Distress Migration

The Program has an established research portfolio covering a wide range of topics and geographies, which generates data on the plight of specific distress migration populations such as children, women, victims of trafficking and pregnant women across the world: from the US-Mexico borders, to West and Central Africa, Sudan, Greece, Poland, Lebanon, India and Bangladesh.

The goal of 2023-24 is to expand this agenda by adding critical regions of distress migration, additional vulnerable populations and more nuanced questions of interest. For example, among others, our program is one of the few distress migration programs currently focusing on the impact of migration flows on frontline host communities and the factors that generate or dissipate communities’ solidarity to distress migrants. Our program has identified this gap and is taking action to facilitate research and scientific dialogue around this unexplored topic.

The Summer Course on Migration and Refugee Studies is a three-week, intensive, interdisciplinary course on migration and refugee studies and one of the latest additions to the Harvard FXB Center’s pedagogical agenda. Born from the Center’s longstanding commitment to the advocacy of refugee’s rights, as well as a research agenda that spans continents and regions, it offers a multidisciplinary space for participants to study all aspects of migration with a specific focus on the very real and extensive human, social and political consequences of migration.

The course is the first product of a very promising collaboration between Harvard University and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, a synergy that opens the door for auspicious prospects for research, pedagogy and advocacy on a global and complex phenomenon. Held in Greece, a country with a rich migration history that in 2015 became the epicenter of Europe’s migration crisis, the course offers participants the unique opportunity to engage conceptually but also practically with key contemporary migration issues. From simulations of rescues at sea, to meetings with national and local governmental Greek actors and European Union representatives, from lectures by more than 90 experts from across the world, to discussions with refugees and locals at the frontlines, from visits to migrant camps, to an opportunity to participate in an NGO Fair, students become fully immersed on issues of migration through perspectives that are hard to find in traditional academic settings. Read the 2022-2023 course report here and visit the course webpage here.

The program has established scholarly collaborations between institutions at both international and domestic levels on questions of distress migration. Some of the most important, official collaborations have been established with the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a thought leader in distress migration research in the Mediterranean Basin, and the University of Strathclyde’s Center of Excellence for Looked after Children in Scotland, as well as with international leading organizations like BRAC, IOM (5 years), UNICEF, ICRC, UNHCR & ISS.

The ultimate purpose of these collaborations is the establishment of a broad, extended network of high-level experts that work together to create a uniquely collaborative approach to distress migration research and targeted policy development, while establishing a framework for systematic evaluations, policy assessment, and targeted policy interventions.

The Program’s research and work on distress migration studies grows directly out of the FXB Center’s long-standing aim to bring a human rights based approach to treatment of vulnerable populations. For the past 10 years, the program faculty are shaping and influencing policy development through the broad dissemination of findings and recommendations across diverse media, including expert panels at the United Nations, EU level meetings, panel discussions at local Universities and public conferences in the US and Europe.

Migration policy has direct and dramatic impacts on refugees. It affects refugees’ route to safety and the quality of protection refugees receive. But migration policy also affects the frontline host communities that refugees depend on. State failures to anticipate predictable refugee needs burden host communities with unsustainable responsibilities, vitiating the possibility of sustaining the initial solidarity that they so often exhibit. While a considerable body of scholarship examines the drivers of xenophobia across host communities over time, no comparable effort engages with the key variable of host community solidarity, its diffusion, intensity and dissipation. This lacuna is highly consequential because host community solidarity is a critical democratic resource that merits sustenance by state policy.

Frontline empathic solidarity, is both critical and fragile. In such settings, the cost of inaction is high and potentially irreversible. Once allowed to take root, the dissipation of solidarity, and its replacement by hostility, from frontline hosts sets in motion negative and foreseeable outcomes widely documented in policy analyses across comparative contexts. If sustained, it enhances the political viability of rights-respecting and non-discriminatory public policies that generate inclusive and diverse societies.  Proactive state and international policies that anticipate and strengthen the empathic solidarity of border communities, policies could, by contrast, foster generative win-win outcomes.

