Constant talks and fears of a new war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) alongside the country’s worsening political situation are not the sole reason why 23-year-old Sarajevan activist and marketing management student Kerim is moving to Berlin in a couple of months.
An advanced industrial economy with a high quality of life and one of Asia’s few liberal democracies, South Korea is a comparatively attractive destination for international migrants.
Migrant flows across the Mediterranean will increase, though there won’t be a real turning point in immigration policies.
The COVID-19 pandemic showcases the need for a fundamental systemic change in migration management. In this framework, working together is the only viable scheme to accomplish an effective and sustainable response to the international migration phenomenon.
The MED This Week newsletter provides expert analysis and informed insights on the most significant developments in the MENA region, bringing together unique opinions on the topic and reliable foresight on future scenarios. Today, we focus on the Central Mediterranean Route, where a recent spike in border crossings followed by mounting, tragic migrant deaths underlines the need for long-term policies to address the phenomenon.
The vast majority of African migrants move from one African country to another. Rare are those who leave the continent.
Discourse and policymaking around migration in the West Africa region tend to be dominated by the EU lens focusing on containment and the ‘fight” against irregular migration.
While the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic plunged the globe into an unprecedent state of immobility, a gradual reopening is beginning. The deep economic recession that has followed may spark new forms of migration and changing routes, even as it constrains other movements. What are some of the first indications as to the drivers of migration in a post-pandemic world? And is Europe geared up for dealing with a new migration wave?
For World Refugee day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released its 2019 report on forced displacement. Its numbers are staggering. There are 79.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world, 45.7 million of whom are internally displaced people (IDPs), 20.4 million are refugees and 4.2 million are asylum seekers.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of forcibly displaced people has gained an additional urgency for three reasons.
Migration entered the G20 agenda only at the Antalya summit in 2015. At that time, the presence of several million Syrian refugees in Turkey and their onward migration to Central and Northern Europe were viewed as a threat to political stability in Europe and beyond. When the urgency of the 2015 situation was gone, the language on migration in subsequent G20 Summit Communiqués became weaker and weaker.
US President Donald Trump’s migration discourse has been put to a tough test, that of a global pandemic. But the “build-a-wall” rhetoric has emerged more resilient than one would have imagined. Even while the United States face a healthcare emergency, an economic crisis, and protests are sweeping across the country, Trump has managed to not put aside his focus on curbing migration; quite the contrary.
In West Africa, characterized by movements both within and out of the region, refugees and migrants on the move are among those particularly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and related mobility restrictions.