The recent fall of Syria’s longtime dictator Bashar Al-Assad is causing the Syrian diaspora across the globe to consider a key question — is now the right time to return home to Syria or does the instability that has been caused by Assad’s fall mean it remains too risky to depart from their host countries?

“Until last week, the idea of being able to go back home seemed an impossible dream for many Syrian refugees. Now, the fall of Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad has opened the door for their return,” writes Politico’s Clothilde Goujard. “While some have already headed back, many more harbor worries about the future of their country or feel reluctant to leave the lives they’ve built over as much as a decade abroad.”

For many Syrian refugees, “the decision to repatriate depends on where they now live. Millions of Syrian refugees reside in countries bordering Syria — Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan — and endure precarious conditions in crowded and destitute refugee camps. Others are internally displaced within Syria,” Vox reported

Meanwhile, some host countries are encouraging and in some cases providing financial incentives for Syrian refugees to return to Syria.

For example, Austria’s conservative-led government said on Friday it is offering Syrian refugees a “return bonus” of 1,000 euros to move return to their home country, Reuters reported.

Canada’s immigration minister plans to propose measures “to reform the country’s refugee system, potentially fast-tracking refusals of cases deemed to have little chance of succeeding,” Reuters reported on Nov. 26.

“Experts and advocates warned that could violate asylum-seekers’ right to due process and could be challenged in court,” wrote Reuters reporter Anna Paperny.

“I plan to put forward more measures. I want to reform the system. It’s not working in the way it should,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller told a parliamentary committee on Monday.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has launched a $10 billion appeal for 2025 to meet critical needs and implement sustainable solutions for millions of refugees, displaced persons and stateless people worldwide.

The agency’s Global Appeal “comes amid escalating humanitarian crises, as conflict, persecution and the growing impacts of climate change continue to force millions from their homes,” UNHCR said.

The appeal focuses on three primary areas: emergency response, inclusion, and long-term solutions.

In an era where xenophobia is on the rise across the globe and countries are looking to restrict the flow of immigrants and refugees, Spain is going against the grain by recently announcing it will legalize 300,000 undocumented migrants a year, starting next May and through 2027.

“The policy aims to expand the aging country’s workforce and allow foreigners living in Spain without proper documentation to obtain work permits and residency. Spain has largely remained open to receiving migrants even as other European nations seek to tighten their borders to illegal crossings and asylum seekers,” the Voice of America reported.

Spain “has been largely receptive to migrants even as other European countries such as Italy and Germany seek to tighten border controls,” Reuters reported.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez “has often described his government’s migration policies as a means to combat the country’s low birthrate. In August, Sánchez visited three West African nations in an effort to address irregular migration to Spain’s Canary Islands,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

The Biden Administration recently committed to the admission of up to 125,000 refugees to the United States during Fiscal Year (FY) 2025.

“We commend the Biden administration for its steadfast efforts to rebuild the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President and CEO of Global Refuge.

“Resettling 100,000 refugees, a figure surpassing the three previous fiscal years combined, represents a milestone achievement signaling renewed U.S. humanitarian leadership. Thanks to this administration’s commitment, these families have found safety, hope, and a sense of belonging in communities that are eager to embrace them as neighbors, friends, congregants, and co-workers,” she said.

“The IRC commends the Biden administration’s efforts to rebuild and revitalize the refugee admissions program of four years prior, through which the IRC has been a proud partner by resettling 29,611 refugees that arrived through the refugee pipeline since FY21, as well as an additional 12,228 Afghan allies arriving on Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs),” the International Rescue Committee said.

In one of the most impressive feats of immigration-related reporting in decades, the Atlantic Magazine’s Caitlin Dickerson details the harrowing trek that immigrants and refugees take through the Darien Gap in the September 2024 issue of the magazine.

Joining Dickerson on her journey were immigrants and refugees from Haiti, Ethiopia, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil, Peru, heading north “across the only strip of land that connects South America to Central America,” she notes in her article, “What I Saw in the Darien Gap.”

Her reporting brings the reader into an immersive experience where one lives the journey in all of its terrifying moments.

“I went to the Darién Gap in December with the photographer Lynsey Addario because I wanted to see for myself what people were willing to risk to get to the United States,” writes Dickerson.

“Crossing the jungle can take three days or 10, depending on the weather, the weight of your bags, and pure chance. A minor injury can be catastrophic for even the fittest people,” she notes.

The most heartbreaking moment of the article is when a single mother from Vietnam named Bé loses her son to a flash flood as she and others tried to cross a river.

“Bé said she felt all the energy drain from her body as she sat on the beach, speechless and unmovable. Some of the other migrants in their group told her they had heard Khánh call out ‘Mommy’ as he was pulled away,” wrote Dickerson.