The program on distress migration received a generous grant from the Harvard Weatherhead Center to establish a 3-year Research Cluster that seeks to understand both the processes and mechanisms by which empathic solidarity towards distress migrants is built and sustained, as well as the triggers of attitudinal change among frontline host. By bringing together Harvard University scholars and students from different disciplines, and further connecting them with scholars and practitioners from different frontline contexts, the cluster fosters a new and potentially impactful intellectual constituency that addresses the issue of front-line solidarity and government actions to sustain solidarity over time as a crucial resource for democratic robustness.

Following up on the theoretical background of the broader project on solidarity, this exploratory study focuses on the solidarity that the Polish host communities show to Ukrainian refugees. Four months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with over 12 million Ukrainians displaced from their homes, at least half of them outside their own country, a picture of unprecedented European solidarity has emerged. In Poland particularly, the frontline state with the largest influx of Ukrainian refugees, we are witnessing a dramatic asymmetry in the response to Ukrainians arriving at Poland’s eastern border compared to all other recent refugee arrivals, including Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, at Poland’s Byelorussian border.

This study aims to understand the reasons that drive this unprecedented solidarity that Polish people has showed to Ukrainian refugees, explore the factors that can lead to its dissipation and document the impact, if any, that a welcoming migration state and local policy has on both the newly arrived Ukrainian refugees and the solidarity of five Polish front-line host communities.  A better understanding of what nourishes and sustains the empathic engagement at local level will help policy makers explore productive ways of re-thinking current migration management.  New strategies for welcoming, resettling and relocating distress migrants can extend the temporal reach of frontline solidarity, avoid its depletion and preempt negative responses.

After completing the project in Poland, our program aims to conduct a similar study in Greece, a country that has seen more than 1,5 million distress migrants entering its premises during the last 5 years but in contrary to Poland, these migrants do not just flee war, they are not all eligible for a refugee status and they come from at least 24 different countries. Greece has also been chosen as a critical case study as a country whose once emblematic example of host community compassion has slowly started to collapse.

This study aims to provide an answer to the following questions:

1. What factors generated initial humanitarian compassion in Greece;
2. What are the sustainers of local compassion in these relatively small frontline communities towards new arrivals – the personal, social, ethical and what benefits this empathic solidarity generates not just for distress migrant arrivals but for local hosts themselves;
3. How has compassion shifted over time?
4. What are the drivers behind this shift?
5. How can we replenish and incentivize compassion within these communities?

We anticipate that the findings from both studies in Poland and Greece will lay the ground for a broader set of comparative studies and will have important policy implications for migration policy and preparedness in Europe and beyond. The goal is to contribute to social cohesion and democratic politics within the context of the global migration phenomenon.

In the United States, children continue to be held in detention centers when they are apprehended on the US border. While the Flores Settlement Agreement limits the number of days children can be held at three to five days with up to twenty days in emergency situations, in reality the average length of stay for juveniles in ICE detention centers is 100-240 days. Given the length of time that children may be held in detention following long, often traumatic journeys, understanding the delivery of medical care to children in immigration detention facilities, and the burden of baseline medical conditions among children detained allow for a better understanding of potential systems failures and more targeted interventions to improve medical standards and ultimately the best interests of the children in immigration detention centers and minimize burdens on the broader US health system.

By reviewing the medical charts of 166 detained children in the Karnes Family Residential Center (KCFRC), one of the three family immigration detention facilities in the US, this first of its kind study aims to:

1. Quantify the burden of mental and physical health needs of detained migrant children;
2. Document the gaps in the provision of services despite existing guidelines for medical treatment
3. Shed light on the impact of these gaps on the health of detained children;
4. Provide a launching point for a series of programming recommendations on child protection and provision of pediatric care in migrant detention centers in the US.

This study aims to add valuable data to a scarce existing body of information to inform public policy and medical care.

