Date:
Location:
Seeking Refuge in Dangerous Times
A rise in brutal wars and natural disasters has propelled an unprecedented amount of people to leave their homes in search of refuge. Fleeing violence and despair, they often find that the journey and even the arrival are no less dangerous and dehumanizing. Seeking refuge in Europe thousands drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Seeking refuge in the United States, families were torn apart and incarcerated. While Canada remains a beacon of hope for many, asylum and resettlement processes are lengthy, complex, and often accompanied by experiences of racialization and marginalization. The fact that today’s responses to refugee movements are guided by national interests, cultural anxieties, welfare chauvinism, and the politics of closed borders was further heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. The papers of this panel explore what it means and takes to seek and being granted refuge in dangerous times.
Please register here: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0kf-Ghpz0uH9zrvY4b-aGNMqs5vt0O3BMD
"Here and There"
Heba Gowayed, Assistant Profressor of Sociology, Boston University
This presentation entitled "Here and There" examines how refugee lives remain connected to people back home or in the broader diaspora as they settle into countries of resettlement and asylum. It follows how these relationships are maintained, and their impact on people "here" in countries of resettlement and asylum emotionally and materially, and "there" in destination contexts through remittances and attempts to reunify through citizenship. This presentation draws from my book Refuge which examines how the United States, Canada, and Germany, as receiving countries, shape refugee resources and potential.
"Irregular Border Crossings and Asylum Seekers in Canada: A Complex Intergovernmental Problem"
Mireille Paquet, Associate Professor of Political Science, Concordia University
Robert Schertzer, Associate Professor University of Toronto
Between 2017 and mid-2020, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intercepted 59,658 people as they crossed into Canada outside official ports of entry. This spike in crossings was a clear break with past trends and with Canada’s managed migration programs. A large majority of these migrants went on to apply for refugee status in Canada. Supporting asylum seekers falls to the provinces where they settle but border enforcement and refugee status determination are the responsibility of the federal Canada. As a consequence, these crossings have become a contentious issue between Canadian provinces and the federal government. This presentation will explore how Canada’s intergovernmental system reacted to the increase of irregular border crossings, beginning in 2017 and how this complex intergovernmental problems challenges the established norm of multilateralism in intergovernmental relations on migration in Canada.
"How COVID-19 has affected the settlement experiences of refugees in Canada and the United States"
Lori Wilkinson, Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg Canada
The pandemic and its associated social, government, and economic restrictions have upended the societies we live in. What is largely forgotten as we scramble to reorganize and resolve many of the social problems that COVID-19 is the resettled refugees. With borders closed, the refugees already living in Canada and the USA have found themselves with precarious access to settlement services, language classes, health services and economic support, all vital components of successful integration. Using findings from two separate Canadian Institutes for Health Research projects, this presentation provides a brief overview of two current projects: one involving the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 among refugees in Canada and the US, the other examining gender-based violence among newcomers in seven countries. Findings indicate that precarity among resettled refugees in both countries has increased, particularly in terms of foodbank use, loss of jobs, work in dangerous employment, and the increased experience of violence in the home.
"The European asylum regime in the 21st century"
Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, Senior Research Fellow, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs
The end of the 20th century witnessed major changes in global asylum regimes towards a less generous approach to refugees. The European Union main approach was to keep refugees in their region of origin or transit, by closing borders and externalising migration control to third countries. The 2015 refugee crisis and the 2020 Covid19 pandemia have represented another shift in the European asylum regime, adding to the later the creation of spaces of contention (and exception) at the EU borders. Taking into account this context, the paper will analyse the so-called «prison islands» (also called cage islands), where the multiple crisis that cross contemporary Europe implode in a very limited and circumscribed geographic space.
Chair: Elke Winter, William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Harvard University
Heba Gowayed is the Moorman-Simon Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her research, which is global and comparative, examines how low-income people traverse social services, immigration laws, and their associated bureaucracies, while grappling with gender and racial inequalities. Her writing has appeared in Gender & Society, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Sociological Forum and in public outlets including Slate and Teen Vogue. She is currently working on her book, Refuge, under contract at Princeton University Press, and expected in 2022.
Mireille Paquet is Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia University and the Concordia University Research Chair in the Politics of Immigration She was the WLMK Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center’s Canada Program. Her research interests include comparative immigration politics, the role political institutions and bureaucracies affect the content of immigration policy and the role of these institutions in immigration politics as well as innovation in the immigration sector. She has conducted research on Quebec, Canada, Australia and the United States. She is the author of Province Building and the Federalization of Immigration in Canada (University of Toronto Press in 2019; Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016). Her research has also been published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Migration, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Regional Studies, the Journal of International Migration and Integration, Plein Droit, Politique et Sociétés, Liens Social et Politiques as well as Policy and Society.
Robert Schertzer is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. He publishes and teaches on the intersection of three areas: federalism, constitutional law, and the politics of diversity. He is the author of The Judicial Role in a Diverse Federation: Lessons from the Supreme Court of Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2016). His forthcoming book – The New Nationalism in America and Beyond (Oxford University Press) – explores the rise of anti-immigrant politics across the West. Prior to joining UofT, he spent a decade with the federal public service working on immigration policy and intergovernmental relations.
Lori Wilkinson is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Her current program of research centres on the resettlement and integration experiences of immigrants and refugees. She is the director of Immigration Research West, a multidisciplinary group of over 100 members who work together to educate Canadians about the contributions of newcomers. Her research has been published in several international and national academic journals and reports to national and international governments. Her recent research includes a co-edited book (2020) Understanding the Outcomes of Refugees-Canada and Germany Compared and a special issue of Canadian Diversity (2020) which she co-edited. She volunteers with a number of national and local community organizations and has won several awards including Professor of the Year, the Faculty of Arts’ Teaching Excellence Award, and the Dr and Mrs Ralph Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Service for her work with the immigrant and refugee settlement community.
Blanca Garcés is a Senior Research Fellow in the area of Migrations and Research Coordinator at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). PhD cum laude in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam and BA in History and Anthropology from the University of Barcelona. Her PhD thesis was awarded the Dutch Sociological Association (NSV) prize for the best sociological dissertation defended in the Netherlands in 2009 and 2010. For more than 15 years she has studied immigration and asylum policies from a comparative perspective. In her book Markets, citizenship and rights (2012), she analysed to what extent different political contexts (Spain and Malaysia) lead to different immigration policies. In the book Integration, processes and policies in Europe (2014), written together with Rinus Penninx, she proposes a heuristic model to study integration processes and policies. In the last five years she has studied policies and political discourses on asylum in Europe, with a special attention to border policies and state reception systems. Since 2021, she coordinates a H2020 project to understand the causes and consequences of migration narratives in a context of increasing politicisation and polarisation in Europe. She is member of the european network IMISCOE and of the editorial college of the recently created Migration Politics Journal.