"…and of the essential morality of eroding the injustices that borders create by way of policy, rather than conquest."
August 8-15, 2022 Mixed Migration—hebdo
Welcome to Mixed Migration—hebdo! Here, in the time it takes to read one feature, you get a global sweep of the last week's most relevant migration policy developments, along with links to all the articles you need to dig deeper.
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Spotlight
Last week, Kenyans went to the polls to elect a new president. This was a hugely consequential election for east Africa, and one that bears on questions of both internal displacement and regional refugee politics, so I thought it would be worth reflecting a bit on it here.
Outgoing Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta is a larger-than-life figure in East Africa, both because of how he was elected and for how he has conducted himself in office since then. Kenya’s 2007 election had been violently contested, leaving ~1.300 fatalities and ~650.000 displaced, with Mr. Kenyatta a prime suspect of stoking the post-election violence. From an embattled candidate in Kenya’s 2013 election, which he ran under the shadow of an ICC investigation for potential crimes against humanity, Kenyatta soon consolidated his role as an indispensble player in East African politics.
This election also matters because Kenya hosts, in Kakuma and Dadaab, some of the largest and longest-lasting refugee camps in the world. As Nhial Deng explains in an essential backgrounder, President Kenyatta has been, at times, both a constructive and a bad-faith actor toward the 400.000 refugees living in these camps—threatening to close them time and again, and most recently in March 2021 (though the June 2022 deadline came and went); signing the Refugee Act into law in late 2021 easing refugees’ access to the education system and labor market (though then moving slowly to implement it).
This election catches Kenya, and the whole of East Africa, in perhaps the greatest economic stress in a generation, with food security squeezed between severe drought in the Horn of Africa and shortages of grain, fertilizer, and fuel due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kenyan Ambassador to the UN Martin Kimani delivered a memorable speech at the UN Security Council as hostilities broke out, reminding the world of the cynically ill-conceived borders contemporary Africa inherited from its former colonizers, and of the essential morality of eroding the injustices that borders create by way of policy, rather than conquest. In a recent episode of Global Dispatches, Ambassador Kimani further details Kenya’s precarious position in the face of economic hardship that could easily degenerate into humanitarian catastrophe.
Between the memory of Kenya’s 650.000 internally displaced on the heels of the 2007 election, the present needs of the 400.000 refugees in Kakuma and Dadaab, and the potential needs of millions facing climate breakdown and devastation in neighboring Somalia, it is essential that Kenya’s electoral count and presidential transition proceed calmly and peacefully.
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On to the news…
Asia
Post-occupation Afghanistan
Last Wednesday, Save the Children issued a report documenting pervasive child malnourishment in Afghanistan, tallying that 97% of Afghan families struggle to feed their children, with 45% of girls no longer attending school (see StC’s full report here). On the same day, 71 globally prominent economists issued a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden appealing to him to release ~$9 billion in reserves nominally belonging to the Afghan central bank, but frozen since the August 2021 Taliban takeover. Also on Wednesday, Afghan educators lamented that over 400 private schools had closed over the year prior due to economic hardship, depriving ~10.000 students of an education and thousands of teachers of a livelihood. | On Thursday, ~300 Afghan civilians arrived in Spain from Pakistan, having been evacuated as former collaborators of Spain’s civilian and military presence in Afghanistan.
Myanmar and its neighbors
On Tuesday, the United Nations’ Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar announced it had accumulated—despite never having been allowed in-country—3 million items of information, including evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity amid Myanmar’s multiple ongoing armed conflicts. | On Thursday, al Jazeera highlighted concerns among refugees and advocates in Malaysia with the potential dual use of its novel Tracking Refugees Information System, inaugurated in late July and potentially usable for service coordination or for surveillance and control.
Sources: TOLOnews, Reuters, AFP, al Jazeera
Sub-Saharan Africa
Ethiopia’s civil war
On Tuesday, the WFP, UNHCR, and Ethiopia’s Government Refugees and Returnees Service issued a joint $73 million appeal to extend food assistance to 750.000 civilians—with WFP aid stocks set to run out by October despite 2 aid basket reductions since November 2021.
Conflict and displacement in the Sahel
Last Monday, Chad’s transitional government signed a peace deal with over 30 rebel groups, paving the way for forthcoming reconciliation talks. | On Tuesday, HumAngle tallied at least 840 civilian deaths due to conflict in Nigeria over the whole of July. | On Wednesday, IOM assessed that ~20.000 IDPs had departed the Dalori displacement camp complex since late July. On Thursday, IOM tallied nearly 7.000 people affected by flooding on the heels of heavy rains in Chad.
Conflict and displacement in east Africa
Last Monday, HumAngle tallied 60 fatalities, including 20 civilians, in fighting between national military and armed rebel forces in eastern DRC.
Sources: Addis Standard, HumAngle
Middle East and North Africa
Displacement within and beyond Syria
Last Wednesday, the White Helmets announced they had tallied 75 regime attacks on civilians last July, resulting in 20 fatalities and 34 injuries. On the same day, the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement announced it would repatriate 500 families from the al-Hol containment camp in northeastern Syria by the end of 2022. | On Thursday, Kurdish forcesannounced they had found the bodies of 3 murdered men in the al-Hol containment camp.
