Migration & Refugees

Real Estate Boom as Displaced Pakistanis Seek Housing

By IPS Correspondents
Real estate prices have shot up in areas adjacent to the tribal districts of northwest Pakistan where violence continues to displace local residents.

ARGENTINA: Deep-Rooted Prejudice Against Immigrants

By Marcela Valente
Although Argentina's immigration law is regarded as one of the most progressive in Latin America, xenophobia and discrimination persist, showing that progress is still more theoretical than practical.

Poor Countries Host Vastly More Displaced People Than Wealthier Nations

By Portia Crowe
The hardest part of Jan Egeland’s job is coming home at the end of the day. He is the Director of the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs and the former U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator, and has travelled to the farthest reaches of the world to help protect refugees and displaced people.
Numbers or people? Migrants at Lampedusa. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS.

ITALY: ‘They Saw Numbers, We Saw People’

By IPS Correspondents
It’s only a few hundred metres from the rocky hillside overlooking Lampedusa’s commercial port to the other side of the protected bay. For more than a decade this narrow strip of ocean has been a migratory gateway into Europe for tens of thousands of mostly African migrants. The numbers have risen and fallen in response to shifting government policies and geopolitical developments.
Refugees land at Lampedusa island in Italy. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS.

ITALY: Refugees Find Easier Reception, For Now

By IPS Correspondents
It’s 4.30 in the morning and the full moon is low in the sky above Lampedusa harbour as the Guardia di Finanza patrol boat escorts a fishing boat containing 19 Tunisian migrants into the closed military port. They include six women, one child and – to the amusement of the Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) team - one sheep. The migrants are driven away in a coach to one of the two holding centres, some of them wrapped in silver emergency blankets. But the sheep remains in the port.

U.S.: Immigration Detainees Shuttled from Jail to Jail

By Elizabeth Whitman
Frequent and long-distance transfers to remote detention facilities are jeopardising the political and human rights of immigrants detained in the United States, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Dam Project in Turkey Breeds Controversy

By IPS Correspondents
The tranquillity and mystery of this town on the banks of Tigris River will not last long. The millennia-old town will be nearly totally destroyed once the nearby Ilisu dam, built for energy and irrigation, is complete.

U.S.: Alabama’s Immigration Bill “Turns Back Clock” on Civil Liberties

By Kanya D'Almeida
On Dec. 1, 1955, at the height of racial segregation in the United States, a little-known middle-aged seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery City bus in the southern state of Alabama.
Rania Abdechakour Credit: Bolton News Picture Agency

As Britain Sees a Needy Child

By IPS Correspondents
The British Home Office has ruled that a severely disabled five-year-old girl should be returned to Algeria. The ruling demonstrates just how tough some European governments are getting on immigration.
UN peacekeepers rescue Haitian children from an orphanage destroyed by Hurricane Ike in September 2008. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

Millions May Soon Be Fleeing the Floodwaters

By Stephen Leahy
Mass migration will inevitably be part of human adaptation to climate change, experts agree, since parts of the world will become uninhabitable in the coming decades.
Isaac Nwankwere, who escaped from Nigeria, sells the Augustin street paper in Austria. Credit: Mario Lang/Augustin

Asylum-Seekers Find Refuge in a Street Paper

By Ines Santinhos Goncalves
The reasons why people become street paper vendors are many and diverse. Some are homeless; others suffer mental or physical health problems, struggle with addiction or face unemployment. And some people do it because the magazines offer them the refuge they so desperately need.

PAKISTAN: Tribes Plead for End to Army Offensives

By IPS Correspondents
Fear and anxiety have spread among residents of North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan after U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that the Pakistani government would launch a major offensive in the area.

Urban Transformation for Interethnic Cities

By IPS Correspondents
Urban centres, marked by globalisation, migration and the intermingling of culturally and ethnically diverse communities were among the major topics of the International Conference on the Inter-ethnic City held in Rome last week on the eve of the celebrations of Italy’s national day.

OP-ED: Cutting the Fog: Multiculturalism, Religion and the Common Good

By Sara Silvestri
The death of "multiculturalism" has been proclaimed repeatedly recently, the idea pronounced with a big "M" as if we were talking of something tangible around which there is consensus.

Prison Lobbyists Help Spread Anti-Immigrant Laws to U.S. South

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
Earlier this month, Georgia became the third state to enact some of the most anti-immigrant legislation in recent U.S. history, when Governor Nathan Deal, a Republican, signed the bill, HB 87.

Syrians Running Out of Refuge in Lebanon

By Mona Alami
Syrians from the border town Tell Khalakh have been fleeing a wave of violence over recent weeks to cross into neighboring Lebanon. But those seeking refuge now face an uncertain fate.
Kosovar refugees fleeing their homeland in March 1999. [Blace area, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia] Credit: UN Photo/R LeMoyne

Global Refugee Problem Bigger Than Ever

By IPS Correspondents
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the landmark 1951 U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees defining their rights and states' legal obligations to protect them.

OP-ED: Do One Thing for Diversity and Inclusion

By Irina Bokova and Jorge Sampaio
All cultures contribute to the enrichment of humankind. Human beings must respect one another in all their diversity of belief, culture and language. Differences within and between societies should be neither feared nor repressed but cherished as a precious asset of humanity. This is a core challenge of the 21st century.
Food for a family. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

PAKISTAN: Militancy Keeps Refugees Far From Home

By IPS Correspondents
Back home, Abdur Rehman’s family had a spacious house that could easily fit the 10 members of his family. Now they all have to squeeze into a small tent in a refugee camp near Peshawar in north-west Pakistan.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the subject of a federal grand jury investigation into abuse of power. Credit: Valeria Fernandez/IPS

U.S.: “Toughest Sheriff” in Legal Crosshairs

By Valeria Fernández
The United States' self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff" has made international headlines for housing inmates at outdoor tent facilities and conducting immigration sweeps in Latino neighbourhoods.
At Tahrir Square. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS.

Spring Not New to Arab Women

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
Women have been taking leading roles in the Arab uprisings of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Morocco and Bahrain - shattering many decades old Western myths that Arab women are powerless and enslaved.
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