SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
Annual Review of Sociology
The Sociology of Refugee
Migration
David Scott FitzGerald and Rawan Arar
Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA;
email: dfitzgerald@ucsd.edu, rarar@ucsd.edu
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2018. 44:387–406
First published as a Review in Advance on
April 4, 2018
The Annual Review of Sociology is online at
soc.annualreviews.org
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073117-
041204
Copyright c© 2018 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
Keywords
asylum, citizenship, integration, migration, refugee, violence
Abstract
Theorization in the sociology of migration and the field of refugee studies
has been retarded by a path-dependent division that we argue should be
broken down by greater mutual engagement. Excavating the construction of
the refugee category reveals how unwarranted assumptions shape contempo-
rary disputes about the scale of refugee crises, appropriate policy responses,
and suitable research tools. Empirical studies of how violence interacts with
economic and other factors shaping mobility offer lessons for both fields.
Adapting existing theories that may not appear immediately applicable, such
as household economy approaches, helps explain refugees’ decision-making
processes. At a macro level, world systems theory sheds light on the inter-
active policies around refugees across states of origin, mass hosting, asylum,
transit, and resettlement. Finally, focusing on the integration of refugees in
the Global South reveals a pattern that poses major challenges to theories of
assimilation and citizenship developed in settler states of the Global North.
387
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
THE SOCIOLOGY OF REFUGEE MIGRATION
Refugee status opens doors closed to many other migrants, as states increasingly try to filter who
can cross international borders (Shacknove 1985). Along with many scholars, the United Nations
HighCommissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) insists that “refugees are not migrants” (Feller 2005,
p. 27). TheUNHCR’s goal is to safeguard the refugee exemption from restrictive policies (Betts &
Collier 2017). Skeptical media and political entrepreneurs in turn dismissively label people trying
to get in as “migrants”—not “genuine refugees” with legitimate claims to enter and be protected
(Crawley & Skleparis 2018).
The notion that migrants and refugees are distinct extends throughout the academy for histor-
ical and contemporary political reasons. The great wave of transoceanic European immigration
to the New World in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place at a time when
there was not a separate track for refugee admissions nor an international refugee regime. As a
result, foundational theories of immigration typically ignored the refugee question even if many
of those early migratory movements, from Russian Jews fleeing pogroms to Irish escaping the
Great Famine, can be reconceptualized as forced migrations (Zolberg et al. 1989). Immigration
studies in the United States, Canada, and Australia address post–World War II refugee admis-
sions, but they easily conflate all people who moved to settler states as “immigrants,” regardless
of why they came ( Jupp 2002, Kelley & Trebilcock 2010, Portes & Rumbaut 2014). Research
on US immigration has been especially influential on the broader field of international migration
studies, whose foundational theories generally assume labor migration (FitzGerald 2014, Massey
et al. 1998).
The field of refugee studies is a more recent scholarly endeavor with its own research centers,
journals, professional associations, and research paradigms that focus on the concerns of refugees,
their advocates, and legal scholars. In the 1980s, academics based primarily in theUnitedKingdom
shaped the field around the assumption that refugees are fundamentally different from migrants
because of the push factors that impel their movement and of the states’ unique legal obligations to
protect refugees in the post–WorldWar II regime (Black 2001, Richmond 1988, VanHear 2012).
There is surprisingly little overlap between refugee studies and the sociology of international
migration (Scalettaris 2007, Stepputat & Sørensen 2014, Van Hear 2012). A review by Mazur
(1988, p. 45) claimed that “whether sociology has a contribution [to refugee studies] distinguishable
from that of geography, anthropology, economics or political science. . .remains to be proven.”
Castles (2003, p. 14) lamented that “there is little sociological literature on forced migration and
one certainly cannot find a developed body of empirical work and theory.”
This review argues that the sociology of international migration and refugee studies can mu-
tually enrich each other and push theorization in both directions. A sociology of knowledge
approach illuminates the classificatory struggles that created and sustain the refugee category and
shows how predominant frames in the field limit scholarly understandings (see Bourdieu 1991).
Breaking out of the constraints of the statutory refugee label allows social scientists to bring to
bear well-developed tools from the study of international migration and integration that can help
explain refugee experiences across countries of origin, transit, and destination. World systems
theory and a refugee household decision-making model are particularly productive.
The insights of refugee studies can benefit the sociology of international migration in three
ways. First, migration theories explain a subset ofmobility: labormigration. Expanding the inquiry
to include people who flee violence challenges theorists of international migration to define their
scope conditions and to consider interacting factors that explain movement as well as decisions
to stay. Second, in contradistinction to many underpoliticized theories of international migration
(Piore 1979, Stark 1991, Todaro 1969), refugee studies rightfully focuses on the role of states in
388 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
shaping the flows and life chances of mobile persons (Greenhill 2010, Zolberg et al. 1989). Finally,
attending to refugees expands the range of cases to be considered when analyzing other concerns
in the sociology of international migration, such as integration, transnationalism, and citizenship.
The migration literature’s tendency to investigate labor flows to Western states disregards most
refugeemovements, which take place between neighboring countries in theGlobal South (Chimni
1998). Investigating a broader set of cases enables a better specification of scope conditions for
existing theories, introduces fresh research questions, and develops a systemic understanding of
international mobility and its constraints.
WHO IS A REFUGEE?
Sociologists of migration rarely define who is a migrant (FitzGerald 2014). By contrast, debates
have raged about just who is a refugee ever since exceptions for refugees were created in restrictive
immigration laws. The refugee label confusingly blends categories of everyday usage, law, and
social science (Hamlin 2017). The definition is consequential, potentially amatter of life and death,
when governments decide whether to admit certain individuals or groups. The construction of
the categories also matters analytically because the categories deployed shape explanations of why
refugeesmove, the opportunities and barriers to integration in their places of transit or destination,
and eddies of circular movements along the way.
Constructivist Approaches
The term “refugee” first entered English to describe the Huguenots expelled from France in
the seventeenth century. During the early twentieth century, governments applied the label on
an ad hoc basis to many groups such as White Russians, Armenians, and German Jews, amid
an emerging sense in Europe that refugees deserved protections that other mobile persons did
not (Gatrell 2013). During World War II, as in the present day, stakeholders debated whether
particular groups and individuals were refugees or “merely” immigrants. The open deterrence of
refugees was becoming less politically legitimate, even as the criteria for selecting them in settler
states continued to be deeply embedded in the economic and ethnoracial preferences of existing
laws (FitzGerald & Cook-Martı´n 2014, Neumann 2015).
After WorldWar II, the victorious Allied powers negotiated the 1951 Convention Relating to
the Status of Refugees, whose Article 1(A)(2) defines a refugee as a person who,
owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership
of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable
or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having
a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events,
is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
This focus on persecution was not created ex nihilo in 1951. Gray (2016) shows that ancient
Greek notions of sanctuary focused on political persecution, and that intellectuals transmitted
this classical inheritance into the mid-twentieth century. Long-standing traditions of political
asylum in national laws, such as Article 120 of the 1793 French Constitution, predate international
instruments. Regardless of the precise genealogy of the notion of refugee, the Western powers’
control over the 1951 Convention crystallized a definition that emphasized persecution over other
forms of distress caused by economic or environmental catastrophes. This definition was intended
to prevent the repetition of the Allied powers’ failure to save European Jews from the Holocaust
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 389
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
as well as to fire an early salvo of the Cold War aimed at embarrassing communist countries by
encouraging defections. None of the Eastern Bloc countries, except Yugoslavia, participated in the
negotiation of the Convention. The Western powers adopted a classically liberal approach that
privileged the protection of refugees based on violations of political or civil rights. This worked
to their advantage, given the recurring violation of those rights by totalitarian communist states.
By contrast, a definition of refugees based on violations of social rights would have undermined
laissez-faire liberalism (Chimni 2009, Karatani 2005, Long 2013, Skran & Daughtry 2007).
