Faithful Doxology: The Church’s Allyship with Immigrants Seeking Asylum

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Boursier
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Detention Facility ◽  
Mission Strategy ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Pastoral Care Ministry ◽  
The Church

Given the mass human movement from Central America to the United States, the church needs to rethink its mission strategy for its humanitarian involvement with these immigrants seeking asylum. Looking through the hermeneutical lens of practical theology and its attention to contextualized praxis, the article situates the argument in conversation with qualitative research that emerged from a pastoral care ministry inside an immigrant family detention facility. The voices of these Central American women and children seeking asylum serve to contextualize, localize, humanize, and testify to the unjust reality of mass migration. The proposal endorses a missional hermeneutic that prioritizes allyship with asylum seekers as the church’s witness to the justness of God.

Sanctuary for Asylum Seekers: Revisiting the Religious Principle and Practice of Refuge in the Church

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-309
Author(s):  
Leo Guardado
Keyword(s):  
Canon Law ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Code Of Canon Law ◽  
Pastoral Response ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
The Church

This article argues for a reconsideration of the tradition of church sanctuary. First, I analyze the reality of Central American asylum seekers who are systematically denied protection in the United States. Second, using the earliest Christian references to sanctuary from the fourth century, I show that sanctuary was a religious and pastoral response to persecuted persons fleeing violence and death. Third, I trace the process that led to sanctuary’s disappearance from the Code of Canon Law in the late twentieth century, and argue that there is a need to reintroduce sanctuary as a religious principle and practice of the church.

Immigration Detention Reborn, 1981–1982

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Carl Lindskoog
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Detention ◽  
Mass Migration

Immigration detention was formally reborn in the United States when the Reagan administration reinstituted a policy of detention in 1981. And at that moment, the new detention policy applied exclusively to Haitians. Chapter 3 documents how and why Haitian asylum seekers were the first targets of the revived detention program; it considers how the Reagan administration’s concerns about surging numbers of asylum seekers and anxiety over mass migration to the United States also influenced its decision to redeploy immigration detention. Finally, this third chapter documents the government’s early efforts to construct its new detention system and the movement that emerged to resist it.

Debacles on the Border: Five Decades of Fact-Free Immigration Policy

2019 ◽  
Vol 684 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Durand ◽  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Undocumented Mexican Migration ◽  
Trump Administration

Since 1987, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has compiled extensive data on the characteristics and behavior of documented and undocumented migrants to the United States, and made them publicly available to users to test theories of international migration and evaluate U.S. immigration and border policies. Findings based on these data have been plentiful, but have also routinely been ignored by political leaders, who instead continue to pursue policies with widely documented, counterproductive effects. In this article, we review prior studies based on MMP data to document these effects. We also use official statistics to document circumstances on the border today, and draw on articles in this volume to underscore the huge gap between U.S. policies and the realities of immigration. Despite that net positive undocumented Mexican migration to the United States ended more than a decade ago, the Trump administration continues to demand the construction of a border wall and persists in treating Central American arrivals as criminals rather than asylum seekers, thus transforming what is essentially a humanitarian problem into an immigration crisis.

scholarly journals Is There 'Mass Migration' in Canada?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Usha George ◽  
Tearney McDermott
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Great Debate ◽  
Canadian Population ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Opinion Polls ◽  
Opinion Polls

Immigration in Canada has been a topic of great debate in recent years. Canadian public opinion polls have raised problematic issues around immigration and the increasing diversity of the Canadian population. Some feel that Canada accepts far too many immigrants from diverse backgrounds, too many refugees from crisis-ridden parts of the world and allows large numbers of asylum seekers from the United States.

