In a March 10 story in the New York Times, Natasha Frost details the harmful legacy of Australia’s approach to refugees.

“Australia’s unyielding approach to refugees — which includes a system of indefinite mandatory detention for people suspected to be in the country unlawfully — is among the strictest in the world,” she writes.

Refugees who successfully make it to Australia “have been held for years on end at detention centers run by private contractors on nearby islands,” Frost notes.

Australia’s approach to refugees appears “to be the playbook for proposed legislation in Britain that would give the Home Office a “duty” to remove nearly all migrants who cross the English Channel on small boats.”

“The main thing they have in common is in seeking to criminalize, almost, asylum, or at least to undermine the right to an institution of asylum,” ssad Michelle Foster, a professor at Melbourne Law School and the director of the Peter McMullin Center on Statelessness, of Britain’s and Australia’s policies.

In a compelling new piece published in Foreign Affairs, Lant Pritchett makes a convincing argument that the drive to utilize automation to fill labor shortages overlooks a far simpler solution — namely, filling those job openings with migrants.

Choosing devices over people is a mistake, argues Pritchett, Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships, RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Development at the University of Oxford, and a former World Bank economist.

Such a decision “leads the world to miss out on the real economic and humanitarian gains that would come from letting people move to where they are needed instead of trying to invent machines that can supplant humans. The refusal to allow people to cross national borders as economic migrants, especially to engage in jobs that require just core labor skills, massively distorts the trajectory of technological change in ways that make everybody, especially the world’s poor, worse off.”

He points out that the U.S. faces a scarcity of truck drivers. “To deal with this deficit, many tech moguls, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have invested in the research and development of self-driving vehicles, technology that would reduce the demand for drivers,” Pritchett notes.

But there is no global scarcity of people who would like to be long-haul truck drivers in the United States, where the median wage for such work is $23 per hour, the article points out. “In the developing world, truck drivers make around $4 per hour. Yet firms cannot recruit workers from abroad even at the higher wage because of restrictions on immigration, so business leaders in the United States are impelled to choose machines over people and eradicate jobs through the use of technology.”

The fact of national borders “steers businesses toward investing in technology that does not respond to global scarcities—and that no one really needs,” he argues.

A record surge of migrants crossing the Canadian border from the U.S. is the focus of recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

 “The number of arrests along the Canadian border remains a fraction of those from the southwest border, but federal officials along the Canadian border have said they have never before seen this volume of arrests,” wrote Alicia Caldwell in the WSJ.

“Shielded by geography, strict immigration policies favoring the educated and skilled, and its single border with the United States, Canada is now being forced to deal with an issue that has long bedeviled other wealthy Western nations: mass illegal border crossings by land,” reports Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times.

Thousands of asylum seekers “crossing irregularly into Canada from the United States along a dirt path are becoming a political flashpoint once more as the provincial government of Quebec says it can no longer accommodate the rising numbers,” Al Jazeera reported.

More than 60 people have died after a wooden boat believed to be carrying refugees crashed off the coast of Italy’s Calabria region. Twelve of the refugees who died were children.

“Wooden debris from the shattered boat was still being buffeted by rough seas, pushed up along the coast and strewn across the beach in southern Italy on Monday morning — grim evidence of the tragic end of a journey that scores of people hoped would deliver them to a better life,” CBS News reported.

The vessel had set sail from Turkey several days ago with refugees from Afghanistan, Iran and several other countries, and crashed on Sunday in stormy weather near Steccato di Cutro, a seaside resort on the eastern coast of Calabria, Al Jazeera reported.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni “has concentrated on complicating efforts by humanitarian boats to make multiple rescues in the central Mediterranean by assigning them ports of disembarkation along Italy’s northern coasts. That means the vessels need more time to return to the sea after bringing migrants aboard and taking them safely to shore.” (NPR).

In a recent article for the BBC, Bernd Debusmann Jr. takes a closer look at Uniting For Ukraine, a U.S. government program that allows Americans to sponsor Ukrainians to come to the US for up to two years. The program, “which has been considered a resounding success, has led to the Biden administration announcing similar initiatives for refugees from other countries,” writes Debusmann.

Under Uniting for Ukraine, sponsors are supposed to help provide financial support for basic needs such as housing and health care, “but participants and activists say the initiative has led to bonds being formed between refugees and their sponsors that often go far beyond their initial commitments,” the article notes.

