There was a time when resettlement was considered as the ‘preferred’ solution for refugees. In the context of the Indochinese refugee crisis, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s resettlement played a particularly important role. The main countries of first asylum…
A process called regional relocation aims to distribute recent refugees among the various Member States of the European Union (EU), according to national quotas that take into account a variety of factors such as each state’s GDP, population size and…
For refugees going to the United States (US), resettlement begins long before they step off the airplane in their final destination. Those selected for resettlement must first undergo pre-departure processing, which typically includes cultural orientation, official government interviews and long…
www.liela.li In February 2016 Liechtenstein introduced the LiechtensteinLanguages project (LieLa) to help asylum seekers and refugees integrate more quickly in their new country. Based on the New Learning Method developed in Liechtenstein in the 1990s, this language teaching method focuses…
In 2016, we published an article in Forced Migration Review called ‘Choices, preferences and priorities in a matching system for refugees’[1] in which we argued that refugees to be resettled should be allocated to countries through a centralised matching system,…
While the assumptions underlying the current refugee resettlement system in the United States (US) may have been true 35 years ago, the likelihood of an arriving refugee having no connections in the US diminishes every year. Every year the odds…
Legal advocates are particularly well suited to compile a refugee’s narrative and explain why the facts of the individual’s case demonstrate that the individual should be considered for resettlement. At each step of the resettlement process, legal advocates can assist…
Resettlement opportunities for Syrian refugees are allocated to those who are deemed to be particularly vulnerable, and thousands of Syrian men, women and children have now been resettled. However, single Syrian men (‘unattached’ or ‘unaccompanied’ adult males) living in Middle…
While one can easily grow impatient with resettlement’s shortcomings, it is important to consider how far resettlement has come over the past decades and the role that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have played in its evolution. The involvement of civil society…
Camps, for better or worse, have been the backbone of global refugee resettlement, with most referrals coming from camp-based populations and submitted to resettlement countries (those countries offering to resettle refugees) almost exclusively by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. With…