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Global, National, and Ethical Issues

GLOBAL MIGRATION TRENDS, MOTIVATIONS, AND POLICIES

Michaela Hynie (York University) began her presentation by noting that when she talks about data on refugees, she is talking about people who roughly fit the definition under the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention, which means that they are fleeing persecution and that the state cannot

TABLE 2-1 Top Source and Host Countries for Refugees

NOTE: High-income countries are in boldface.

SOURCE: UNHCR (2019b).

protect them.¹ Hynie observed that since the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) began keeping records, the number of people displaced by conflict has never been higher. This number varies from year to year and decade to decade, depending on which conflicts are active. In 2018, more than 41 million people were internally displaced within the borders of their own countries as a result of conflict, and approximately 25.9 million people had been forced to cross international borders as a result of conflict or persecution. In addition, approximately 3.5 million people were waiting for their asylum claims to be assessed (UNHCR, 2019a).

More than one-half of the people who are currently refugees come from five countries—Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia (see Table 2-1).² Some of these refugees have fled from recent conflicts, such as the conflicts in Syria, while others have moved as a result of longstanding conflicts, such as the conflicts in Afghanistan and Somalia.

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¹ Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention, or Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, defines refugee as someone who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”

² A participant noted that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) produces a separate set of statistics about Palestine refugees, which Hynie acknowledged are not counted in the UNHCR statistics.

Hynie pointed out that many more refugees are being hosted in low- and medium-income countries than in high-income countries. The majority of refugees are seeking asylum in countries that are close to the region where the conflict happened, and these countries are generally low- and middle-income countries (UNHCR, 2019b). Overall, 30.4 percent of refugees are in African countries (excluding North Africa), 13.8 percent are in Middle Eastern and North African countries, 21.0 percent are in Asian and Pacific countries, 13.6 percent are in European countries (excluding Turkey), 17.9 percent are in Turkey, and 3.3 percent are in the Americas. When compared with the number of inhabitants in a country, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have the highest proportion, with 160, 71, and 44 refugees per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively. The only European country in the top 10 list is Sweden, with 24 refugees per 1,000 inhabitants.

Among refugees worldwide, millions have been in protracted exile. According to Devictor and Do (2017), approximately 2.2 million people have been displaced for 5 to 9 years, about 1.9 million have been displaced for 10 to 34 years, and about 2.2 million have been displaced for 35-plus years. Some people have been in forced exile for 50 years or longer, Hynie noted.

The number of refugees who have been able to attain some kind of permanent resolution of their status is extremely small, according to Hynie. Very few of the 25.4 million refugees in 2018 have access to what UNHCR has identified as the three durable solutions to international displacement: voluntary repatriation to their country of origin, resettlement in a third country, or local integration into the country of asylum (Bradley, 2019; UNHCR, 2019c). In the first half of 2018, only 124,000 individuals were voluntarily repatriated to their country of origin, primarily Nigeria and Burundi. Even in these cases, questions have been raised about whether these were voluntary repatriations or whether the conditions of asylum were so harsh that people essentially had no choice but to repatriate, either because of economic conditions or constraints on their freedoms. Though UNHCR estimates that about 1.4 million people were in need of resettlement in 2018, only about 75,000 achieved resettlement in that year, which was about the same as the number who found resettlement in 2017 but one-half the number in 2016.

Local integration is perhaps the most promising and the most difficult of the solutions to achieve, Hynie said. It is politically difficult, with many countries resisting local integration of asylum seekers in the region. Since many refugees are residing in low-income countries, asylum seekers are forced to draw on scarce support and resources. UNHCR estimates that about 1.1 million people achieved local integration in the past 10 years, a number that is very small relative to the overall number, according to Hynie.

Today’s migration flows are resulting from a combination of forces, Hynie explained. Most of the data on forced migrants focus on refugees.

But the boundary between people who are migrating as a result of conflict and people who are migrating for other reasons is not necessarily clear. Increasingly, the large flows of migrants are made up of people whose motives are mixed. They may not just be escaping conflict or a lack of rights but also seeking economic betterment. Based on interviews with 10,059 migrants, the 4Mi initiative of the Mixed Migration Centre found that many people cited multiple and often interconnected reasons for migrating (economic, violence, lack of rights, personal/family, poor governance, environment, and “everyone left”). For example, states with poor governance and a lack of services also tend to have high levels of violence; any and all of these may motivate migration and can co-occur with migration for economic reasons.