Access to timely antenatal care is considered an effective method to ensure successful pregnancy outcomes, as well as a lifelong health of the mothers and their children. However, in the context of humanitarian crisis, asylum seeking women face significant barriers in accessing antenatal care leading to a series of poor perinatal outcomes and risks to the health of both the young mothers and the babies, furthering health inequalities for this vulnerable population. Recent reports on asylum seeking and

refugee pregnant women in Europe found that 65% did not have access to antenatal care during pregnancy. This differentially influences several perinatal health outcomes including mental health, mortality of both mother and child, mode of delivery, birth weight, preterm birth, congenital anomalies, and other morbidities. This exploratory study seeks to make visible the diverse lived experiences of Central- American asylum seeking pregnant women stranded at three critical transit cities at the US- Mexican borders: Monterrey, Tijuana and Matamoros.  Given the significant number of pregnant women stranded in these cities in perilous and often informal settings for prolonged periods of time, the study aims to explore this group’s current access to antenatal care, and the impact of current deterrent US migration policies on them in these three specific geographic areas.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been devastated by a brutal and prolonged civil war for decades. Pervasive gender- based violence has been a particularly salient feature of this conflict, and has led to the forced international migration of large numbers of women and girls in search of safety.  Since 2015, a significant number of  these at risk DRC citizens have sought refuge in Europe, many of them by entering Greece. As of November 2020, forced migrants from the DRC make up the third largest national group entering and seeking asylum in Greece, following forced migrants from Afghanistan and Syria. Based on anecdotal evidence, despite their vulnerability as victims of abuse, trafficking and torture prior and during their migration journeys,  recognized refugee women from the DRC, lag far behind the Greek population across a broad swath of quality of life indicators.  This exploratory study aims to document the diverse lived experiences of refugee and asylum seeking women from the DRC in Greece, a European country, aiming to investigate the obstacles that make sources of support unavailable to these vulnerable women and document what, if any, state services are provided to them and their children.

This study assessed the factors that drive vulnerability to trafficking, and revealed trends for the trafficking were mostly gendered, informed by education and income levels of the victims (and their families). For instance, boys were almost twice as likely to be trafficked as children than girls and had 39 per cent less likelihood of being trafficked internationally than domestically, as compared to girls. Victims with little or no education were more than 20 times more likely to be trafficked than victims who had attended high school while children from low-income countries were five times more likely to be trafficked as a child (rather than as an adult) when compared to victims from high-income countries.

Digidiki, V., J. Bhabha, K. Connors, H. Cook, C. Galez-Davis, C. Hansen, M. Lane, S. Laursen, and L. Wong, 2023. From Evidence to Action: Twenty years of IOM child trafficking data to inform policy and programming. FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, Boston and International Organization for Migration (IOM), Geneva.

This research collaboration with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) aimed to analyze migration flows and patterns, and migrants’ vulnerabilities along their journeys within and from West and Central Africa. The study analyzed data from IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) flow monitoring survey, a survey consisting of over 110,000 migrants across 38 transit points in 7 countries in West and Central Africa. In addition, qualitative data gathered from expert interviews conducted by the main author in 2020 shed light on the impact of COVID-19 on migrants’ journeys and well-being.

Digidiki, V., Bhabha, J., Bhatia, A.,Peisch, S, Sattler, V., Cordaro, B. and H. Cook (2021). “See Migration Like Water”: An Analysis of IOM Flow Monitoring Survey Data on Migration Flows in West and Central Africa. FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, Boston, and International Organization for Migration, Geneva.

Books

Bhabha, J., J. Kanics, and D. Senovilla Hernández, eds. (2018). Research Handbook on Child Migration. Chetlanham: Elgar Press.

Bhabha J. (2018). Can We Solve The Migration Crisis? Cambridge: Polity Books.

Chapters

Bhabha, J. (2021). “Zero Humanity: The Reality of Current US Immigration policy toward Central American Refugee Children and their Families”. In Beyond Borders: The Human Rights of Non-Citizens at Home and Abroad, Cambridge University Press. 35-52.

