Refugees: Home

Told through heart-wrenching testimonies, photographs, and artwork of refugees fleeing their homelands, Desperately Seeking Asylum describes firsthand accounts of the harrowing and dangerous journey immigrants are willing to endure knowing that they might not even make it onto US soil. Desperately Seeking Asylum prioritizes the testimonies of refugee families and unaccompanied children who are seeking asylum in the United States from Central America, primarily Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Their desperate and heart-wrenching stories disclose why they fled their homelands, their experiences along the treacherous overland journey, and the harsh reality of how the United States treats these families and children upon arrival to the United States. It critiques US complicity to the violence they are fleeing and discloses how national leadership shapes US immigration policies and practices, including the blatant documented violations against asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. Most notably, it offers transparency on US immigration practices at the US-Mexico border which violate existing US and international laws that are intended to protect asylum seekers, including the current official practice of blocking bridges with "turnbacks" to prevent "inadmissibles" from applying for asylum in the United States. It explains protections mandated by US law for unaccompanied children who are in US custody, and discloses violations which keep these children detained excessive lengths of time in substandard for-profit facilities which are overseen by the government and funded by taxpayers. Boursier also deconstructs the complicated asylum process, including examining the credible fear for asylum procedure, showing how technical terms and language are used to justify injustice at the border. Desperately Seeking Asylum offers hope for a new vision with alternative options and practical actions which assist migrants through humanitarian aid on both sides of the border. The witness for compassionate and responsible response by people of conscious becomes an antidote to injustice against asylum seekers. Instead of the current administration manipulating US laws to support its ulterior motives and political agenda, Boursier asks readers to hold US elected officials accountable to the same "Rule of Law" that the United States demands of refugees. Ultimately, Boursier suggests a spectrum of options for practical ways to make the political personal through public witness and civic engagement to transform the broken immigration process for refugees who are desperately seeking asylum.

Catalog description: "Mollie Gerver considers when bodies such as the UN, government agencies and NGOs ought to help refugees to return home. Drawing on original interviews with 172 refugees before and after repatriation, she resolves six moral puzzles arising from repatriation using the methods of analytical philosophy to provide a more ethical framework."

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened 'home identity' of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians' speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages - Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian - , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

The Psychiatric Evaluation and Treatment of Refugees is designed to provide mental health clinicians with the foundational knowledge and skills they need to diagnose and treat refugees, who are disproportionately likely to suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder and psychosis in the short term and depression and anxiety in the long term. According to a report by the United Nations, as of 2018, there were 22 million refugees, forcibly displaced and unable to return to their country of origin based on their well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinions, or membership in a specific social group. Refugees in the United States tend to share common characteristics, including the experience of forced migration from their homeland; multiple episodes of abusive and traumatic treatment prior to, during, and postmigration (including death of family members, torture, starvation, and prolonged periods living in unsafe refugee camps); and the bureaucratic nightmare of obtaining housing, medical care, and so forth. Providing these patients with mental healthcare can be both grueling and challenging, and this guide--written by experts in intercultural psychiatry--offers support and counsel to help clinicians understand and provide care to their patients, while caring for themselves and avoiding burnout. The book's content is compelling and timely: * Absolutely indispensable is the chapter on children and adolescents, who have borne the brunt of recent policy changes mandating family separation. The complex issue of acculturative stress for immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking children, youth, and families in the face of negative stereotyping and economic and educational disadvantage is addressed, as is mitigating the risk of long-term developmental trauma.* The Oregon Model, developed and launched by the editors and explained in depth in the book, is a research-grounded, team-based treatment model that accommodates the language of refugees, shows respect for their cultural traditions and behaviors, understands the traumas and tragedies of their life experience, and above all demonstrates empathy. * Psychiatric assessment and both biological and psychological treatment of individuals and families are covered in several chapters, which include techniques involved in adapting individual, group, and family psychotherapy. Each chapter includes clinical case examples to effectively illustrate diverse issues in assessment and treatment.* The psychiatric assessment and treatment of traumatized refugees raises a wide range of ethical issues, which are examined in a thoughtful and nuanced chapter, in which the author points out that the nature of the refugee experience invariably results in a blurring between the considerations of clinical ethics, which focuses primarily on the doctor-patient relationship, and the broader human rights domain which extends to the relationship of the individual and group to the state. The Psychiatric Evaluation and Treatment of Refugees will help mental healthcare providers deliver culturally and psychologically sensitive care to patients and clients grappling with past and present trauma and the trials of adjustment in a landscape that can be ethically challenging and emotionally overwhelming.

A wide-ranging study on the reasons why queer individuals migrate to Europe and the sociopolitical frameworks they navigate.  Europe is a popular destination for LGBTQ people seeking to escape discrimination and persecution. Yet, while European institutions have done much to promote the legal equality of sexual minorities and a number of states pride themselves on their acceptance of sexual diversity, the image of European tolerance is often quite different from the reality faced by LGBTQ migrants and asylum seekers. Queer Migration and Asylum in Europe brings together scholars from politics, sociology, urban studies, anthropology, and law to analyze how and why queer individuals migrate to Europe, as well as the legal, social, and political frameworks they are forced to navigate in the destination societies. The subjects covered include LGBTQ Latino migrants in queer and diasporic spaces in London; the diasporic consciousness of queer Polish, Russian, and Brazilian migrants in Berlin; the role of the Council of Europe in shaping legal and policy frameworks relating to queer migration and asylum; the challenges facing bisexual asylum seekers; queer asylum and homonationalism in the Netherlands; and the role of space, faith, and LGBTQ organizations in Germany, Italy, the UK, and France in supporting queer asylum seekers.