The 1951 Convention included geographic and temporal limitations that only applied the
refugee category to Europeans displaced by World War II. The 1967 Protocol removed the
limitations of time and place and confirmed the crucial principle of non-refoulement, according
towhich refugees cannot be returned to countrieswhere theywill be persecuted.TheUnited States
and Canada did not join the international regime until 1968 and 1969, respectively. By 2015, 148
countries had signed the Convention and/or the Protocol and established one of the strongest
norms, along with antislavery, to govern international mobility. The Convention delegates in
1951 debated whether to include internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the refugee definition, but
to preserve the principle of nonintervention in sovereign states that undergirds the Westphalian
system, they settled on a definition insisting that refugees were only persons who had crossed an
international border. The principle of sovereignty eroded slightly after the end of the Cold War,
culminating in the notion of states’ responsibility to protect IDPs from the most egregious crimes
against humanity. In 2016, there were more IDPs than statutory refugees (Loescher 2001, Stahn
2007, UNHCR 2017).
TheUNHCR, founded in 1950, is the primary producer of knowledge in the study of refugees.
The agency assembles, curates, and distributes statistical data from its own operations and national
governments. The UNHCR identifies who the refugees are, where they are coming from, where
they are going, and how they are treated. Idiosyncratic definitions created in the early days of the
refugee regime have become path dependent (Loescher 2001). For example, “Palestine refugees”
were the first non-Europeans to be legally considered refugees by the international community.
Their protection falls to an ad hoc agency created in 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine Refugees in theNear East (UNRWA) (Akram 2002).1 This population of 5.3
million refugees often falls outside the scope of knowledge production by the UNHCR. Palestine
refugees are excluded from the presentation of politically consequential facts, as is evident in the
2016 UNHCR Global Trends report (UNHCR 2017). Although the report includes Palestine
refugees in the overall count of the world’s refugees, they are erased fromfigures that illustratema-
jor source and hosting countries. Palestine refugees, and the states that host them, become increas-
ingly tangential to the global conversation about refugee displacement and scholarly investigations.
Historical comparisons of the scale of refugee flows are extremelymisleadingwhen they neglect
that all the baseline statistics collected by the UNHCR only include Europeans. For example, the
UNHCR claimed in its 2016Global Trends report that the “world’s forcibly displaced population
remained at a record high” (UNHCR 2017, p. 2). The world’s press and prominent scholars
amplified this claim (Betts & Collier 2017, pp. 15, 204; Gladstone 2017). Although it is true that
the 65 million displaced people in 2016 are more than the estimated 60 million displaced after
WorldWar II according to UNHCR data, the postwar figures only include Europeans and ignore
an additional 90 million people displaced in Asia alone, for a total of 175 million people displaced
1Palestine refugees are defined by UNRWA as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1
June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict” (https://www.
unrwa.org/palestine-refugees).
390 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
by World War II across the globe. The partition of India led to the further displacement of
13.5 million people across the Pakistan/India border between 1947 and 1951, but they were not
labeled refugees within the UNHCRmandate. The scale of displacement in 2016 was even lower
in relative terms, at less than 0.9% of the world’s population, compared to 7.6% afterWorldWar
II (Gatrell 2013, pp. 3, 151; UNHCR 2017). The fact that the world’s refugee statistics reflect a
definition of the refugee forged in 1951 contributes to the contemporary failure to apprehend the
scale and global distribution of refugee movements over time. It feeds fears that the world is facing
an unprecedented refugee crisis and thus legitimates proposals to change the existing architecture
of protection (e.g., Betts & Collier 2017).
Refugee numbers are flawed and can be intentionallymisleading. These numbers serve political
purposes: to advocate for increased aid or influence admissions policies. Aid agencies and major
refugee-receiving states may overreport the number of refugees and/or repatriates to solicit more
international aid. Conservatives may invoke the specter of massive refugee flows to justify re-
striction (Crisp 1999). Additionally, institutional factors can purposefully or inadvertently distort
statistics. During the European crisis of 2015, the European Union (EU) border agency Frontex
counted the same people two or three times over. According to sociologist Nando Sigona, an
individual counted on arrival in Greece who then left the EU to travel through the Balkans to
another EU state would be counted again on entering an EU country such as Hungary (cited in
Nature 2017). Castles’s (2003, p. 26) warning that “policy-driven research can lead not only to
poor sociology, but also to bad policy” rings especially clear when exaggerated numbers perpetuate
fears of an unprecedented crisis in ways that undermine refugee protections or misdirect scarce
resources.
The categorization of refugees is malleable both from above and from below. State labels are
not necessarily transferable. The same person who is a “refugee” in Kenya could be a “guest”
in Jordan, an “asylum seeker” in Germany, a “migrant worker” in the United Arab Emirates
(UAE), or an “irregular arrival” in Canada. There is also a gap between the definitions imposed
from above by states and international institutions and the self-definitions by displaced people who
sometimes reject the refugee label or only use it situationally when interactingwith authorities. For
some, “exile” carries a more accurate and/or higher class connotation (Chatelard 2010, Ludwig
2016). The distinction between external and self-assigned refugee labels is important for two
reasons. First, it draws attention to how refugee status may be a favorable legal category for
gaining admission to a state’s territory, yet it may be unfavorable when the identity is stigmatized
and impedes belonging. Second, recognizing that some forced migrants do not want to identify
as refugees allows scholars to unpack the social construction of refugee victimization and the
narratives that states andNGOspromulgate to depict themselves as saviors (Espiritu 2014,Rajaram
2002).
Although refugees and asylum seekers are often colloquially conflated, their legal designations
reflect their distinct spatial relationships to the state in which they seek sanctuary. In states of
resettlement, refugees are selected and vetted while still abroad. Their migration is expected and
facilitated by governments and international agencies. Asylum seekers ask for protection within or
at the borders of states in a process that is co-constructed by the asylum seekers, legal advocates,
government officials, and judges. Ethnographic accounts show how actors on the ground try to
force asylum seekers’ complex life stories into legal categories and classify thembased on unwritten
expectations of how a victim should act (Galli 2017, Mountz 2010). Autonomous judiciaries have
been key institutional actors in expanding the grounds for asylum to include, for example, women
fleeing domestic violence who are left unprotected by the governments of their countries of origin.
The category of persecution for “membership of a particular social group” has been especially
expansive (Goodwin-Gill & McAdam 2007).
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 391
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
Realist Approaches
Unlike constructivists, realists use the refugee category to investigate the experiences of individuals
and groups who exist independently of how they are labeled (Hein 1993). An immediate source of
confusion and ethical dilemma is that refugee is a category of both legal practice and sociological
analysis (Brubaker & Cooper 2000). Constructivist accounts favored in sociology are in tension
with legal arguments built on a realist rock. For example, the legal concept of “recognizing”
refugees is based on the premise that refugees are an ontologically given category existing in the
real world, waiting to be seen for who they are. As the UNHCR (2011, ch. 1, paragraph 28)
explains in its refugee status determination handbook,
A person is a refugee within the meaning of the 1951 Convention as soon as he fulfils the criteria
contained in the definition. This would necessarily occur prior to the time at which his refugee status
is formally determined. Recognition of his refugee status does not therefore make him a refugee but
declares him to be one. He does not become a refugee because of recognition, but is recognized because
he is a refugee.
Discussions of human rights pose a conundrum for those who wish both to understand and
to deploy the concepts, or at least not to pour boiling oil from the ivory tower on the heads of
vulnerable people. According to the Turton (1996, p. 96) principle, there is no “justification for
conducting research into situations of extreme human suffering if one does not have the alleviation
of suffering as an explicit objective of one’s research.” Yet historians and sociologists point out that
ideas about human rights are historically elaborated,malleable, and contingent (Frezzo 2015).This
observation threatens to rob human rights claims of their rhetorical persuasiveness, which is based
on the fiction that such rights are natural and inalienable.While acknowledging these tensions, we
argue that sociologists should not hold themselves hostage to a refugee definition created to meet
specific political objectives in 1951. We agree with Hathaway (2007) that legal scholars and social
scientists need not marry their distinctive approaches, and we leave to legal scholars the debate
about whether certain grounds for refugee status should be expanded in domestic and international
law (McAdam 2012) or remain focused on persecution based on more classical interpretations of
the five Convention grounds (Hathaway 2007). A constructivist account of the refugee category
does not preclude the legal argument that states have obligations to protect individuals who meet
agreed standards.