Digidiki, V. & Bhabha, J.  (2021). Against the Best Interests of the Child: the global injustice of migrant externalization (pp.99-117). In L. Weber & C. Tazreiter (Eds). Handbook of Migration and Global Justice, UK: Edward Elgar Publications.

Bhabha J., “What it means for a child to be a refugee or a distress migrants” in ed. Harlow T. Freedom from Flight: Refugee Children, Trauma, Strategies & Best Practices, University of Arizona e-Books.

Bhabha, J.(2019).  Children on the move in the Twenty-First Century: Developing a Rights-Based Plan of Action. In Humanitarian and Mass Migration, ed. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 83-98.

Bissell S. & Bhabha J., (2019). The Health Challenges facing Children on the Move”, Ed. Allotey P. and Reidpath D., The Health of Refugees: Public Health Perspective from Crisis to Settlement,  Oxford: Oxford University Press. 169-178.

Bhabha J. (2018). “The Best Mankind Has to Offer?” In Illegal Encounters: Migration, Detention, and Deportation in the Lives of Young People, ed. Deborah A. Boehm and Susan J. Terrio, New York, NY: NYU Press.

Bhabha J. (2018). “The Migrant Tax – How Children and Young People Pay to Exercise Mobility Rights.” In Global Labour and the Migrant Premium, ed. Tugba Basaran and Elspeth Guild. New York: Routledge.

Bhabha, J. (2018) “Children on the move in the Twenty-First Century: Developing a Rights-Based Plan of Action.” In Humanitarian and Mass Migration, ed. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Digidiki, V. (2018). “The experience of distress: Child migration on Lesvos, Greece”. In J. Bhabha, J. Kanics & D. Senovilla. (Eds). Research Handbook on Child Migration, E. Elgar Publishing.

Reports

MMC and UNHCR (Eds.). (2021). A Roadmap for Advocacy, Policy Development, and Programming: Protection in Mixed Movements along the Central and Western Mediterranean Routes 2021. Mixed Migration Centre and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
https://mixedmigration.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MMC-UNHCR-Full-Roadmap-A4-132pp-web.pdf

Digidiki, V., Bhabha, J., Bhatia, A.,Peisch, S, Sattler, V., Cordaro, B. and H. Cook (2021). “See Migration Like Water”: An Analysis of IOM Flow Monitoring Survey Data on Migration Flows in West and Central Africa. FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, Boston, and International Organization for Migration, Geneva.

Bhabha, J., Chakraborty, R., Digidiki, V., Matache, M., Peisch, S. & Sedas, A. C. (June, 2020). Protecting Human Rights During and After COVID-19: A Child Rights’ Perspective. Harvard University. Commissioned by the Office of the High Commissioner.

Digidiki, V., Bhabha, J. /IOM (November, 2019). Returning Home? The reintegration challenges facing child and youth returnees from Libya to Nigeria.FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Harvard University.

Donger E, Fuller A, Bhabha J, and Leaning J. Protecting Refugee Youth in Ecuador: An Evaluation of Health and Wellbeing.

Donger E, Leigh J, Fuller A, Bhabha J, and Leaning J. Protecting Refugee Youth in Lusaka: An Evaluation of Health and Wellbeing. FXB Center and UNHCR.

Digidiki V and Bhabha J.(2017). Emergency Within an Emergency: The Growing Epidemic of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Children in Greece.

Articles

Bhabha, J. & Digidiki, V.(2022). Child Repatriation in the Time of COVID-19. Rethinking Refuge.

Digidiki, V. & Bhabha, J., (2021). Gendered aspects of distress migration: Taking note of

Rohingya voices. DiGeSt – Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 8(2), 22-39.

Maioli, S., Bhabha, J., Wickramage, K., Wood, L., Erragne, L., Garcia, O., Burgess, R., Digidiki,

V., Aldridge, R., Devakumar, D., (2021).  International migration of unaccompanied minors: trends,

health risks, and legal protection. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 5, 882-895.

