Suchergebnisse

The term "refugee" is generally held to refer to those who have left or been forced to leave their country for political reasons, who have been deprived of its diplomatic protection and have not acquired the nationality or diplomatic protection of any other state. This includes those from whom the state has taken away protection and assistance but without suppressing juridically their nationality, and those whom the state has deprived of their nationality, thus making them stateless. While in strict law the position of these different categories of refugees is not uniform, in practice it is identical.

This Article will survey and assess the attempts of five of the major refugee receiving countries of the West, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Italy, to comply with the mandates of the Convention and Protocol. Specifically, inquiry will focus on the two issues most applicable to the admission and exclusion of political refugees: (1) domestic interpretation of the Convention definition of "refugee;" and (2) adherence to the principle of nonrefoulement, which is the Convention's proscription on returning persons falling within its refugee definition to countries of alleged persecution. Section II explores the precise substantive provisions of the Convention and Protocol on these matters. Section III briefly surveys implementing municipal legislation and regulation of refugee admission and exclusion and the interrelationship of these with international treaty law. Section IV presents a detailed analysis of domestic administrative procedures because the breadth or narrowness of a state's construction of the Convention definition of "refugee" and the consequent binding or nonbinding nature of the nonrefoulement provision may be largely a function of the peculiar strengths or weaknesses of its administrative refugee determination processes. Finally, Section V reveals that local interpretation of the Convention definition of refugee varies considerably among the contracting states. This results in the application of conflicting standards, so that a person recognized as meeting the criteria for refugee status in one country may be denied refugee status in another country. The major stumbling blocks to a more uniform set of international standards are the divergent interpretations accorded the term "well-founded fear." Other factors, including whether the reasons for the refugee's persecution fit within one of the five grounds specified in the refugee definition, significantly burden the refugee determination decision. These extra-legal motivations often result in flagrant discrimination against ...

The model of established and outsiders proposed by Norbert Elias is a useful analytical tool for comparing and contrasting different types of habitus. In this paper, I apply this model in a 2010-11 study based on twenty in-depth biographical interviews with Polish Solidarity refugees in Norway who left Poland as a result of the Martial Law of 1981. In this qualitative, biographical research we managed to initiate extensive narratives on the imagery of the immigrant group. The key notion of my analysis is the "moral circle", an expression used by one of the interviewees in order to describe the differences in the scope and intensity of personal relations in Poland and Norway, as well as the standard of self-control applicable inside and outside it. My aim in this paper is to expand Elias' perspective by discussing the role which social imagination and cultural differences may play in the dynamics of relations between established and outsiders.

AbstractImmigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variation across US states for the period 2008 to 2013, I estimate the respective causal impact of immigrants on US exports and imports. I address endogeneity and reverse causality by exploiting the exogenous allocation of political refugees within the US refugee resettlement program that prevents immigrants from choosing the destination location. I find that a 10% increase in recent immigrants to a US state raises imports from those immigrants' country of origin by 1.0% and exports by 0.8%.