Most sociological definitions of refugees are oriented around a set of related dichotomies that
define refugees against migrants, or at least against other types of migrants. The common thread
in many of these categorizations is that refugees have less agency. Their movements are described
as involuntary ( Ja´szi 1939), forced (Petersen 1958), or reactive (Richmond 1988). Proponents
of forced migration studies have steadily expanded the scope of the field, usually in the hope of
promoting new legal protections for people whose movements are compelled. The concept of
forced migration includes development-induced migrants—such as populations forced to move
after dam projects flooded their land, environmental refugees displaced by climate change, slaves,
deportees, trafficking victims, and IDPs (Black 2001, Bylander 2015, De Wet 2006, McSherry &
Kneebone 2008, Mooney 2005).
The forced migration framework usefully highlights the compulsion in many movements, but
the conflation of different categories of migrants comes at an analytical cost. One of the more
provocative moves is to lump international adoptees into the same category of forced migration
as people driven from their homes by war (Louie 2013). The observation that adopted children’s
movement is forced is accurate. Yet children are routinely taken from one country to another
392 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
without consulting their preferences, which was the justification for the 2012 Deferred Action for
ChildhoodArrivals (DACA) program in theUnited States that granted temporary protection from
deportation for certain classes of unauthorized immigrants who entered the country as children
(Amuedo-Dorantes & Puttitanun 2016).
Movement takes place on a continuum of compulsion. At one pole, options are limited, all
choices are bad, and the difference between leaving and staying is death, be it at the hands of a
death squad or starvation in an infertile land. At the other extreme, people who hold passports that
allow them to bypass visa restrictions in the Global North and who have high levels of financial,
human, and social capital face no great penalty if they stay home and can choose among a menu
of destinations. Between these extremes are people who must leave to achieve their expectations
of a dignified life. A challenge for refugee status determination is that whereas the extent to which
migration is compelled by violence lies on a continuum, individual cases must be shoehorned
into categorical definitions. Dichotomous categories juxtaposing refugees and economic migrants
are especially ill suited to capture the underlying messiness. Partly as a result, legal categories
have proliferated that provide complementary protection for non-Convention refugees, such as
subsidiary protection in the EU and temporary protected status in the United States (Goodwin-
Gill & McAdam 2007).
Another criterion long used to distinguish refugees frommigrants is that the former are people
who leave for political rather than economic reasons (Simpson 1939). The political/economic
dichotomy is only useful in some cases, and it obscures the multiplicity of motivations that drive
many migrations. Illiberal states can use economic tools to punish opponents and despised mi-
norities by cutting off their access to employment, markets, education, and land. Economic crises
often have political causes, and they can generate political unrest. Wars raise the risk of falling
victim to generalized violence as well as that of becoming unable to maintain one’s livelihood in
a collapsing economy.
Betts (2013) proposes the concept of survival migration, which has the merits of breaking
down the political/economic dichotomy and of recognizing the agency of those who move, while
capturing the fact that some people are motivated to move by existential stakes rather than
the desire to maximize consumer utility or some lesser goal in the hierarchy of needs. Oper-
ationalizing the concept of survival migration is difficult, however, given the social malleabil-
ity of expectations about what constitutes reasonable subsistence and the fact that many people
who flee illiberal governments face nonlethal types of persecution. A further complication of
the political/economic dichotomy is that individuals’ goals and opportunities to achieve them
often change over the course of time and multiphase movements (Crawley et al. 2016, Koser
& Martin 2011). There is no a priori reason to accept the political refugee/economic migrant
distinction.
For sociological purposes, we followZolberg et al. (1989) in defining refugeemigration as flight
frompolitical violence, including the threat of violence behind persecution.This conceptualization
facilitates the engagement of refugee studies with theories of migration. It is possible to investigate
empirically how variations in economic conditions and violence, as well as their interaction, affect
out-migrationover time (Alvarado&Massey 2010,Bohra-Mishra&Massey 2011, Schmeidl 1997).
This approach requires a realist conception of refugees as people who are motivated to flee at least
in part by political violence, regardless of whether they are named as such by a legal authority.
We survey the surprisingly thin empirical literature on the drivers of refugee flows to establish the
extent to which they can be explained by theories of international migration developed to explain
labor mobility, and where they cannot, we highlight the need to refine theories for contexts of
political violence.
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 393
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
WHAT DRIVES REFUGEE MIGRATION?
What types of political violence generate refugees? Nation-state building (Roucek 1939,
Stoessinger 1956, Zolberg et al. 1989), genocide, politicide (i.e., the elimination of politically
defined groups) (Fein 1993, Schmeidl 1997; but see Neumayer 2005), wars with foreign inter-
ventions, and generalized violence rather than institutionalized violations of human rights have
been singled out as types of conflict that are more likely to generate refugee flows (Schmeidl
1997). However, these findings risk circular reasoning, because they are based on refugee statistics
collected by the UNHCR and national governments that use a legal, rather than sociological,
definition of refugee. It is not surprising that genocide and politicide generate refugee flows when
the definition of refugees in these statistics designates people who are “persecuted for reasons
of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” In
other words, it is difficult for realists to escape the legal construction of the refugee category when
measuring the sociological determinants of refugee movement.
One way to avoid this circularity is through independent surveys that do not select on the
dependent variable. For instance, Bohra-Mishra & Massey (2011) found that low to moderate
violence during the Maoist insurgency in Nepal reduced the level of out-migration, whereas high
levels of violence increased the odds of movement. Adhikari (2013) estimated the higher risks of
migration in Nepal after the outbreak of violence and showed how out-migration was mediated
by the destruction of industry and loss of crops, land, and homes, thus opening the field to a better
understanding of the mechanisms linking violence and flight.
The question of what constitutes political violence is not always straightforward. For example,
in parts of Central America and Colombia, armed gangs have sometimes taken on state-like
qualities by controlling territories and establishing at least some partial local legitimacy in their
application of violence. When people flee these spaces and ask for asylum, the legal question
is whether they qualify for protection even if states are not their persecutors. A 2014 survey of
Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans found that Hondurans and Salvadorans were more
likely to report their intention to migrate if they had been victims of crime in the previous year.
Honduran crime victims were more than twice as likely to say they intended to migrate compared
to nonvictims (Hiskey et al. 2016, pp. 6–10). A municipal-level study of Nicaragua, Honduras, and
El Salvador between 2011 and 2016 showed that a rise in homicides was associated with increased
US border apprehensions of unaccompanied minors from those countries (Clemens 2017). In
Colombia, rising violence in the 1990s was associated with increased flows to Europe and Latin
America, but not North America (Silva & Massey 2015).
Statist approaches to explaining refugee flows are especially powerful given the salience of
foreign policy and security concerns in determining refugee policies, which in turn influence
movement. States make refugees. By statutory definition, refugees would not exist without the
creation of an international border for them to cross (Haddad 2008). Pluralist and institutionalist
theories of the state in sociology and the constructivist approach to international relations ex-
plain the competing logics by which governments select refugees and other kinds of immigrants
(Orchard 2014).The institutional design of legal systems shapes asylumdecisions differently across
countries that otherwise share similarities (Hamlin 2014). Realist foreign policy rationales, such
as pushing out refugees as a weapon of war (Greenhill 2010), are accompanied by the softer goals
of promoting a humanitarian brand abroad (Gibney 2004). Domestic politics also plays a role as
ethnic lobbies promote the resettlement of coethnics (Zucker & Zucker 1989) and xenophobic
politicians try to keep out racialized others (Arango et al. 2016, Madokoro 2016).