Documenting the undocumented: Valeria Luiselli’s refugee children archives

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-230
Author(s):  
Oana Sabo
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Refugee Children ◽  
Archival Theory ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Compositional Method

This article reads comparatively Valeria Luiselli’s essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and her novel Lost Children Archive in the context of critical debates about the uses of archival documents in contemporary literature and in relation to archival theory (Foucault, Derrida, Farge). Both texts draw on a wealth of archival materials to explore the causes of mass migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States since 2014, and especially the plight of refugee children who disappear in the desert, in detention centres, and through deportation. I argue that these texts use the archive as a compositional method to confront restricted representations of Mexican and Central American migration with a plethora of documents that propose a historical and transnational perspective. The proliferation of archives stands in for missing evidence and foregrounds multiple points of view on the refugee children, compelling readers to imagine their migrant journeys more vividly.

Refugees in the United States and the Politics of Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-180
Author(s):  
Stephanie J. Nawyn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Border Enforcement ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real Nature

Labeling a refugee migration as a “crisis” is not an inevitable action to large-scale forced migration. It is a choice that is steeped in racial, gender, and colonialist politics. The choice to label a situation a crisis might have underlying it good intentions for highlighting migrants’ dire situations, but it can also have negative discursive (and potentially material) consequences. Discursively, labeling a crisis could justify a more defensive stance than a humanitarian approach, leading to greater border enforcement and less willingness to provide protection and assistance to refugees. This chapter outlines some of the negative responses that are typical in US discourse on refugees, and how those responses tend to misinterpret the real nature of refugee crises, using the situation of Central American asylum seekers entering the United States in the mid-2010s as an exemplar.

scholarly journals Latino and Central American Asylum Seekers in the United States of America During the Trump Administration

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (Especial) ◽  
pp. 406-420
Author(s):  
Sina Mohammadi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
United States Government ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Us ◽  
States Government ◽  
Political Approach ◽  
The Right

The purpose of the article was to examine the Trump administration's asylum policy applied to Central American and Latino applicants. The United States has grappled with refugee problems in recent decades, and in 2018 Trump signed an executive order to detain families seeking to immigrate to the United States without separating from one another. With this decree, a new approach was formed in the policy of the United States government, which emphasizes the severe restrictions on the entry of asylum seekers and immigrants. In the methodological, it is a documentary research close to hermeneutics. It is concluded that, although the United States government has cited security concerns as an excuse to restrict the entry of asylum seekers, especially Latinos from Central American countries, this political approach is in conflict with the national legislation of the United States that stipulates that any citizen Foreigner arriving at any point along the US border, or at official exit points, has the right to apply for asylum. Furthermore, the implementation of such a policy is contrary to the end of the 1951 Convention, which focuses on the protection of refugees without distinction.

scholarly journals México como tercer país ¿seguro? Instrumentalización del derecho de asilo

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Elisa Ortega Velázquez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
American People ◽  
International Protection ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Right

This paper aims to argue that the United States has instrumentalized the right to asylum by converting Mexico into a “third ‘safe’ country” to divert Central American asylum seekers to Mexican territory and evade its international protection obligations. The methodological design is deductive, that is, such theorization was reached through documentary sources. Even with the limitations of the method, the paper is innovative because it analyzes migration management from critical legal studies and legal biopolitics by approaching securitization of migration through a genealogy of the discourses used by the United States to externalize its borders to Mexico, which have as their most recent strategy the “third ‘safe’ country” agreement. The consequences are the distortion of the right to asylum by removing its main protection: the non-refoulement principle and, in consequence, to let die Central American people fleeing from persecution and death geographies.

Militarizing Migration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna M. Loyd ◽  
Alison Mountz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Migration Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Military Facilities

Chapter 2 discusses the politics of deterring asylum seekers by exploring the simultaneous efforts to find new detention space for Cubans and Haitians who had already arrived in the United States and to develop “contingency” space in the event of another mass migration. This chapter focuses on the pivotal role of military bases in the ad hoc creation of U.S. migration policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations. Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers who arrived in 1980 found themselves confined on separate military facilities from Florida to Wisconsin and Arkansas. The search and negotiations surrounding new places to detain reveal racialized imaginations and seemingly irrational investments in new places to detain. The deeply contingent and contested use of decommissioned military bases led ultimately to the search for more permanent detention space.

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