Forced Migration Online: Blog

Since the mid-1980s, over two million Burmese migrant workers have entered Thailand, searching for a better future.

The jobs they have found are dirty, dangerous and difficult. Often undocumented, migrant workers risk arrest, extortion, deportation and other human rights abuses.

Something of these difficulties and tragedies faced by these workers are documented in these images by Thailand-based documentary photographer John Hulme.

The exhibit ‘In Search of a Job – Any Job: The Life of Burmese Migrant Workers‘, was held by the Refugee Studies Centre and International Migration Institute in Oxford. It ran from 17 – 25 February 2011.

• In Search of a Job – Any Job: The Life of Burmese Migrant Workers
• John Hulme’s website

Issue 32 of Forced Migration Review: Statelessness is now available in the digital library (FMR is one of five journals available).

A ‘stateless person’ is someone who is not recognised as a national by any state. They therefore have no nationality or citizenship and are unprotected by national legislation, leaving them vulnerable in ways that most of us never have to consider. This latest issue of FMR includes 22 articles by academic, international and local actors debating the challenges faced by stateless people and the search for appropriate responses and solutions.

The issue also includes 17 articles on other aspects of forced migration, among which are a mini-feature (comprising four articles) on refugee status determination and articles on European migration policies, Colombia, Ecuador, disaster IDPs, Europe-Africa cooperation, trafficking in Iran, cash grants for refugees and reproductive health care in emergencies.

Full Issue

• FMR 2009, No. 32: Statelessness

Individual Articles

• Statelessness: what it is and why it matters
• UNHCR and responses to statelessness
• North Arakan: an open prison for the Rohingya in Burma
• We have no soil under our feet
• Ethiopia-Eritrea: statelessness and state succession
• Am I stateless because I am a nomad?
• Kenyan Nubians: standing up to statelessness
• The Universal Birth Registration campaign
• Contesting discrimination and statelessness in the Dominican Republic
• Advocacy campaigns and policy development
• Reducing de facto statelessness in Nepal
• The end of Bihari statelessness
• Childhood statelessness
• Stateless persons from Thailand in Japan
• Combatting statelessness: a government perspective
• No place to go: statelessness in Israel
• The lost tribes of Arabia
• Nowhere people
• The legal limbo of detention
• Displaced Kosovo Roma and property rights
• Stateless Roma in Macedonia
• Remember the forgotten, protect the unprotected
• Statelessness and the right to citizenship
• Refugee status determination UNHCR and individual refugee status determination
• Refugee status determination: three challenges
• Refugee status determination in southern Africa
• Refugee protection in Turkey
• An institutional gap for disaster IDPs
• Unmet refugee needs: Colombian refugees in Ecuador
• Europe-Africa cooperation in Mali
• Towards an EU-wide regularisation scheme
• Return and re-admission in states’ migration policies
• Iran: migrant smuggling and trafficking in persons
• RAISE: Reproductive health-care provision in emergencies: preventing needless suffering
• UNHCR: On the money
• Brookings-Bern: Internal displacement and peacebuilding in Colombia
• NRC: One last chance for Colombia’s victims
• IDMC: Stateless former farm workers in Zimbabwe
• Letter from the field: The experience of refugees in Oru refugee camp, Nigeria

The film ‘Yemen: Refugees crossing the Gulf of Aden‘ is now available to view online. The film reports how thousands of people risk their lives every year to cross the Gulf of Aden to escape from conflict, violence, drought and poverty.

During 2007, almost 30,000 took the dangerous voyage to seek relative safety in Yemen. Due to the escalation of the conflict in Somalia and the food crisis in parts of the Horn of Africa, more and more people are joining the already large refugee and migrant population in Yemen. During the first five months of 2008 over 20,000 arrived, more than double the number of arrivals in the same period last year.

• Yemen: Refugees crossing the Gulf of Aden
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