World systems theory posits that interventions by core countries in the periphery spawn mi-
gration in the opposite direction (Portes &Walton 1981). Many refugee flows are shaped by this
394 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
dynamic in the US and European metropoles (Abrego 2017, Castles 2003), though counterexam-
ples abound (Neumayer 2005, Vogler & Rotte 2000). Cue´llar (2006, p. 622) identifies a “grand
compromise” whereby countries in the Global South host most of the world’s refugees while
donor states in the Global North finance refugee hosting in the South and resettle less than one
percent of the total. At the same time, Northern states try to push their border control onto the
territories of buffer states. For example, the EU and Turkey have been negotiating the possibility
of rewarding Turks with visa-free travel to the EU in exchange for Turkey’s efforts to stymie
refugee transit to Europe. In this way, emigration, immigration, transit migration, and refugee
displacement become inextricably linked in a global system of mobility control (Ic¸duygu 2000;
FitzGerald 2019).
An approach rooted in neoclassical economics adds safety from violence to the economic
utilities pursued by individuals in models of labor migration (Morrison & May 1994). At a macro
level, violence and dire economic conditions often feed on each other (Zolberg et al. 1989).
Quantitative studies vary in their support of economic explanations for refugee flows. Moore &
Shellman (2007) and Neumayer (2005) find that income and GDP per capita in the country of
origin are negatively associated with refugee flows. Davenport et al.’s (2003) analysis of a global
database from 1964 to 1989 suggests that economic factors do not predict refugee migration, a
finding repeated by Schmeidl’s (1997) study of UNHCR data from 1971 to 1990 and Melander
& O¨berg’s (2006) study of UNHCR data from 1981 to 1999. Smaller studies by Stanley (1987),
Amuedo-Dorantes & Puttitanun (2016), and Clemens (2017) find evidence that both violence
and economic factors generated the flight of refugees and unaccompanied minors from Central
America.
Refugees are a hard case for the new economics of labor migration, because this framework
is based on the idea that households allocate labor to different markets, including the one they
currently occupy, to manage risks of unemployment, crop failures, and other economic problems
(Stark 1991). In contexts of violence, the major risks to be managed are to life and limb rather
than the maximization of a household economic portfolio. Irregular migration can incur its own
deadly risks and high financial costs, which make moving a high-stakes gamble to circumvent
state controls (Belloni 2016). Yet households do not always respond to the risk of violence by
collectively fleeing. Individual members of a household may be targeted for persecution and leave,
while others stay behind (Steele 2009). Even in contexts of generalized violence, not everyone
who can leave always does. Families manage the risks of violence at the same time as they manage
economic risks, such as losing their illiquid assets if they all flee at once. The household can be
considered a unit of analysis, but there may also be bargaining around migration decisions within
the household that is affected by power differentials along the axes of age and gender (Nobles
& McKelvey 2015). A 2017 study of unaccompanied child migrants found that most of those in
Greece had come from war-torn countries such as Syria and had made a joint decision within their
family to flee, whereas most of those in Italy had come from African countries and had taken an
individual decision to leave (UNICEF 2017).
The utility of a household-level risk management perspective on refugee flows is illustrated by
the Syrian refugee families interviewed by Arar in 2016–2017. The Jabbar2 family of 11 was split
between the Syrian city of Dar’a and the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. At age 18, Ahmad left
Dar’a with his mother, two unmarried teenage sisters considered especially vulnerable to sexual
assault, and three brothers. Ahmad’s father stayed behind to protect two married daughters whose
husbands refused to flee and to maintain the reliable paycheck on which the family depended.
2This is a pseudonym.
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 395
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
Ahmad was the “pioneer refugee” (see Bakewell et al. 2012). He expected to help his family
members establish themselves in the camp and then return to Syria to attend university. The
family expected the conflict would only last a few weeks and did not anticipate the eventual
closing of the Syria/Jordan border that ended the possibility of family reunification. Five years
after Ahmad’s departure, his father remained in Syria. Ahmad explained that earlier he had the
chance to flee to Europe, a choice some of his friends hadmade, but he had decided that he wanted
to make it to the West “with dignity” rather than as a “refugee.” For three years, he sat for (and
failed) the English prerequisite exam to enter the Canadian university system. On his fourth try,
he passed and resettled in Canada as a refugee student. He feared that his only hope to reunite his
family would be by naturalizing in Canada and sponsoring the immigration of his family members.
The Jabbar family’s experience captures the multifaceted ways in which refugee families use
moving or staying behind to manage risks to their security, household economy, and ability
to live as a unified family. Even in the midst of a rapidly changing security context, refugees
take strategic action with multiple time horizons. Household decisions are shaped by culturally
elaborated expectations of the different vulnerabilities faced by family members depending on
their age and gender; reactions to shifting policies at home, in neighboring countries, and in
countries of potential asylum or resettlement; and efforts to maintain an income stream and to
protect their assets while laying the long-term educational groundwork for economic mobility.
The applicability of the new economics of labor migration framework to refugee migration is
ultimately an empirical question requiring more research (see Alvarado & Massey 2010), but the
concept that households collectivelymanage different kinds of risk holds great promise for opening
up the black box of mixed motivations for flows.
Economic perspectives on refugee migration are most useful when they distinguish among
ideal-typical stages of mobility. In a first stage, violence drives the refugee to the most easily
accessible safe space, often within the conflict country, and secondarily to a neighboring, often
poor, country.Tertiarymovements inwhich the refugee has the opportunity to consider long-term
solutions and options look more like migration for the purposes of work or family reunification
(Collyer et al. 2012, Davenport et al. 2003, Zimmermann 2009; but see Day & White 2002).
Forced repatriation reduces the weight of economic considerations as well as the refugee’s degree
of agency (Stein & Cuny 1994).
The segmented labor market theory developed to explain the migration pull factors in indus-
trialized societies (Piore 1979) may help explain some tertiary refugee flows to rich countries.
Certainly not all refugee resettlement programs are motivated by labor policies (Suhrke & Klink
1987), but rich destination countries sometimes use refugee admissions as a backdoor to access
workers (FitzGerald & Cook-Martı´n 2014, Gibney 2004). For example, followingWorldWar II,
Canada resettled Polish refugees to do agricultural work for which German prisoners of war were
no longer available. The government tried to disguise its economic motivation for filling gaps
in secondary labor markets by publicly emphasizing a humanitarian rationale (Satzewich 1991).
Other times, states justify humanitarian policies to a skeptical public by highlighting the utility of
refugee labor, as the German government did during the Syrian conflict ( Juran & Broer 2017).
In other cases, states may accept people fleeing violence as economic migrants without granting
them legal refugee status. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE facilitated the entry and residence
of hundreds of thousands of Syrians in 2011 without registering them as refugees (De Bel-Air
2015). Accounts drawing on segmented labor market theory are more powerful when combined
with analyses of the domestic and foreign policy inputs of refugee resettlement and mass asylum.
One of sociology’s main contribution to theories of international migration is to highlight
the importance of social networks in channeling migrants along particular routes and reducing
the costs of movement and integration (Massey et al. 1998). The refugee literature shows that a
396 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
similar dynamic applies to people fleeing violence (Crisp 1999, Hein 1993, Koser 1997, Scalettaris
2007, Williams 2006). Refugees often travel to the same destinations of previous labor migrations
(Gatrell 2013, Silva & Massey 2015). The mass migration of asylum seekers to Europe in 2015
introduced new kinds of social networks facilitated by technology. People on the move turned to
Facebook, Twitter, and smartphone applications to learn about the changing landscape of border
crossings, lodging, and employment opportunities. When it comes to hosting refugees in camps,
social networks can influence which camp one may enter or leave for urban settlement. Sullivan &
Tobin (2014) discuss the kafala (sponsorship) system in Jordanian refugee camps in which citizens
can “bail out” Syrian refugees to live in the city. On the other hand, refugees try to avoid using their
social networks when doing so renders their identities more visible and makes them vulnerable to
further violence (Arar 2016).
The establishment of a migration industry makes it possible for people with access to capital
or credit to move across borders even without established social networks or legal permission
(Gammeltoft-Hansen & Sørensen 2013). Nonprofit actors such as Doctors Without Borders aid
refugees as well. Such agencies are fundamentally motivated by ideology rather than profit, but
they serve a similar function of enabling movements for those who do not have the requisite
documentation or social capital (Andersson 2014). The smuggling industry helps circumvent
migration controls between the Global South and the Global North. Yet because smugglers sell
their services to the highest bidder, the samemilitias that one day smugglemigrants can be secretly
paid the next to do the dirty work of migration control. The Italian government carried out such a
contracting scheme in Libya to prevent asylum seekers from reaching European territories where
they could ask for protection (D.S. FitzGerald 2018, unpublished manuscript).
WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT REFUGEE INTEGRATION?
The study of refugee integration can simultaneously build upon the sociology of immigrant assimi-
lation/integration while throwing into reliefWestern-centric or even more parochial assumptions
in canonical studies. For the UNHCR, durable solutions are incorporation into the initial host
country, resettlement to a third country, or repatriation. Displacement and the challenges of in-
corporation for refugees are not erased when these durable solutions are met, but in line with the
UNHCR’s mandate, refugees are no longer “populations of concern.” The refugee stops being a
refugee. Conversely, for states of resettlement, the arrival of displaced persons is the first chap-
ter in their integration as they acculturate and gain economic independence (Nawyn 2011). The
movement that defines the end of the refugee category for the UNHCR marks the beginning
of the refugee category for the resettlement state. By adopting a sociological rather than official
definition of refugees, researchers can avoid being analytically hobbled by this artificial disruption
and can examine a multisite, multigenerational process of integration across countries of mass
hosting, asylum, transit, resettlement, and repatriation.
Themainstream sociology ofmigration in theUnited States analyzes the experience of refugees
such asVietnamese, Salvadorans, andRussian Jewswithin the assimilation paradigm, as it doeswith
other immigrants (Menjı´var 2000, Morawska 2004, Zhou & Bankston 1998). Canonical research
measures linguistic, educational, economic, residential, and marital markers of integration (Alba
& Nee 2003). Some scholars acknowledge that the context of reception for refugees is distinct.
For example, for decades the US government treated Cubans more favorably than other groups
(Portes & Bach 1985). Luthra et al.’s (2017) study of integration in the United States finds that
after applying the appropriate controls, national-origin populations with high levels of refugee
admissions do not have appreciably different educational outcomes than other types of immigrants.
The legal status of individuals may be more important over time than the modest, temporary
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 397
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
resettlement benefits. In theory, studies that identify an individual’s refugee status on arrival,
rather than using nationality as a proxy, could better tease out the effects of being a refugee;
for example, such effects may be different for refugees who directly fled violence compared to
family members sponsored later under immigrant family reunification provisions. Pedraza-Bailey
(1985) describes howdifferent waves of refugeemigration from the same place can be influenced by
different factors, so that the samenationality cannot be assumed to follow the same stages over time.
Much research on refugees in the Global North centers on resettlement programs. Colic-
Peisker & Tilbury (2003) provide a typology of different resettlement styles in Australia. Re-
searchers have compared the effects of Canada’s private sponsorship and government resettlement
programs (Lanphier 2003). Bloemraad’s (2006) study of Canada and the United States finds that
refugees’ political incorporation is influenced, respectively, by models of official multicultural-
ism and laissez-faire. In each case, refugees’ resettlement experiences in Western contexts appear
broadly similar to the experience of authorized immigrants drawn by work or family reunification.
Even if the experiences of resettled refugees and other types of immigrants in rich, demo-
cratic destination countries eventually converge, the same does not hold true for most refugees.
Major refugee-receiving countries in the Global South are generally neglected in the sociologi-
cal literature, even though 84% of refugees are living in developing countries (UNHCR 2017).
State policies often deliberately seek to prevent the integration of refugees by impeding access
to citizenship, banning or limiting legal employment, and isolating refugees in camps (Betts &
Collier 2017, Malkki 1995). For those living in camps, the residential integration emphasized
by neo-assimilation studies is not feasible. Camps are total institutions that simultaneously pro-
tect, surveil, and control refugees (see Goffman 1961). In contexts of prolonged displacement and
forced encampment, the population of camp residents is the segment of the population into which
new refugees assimilate (see Portes & Rumbaut 2014).
Most refugees live in urban areas rather than camps. The urban context creates its own set of
challenges to integration that stem from aid agencies’ difficulty in making dispersed populations
identifiable and available to receive services (see Scott 1998). The UNHCR and other agencies
provide aid that includes education, housing, documentation, residency status, and health services.
When funding falls short, urban refugees have been deprioritized and encamped refugees gain
preference (Werker 2007). Urban refugees must also navigate tensions with the host community
in public spaces and institutions in ways that encamped refugees do not directly face when they
are segregated (Pavanello et al. 2010, Zetter & Deikun 2010). Access to the informal economy
increases the risk of labor exploitation ( Jacobsen 2006), even as it can offer new opportunities
for entrepreneurship (Betts & Collier 2017). Many small business opportunities are available in
refugee niches that are sometimes spatially bound as enclaves, including in camps (see Portes
1995).
For some refugees, the pathway topolitical rights is generations long and elusive, if not unattain-
able. Stateless refugee status is passed from one generation to the next like a nationality derived
from jus sanguinis.Transmission can last far longer than anyone would predict. A 1967 CIA cable
in the wake of the Israeli victory in the Six DayWar crowed, “There is every reason to be very op-
timistic on the question of the Arab refugees, with the refugee problem being solved once and for
all and this political cancer being removed from Arab-Israeli affairs” (CIA 1967, p. 1). Fifty years
later, millions of Palestinians remain displaced. Three generations of Somali refugees reside in
Kenya’s Dadaab camp, where for most Somalis, the threat of refoulement is more imminent than
the promise of resettlement (Hyndman & Giles 2017). Even in Australia, a liberal state whose
citizenship was long based on jus soli, the children of irregular maritime asylum seekers born
in Australia inherit their parents’ subjugated status as people who will never be allowed to settle
(Commonw. Aust. 2014). Acculturated stateless refugees, like acculturated young immigrants who
398 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
grow up in a society without legal authorization to live in it, face blocked mobility (Bean et al.
2015).
The concept that assimilation is a multigenerational process (Alba &Nee 2003) takes on a new
dimension when statelessness is an inherited status.Without citizenship rights, most of the world’s
refugees must rely on precarious claims to human rights and incomplete humanitarian protections
(Arendt 1968, Holzer 2015). A “surrogate state” (Kagan 2012) composed of the UNHCR and
subcontracted NGOs often provides many government-like functions that help keep refugee
populations alive. Analyzing the membership claims that refugees make under these conditions
promises to push forward debates in the sociology ofmigration about the extent towhich territorial
personhood by virtue of presence in a state, national citizenship, or postnationalism are the bases
of meaningful access to rights (Motomura 2006, Arar 2017, Hansen 2009, Soysal 1994).
Despite political and economic challenges to integration, refugees who flee to neighboring
states in the Global South often share important cultural similarities with the native popula-
tions. Although national identities differ, these populations often have similar ethnic identities,
languages, or religions. Integration in major refugee host countries is often different from inte-
gration into rich, liberal states of resettlement. Refugees in much of the Global South do not need
a generation to learn the language or cultural norms of the host. Instead, the lack of political in-
corporation and the protections that are afforded in such contexts become the greatest challenge.
The ethnic boundary changes that are a subset of the assimilation process may be easier and faster
for refugees in the Global South than in many contexts of labor migration to the Global North,
even as political integration is slower (or unattainable) because of government restrictions (see
Abdi 2015). Analyzing the integration of refugees across cases and social domains points out the
limits of universal theorizations about the necessary sequence of domains of assimilation, such as
the question of whether acculturation precedes structural assimilation or vice versa (see Alba &
Nee 2003).
