What explains voter attitudes toward immigration in Latin America? This article argues that increased refugee arrivals moderate the impact of social identities on immigration attitudes. We propose that informational cues associated with increased immigration make cosmopolitan identities less important—and exclusionary national identities more important—determinants of immigration preferences. Analyzing 12 Latin American countries from the 2017–2022 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is positively associated with pro-immigration attitudes, but only in countries experiencing low-to-moderate refugee inflows. Conversely, nationalism is negatively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes, and increasingly so as refugee inflows increase. The uneven distribution of refugee migration has therefore reshaped public opinion in Latin America by moderating the effects of competing social identities (i.e., cosmopolitanism and nationalism). These findings contribute to broader debates on the behavioral impacts of immigration by highlighting an indirect mechanism by which increased immigration may generate anti-immigrant hostility.

Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, millions of people had fled to neighbouring countries and across Europe. People throughout Europe were mobilised into action, and from the outset, the response to the unfolding humanitarian emergency in Ukraine was a complex and often messy web of private and public initiatives. In this article, we focus on the unique British humanitarian response to the greatest movement of refugees in Europe since the Second World War, known as ‘Homes for Ukraine’ (HfU). We develop our argument in three steps. First, we situate HfU within existing scholarship on ‘everyday humanitarianism’ and private refugee hosting in Europe, locating these within longer histories of private humanitarian action. Secondly, we show how HfU shifts the humanitarian space into the private and domestic sphere, a move reliant on particular conceptions of the ‘home’ as a space of sanctuary and safety. Finally, we unpack the gendered and racialised conceptions of the home and humanitarian hospitality more broadly, and how HfU sits within and outside of the broader bordering practices of the United Kingdom’s refugee response.

This article explores aspects of the organization of refugee education in imperial Austria during the First World War. Authorities in charge of refugees’ control and their eventual assistance interpreted access to education in two ways. First, it was an avenue of relief through schooling, aimed to counter the effects of uprootedness and, thus, safeguard some continuity in refugee children’s lives. Second, it was a way to ensure the making of productive and loyal citizens. In this context, this article looks at various policies regarding organization of schooling for displaced children. Moreover, it analyzes the ways language entered the realm of the refugee-focused classroom. Officials used schooling in refugee students’ vernacular to relieve the effects of their displacement and to reinforce ethnonational classifications of imperial subjects. At the same time, education through refugee children’s growing exposure to German language courses became a measure of a gradual inculcation of an imperial consciousness. Furthermore, it was a civilizing dimension of displacement management and, in this way, it became an avenue to consolidate a war-feeble state.

The aspirations-ability framework proposed by Carling has begun to place the question of who aspires to migrate at the center of migration research. In this article, building on key determinants assumed to impact individual migration decisions, we investigate their prediction accuracy when observed in the same dataset and in different mixed-migration contexts. In particular, we use a rigorous model selection approach and develop a machine learning algorithm to analyze two original cross-sectional face-to-face surveys conducted in Turkey and Lebanon among Syrian migrants and their respective host populations in early 2021. Studying similar nationalities in two hosting contexts with a distinct history of both immigration and emigration and large shares of assumed-to-be mobile populations, we illustrate that a) (im)mobility aspirations are hard to predict even under ‘ideal’ methodological circumstances, b) commonly referenced “migration drivers” fail to perform well in predicting migration aspirations in our study contexts, while c) aspects relating to social cohesion, political representation and hope play an important role that warrants more emphasis in future research and policymaking. Methodologically, we identify key challenges in quantitative research on predicting migration aspirations and propose a novel modeling approach to address these challenges.

