It is time that debates surrounding religion and migration in the UK move beyond the almost monolithic focus on Islam, recognising the multiple and fluid ways in which religion shapes, and is in turned shaped by, experiences of migration, says Chloé Lewis
As the Global Forum on Migration and Development prepares to meet in Geneva, Don Flynn reports on the attempt to break the deadlock between civil society and governments over rights vs security in migration policy
Time and time again I hear from refugee women that they want to work and contribute to British society. A dignified asylum system would be a positive asset; we cannot create an inclusive and cohesive society while we create this subset of excluded, marginalised and desperate individuals, says Nata
An ongoing UK Government consultation on immigration policy makes an exemplar of the Danish system. But is Denmark's immigration policy really something to aspire to?
The Somali refugee community in Smethwick is less than ten years old. Muni Abdikarim and Ahmed Sirad spoke to Jenny Morgan about their work with middle-aged Somali women who are being turned away from a doctor's surgery and told 'Come back when you've got an interpreter'
The British government's new anti-trafficking strategy is high on rhetoric about immigration crime and border control, and lacks any real commitment to protecting victims of trafficking, says Jenny Moss
The policy of dispersing migrants in Britain has led to large numbers of Somali refugees in Smethwick, a town notorious for anti-migrant mobilising in the 1960s. In the first of her Letters from Smethwick, Jenny Morgan describes a meeting with charismatic Somali community organiser Hodan Rashid.
In proposing to remove the most basic safeguards for migrant domestic workers, Jenny Moss asks whether the UK government has forgotten some of the most basic principles of justice which we as a country claim to espouse
A group of us gasped when one tiny mother of five, who looked no older than my 20-year old daughter, lamented, “When I think about my life here, I often feel I’d rather be back in the bush with the Lord’s Resistance Army, at least there I had a community". While we are making some progress in fitf
"I was 12 years old.....my anguish ended when my family left Okinawa after this man had paid me $5 during our last encounter for my ‘services’," Betsy Kawamura
Europe’s civilizing mission is humanitarian - its duty to intervene to spread the good word, protecting the oppressed against local tyrants. The conditions by which this protection is granted are always dictated by the protector and never the protégé. Though this is not said, it is a given.
In the UK, people lose their liberty simply for claiming asylum. On the 60th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, which enshrined the right to seek protection from persecution, it is worth reminding ourselves of how far we have fallen from those aspirations.