Their motives also influence where people migrate. For example, people from the Horn of Africa who are traveling to Yemen or Saudi Arabia are not looking for greater freedoms but rather better economic prospects, acknowledging the circumstances in those host countries. Hynie observed that people are making rational choices in terms of the pathways that they are choosing.

She noted that environmental issues tend to be relatively low on the list of factors people cite as reasons for migration. Most of the people who report environmental issues as the reason for migration are engaging in short-term or cyclical migration, often within their own countries or across the nearest border, and usually from rural to urban areas, because the people who are most affected by climate change tend to be those who rely on such resources as farms, fisheries, and forests for their livelihoods. Nonetheless, environmental factors interact with other drivers of migration (Farinosi et al., 2018). In Sudan and Somalia, for example, drought is thought to be one of the drivers of increased conflict and loss of livelihood. Even when people cite conflict or economic factors as reasons for migrating, those factors may be exacerbated by environmental changes.

Hynie said that, in the past 20 years or so, policies around certain aspects of migration have actually become more liberal, especially policies regarding migration for economic reasons. A review of seven migration indexes since the 1980s suggests less restrictive policies in terms of entry, integration, high-skilled and low-skilled workers, and students, but more restrictive policies around border control, exit policies, and irregular migration (Scipioni, 2018).

The stricter border control policies are associated with increased criminalization of migration. Hynie noted that countries increasingly are using detention as a standard policy for dealing with asylum seekers and irregular migrants, and those who are being detained are often detained in facilities used for criminal violations. Though data regarding detention are difficult to obtain, a recent UNHCR campaign called Beyond Detention, designed to reduce detention in 10 participating countries, has had only mixed success

(UNHCR, 2019d). In Hungary and the United States, for example, detentions, including detentions of children, have increased as a part of greater restrictions. Also, community release is still not being widely used for asylum seekers in the participating countries.

Hynie indicated that the restrictive policies of destination countries, in terms of processing policies, ease of asylum, and welfare policies, nevertheless have only a small impact on the number of people seeking asylum in those countries. What is happening in the countries of origin in terms of terror, violence, and the lack of civil liberties is a much stronger influence (Hatton, 2016).

Increased border control is, however, heightening the risks associated with migration. Hynie said that since 2014, an estimated 4,000 international migrants have died each year on their journeys, and about 60,000 people have died since 2000 (Horwood et al., 2018). In interviews of international migrants across Africa, between one- and two-thirds reported experiencing sexual violence, physical violence, robbery, or kidnapping. When asked whether, given what they know now, they would encourage others to migrate, 60 percent said “no.” However, when asked whether they would migrate knowing what they know now, 70 percent said “yes.”

During the general discussion, Hynie called attention to problems in how countries are addressing migration given that large migration flows are often the result of mixed motivations. For example, climate change is affecting and will increasingly affect the people who are the poorest and have the fewest resources. However, countries do not have a mechanism to ensure that migration pathways across international borders are available for these individuals. Protecting one category of migrants while not protecting others who are starving or suffering from other threats to their livelihoods and well-being is very problematic, she said. Policy makers do not seem to have an appetite for taking up the issue of protecting the rights of people who are forced to migrate for reasons other than those that are currently recognized.

According to Hynie, a widespread view is that refugees have no choice but to migrate and they are forced to migrate in particular directions and end up in particular places. When refugees are seen as making rational choices about where to migrate, they tend to receive less sympathy because they are not seen so much as victims. Yet people who flee from similar regions go to destinations that offer different things in terms of security or economic opportunity, Hynie observed. Some are following families or friends to other communities, while others are making choices for other reasons. Moreover, not everyone leaves in a conflict situation. People are rational actors and make choices, and not enough is known about what goes into those decisions and how those decisions are being made.

Hynie also noted that in the 4Mi surveys, women seem to be less aware of what they will confront as migrants than are men, so the availability of

information to migrants also seems to differ. This raises the issue of how information is shared among people before, during, and after migration so that they can make choices in an effective way, she concluded.

