The Danger of being a Young Female Migrant: A Case Study Female Refugees in Musina Town in South Africa

Several studies show that international migrants across the globe extremely face challenges upon their arrival in the host countries. This constant influx of international population movement is driven by factors such as escaping from poverty, seeking better livelihoods, or escaping from political upheavals and civil strife, such as wars. There have been several studies in South Africa that generally explored challenges faced by the international migrant youth but not necessarily on the gendered nature of migration. This study argues that migration affects males and females inversely. Thus this study aimed to contextually explore the danger of being a young female migrant by following a qualitative research approach using female refugees in Musina town as a case study. Nine participants were purposively and conveniently selected and semi-structured face-to-face interviews with open-ended questions were followed to collect data that is analysed thematically in this paper. The Nvivo software was used to manage and organise data. Findings reveal that young female migrants face challenges from the cross-bordering where they are at risk of being raped. Findings further show that upon their arrival in South Africa, female young migrants face challenges such as exclusion from basic health care services due to lack of immigration documents, sex work, and exploitation by local citizens as well as victimization by the police. The security at border posts should thus be tightened and the defence forces should jointly work with the police officials to deport female migrant youth who migrate illegally and stakeholders in South Africa should run educational programmes where the illegal immigrants would be educated about the risks of cross-boarding to South Africa without legal immigration permits.

Omicron will slow but not weaken German recovery

Significance Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann stated that the “recovery has been somewhat pushed back” by the impact of supply chain restrictions, the rising costs of raw materials and energy and the spread of the more transmissible Omicron COVID-19 variant. Impacts Higher taxes on carbon emissions and elevated electricity prices will slow economic growth in the short term. Opening more paths for legal immigration will become a crucial policy for tackling labour shortages over the coming years. Education and infrastructures will be the main recipients of new investment under Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government.

Reform of Germany’s economy faces serious challenges

Significance Arguably the greatest challenge for his three-party government, which includes the Greens and Free Democrats (FDP), will be addressing the need to transform Germany’s economy for the 21st century, particularly the digital and green transformations. Impacts The new government will seek to make legal immigration rules more flexible to offset the impact of Germany's ageing population. The global shortage of semiconductors will slow the recovery for Germany’s auto-mobile industry. Germany’s export dependence on China will make Berlin reluctant to adopt a hardline stance on Beijing.

Navigating the Family Law Provisions: Migrant Women’s Voices

This article considers the voices of migrant women engaging with Home Affairs to guarantee permanent residency (PR) in Australia after experiencing domestic violence. Data collected from longitudinal interviews with 20 participants were considered, with two participants’ stories analysed in detail. The research indicates how the legal immigration system is set up in a way that does not listen to women and disadvantages them. Particular issues pointed out include extended timelines, lack of concern for cultural differences and inconsistencies in the process, and how they affect women undermining the goal of the law, which is to protect migrants from sponsors’ violence.

Changing Americans’ Attitudes about Immigration: Using Moral Framing to Bolster Factual Arguments

How can the effect of appeals on immigration attitudes be bolstered? Partisans’ tendency to interpret facts consistent with their priors impedes evidence-based persuasion. Accordingly, most prior work finds that favorable information about the impact of immigration has little or no influence on policy preferences. Here we propose that appealing to moral values can bolster the persuasive power of information. Across three experiments (total N = 4,616), we find that an argument based on the value of in-group loyalty, which emphasized that immigrants are critical to America’s economic strength, combined with information about the economic impact of legal immigration, significantly increased Americans’ support for legal immigration. Additionally, we found a significant effect of the moral component of this message, whereas the effect of the information alone was of similar size but only marginally significant. These results show that moral arguments can strengthen the persuasiveness of informational appeals.

Reliable Sources? Correcting Misinformation in Polarized Media Environments

Providing corrective information can reduce factual misperceptions among the public but it tends to have little effect on people’s underlying attitudes. Our study examines how the impact of misinformation corrections is moderated by media choice. In our experiment, participants are asked to read a news article published by Fox News or MSNBC, each highlighting the positive economic impact of legal immigration in the United States. While the news content is held constant, our treatment manipulates whether participants are allowed to freely choose a media outlet or are randomly assigned. Our results demonstrate the importance of people’s ability to choose: While factual misperceptions are easily corrected regardless of how people gained access to information, subsequent opinion change is conditional on people’s prior willingness to seek out alternative sources. As such, encouraging people to broaden their media diet may be more effective to combat misinformation than disseminating fact-checks alone.

Back for Good

This article suggests that legalization and amnesty programmes have not been able to reduce undocumented migration in Malaysia for two reasons. First, the programmes merely serve as a registration tool that provides foreign workers with short-term work permits and as a surveillance tool to keep track of foreign workers. Second, the temporary work permits granted are no substitute for a migrant-labour management policy in addressing the acute shortage of low-skilled workers. Despite the introduction of these programmes, undocumented migrants have continued to exist because employers prefer to hire undocumented workers in their ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of costs, and the workers are dependent on their employers and agents as the gatekeepers of their legal immigration status. In 2016 and 2019, the Malaysian government introduced two reforms to its legalization and amnesty programmes: it eliminated outsourcing of the process in the Rehiring Programme (2016) and barred repatriated migrants from re-entering the country under the Back for Good amnesty programme (2019). Though these reforms have partially addressed the limitations of the previous programmes, they have not addressed the root cause of migrant labourers working without proper documentation.

Foreign-Born Population Growth, Negative Outgroup Contact, and Americans’ Attitudes Towards Legal and Unauthorized Immigration

Individual attitudes towards immigration are powerfully driven by ethnic context, that is, size of foreign-born population. We advance the literature by examining how the change (growth) in foreign-born population, in addition to its size (level), is related to two distinct outcomes: natives’ views on legal and unauthorized immigration. By analysing a probability US sample, we find that an increase in the state-level immigration population is positively related to Americans’ approval of a policy aimed at containing the flow of undocumented immigrants. The proportion of immigrants in a state, however, is not a significant predictor of support for such restrictive policy. With respect to legal immigration, neither the amount of recent change in, nor the size of, the immigration population matters. Our study provides strong evidence for contextual effects: net of compositional factors, a dynamic change in foreign-born population has an independent impact on how Americans view unauthorized, but not legal, immigration.

The Labor Market Impact of Immigration: Job Creation versus Job Competition

This paper studies the labor market effects of both documented and undocumented immigration in a search model featuring nonrandom hiring. As immigrants accept lower wages, they are preferably chosen by firms and therefore have higher job finding rates than natives, consistent with evidence found in US data. Immigration leads to the creation of additional jobs but also raises competition for natives. The dominant effect depends on the fall in wage costs, which is larger for undocumented immigration than it is for legal immigration. The model predicts a dominating job creation effect for the former, reducing natives’ unemployment rate, but not for the latter. (JEL E24, J15, J23, J31, J61, M51)