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The purpose of this paper is to use Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital–Field–Habitus to explore how refugees, asylum seekers and migrants accumulate and mobilise social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital to find meaningful work in the Australian construction industry.

The paper reports the results of a survey of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who have either successfully or unsuccessfully searched for employment in the Australian construction industry.

The findings dispel widely held negative stereotypes of about this group by describing a highly capable workforce which could address significant skills shortages in the industry, while concurrently diversifying the workforce. However, it is found that refugees, asylum seekers and migrants face considerable barriers to finding meaningful employment in the construction industry. In circumventing these barriers, education institutions, charities and community-based organisations play an especially important role, alongside friends and family networks. They do this by helping refugees, asylum seekers and migrants accumulate and deploy the necessary capital to secure meaningful work in the construction industry. Disappointingly, it is also found that the construction industry does little to help facilitate capital accumulation and deployment for this group, despite the urgent need to address diversity and critical skills shortages.

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital–Field–Habitus, the findings make a number of new theoretical and practical contributions to the limited body of international research relating to the employment of refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers in the construction. The results are important because meaningful employment is widely accepted to be the single most factor in the successful integration of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants into a host society and the construction industry represents an important source of potential employment for them.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the world is experiencing the greatest refugee crisis in recorded history alongside increasingly restrictive limits on asylum seekers and refugees. In 2020, the US administration established a ceiling for refugees of 18,000 people, the lowest number on record, and only 11,814 refugees were admitted to the United States. The Biden administration has expressed commitments to building a coherent asylum and refugee system and quickly reversing recent detrimental policies. But the administration has cautioned how quickly change might occur, given how “agencies and processes…have been so gutted.”¹

2016 to 2020 included an overwhelming series of changes to laws and policies affecting asylum seekers, often with little documented planning or communication, wreaking severe effects on conditions for asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border. These changes had significant consequences for human rights, most notably the linchpin right of access to information. At the US–Mexico border, must the right “to seek, receive and impart information” be fulfilled in order to fulfill the right to asylum?

While information professionals are not expected to be experts in law, they are experts in understanding the link between access to information and the realization of justice and human rights. This chapter investigates the role of the information professional in the fulfillment of the right to asylum, particularly in the context of contemporary asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border, volatile information landscapes, and the legal and historical framework in the United States for seeking asylum.

Refugees and asylum seekers represent one of the most vulnerable social categories in Western societies. Their condition presumes facing social, economic and political factors, which often lead to their marginalisation within host society. Indeed, discrimination, lack of professional skills or employment, as well as the frustration related to the slow bureaucratic process of assessing their status, are all key elements in building a vulnerable profile. This chapter examines non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations policies in the resettlement processes of refugees and asylum seekers, highlighting their role in creating effective connections between humanitarian immigrants and host societies. This topic is explored from an intercultural perspective, considered by scholars as an appropriate approach to create and maintain constructive correlations between different levels of the framework. The concept of interculturality is observed within the context of support services provided by the humanitarian organisations, and so the effectiveness of intercultural practices as part of these activities.

Drawing on a comparison between issues concerning the resettlement of refugees in Australia and Italy, the role of intercultural communication is explored through an in-depth examination of intercultural practices and their application in this specific context. Humanitarian organisations, six from Australia and nine from Italy, provide the basis for a total of fifteen case studies. Analysing the practices relating to intercultural communication, this chapter explores their contribution to the resettlement process of humanitarian immigrants, with accent on providing valid instruments for enhancing their skills in dealing with vulnerability.

There are ongoing concerns that asylum seekers who have been tortured and who suffer trauma‐related mental disorders are being refused protection by countries in which they seek asylum. The study described here assessed a consecutive sample of recently arrived asylum seekers attending immigration agents in Sydney, Australia, using a series of structured measures. Participants were followed up to assess the outcomes of their refugee applications. The 73 participants, who had resided in Australia for an average of 4.3 months, reported high rates of torture (51%), and that group was at highest risk of suffering a combination of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression, a response pattern associated with substantial levels of psychosocial disability. Neither past torture nor current psychiatric disorder influenced the outcomes of refugee applications. The study raises further concerns that tortured asylum seekers and others with trauma‐related mental disorder may be at risk of repatriation to their countries of origin.