FORCED MIGRATION RESEARCH IN THE UNITED STATES

Donald Kerwin (Center for Migration Studies of New York) observed in his presentation that, historically, much of the forced migration research literature has examined the interplay between refugee policy and foreign policy, mostly treating refugee policy as an extension of foreign policy. For example, this research has attributed to foreign policy interests in the past, U.S. preferences for Soviet bloc and for Cuban refugees over Haitians, and the higher approval rates for Nicaraguan asylum claims in years past as opposed to El Salvadoran or Guatemalan asylum claims. Kerwin observed several other emphases in forced migration research. They include the conditions driving migration (e.g., violence, persecution, and national disasters); external barriers to access to protection (e.g., interdiction, interception, and border enforcement); internal/legal barriers to access (e.g., 1-year asylum filing requirements, delays in providing work authorization to asylum seekers, and broad readings of security-related grounds for inadmissibility); and barriers to positive asylum case outcomes (e.g., detention, lack of counsel, biased judges, and noncourt removal processes that encompass about 90 percent of all removals from the United States). After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, researchers also began to engage national security experts on the intersection of national security and refugee protection, since this appeared to be emerging as a major barrier to providing protection. At that point, according to Kerwin, security experts had not given much thought to migration as a security risk.

Another category of research explores how different refugee populations have fared in the United States. For example, the Center for Migration Studies of New York recently published an analysis based on American Community Survey data on how 1.1 million refugees had fared by 2016. This analysis looked at three different groups of refugees who had arrived in the decades starting in 1987 and found that they had fared quite well, particularly those who had been in the United States for longer periods (Kerwin, 2018).

Detention has also been a consistent topic of research for decades, much of it focused on asylum seekers, Kerwin said. Reports and studies have looked at detention as a deterrent to keep others from coming, as an attrition strategy to make people abandon their claims, as a pretext to hold possible security threats in the absence of probable cause, and as a last resort when strictly necessary to guarantee court appearances. Groups such as the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute have

also produced public opinion research on migration, including narratives that reflect on the influences on how people view refugees and people in need of protection.

Kerwin identified several gaps and challenges in research, including the search for alternatives and durable solutions for refugees and how to forecast and respond to conditions that force people to migrate. Finally, he suggested applying lessons to migration reform from criminal justice reform, where he said real progress has been made in the United States.

Kerwin also observed that the current period feels much like the period after 9/11; so many things are happening over such a short period of time that they are difficult to fully understand and put in context. What is happening in the United States with regard to border security, asylum policies, and humanitarian programs will have long-term impacts on children, families, and U.S. democracy, he said. Research will be very important for understanding these impacts—even though, according to Kerwin, efforts are more in a “documentation mode” to keep track of what is happening.

THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH ON FORCED MIGRATION

Christina Clark-Kazak (University of Ottawa) emphasized the need for research on forced migration to carefully consider ethical issues. People undergoing forced migration have precarious legal situations, she noted. Those who have gained refugee status—or even citizenship—can have their statuses revoked if they have not been born with that citizenship. In addition, as observed by Hynie and Kerwin, laws and policies are increasingly criminalizing migration. Forced migration is characterized by extreme dependence on governments and service providers, which also has implications for research, Clark-Kazak noted. For example, people need legal status to get access to certain services, and people depend on service providers. Yet unequal powers, relations, and resource distributions are characteristic of forced migration. These issues point to the need to adapt standard ethical principles to the specifics of forced migration, Clark-Kazak said, including in the areas of voluntary informed consent, confidentiality, and minimizing harm.

Most forced migration occurs in poorer countries in the Global South. Yet most of the research on forced migration is conducted from rich countries of the Global North, even though many people based in the Global South also have the capacity and knowledge to do such research. Clark-Kazak urged researchers to think carefully about these resource inequalities and their role within this global system of inequality. She said that some of her colleagues have suggested that people who have had a personal experience of migration or have close contacts with people in situations of forced migration are biased in their research. However, she countered,

everyone is “biased,” and researchers based in the Global North can also have an “agenda.” She commented that researchers who do work with governments need to question the degree to which they have full autonomy over a research agenda that may be set primarily by the government partner. Clark-Kazak also underscored the hegemony of the English language, both in scholarship and in policy, which inhibits people whose first language is not English or have not had the opportunity to learn English. For many in the Global South, moreover, the cost of publishing can be prohibitive, access to publishing can be an issue, and people who have experienced forced migration and want to share their stories in an academic setting face both linguistic and financial barriers, she pointed out.

In the context of forced migration, said Clark-Kazak, informed consent means trying to anticipate the potential risks and making sure that research participants and respondents understand the nature of those risks. One strategy is to aggregate data to protect confidentiality so individuals cannot be identified, but this is difficult, if not impossible, in small-scale qualitative studies and narrative research. Also, given the increasing criminalization of migration, researchers face limits to confidentiality. They do not benefit from the same kind of client privilege that lawyers, doctors, or others have. In some cases, researchers have been subpoenaed or have had their data seized, and they could not do much to protect the individuals who contributed to the data. Similarly, researchers who use online survey instruments need to be aware that the data can be intercepted electronically. Researchers also have ethical, legal, and moral responsibilities to report harm to others or self-harm. Social work, for example, clearly delineates the obligation of researchers to report such harm. This needs to be made clear in consent forms, Clark-Kazak said, so that if information is disclosed, a researcher can know that the person was aware from the beginning that such information may well be referred to a government or social service agency.

