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Large-scale displacement can trigger instability and feelings of threat in refugee host countries. But in certain cases, it can also uncover deep wells of solidarity that create space for generous policy responses. This report explores factors that can foster and erode public support for forced migrants, drawing examples from attitudes towards Syrians in Turkey, Venezuelans in Colombia, and Ukrainians in Europe.
The pandemic and move to remote learning affected students across the United States, and certain groups—including the nation’s 5 million English Learners (ELs)—were hit particularly hard. At the same time, the federal government made unprecedented investments in public K-12 education to counter the pandemic’s adverse impacts. This issue brief explores the ways school districts have invested these funds to support ELs.
With millions of Ukrainians seeking safety in Europe, receiving countries are facing considerable pressure and also potential opportunities to benefit from this highly qualified population’s skills. This report explores displaced Ukrainians’ early employment outcomes, common challenges to finding jobs commensurate to their skills, and opportunities to more fully support their labor market integration.
Increasing equitable access to educational opportunities is a major focus for U.S. educators and others. For English Learners, the hands-on courses offered through career and technical education (CTE) programs can play an important role in helping them stay engaged in school, graduate, and get on a path to a career providing a family-sustaining wage. This report explores policies and practices to support their participation in CTE, as well as persistent barriers.
People displaced from Ukraine are finding work more rapidly in European countries than prior refugee cohorts. But uncertainty over how long they will stay, combined with hurdles such as language barriers, has meant many are prioritizing any job over the right job. This commentary examines how policymakers could address this waste of skills as they seek to fill pressing labor needs and facilitate deeper integration of the new arrivals.
Language access policies and services are critical to promoting the equitable participation of Dual Language Learners and their families in early childhood programs, yet there are persisting participation gaps. This webinar outlines federal and state efforts to implement language access policies in the early childhood field, opportunities to improve language services, and more.
Looking for some of the most often-sought information on global migration? This statistics-rich article draws on the most current data sources to offer a primer on international migration, highlighting its types, the size of the migrant population and growth over time, and major sending and receiving countries and regions. Beyond looking at labor and humanitarian migrants and international students, the article examines remittances and more.
As school districts across the United States move to allocate their federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, it is essential that they engage with multilingual and diverse community stakeholders, in part given English Learners have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. The track record suggests many districts are struggling to effectively engage these communities.
English Learners (ELs) in U.S. high schools often face unique challenges to navigating a path to graduation. This report examines the wide range of state policies that shape ELs’ education as they work toward high school completion—from the placement of newcomers to instructional design and graduation requirements. The report also presents opportunities for states to strengthen ELs’ access to a high-quality education.
European countries’ responses to the pandemic have been extraordinary in scope and volume, and strengthened appreciation for the role of robust welfare programs in helping individuals and communities weather challenges. This report explores the case for using the crisis to more permanently rethink European welfare states and whether the social-investment approach could serve as a tool for post-pandemic recovery in diverse, immigrant-receiving societies.
With COVID-19 likely to significantly reshape health-care systems in Europe and worldwide, there is a window of opportunity to test new strategies to tackle longstanding migrant health disparities, and ensure that structural changes accommodate the complex needs of diverse populations.
While the pandemic has had broad impacts across European societies, these have not been evenly felt. Many migrants and refugees have long faced health challenges, such as limited health-care eligibility and accessibility, and COVID-19 has threatened to deepen health disparities. This report explores how European countries have responded and what opportunities have emerged to tackle disparities in migrant health.
With COVID-19 likely to significantly reshape health-care systems in Europe and worldwide, speakers on this webinar reflect on the implications of the public-health crisis for migrant health and discuss promising innovations and strategies that ultimately could reduce the disparities in health care that already existed pre-pandemic for immigrants and other diverse populations—if undertaken in timely fashion.
Even as COVID-19 vaccination campaigns have picked up speed in Europe, economic uncertainty remains. Recently arrived refugees, migrant women, and other immigrants who faced labor market challenges before the pandemic have in many cases seen these challenges grow. This report explores the impact of the public-health crisis on migrants’ labor market integration and options for building inclusive pandemic recovery strategies.
Being there for one another is a fundamental response to adversity, but what happens when in-person interactions are limited in the interest of public health? This report explores the pandemic’s effects on social cohesion in Europe and North America, including its impact on bonds between and within diverse groups, on immigrant integration programming, and on volunteering and other forms of solidarity. It underscores the importance of planning for an inclusive recovery.
This MPI Europe webinar reflects on the implications of this current moment for European economies and societies and the role of immigration and immigrant integration policy, and highlights research from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre on the fiscal and demographic impacts of migration.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of education, and it is expected that English Learners (ELs) will suffer disproportionate impacts. In this webcast, panelists discuss how weaknesses in existing EL teacher education and professional development policies have played into schools’ uneven response to the pandemic. They also offer lessons for future reform.
The 2020–21 academic year is underway, but many U.S. schools, students, and families are still reeling from the rocky transition to remote learning that occurred months earlier, after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. For English Learners and students in immigrant families, many of the challenges are magnified. This policy brief examines how schools’ pandemic response is affecting these students and offers recommendations to help schools and districts support them in this period of uncertainty.
The fires that devastated the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos have further raised the stakes for the soon-to-be unveiled EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. If Moria persists as a concept—with asylum seekers prevented from onward movement elsewhere in Europe—this becomes an integral pillar of future EU asylum practice, whatever is written on paper, as this commentary explores.
A growing number of countries, particularly in Europe, have piloted or implemented refugee sponsorship programs in recent years. Yet there is limited evidence of how well these programs, which tap community members and civil society to take key roles in refugee resettlement, are working and how they can be improved. This issue brief explores how building monitoring and evaluation activities into sponsorship programs can help answer these and other critical questions.