If only more Americans took the time to read this remarkable piece of journalism, perhaps empathy would eclipse xenophobia as the dominant force in today’s debates about immigration.

It is beyond disturbing and disappointing that when a migrant is charged with a crime in the U.S., conservative media outlets jump on the news and try to portray the crime as part of a broader trend that migrants are engaged in an ongoing crime wave.

So I was glad to see the New York Times and John Oliver recently puncture holes in the myth of “migrant crime.”

“It’s no accident that Republicans were focusing so hard on immigration,” John Oliver, Host of “Last Week Tonight,” said in reference to this month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

“Recent polling shows it’s the second most important issue among Americans. But a big reason for that is the relentless, bad-faith fearmongering around the issue by the Republican party themselves, perhaps best summed up by the startling growth this year of the toxic phrase ‘migrant crime,’” said Oliver.

The Guardian noted Oliver’s comments in a recent article. “There is no migrant crime wave happening right now. In fact, there is no crime wave at all. Crime in general has been trending downward in recent years, including this one,” Oliver said.

U.S. rates of crime and immigration “have moved in opposite directions in recent years. After illegal immigration plummeted in 2020, the murder rate rose. And after illegal immigration spiked in 2021 and 2022, murders plateaued and then fell,” notes German Lopez, a reporter for the New York Times in a July 18 article.

Lopez points out that undocumented migrants “have an incentive to avoid trouble with the law so they do not get caught by the authorities and deported.”

“Despite claims from conservative media and campaign rhetoric pointing to immigration as the cause of crime increases, there is no evidence that immigration — and in particular the recent influx of immigrants to Democratic-run cities — is causing a ‘crime wave,'” the Brennan Center for Justice noted in late May.

Refugees and migrants continue to face extreme forms of violence, human rights violations and exploitation not just at sea, but also on land routes across the African continent, towards its Mediterranean coastline, a new report released by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC)

The new report, titled “On this journey, no-one cares if you live or die” (Volume 2), was released on July 4.

With more people estimated to cross the Sahara Desert than the Mediterranean Sea – and deaths of refugees and migrants in the desert presumed to be double those happening at sea – the report casts light on the much less documented and publicized perils facing refugees and migrants on these land routes, a news release related to the report said.

Spanning a 3-year data collection period, the report also warns of an increase in the number of people attempting these perilous land crossings and the protection risks they face.

This is in part the result of deteriorating situations in countries of origin and host countries – including the eruption of new conflicts in the Sahel and Sudan, the devastating impact of climate change and disasters on new and protracted emergencies in the East and Horn of Africa, as well as the manifestation of racism and xenophobia affecting refugees and migrants.

“The report also notes that across parts of the continent, refugees and migrants are increasingly traversing areas where insurgent groups, militias and other criminal actors operate, and where human trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, forced labor and sexual exploitation are rife. Some smuggling routes are now shifting towards more remote areas to avoid active conflict zones or border controls by State and non-State actors, subjecting people on the move to even greater risks,” the news release said.

Forced displacement surged to historic new levels across the globe last year and this, according to the 2024 flagship Global Trends Report from the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. 

The rise in overall forced displacement – to 120 million by May 2024 – was the 12th consecutive annual increase and reflects both new and mutating conflicts and a failure to resolve long-standing crises.

“A key factor driving the figures higher has been the devastating conflict in Sudan: at the end of 2023, 10.8 million Sudanese remained uprooted,” the UNHCR said.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Myanmar, millions were internally displaced last year by vicious fighting. UNRWA estimates that by the end of last year, up to 1.7 million people (75 percent of the population) had been displaced in the Gaza Strip by the catastrophic violence, most of whom were Palestine refugees. Syria remains the world’s largest displacement crisis, with 13.8 million forcibly displaced in and outside the country.

In a new research briefing, Amnesty International “documents extensively the ways in which technology contributes to the growing trend of human rights violations at borders and urges that states stop using such technologies until they can ensure their use does not violate  human rights,” the group said on May 21.

The briefing, The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, and Inequality, outlines how the use of new technologies by both state and non-state actors in migration systems across the world increases the likelihood that the human rights of people on the move—including the rights to privacy, non-discrimination, equality, and to seek asylum—will be violated, Amnesty International said.

The technologies “also exacerbate underlying racial, economic, and social inequalities at borders and beyond. Migrant workers and others with insecure citizenship status are often subject to the same forms of digitally enabled surveillance, monitoring, and exploitation as asylum seekers and refugees, and are similarly targeted by these technologies because of their inability to opt out or seek redress from harm,” Amnesty International said.