Studies of the repatriation of refugees cry out for comparisons with other forms of return,
be it forced, voluntary, or circular (Bakewell 2000, Black & Koser 1999). As for other types of
international migrants, it is sometimes possible for refugees to maintain strong ties with their
countries of origin even without repatriation, notwithstanding Hein’s (1993) claim that refugee
status is constituted by exile and the impossibility of returning home. Refugees often maintain
connections with their homelands as conflicts rage, including by sending money, in ways that
challenge the notion of complete separation (Zetter 2007); once again, this highlights the utility
of a refugee household decision-making model. Bringing together the sociology of international
migration and refugee studies promises to refresh debates about transnationalism and diaspora
(Wahlbeck 2002). Scholars of immigrant homeland political engagement typically focus on the
pacific activities of immigrants who have moved primarily for economic reasons (Waldinger &
FitzGerald 2004). Examining the concept of transnationalism in the light of refugee experiences
reveals a wider range of engagements, from remittances to the cross-border raids of “refugee
warriors,” and it illuminates the conditions in countries of origin and destination that facilitate or
impede transborder activities (Al-Ali et al. 2001, Banki 2016, Koser 2007, Van Hear 2006).
Sociologists can gain valuable theoretical leverage by turning their focus to integration in the
Global South. First, refugee integration in the Global South reflects the experiences of most of
the world’s refugees—a fact that putatively generalizable theories of integration should take into
consideration. Even when the focus is solely on resettled refugees or asylees, most of these individ-
uals have spent long periods in countries that neighbor their places of origin. The lack of a stable
legal status and restricted economic options shape decision making during multistage migrations
and subsequent experiences in the countries of settlement (Moret et al. 2006). Second, the study
of integration in illiberal contexts forces scholars to tackle the unquestioned premises about access
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 399
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
to membership that have influenced theories of assimilation/integration and postnationalism. Fi-
nally, the study of refugee integration in the Global South draws attention to the symbiotic, albeit
asymmetrical, relationship in the world system between major refugee host states and donor states
of refugee resettlement—a relationship in which theUNHCR and the International Organization
for Migration (IOM) are the arbitrators and facilitators of refugee movement and containment
(Geiger&Pe´coud 2010).Human rights norms and supranational governance limit the sovereignty
of major refugee-receiving countries (Arar 2017). By taking a relational perspective, scholars are
better able to understand global policies, state interests, and refugee experiences.
CONCLUSION
Theoretical and empirical studies of the sociology of international migration evolved primarily
from observations of economic migration, which crystallized a canon without fully taking into
consideration the case of refugees. This scholarly chasm is further widened by the relatively
new field of refugee studies, which does not build upon the scholarly lineage of the sociology of
international migration but rather upon the concerns of the UNHCR and advocacy knowledge
producers. In this review, we have discussed how the sociology of international migration and
refugee studies can mutually benefit each other by stretching theory from both ends.
The path dependency of the distinction between the sociology of migration and refugee studies
arose from their different moments of formation in an academy dominated by the Global North.
The sociology of migration was formed in a period of relatively open immigration with no need
for a special refugee category. The field of refugee studies was born during a period of selective
immigration with high enforcement capacity, when classification as a refugee could open the door
to resettlement or at least constrain deportation back to one’s persecutors. Recognizing the origins
of these classificatory struggles is critical to understanding contemporary disputes about the scale
of refugee crises, appropriate policy responses, and the suitability of different research tools to
understand the phenomenon.
At the same time, realist approaches that try to measure how violence interacts with other
factors to propel movement offer lessons for theories of international migration and refugee flows
alike. Adapting lessons from existing theories, even economistic approaches that at first blush
would not appear apposite, like the new economics of labor migration model, offer a framework
for interpreting refugees’ household decisionmaking. At amacro level, world systems theory sheds
light on the interactive policies around refugees across states of origin, mass hosting, asylum, tran-
sit, and resettlement. Lastly, focusing on the integration of refugees in the Global South reveals a
common pattern of acculturation combined with blocked political and economic integration. This
pattern poses a major challenge to theories of assimilation and citizenship based on unwarranted
assumptions of access to political and civil rights.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments of Roger Waldinger, Jenna Nobles, Rebecca
Hamlin, Molly Fee, David Cook-Martı´n, and twoAnnual Review of Sociology reviewers on previous
drafts of this article.
400 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
LITERATURE CITED
Abdi CM. 2015. Elusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and a Borderless Muslim Identity. Minneapolis: Univ.Minn.
Press
Abrego LJ. 2017. On silences: Salvadoran refugees then and now. Lat. Stud. 15(1):73–85
Adhikari P. 2013. Conflict-induced displacement, understanding the causes of flight. Am. J. Political Sci.
57(1):82–89
AkramSM. 2002. Palestinian refugees and their legal status: rights, politics, and implications for a just solution.
J. Palest. Stud. 31(3):36–51
Al-Ali N, Black R, Koser K. 2001. The limits to “transnationalism”: Bosnian and Eritrean refugees in Europe
as emerging transnational communities. Ethn. Racial Stud. 24(4):578–600
Alba R, Nee V. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press
AlvaradoSE,MasseyDS. 2010. In search of peace: structural adjustment, violence, and internationalmigration.
Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci. 630(1):137–61
Amuedo-Dorantes C, Puttitanun T. 2016. DACA and the surge in unaccompanied minors at the US-Mexico
border. Int. Migr. 54(4):102–17
Andersson R. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland: Univ.
Calif. Press
Arango J, Mahı´a R, Moya D, Sa´nchez-Montijano E. 2016. Introduccio´n: el an˜o de los refugiados. In Anuario
CIDOB de la Inmigracio´n, ed. CIDOB, pp. 12–26. Barcelona: CIDOB
Arar R. 2016. How political migrants’ networks differ from those of economic migrants: “strategic anonymity”
among Iraqi refugees in Jordan. J. Ethn. Migr. Stud. 42(3):519–35
Arar R. 2017. The new grand compromise: how Syrian refugees changed the stakes in the global refugee
assistance regime. Middle East Law Gov. 9(3):298–312
Arendt H. 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Bakewell O. 2000. Repatriation and self-settled refugees in Zambia: bringing solutions to the wrong problems.
J. Refug. Stud. 13(4):356–73
Bakewell O, de Haas H, Agnieszka K. 2012. Migration systems, pioneer migrants and the role of agency.
J. Crit. Realism 11(4):413–37
Banki S. 2016. Transnational activism as practised by activists from Burma: negotiating precarity, mobility and
resistance. InMetamorphosis: Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar, ed. R Egreteau, F Robinne,
pp. 234–59. Singapore: Natl. Univ. Singap. Press
Bean F, Brown S, Bachmeier J. 2015. Parents Without Papers: The Progress and Pitfalls of Mexican American
Integration. New York: Russell Sage Found.
Belloni M. 2016. Refugees as gamblers: Eritreans seeking to migrate through Italy. J. Immigr. Refug. Stud.
14(1):104–19
Betts A. 2013. Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ.
Press
Betts A, Collier P. 2017. Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System. London: Allen Lane
Black R. 2001. Fifty years of refugee studies: from theory to policy. Int. Migr. Rev. 35(1):57–78
Black R, Koser K. 1999. The End of the Refugee Cycle? Refugee Repatriation and Reconstruction. New York:
Berghahn Books
Bloemraad I. 2006. Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada.
Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Bohra-Mishra P,MasseyDS. 2011. Individual decisions tomigrate during civil conflict.Demography 48(2):401–
24
Bourdieu P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Malden, MA: Polity Press
Brubaker R, Cooper F. 2000. Beyond “identity.” Theor. Soc. 29(1):1–47
Bylander M. 2015. Depending on the sky: environmental distress, migration, and coping in rural Cambodia.
Int. Migr. 53(5):135–47
Castles S. 2003. Towards a sociology of forced migration and social transformation. Sociology 37(1):13–34
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 401
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
Chatelard G. 2010. What visibility conceals: re-embedding refugee migration from Iraq. In Dispossession and
Displacement: Forced Migration in the Middle East and Africa, ed. D Chatty, B Finlayson, pp. 17–44. Oxford,
UK: Oxford Univ. Press
Chimni BS. 1998. The global refugee problem in the 21st century and the emerging security paradigm: a
disturbing trend. In Legal Visions of the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of Judge Christopher Weeramantry,
ed. A Anghie, G Sturgess, pp. 283–99. The Hague, Neth.: Kluwer Law Int.