Asylum seeker (im)mobility in the MENA region
Yemen’s civil war
Last Tuesday, Middle East Eye relayed the distress visited upon IDPs by flooding in Marib, where 54 displacement sites have been damaged, affecting 10.000 people. On Wednesday, Reuters revealed an assessment by Yemen’s internationally-recognized government estimating that its current stockpile and pending deliveries of wheat are enough for just 10 weeks’ autonomy, as external supply shocks and internal currency mismanagement decimate Yemen’s food security.
Sources: Middle East Monitor, Kurdistan24, Middle East Eye, Reuters,
Maritime Migration Routes to the West
Ruta Canaria
Last Tuesday, Salvamento Marítimo rescued 61 asylum seekers and retrieved 1 lifeless body from a distressed vessel in waters off the Canary Islands. | On Wednesday, Senegalese authorities announced they had arrested 143 asylum seekers in 2 groups preparing to set sail toward the Canary Islands.
Central and western Mediterranean
Last Tuesday, Tunisian authorities rescued 20 asylum seekers, retrieved 6 lifeless bodies, and tallied 4 missing persons after the vessel in which they were hoping to reach European waters capsized off of the Kerkennah islands.
The English Channel
Aegean Sea
Last Tuesday, a group of asylum seekers relayed to Aegean Boat Report that, after making landfall on the Greek island of Chios, they had been pushed back into Turkish waters and thrown into the sea—some in handcuffs—leading to the drowning of 3 people. | On Wednesday, Greek authorities rescued 29 asylum seekers, and tallied between 30 and 50 missing persons, on the heels of a shipwreck off the southeastern Aegean island of Karpathos. | On Thursday, 18 asylum seekers documented their arrival near the small port of Limani Kipis on the northern shore of Lesvos.
Gulf of Mexico
Last Tuesday, the U.S. Coast Guard called off the search for 5 missing persons on the heels of a shipwreck off of Sugar Loaf Key on the Friday prior, at which time it had rescued 8 asylum seekers and retrieved 2 lifeless bodies.
Sources: EFE, AFP, TAP, AP, Reuters,
Europe
EU migration policymaking
Last Wednesday, German authorities announced they would soon begin relocating asylum seekers from Italy, under the novel solidarity mechanism approved by the EU Council last June. On the same day, Latvian authorities extended a state of emergency along the border with Belarus, in place since August of last year, to November 10. | On Thursday, Swiss authorities announced they would begin means-testing livelihood assistance to Ukranian refugees with temporary protected status. | On Friday, Cypriot authorities clarified that rejected asylum seekers appealing a negative first-instance decision retain the right to work during their appeal proceedings.
European migration (mis)management
Last Monday, Belgian authorities opened a new asylum seeker reception center in a repurposed military barracks in Berlaar, northeast of Brussels, with current capacity for 100, intended to expand to 750. | On Wednesday, Dutch authorities announced they had identified 2 state-owned facilities suitable for repurposing as asylum seeker housing, to alleviate pressure on the Ter Apel reception center, threatening to force municipalities to accept the siting if they continued refusing to adapt suitable buildings. | On Thursday, Dutch media revealed that authorities are considering suspending family reunification arrivals until the asylum seeker housing crisis is resolved. On the same day, a truck carrying 49 asylum seekers overturned in North Macedonia, likely after having entered irregularly from Greece, leading to 35 injuries. | On Friday, German authorities revealed that the issuance of family reunification visas, which Chancellor Scholz had committed to accelerate in his electoral campaign, has actually slowed down since the Germany’s early 2022 government transition.
Morbidity and mortality in the Evros
Last Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights urged Greek authorities to rescue a group of 32 asylum seekers stranded on an islet in the Evros after successive pushbacks from both Greek and Turkish soil, where a 5-year old child perished, and another in distress, after they had been stung by a scorpion. | On Thursday, Greek authorities formally requested that Turkish authorities rescue 40 asylum seekers stranded on an islet in the Evros River, claiming the islet to be beyond Greece’s sovereignty despite clear evidence of it being Greek.
Dystopia at the Home Office
On Tuesday, UK authorities terminated plans to repurpose a decommissioned RAF barracks in Linton-on-Ouse into asylum seeker detention facilities.
Displacement within and beyond Ukraine
On Wednesday, German authorities introduced a rule, to enter into effect on September 1, allowing Ukrainian refugees to remin in Germany for up to 6 months—up from the current 3 months—before needing to apply for temporary protection.
Sources: InfoMigrants, EFE, Philenews, The Brussels Times, DutchNews, AP, al Jazeera, the Guardian, Kyiv Post,
The Americas
U.S. migration policymaking
Last Monday, the Biden Administration finally terminated the Migration Protection Protocols (colloquially known as Remain in Mexico), after an unusual delay in multiple courts’ implementation of the Supreme Court decision ruling the in favor of the program’s termination. | On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced an Afghan Adjustment Act proposal, which would create a pathway to permanent residence and eventual naturalization for Afghan evacuees admitted to U.S. soil under humanitarian parole, and create an inter-agency task force to facilitate the evacuation of ~100.000 local collaborators who remain at risk in Afghanistan.
Migration and its drivers in Latin America
Last Tuesday, Criterio issued an investigation into the levying of administrative fines on asylum seekers transiting through Honduras, tallying ~$22.5 million in resulting revenues for the Honduran treasury since 2015.
Sources: CBS News, The New Republic, Criterio
Oceania
Sources:
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