The Biden administration recently announced that sponsors could help bring in 30,000 people a month from Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela for a period of up to two years, the article said.

And in January, the Biden administration unveiled Welcome Corps, “which seeks to mobilize 10,000 Americans to help 5,000 refugees from around the globe come to the US.”

In a recent New Yorker article, Geraldo Cadava provides important context about the new Welcome Corps program unveiled by the State Department in January.

“Under the plan, groups of five or more American citizens or permanent residents can apply to privately sponsor the resettlement of refugees,” writes Cadava.

The Welcome Corps will not replace existing refugee support groups, he notes. Instead, “it will provide an additional avenue for Americans to participate in resettlement, helping to place refugees in areas of the country where resettlement agencies don’t work, and shift some of the expense to private citizens.”

Click here for the article.

At least 18 migrants have been found dead in Bulgaria in an abandoned truck near the capital Sofia, Al Jazeera reported on Feb. 17.

“The truck was transporting timber and carrying refugees and migrants hidden in a compartment, the country’s interior ministry said in a statement on Friday,” Al Jazeera reported.

“The Interior Ministry said that, according to initial information, the truck was carrying about 40 migrants. The survivors were taken to nearby hospitals for emergency treatment,” the New York Times reported.

In August 2022, Jérôme Tubiana and Khaled Mattawa boarded the Geo Barents, a rescue vessel run by Doctors Without Borders, and participated in the rescue of migrants on the Mediterranean Sea.

They detailed their experiences through diary entries recently published in the New York Review of Books.

Along with describing the perilous journeys of the migrants that are rescued, Tubiana and Mattawa detail how the European Union is working with the Libyan Coast Guard to prevent the arrival of migrants to Europe.

“The EU perceives its policy in the Central Mediterranean as a success. Arrivals from Libya decreased from 165,000 in 2016 to seven thousand in 2019, and arrivals between 2017 and 2021 combined barely exceeded those of 2016 alone,” writes Tubiana in one of his diary entries. “On the other hand, the rate of migrants returned to Libya increased during the same period from 7 percent to nearly 50 percent. In the past decade, over 20,000 died in the Central Mediterranean.”

A number of the rescued migrants describe in detail being kidnapped, trafficked and held for ransom in Libya.

Click here for the New York Review of Books piece (requires subscription).

Mattawa teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Tubiana has advised Médecins Sans Frontières’s programs for migrants and refugees since 2018.

In a recent episode of a Migration Policy Institute podcast, Ama Francis, a Climate Displacement Project Strategist at the International Refugee Assistance Project, proposes that the U.S. consider creating a climate humanitarian visa.

“The way that I imagine this looking is that we would have a new visa category that was for people from climate vulnerable areas,” Francis said during the podcast episode.

Such a visa would involve two-step eligibility. The first step would be establishing that a person is from a climate vulnerable region. “You could have a U.S. agency. for example, responsible for determining — based on scientific data — which areas of countries are particularly prone to climate impacts. And if you are a person coming from one of those regions, sub-regions in a country, or from a country, you would be just prima facie eligible for this visa,” she said.

“But then you’d have to meet this other layer of eligibility which could be based on vulnerability,” she said. With the climate visa, “you could design it so that people who might have difficulty accessing other forms of immigration relief….could actually migrate.”

Click here for the full episode of the Migration Policy Institute podcast featuring Francis.

Building off its recent investigation of the mistreatment and disappearance of asylum-seeking children, the Observer recently published an editorial rightfully slams the U.K. government’s absolving “itself of its ethical and legal responsibilities to these children.”

The U.K.’s Children Act 1989 places a legal duty on local authorities for the safeguarding and protection of all children in need in their local area, regardless of who they are or how they arrived in the U.K., the editorial notes. “This applies to unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the UK, the vast majority of whom will also meet the threshold for being taken into the care of their local authority.”

Asylum-seeking children “are in a no man’s land: there is no local authority whose care they fall under and so they are, unlawfully, not protected by the 1989 Children Act,” the editorial went on to say.

“There is no one with corporate parental responsibility for them, no one with the formal legal power to advocate on their behalf. They have been left to the residual care of the Home Office, probably the most dysfunctional department in Whitehall,” the editorial said.

More than 100 charities recently called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to stop what they said is the “unlawful” use by the Home Office of hotels from which hundreds of children seeking asylum have gone missing, the Financial Times reported.