Chimni BS. 2009.The birth of a “discipline”: from refugee to forcedmigration studies. J. Refug. Stud. 22(1):11–
29
CIA (Cent. Intell. Agency). 1967.Views [redacted] on the refugee problem. CIA Intell. Inf. Cable, July 14. https://
www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000096584.pdf
Clemens MA. 2017. Evaluating evaluations: violence, development, and migration waves: evidence from Central
American child migrant apprehensions. Work. Pap. 459, Cent. Glob. Dev., Washington, DC
Colic-Peisker V, Tilbury F. 2003. “Active” and “passive” resettlement: the influence of support services and
refugees’ own resources on resettlement style. Int. Migr. 41(5):61–91
Collyer M, Du¨vell F, de Haas H. 2012. Critical approaches to transit migration. Popul. Space Place 18:407–14
Commonw. Aust. 2014. Migration Amendment (protecting babies born in Australia) Bill 2014. Rep. Senate
Leg. Const. Aff. Legis. Comm., Canberra, Aust. http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/
Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/Protecting_Babies/∼/media/Committees/
legcon_ctte/Protecting_Babies/report.pdf
Crawley H, Duvell F, Sigona N, McMahon S, Jones K. 2016. Unpacking a rapidly changing scenario: migration
flows, routes and trajectories across the Mediterranean. Res. Brief 1, MEDMIG, Coventry Univ., Coven-
try, UK. http://www.medmig.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MEDMIG-Briefing-01-March-
2016-FINAL-1.pdf
Crawley H, Skleparis D. 2018. Refugees, migrants, neither, both: categorical fetishism and the politics of
bounding in Europe’s “migration crisis.” J. Ethn. Migr. Stud. 44(1):48–64
Crisp J. 1999. “Who has counted the refugees?” UNHCR and the politics of numbers. Work. Pap. 12, New Issues
Refug. Res., Policy Res. Unit, UNHCR, Geneva
Cue´llar MF. 2006. Refugee security and the organizational logic of legal mandates. Georgetown J. Int. Law
37(4):583–723
DavenportC,MooreW, Poe S. 2003. Sometimes you just have to leave: domestic threats and forcedmigration,
1964–1989. Int. Interact. 29(1):27–55
Day K,White P. 2002. Choice or circumstance: the UK as the location of asylum applications by Bosnian and
Somali refugees. GeoJournal 56(1):15–26
De Bel-Air F. 2015. A note on Syrian refugees in the Gulf: attempting to assess data and policies. Explan. Note
11/2015, Gulf Labour Mark. Migr. Prog., Gulf Res. Cen., Geneva, Switz. http://gulfmigration.eu/
media/pubs/exno/GLMM_EN_2015_11.pdf
DeWet CJ. 2006.Development-Induced Displacement: Problems, Policies, and People. New York: Berghahn Books
Espiritu YL. 2014. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
FeinH. 1993. Accounting for genocide after 1945: theories and some findings. Int. J. Group Rights 1(2):79–106
Feller E. 2005. Refugees are not migrants. Refug. Surv. Q. 24(4):27–35
FitzGerald DS. 2019. Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers. Oxford, UK: Oxford
Univ. Press. In press
FitzGerald DS. 2014. The sociology of international migration. InMigration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines,
ed. JF Hollifield, CB Brettell, pp. 115–47. New York: Routledge
FitzGerald DS, Cook-Martı´n D. 2014. Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy
in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press
Frezzo M. 2015. The Sociology of Human Rights: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Polity Press
Galli C. 2017. A rite of reverse passage: the construction of youth migration in the US asylum process. Ethn.
Racial Stud. In press. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1310389
Gammeltoft-Hansen T, Sørensen NN. 2013. The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International
Migration. New York: Routledge
Gatrell P. 2013. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
402 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
Geiger M, Pe´coud A. 2010. The Politics of International Migration Management. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Gibney MJ. 2004. The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
Gladstone R. 2017. Displaced population hit record in ’16, U.N. says.New York Times, June 19. https://www.
nytimes.com/2017/06/19/world/middleeast/displaced-people-united-nations-global-trends.html
GoffmanE. 1961.Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation ofMental Patients andOther Inmates.NewYork: Random
House
Goodwin-Gill G, McAdam J. 2007. The Refugee in International Law. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
Gray B. 2016. Exile, refuge and the Greek polis: between justice and humanity. J. Refug. Stud. 30(2):190–219
Greenhill KM. 2010. Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell Univ. Press
Haddad E. 2008. The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ.
Press
Hamlin R. 2014. LetMe Be a Refugee: Administrative Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada,
and Australia. New York: Oxford Univ. Press
Hamlin R. 2017. Migrant Categories in Crisis. Presented at Cent. Study Int. Migr., Univ. Calif., Los Angeles
Hansen R. 2009. The poverty of postnationalism: citizenship, immigration, and the new Europe. Theor. Soc.
38(1):1–24
Hathaway JC. 2007. Forced migration studies: Could we agree just to “date”? J. Refug. Stud. 20(3):349–69
Hein J. 1993. Refugees, immigrants, and the state. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 19:43–59
Hiskey JT, Co´rdova A, Orce´s D, Malone MF. 2016. Understanding the Central American refugee crisis: why they
are fleeing and how U.S. policies are failing to deter them. Spec. Rep., Am. Immigr. Counc.,Washington, DC.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/understanding_the_
central_american_refugee_crisis.pdf
Holzer E. 2015. The Concerned Women of Buduburam: Refugee Activists and Humanitarian Dilemmas. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell Univ. Press
Hyndman J, Giles W. 2017. Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge. New York: Routledge
Ic¸duygu A. 2000. The politics of international migratory regimes: transit migration flows in Turkey. Int. Soc.
Sci. J. 52(165):357–67
Jacobsen K. 2006. Refugees and asylum seekers in urban areas: a livelihoods perspective. J. Refug. Stud.
19(3):273–86
Ja´szi O. 1939. Political refugees. Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci. 203(1):83–93
Jupp J. 2002.FromWhiteAustralia toWoomera: The Story of Australian Immigration.Cambridge,UK:Cambridge
Univ. Press
Juran S, Broer PN. 2017. A profile of Germany’s refugee populations. Popul. Dev. Rev. 43(1):149–57
KaganM. 2012. TheUN “surrogate state” and the foundation of refugee policy in theMiddle East. Sch.Works
18(2):307–28
Karatani R. 2005. How history separated refugee and migrant regimes: in search of their institutional origins.
Int. J. Refug. Law 17(3):517–41
Kelley N, Trebilcock MJ. 2010. The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy. Toronto:
Univ. Toronto Press
Koser K. 1997. Social networks and the asylum cycle: the case of Iranians in the Netherlands. Int. Migr. Rev.
31(3):591–611
Koser K. 2007. Refugees, transnationalism and the state. J. Ethnic Migr. Stud. 33(2):233–54
Koser K, Martin S. 2011. The Migration-Displacement Nexus: Patterns, Processes, and Policies. New York:
Berghahn Books
Lanphier M. 2003. Sponsorship: organizational, sponsor, and refugee perspectives. J. Int. Migr. Integr.
4(2):237–56
Loescher G. 2001. The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
Long K. 2013.When refugees stopped being migrants: movement, labour and humanitarian protection.Migr.
Stud. 1(1):4–26
Louie A. 2013. International adoption. In Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies, ed. S Gold, S
Nawyn, pp. 319–30. New York: Routledge
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 403
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
Ludwig B. 2016. “Wiping the refugee dust from my feet”: advantages and burdens of refugee status and the
refugee label. Int. Migr. 54(1):5–18
Luthra R, Soehl T, Waldinger R. 2017. Reconceptualizing context: a multilevel model of the context of
reception and second-generation educational attainment. Int. Migr. Rev. In press. https://doi.org/10.
1111/imre.12315
Madokoro L. 2016. Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press
Malkki LH. 1995. Refugees and exile: from “refugee studies” to the national order of things. Annu. Rev.