Migrants and refugees face elevated risks for mental health problems but have limited access to services. This study compared two strategies for training and supervising nonspecialists to deliver a scalable psychological intervention, Group Problem Management Plus (gPM+), in northern Colombia. Adult women who reported elevated psychological distress and functional impairment were randomized to receive gPM+ delivered by nonspecialists who received training and supervision by: 1) a psychologist (specialized technical support); or 2) a nonspecialist who had been trained as a trainer/supervisor (nonspecialized technical support). We examined effectiveness and implementation outcomes using a mixed-methods approach. Thirteen nonspecialists were trained as gPM+ facilitators and three were trained-as-trainers. We enrolled 128 women to participate in gPM+ across the two conditions. Intervention attendance was higher in the specialized technical support condition. The nonspecialized technical support condition demonstrated higher fidelity to gPM+ and lower cost of implementation. Other indicators of effectiveness, adoption and implementation were comparable between the two implementation strategies. These results suggest it is feasible to implement mental health interventions, like gPM+, using lower-resource, community-embedded task sharing models, while maintaining safety and fidelity. Further evidence from fully powered trials is needed to make definitive conclusions about the relative cost of these implementation strategies.

Recent years have seen a surge of politicians campaigning on policies that aim to deter asylum applicants. We present a game-theoretic model in which foreign nationals consider applying for asylum and bureaucrats decide their case if they apply. We show that while policies that make the asylum application less attractive decrease the probability that foreign nationals apply, they also endogenously raise the credibility of applicants’ claims to political persecution and, therefore, may not decrease the number of admitted refugees. Investigating how these competing effects shape asylum policy-making, we show how policy choices depend on bureaucrats’ leniency and politicians’ objectives. Our analysis speaks to the causes of restrictive asylum policies and their limited effectiveness in reducing immigration.

One of the most immediate effects of the Russian war against Ukraine was the unprecedented influx of Ukrainian refugees in some countries. This article analyzes temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees in two countries—the Czech Republic and Poland, which represent the countries most exposed to immigration from Ukraine. The authors compare the political and legal response of both countries to the institute of temporary protection to reveal similarities and differences in the scope, tools, and nature of temporary protection, including causes and consequences. Both countries go beyond the minimum standards set in the EU Temporary Protection Directive and differ in their approach to its implementation. The authors claim that although the concept of temporary protection has expanded with the current situation, it allows significant benefits in allowing fast-track integration into the labor market, which aligns with the concept of refugees’ “deservingness.” However, the duration of temporary protection is a major limitation to refugees’ integration due to the emphasis on voluntary return to the country of origin.

The article explores the discursive representations of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees in the European Parliament (EP). The theoretical framework draws on Critical Securitisation Theory, pointing out the implicit hierarchies that affect the European Union (EU) reception policies in terms of race and gender. The main hypothesis is that a stigmatisation process based on race and gender affects the representation of refugees in the EU. Against this backdrop, the manuscript delves into how speech acts can either cast refugees as urgent threats or even facilitate the de-construction of the refugee as a threat. These are investigated through Computational Text-Analysis tools, such as Word- and Bigram-Frequency Analysis, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency test and Structural Topic Modelling. On the one hand, contrary to expectations of a securitisation of Syrian refugees primarily based on race, what emerges is also a process of de-personalisation that helps justify the anti-migration stand of some members of the EP (MEPs). On the other hand, the assumption that deconstruction of the refugee as a threat would mainly occur through an emphasis on cultural proximity between Ukrainian people and the EU is challenged. Instead, our analysis shows a gender-based victimisation of Ukrainian refugees, which contributes leading to protective measures being enacted by the EU.

In recent years, anti-refugee hate crimes have soared across Europe. We know this violence has spread fear among refugees, but we know less about its effects on the non-refugee population. This is an oversight, as research suggests political violence often has effects on the broader population. Those effects can range from increased solidarity with the targets of the violence to reduced pro-social behavior and less support for the targets of the violence. In this research note, we examine the effects of exposure to anti-refugee hate crimes in Germany. Our results suggest no direct effect of exposure to anti-refugee hate crimes on support for refugees. These results have several implications for our understanding of political divides over refugees in Europe.