Regarding the extreme dependence on governments and service providers, Clark-Kazak described a private sponsorship program that was part of a large resettlement of Syrian refugees to Canada in 2015 and 2016. As part of this program, which organizes Canadian permanent residents and citizens into groups of five to sponsor individuals or families from Syria, the sponsors had information about individuals that they could disclose to researchers or the press. For example, a Canadian woman sponsoring a family recounted the couple’s marital problems to an Australian media team that came to Canada to film a documentary on the private sponsorship program. When people depend on others for support, they may feel obliged to participate in research to continue to receive these services, even if they have been told they do not have to participate.

Clark-Kazak mentioned the difficulty of navigating different ethics boards and other bodies when doing research in teams or in partnership

with institutions that are based in different places. In some countries, procedures are very elaborate, while in other countries, such as France, there is no research ethics board process. This causes confusion, overlap, and, in some cases, contradiction between different ethics standards. In addition, even for researchers in institutions that have ethics board review, some research is not subject to review. For example, large-scale, macrocomparative data that are based on statistics do not need ethics approval if researchers are not interacting with human subjects. Nevertheless, this research can have a major impact on how people in situations of forced migration are perceived and the policies that flow from those situations. Issues also arise with research done by nonacademic organizations.

Clark-Kazak explained that researchers based in U.S. and Canadian universities are obligated to go through a research ethics approval process, but nongovernmental organizations often are not and do not necessarily have protocols in place. Nor, she pointed out, do they necessarily have protocols in place for responding to requests for research collaboration or access to the individuals with whom they work.

In response to these and other issues, the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies have developed a set of ethical considerations for research on people in situations of forced migration.³ The International Association for the Study of Forced Migration also has developed a code of ethics that provides high-level principles to guide researchers’ work.⁴ The introduction has been translated into French, Spanish, and Arabic.

A continuing dialogue on ethics needs to occur in multiple languages and in multiple spaces, said Clark-Kazak. For example, finding literature on this topic in French is difficult. Mapping existing guidelines and procedures across different places would help researchers navigate complex cross-border research. Clark-Kazak said that more conversations are also needed on failed research—for example, where it was not very ethical or made researchers feel uncomfortable. Sharing and documenting the lessons learned from such failures could provide valuable information for future researchers.

During the general discussion, Clark-Kazak agreed with one participant’s observation that institutional review boards (IRBs) can be legalistic and conservative. IRBs tend to see refugees as a vulnerable population, she said, and therefore as people who should not necessarily be invited

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³ The English version of the document is available at https://refuge.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/refuge/article/view/40467/36453.

⁴ The code is available at http://iasfm.org/blog/2018/11/30/adoption-of-iasfm-research-code-of-ethics.

to participate in research. This is one reason why ethical guidelines were developed in Canada, because IRBs were regularly refusing researchers in this field, she said. The guidelines provide IRBs with information and tools that they can use to evaluate proposals while also referencing broader sets of ethical guidelines for research. However, IRBs are only one part of the ethics puzzle, she noted. Getting IRB approval is necessary but not sufficient—just because researchers have IRB approval does not mean that their research will be ethical.

One form of research that typically is not subject to IRB approval is work with large existing datasets. As one participant noted, research that uses new types of data that fall into this category, such as Internet surveys or cellphone data, may need a different form of ethical review, since they pose ethical pitfalls. Expanding the range of research subject to IRB review may not be the best option in these cases, Clark-Kazak observed, but ethical reflection is still needed to ensure that researchers have anticipated or at least thought through ethical issues. For example, researchers might think about the ways that their findings might be framed or whether their results might be cherry-picked to support an ethically flawed policy. As Ellen Kraly (Malmö University and Colgate University) observed, ethical work in other fields, such as social psychology, could inform migration research.

Clark-Kazak also noted that ethical issues arise when collecting information at the household level. For example, depending on the topic at hand, it may not be appropriate for the eldest male to speak on behalf of others in the household. Because of power relations within a household, some people may also feel forced to participate in research even if they would not individually choose to do so.