Mishra, D., Digidiki, V. & Winch, P. (2021). “The boys from the land don’t get anything”: Unaccompanied minors’ experience of child protection environments and the humanitarian border in Greece. Children’s Geographies.

Bhabha J & Abel G. (2020).  “8 Children and unsafe migration.” World Migration Report. 2020-04, Vol.(1).

Digidiki, V. & Bhabha, J. (2020). EU Migration Pact Fails to Address Human Rights Concerns in Lesvos, Greece. Health and Human Rights Journal, 22(2), 291-296.

Mishra, D., Digidiki, V. & Winch, P. (2020). The endings of journeys: A qualitative study of how Greece’s child protection system shapes unaccompanied migrant children’s futures. Children and Youth Service Review, 116 (C).

Mishra, D., Spiegel, P., Digidiki, V., & Winch, P. (2020). Interpretation of vulnerability and cumulative disadvantage among unaccompanied adolescent migrants in Greece: A qualitative study. PLoS Med 17(3): e1003087.

Bhabha, J. (2019). Governing adolescent mobility: The elusive role of children’s rights principles in contemporary migration practice, Childhood, 26(3), 369-385.

Bhabha, J. (2019).  Toleration deficits: The perilous state of refugee protection today, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 45(4), 503-510. 

Digidiki, V. & Bhabha, J. (2019). Leaving and returning “home”:  The Elusive quest for Belonging and Adulthood among African adolescents on the move. Culture and Education: Special Issue on Childhood and Youth Studies in the Era of Migration, 2(124) 143-156.  

Bhabha J. (2018). “#UsToo: Children on the Move and Belated Public Attention.” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family. 32.(2): 250-258.

Bhabha J. (2018). Contemporary Human Right Protections for Child Migrants. German Federal Agency for Civic Education, (www.bpb.de).

Digidiki, V. & Bhabha, J. (2018).  Sexual abuse and exploitation of unaccompanied migrant children in Greece: Identifying risk factors and gaps in services during the European migration crisis. Children and Youth Service Review, 92(C): 114-121.

Bhabha, J. (2018). Human Mobility and the Longue Durée: The Prehistory of Global Migration Law. AJIL Unbound 111: 136-141.

Bhabha, J. (2018). A Progressive Development, Children’s Rights and the ILC Draft Articles on the Expulsion of Aliens. Harvard Human Rights Journal 30: 15-28.

Bhabha, J. (2017). Borders and the Displacements They Create are Human Artefacts. ReVista 16.2 :2-6.

Op-Eds

Digidiki, V. & Bhabha, J. (2021, December 7). Against the Best Interests of the Child: the global injustice of migrant externalization. Border Criminologies. University of Oxford.

Bhabha J. (July, 2020). Europe shows a Janus face to migrants. Financial Times.

Bhabha, J. & Digidiki, V. (April, 2020). The urgent need to transfer vulnerable migrants from Europe’s largest migrant hotspot. BMJ Opinion.

Digidiki, V. & Bhabha, J. (February, 2020). Greece’s proposed ‘floating wall’ shows the failure of EU migration policies. The Guardian.

Bhabha J. (June 29, 2018). “Opinion: America’s treatment of migrants is sending the country back to the dark ages, “Globe and Mail (Toronto).

Bhabha, J. & Digidiki, V. (March, 2018). Two years on:  Time to reconsider EU refugee and migration management policy. FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health. Harvard University. Available online: https://fxb.harvard.edu/2018/03/20/two-years-on-time-to-reconsider-eu-refugee-and-migration-management-policy/

Digidiki. V. (November, 2018). Blaming the victim: When society chooses to ignore female migrant victims of violence. Available at: http://www.helpis.gr/helpis-voices/otan-kinonia-klini-ta-matia-brosta-sti-via-ton-gynekon-prosfygon-tis-vasilias-digidiki/?fbclid=IwAR3VaqiaScqBeN66TG_qXDro_IzJ4vhCLXxvTSu6IZR5KtTV3LvADyROHSY