflict, and violence. He future explains this point by using the following African countries as his example: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Burundi, Rwanda, Morocco, Algeria, The Ivory Coast, Senegal, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. At the time that this article was written, many of these countries had experienced between 15 to 20 years of what he calls "civil or political strife." Several of these countries still suffer similar conditions, while some have worsen. "...in 1990, there were 125 792 Africans with secondary plus tertiary education in the USA,"Dzimbo states. At that time, South Africa had the highest amount of highly skilled immigrants working in the United States. This is a perfect example, for during this time, South Africa was experiencing much political turmoil due the nature of its remaining years under the apartheid system.

I will also be targeting my efforts to finding government reports and other government information on highly skilled immigrants right before, during, and after an internal conflict. I was hoping to find a surge of Iranian immigrants by scanned Canada's migration reports from the mid/late 70's to the mid 80's, but did not find what I was hoping.