Anthropol. 24:495–523
Massey DS, Arango J, Hugo G, Kouaouci A, Pellegrino A, Taylor JE. 1998. Worlds in Motion: Understanding
International Migration at the End of the Millennium. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
Mazur RE. 1988. Refugees in Africa: the role of sociological analysis and praxis. Curr. Sociol. 36(2):43–60
McAdam J. 2012. Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
McSherry BM, Kneebone SY. 2008. Trafficking in women and forced migration: moving victims across the
border of crime into the domain of human rights. Int. J. Hum. Rights 12(1):67–87
Melander E, O¨bergM. 2006. Time to go? Duration dependence in force migration. Int. Interact. 32(2):129–52
Menjı´var C. 2000. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Mooney E. 2005. The concept of internal displacement and the case for internally displaced persons as a
category of concern. Refug. Surv. Q. 24(2):9–26
Moore WH, Shellman SM. 2007. Whither will they go? A global study of refugees’ destinations, 1965–1995.
Int. Stud. Q. 51(4):811–34
Morawska E. 2004. Exploring diversity in immigrant assimilation and transnationalism: Poles and Russian
Jews in Philadelphia. Int. Migr. Rev. 38 (4):1372–412
Moret J, Baglioni S, Efionayi-Ma¨der D. 2006. The Path of Somali Refugees into Exile: A Comparative Analysis of
Secondary Movements and Policy Responses. Neuchatel: Swiss Forum Migr. Popul. Stud.
Morrison AR, May RA. 1994. Escape from terror: violence and migration in post-revolutionary Guatemala.
Lat. Am. Res. Rev. 29(2):111–32
Motomura H. 2006. Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States.
New York: Oxford Univ. Press
Mountz A. 2010. Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn.
Press
Nature. 2017. Data on movements of refugees and migrants are flawed. Nature 543(7643):5–6
Nawyn SJ. 2011. “I have so many successful stories”: framing social citizenship for refugees. Citizsh. Stud.
15(6–7):679–93
Neumann K. 2015. Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees: A History. Collingwood, Aust.: Black Inc.
Neumayer E. 2005. Bogus refugees? The determinants of asylum migration to Western Europe. Int. Stud. Q.
49(3):389–410
Nobles J, McKelvey C. 2015. Gender, power, and emigration from Mexico. Demography 52(5):1573–600
Orchard P. 2014. A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
Pavanello S, Elhawary S, Pantuliano S. 2010.Hidden and exposed: urban refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. Work. Pap.,
Humanit. Policy Group Overseas Dev. Inst., London
Pedraza-Bailey S. 1985. Cuba’s exiles: portrait of a refugee migration. Int. Migr. Rev. 19(1):4–34
Petersen W. 1958. A general typology of migration. Am. Sociol. Rev. 23(3):256–66
Piore MJ. 1979. Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ.
Press
Portes A. 1995. The Economic Sociology of Immigration: Essays on Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship. New
York: Russell Sage Found.
Portes A, Bach RL. 1985. Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Berkeley: Univ.
Calif. Press
Portes A, Rumbaut RG. 2014. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Portes A, Walton J. 1981. Labor, Class, and the International System. New York: Academic
Rajaram PK. 2002. Humanitarianism and representations of the refugee. J. Refug. Stud. 15(3):247–64
404 FitzGerald · Arar
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
Richmond AH. 1988. Sociological theories of international migration: the case of refugees. Curr. Sociol.
36(2):7–25
Roucek JS. 1939. Minorities—a basis of the refugee problem. Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci. 203:1–17
Satzewich V. 1991. Racism and the Incorporation of Foreign Labour: Farm Labour Migration to Canada since 1945.
New York: Routledge
ScalettarisG. 2007. Refugee studies and the international refugee regime: a reflection on a desirable separation.
Refug. Surv. Q. 26(3):36–50
Schmeidl S. 1997. Exploring the causes of forced migration: a pooled time-series analysis, 1971–1990. Soc. Sci.
Q. 78(2):284–308
Scott JC. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New
Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press
Shacknove AE. 1985. Who is a refugee? Ethics 95(2):274–84
Silva AC, Massey DS. 2015. Violence, networks, and international migration from Colombia. Int. Migr.
53(5):162–78
Simpson JH. 1939. The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey. London: Oxford Univ. Press
Skran C, Daughtry CN. 2007. The study of refugees before “refugee studies.” Refug. Surv. Q. 26(3):15–35
Soysal YN. 1994. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press
Stahn C. 2007. Responsibility to protect: political rhetoric or emerging legal norm. Am. J. Int. Law 101(1):99–
120
Stanley WD. 1987. Economic migrants or refugees from violence? A time-series analysis of Salvadoran mi-
gration to the United States. Lat. Am. Res. Rev. 22(1):132–54
Stark O. 1991. The Migration of Labor. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell
Steele A. 2009. Seeking safety: avoiding displacement and choosing destinations in civil wars. J. Peace Res.
46(3):419–30
Stein BN, Cuny FC. 1994. Refugee repatriation during conflict: protection and post-return assistance. Dev.
Pract. 4(3):173–87
Stepputat F, Sørensen NN. 2014. Sociology and forced migration. In The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and
Forced Migration Studies, ed. E Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, G Loescher, K Long, N Sigona, pp. 86–98. Oxford,
UK: Oxford Univ. Press
Stoessinger JG. 1956. The Refugee and the World Community. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press
Suhrke A, Klink F. 1987. Contrasting patterns of Asian refugee movements: the Vietnamese and Afghan
syndromes. Cent. Migr. Stud. Spec. Issues 5(3):85–102
Sullivan D, Tobin SA. 2014. Security and resilience among Syrian refugees in Jordan. Middle East Res. Inf.
Proj., Oct. 14. http://merip.org/mero/mero101414
Todaro MP. 1969. A model of labor migration and urban unemployment in less developed countries. Am.
Econ. Rev. 59(1):138–48
Turton D. 1996. Migrants and refugees: a Mursi case study. In Search of Cool Ground: War, Flight and Home-
coming in Northeast Africa, ed. T Allen, pp. 96–110. Asmara, Eritrea: Afr. World Press
UNHCR. 2011. Handbook and Guidelines on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status: Under the
1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Geneva: UNHCR
UNHCR. 2017. Global trends: forced displacement in 2016. Rep., UNHCR, Geneva. http://www.unhcr.org/
5943e8a34.pdf
UNICEF. 2017. Children on the move in Italy and Greece. Rep., REACH, UNICEF, New York. https://www.
unicef.org/eca/reports/children-move-italy-and-greece
Van Hear N. 2006. Refugees in diaspora: from durable solutions to transnational relations. Refuge 23(1):9–14
Van Hear N. 2012. Forcing the issue: migration crises and the uneasy dialogue between refugee research and
policy. J. Refug. Stud. 25(1):2–24
Vogler M, Rotte R. 2000. The effects of development on migration: theoretical issues and new empirical
evidence. J. Popul. Econ. 13(3):485–508
Wahlbeck O¨. 2002. The concept of diaspora as an analytical tool in the study of refugee communities. J. Ethn.
Migr. Stud. 28(2):221–38
www.annualreviews.org • The Sociology of Refugee Migration 405
SO44CH19_FitzGerald ARI 20 June 2018 14:27
Waldinger R, Fitzgerald D. 2004. Transnationalism in question. Am. J. Sociol. 109(5):1177–95
Werker E. 2007. Refugee camp economies. J. Refug. Stud. 20(3):461–80
Williams L. 2006. Social networks of refugees in the United Kingdom: tradition, tactics and new community
spaces. J. Ethn. Migr. Stud. 32(5):865–79
Zetter R. 2007. More labels, fewer refugees: remaking the refugee label in an era of globalization. J. Refug.
Stud. 20(2):172–92
Zetter R, Deikun G. 2010. Meeting humanitarian challenges in urban areas. Forced Migr. Rev. 34:5–7
Zhou M, Bankston C. 1998. Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States.
New York: Russell Sage Found.
Zimmermann SE. 2009. Irregular secondary movements to Europe: seeking asylum beyond refuge. J. Refug.
Stud. 22(1):74–96
Zolberg AR, Suhrke A, Aguayo S. 1989. Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing
World. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
Zucker NL, Zucker NF. 1989. The uneasy troika in US refugee policy: foreign policy, pressure groups, and
resettlement costs. J. Refug. Stud. 2(3):359–72
406 FitzGerald · Arar