A four month old baby was taken from his parents at the U.S.-Mexico border and the parents had no idea where he wound up, the New York Times reports.

As a parent, I can’t imagine how horrific this was for the mother and father.

While they were ultimately reunited, it’s clear from the story that the child has suffered emotional and developmental damage.

In a recent article for the New York Times, Melissa Vida reports that in the wake of President Trump’s crackdown on migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, Central American migrants are increasingly seeking refuge in Europe.

Vida reports that the number seeking asylum in Europe has increased nearly 4,000 percent in the last decade “and the rate of arrivals is accelerating. Nearly 7,800 applied for asylum in Europe last year, up from 4,835 in 2017.”

The distance “may be greater, but many have found that the journey to Europe is safer and much cheaper than paying smugglers to get through Mexico to the United States,” writes Vida.

A software program called “Annie” utilizes machine learning in order to place refugees in U.S. cities where they are most likely to be welcomed and succeed, reports Jasu Hu in the Atlantic.

In the article, “How Technology Could Revolutionize Refugee Resettlement,” Hu notes that the Annie software is named after Annie Moore, “the Irishwoman who was the first person to pass through Ellis Island.”

The software the software uses a matching algorithm to allocate refugees with no ties to the United States to their new homes,the article notes.

“Annie’s algorithm is based on a machine learning model in which a computer is fed huge piles of data from past placements, so that the program can refine its future recommendations. The system examines a series of variables—physical ailments, age, levels of education and languages spoken, for example—related to each refugee case. In other words, the software uses previous outcomes and current constraints to recommend where a refugee is most likely to succeed,” Hu writes.

The software is being utilized by HIAS, a refugee assistance nonprofit.

“Every city where HIAS has an office or an affiliate is given a score for each refugee. The higher the score, the better the match,” Hu reports.

For anyone who may have missed it, the New Yorker recently published a series of deeply reported articles on the forces that are driving migration from Guatemala these days including climate change. All three are worth a read.

Here are links to the three articles:

“How Climate Change is Fueling the U.S. Border Crisis”

“The Dream Homes of Guatemalan Migrants”

“The Epidemic of Debt Plaguing Central American Migrants”

A new report argues for refugees and the communities that host them, to have access to Internet connectivity.

“As the report makes clear, the lack of connectivity among those displaced from their homes, and often their countries, is particularly acute. Nearly half of all refugees — about 32 million people — don’t use the Internet. Those who do may not make full use of its capabilities, because of factors such as a lack of key government applications and little native language support,” writes Larry Downes, project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, in the Washington Post.

The “Global Broadband Plan for Refugee Inclusion” analyzes “the multi-faceted context of improving connectivity for refugees. It spells out collective goals and actions necessary for progress, and identifies specific roles for governments, multilateral organizations, the private sector and NGO stakeholders.”

The project is managed by leading experts on broadband policy and practice and funded by USA for UNHCR, Tent.org, and the World Bank.

Additional information about the effort is available here.

Greek authorities “are scrambling to house almost 4,000 people crammed into an overflowing migrant camp in Samos, as aid groups warn of a ‘humanitarian disaster’ on one of Europe’s forgotten frontlines,” writes the Guardian’s Helena Smith in a Feb. 22 article.

“Likening Samos to a ‘new Lesbos,’ the country’s migration minister warned of a race against the clock to find suitable accommodation for the ever growing number of people trapped in a reception centre now six times over capacity,” Smith reports.

As in Lesbos, “which received more than 1 million people at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, smuggler rings have their sights on the eastern Aegean outcrop, which lies barely a mile from the Turkish coast.”

Writer Richard Cooke notes in a recent New York Times opinion piece that Australia honored author Behrouz Boochani with the Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia’s most valuable literary prize.

But Boochani “was unable to collect his stipend in person. The same nation praising him is also keeping him in indefinite detention on a small island in the Pacific,” writes Cooke.

For the past five years, “along with 700 or so other inmates, he has lived on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. His is a prison sentence without an end date: Australia refuses to accept asylees attempting arrival via boat, even if they attain refugee status, and Iran rejects forcible repatriation of these individuals,” Cooke notes.

A new Migration Policy Institute Europe report argues that an effective communications strategy, “though often not at the top of policymakers’ to-do lists, is integral to the success or failure of integration policies.”

But government communications related to immigrant integration in the wake of the 2015-2016 refugee crisis “have often occurred in ad hoc fashion, clustered around narratives that offer either unabashedly positive views of diversity or fear-mongering about costs, social cohesion and crime resulting from migrant arrivals,” MPI said in a news release about the report.

The report, “Communicating Strategically about Immigrant Integration: Policymaker Perspectives,” is available here.

The Australian government said on Feb. 3 that the last remaining children held on the Pacific island of Nauru while seeking asylum “would be resettled in the United States, a long-awaited end to a controversial practice and a victory for migrant advocates,” the New York Times reported.

The Guardian reported that the number of children remaining on the island totals four and that they were preparing to fly to the US with their families for resettlement.

“They are the last of the more than 200 children who had been held at the island’s processing centre when the Coalition won government in 2013,” the Guardian’s Feb. 2 article said.

“The psychiatric and physical suffering of children has been the major criticism of the government’s policy since 2013 to send asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australia by boat to an immigration camp on Nauru or men-only facilities on Papua New Guinea,” wrote AP reporter Rod McGuirk.

The United States agreed in 2016 to accept up to 1,250 refugees and ore than 1,000 others remain on the islands “and face uncertain futures,” wrote McGuirk.

Since the start of 2017, more than 30,000 people “- many of them driven by fears of Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants – have entered Canada at unmarked locations along the border,” writes the Guardian’s Ashifa Kassam.

“t was once a vital corridor for Americans seeking to escape slavery. Now a stretch of land in the north-eastern US is in the spotlight again, as thousands traipse across the world’s longest undefended border in search of asylum in Canada,” writes Kassam.

At the same time, a small number of Canada’s politicians “have seized on the soaring number of asylum seekers, stoking fears about those crossing the border,” reports Kassam.