The influx of refugees and asylum-seekers over the past decade into the European Union creates challenges to the health systems of receiving countries in the preparedness and requisite adjustments to policy addressing the new needs of the migrant population. This study aims to examine and compare policies for access to health care and the related health outcomes for refugees and asylum-seekers settling both in the UK and Germany as host countries.

The paper conducted a scoping review of academic databases and grey literature for studies within the period 2010-2017, seeking to identify evidence from current policies and service provision for refugees and asylum-seekers in Germany and the UK, distilling the best practice and clarifying gaps in knowledge, to determine implications for policy.

Analysis reveals that legal entitlements for refugees and asylum-seekers allow access to primary and secondary health care free of charge in the UK versus a more restrictive policy of access limited to acute and emergency care during the first 15 months of resettlements in Germany. In both countries, many factors hinder the access of this group to normal health care from legal status, procedural hurdles and lingual and cultural barriers. Refugees and asylum-seeker populations were reported with poor general health condition, lower rates of utilization of health services and noticeable reliance on non-governmental organizations.

This paper helps to fulfill the need for an extensive research required to help decision makers in host countries to adjust health systems towards reducing health disparities and inequalities among refugees and asylum-seekers.

Refugees and asylum seekers worldwide face numerous barriers in accessing health systems. The evidence base regarding who and what helps refugees and asylum seekers facilitate access to and the navigation of the health system in the UK is small. This study aims to address this gap by analysing 14 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with refugees and asylum seekers of different countries of origin in the UK to identify where, when and how they came into contact with the health-care system and what the outcome of these interactions was.

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were chosen as the key method for this study. In total, 14 individual interviews were conducted. A trauma-informed research approach was applied to reduce the risk of re-traumatising participants.

The paper identifies key obstacles as well as “facilitators” of refugees’ and asylum seekers’ health-care experience in the UK and suggests that host families, friends and third-party organisations all play an important role in ensuring refugees and asylum seekers receive the healthcare they need.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative study in the UK that looks at comprehensive health journeys of refugees from their first encounter with health services through to secondary care, highlighting the important role along the way of facilitators such as host families, friends and third-party organisations.

This paper aims to raise awareness of the vulnerability of some refugees to various forms of abuse. It will relate the forms of abuse described in No Secrets to the situation of refugees and asylum seekers in general and will then focus on three groups of refugees who may be especially vulnerable. Recommendations to reduce the vulnerability of refugees are included.

Pre- and post-immigration trauma and stress make refugees a particularly vulnerable group in terms of mental health and well-being. The purpose of this paper is to describe a listening project undertaken in Plymouth, UK, which sought the views of 17 service users (n=12) and staff (n=5) from four local support organisations, for people with refugee and asylum seeker status and those with diverse cultural backgrounds. Aims of the project were to expand Western-centric understandings regarding beneficial support and the promotion of good mental health and well-being in this population.

Responses were subjected to thematic analysis, co-conducted with a service user. Participants were asked about their personal understandings of mental health and well-being and what supports or hinders well-being.

The findings enabled the development of a model incorporating 10 threads which support and 9 holes that can hinder well-being.

The relatively small numbers of participants compared with the numbers of asylum seekers and refugees in Plymouth may not be fully representative of the general population in Plymouth and the UK.

Despite increasing cultural diversity within the UK population, available mental health services exist mainly as developed from a Western psychological model of mental distress and treatment. This research provides services with a more informed understanding of mental health for asylum seekers and refugees. As such it is of value towards future service design in Plymouth and the UK. Findings also contributed to a successful funding bid to set up a peer-led support project in the city.

The literature tends to use ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’ interchangeably, creating uncertainty about the mental health of asylum seekers. However, asylum seekers occupy a unique position in British society which differentiates them from people with refugee status and which may have implications for their mental health. For example, ‘asylum seekers’ are supported and accommodated in dispersal areas under the National Asylum Support Service and they are not entitled to work. This mixed‐methods study investigated asylum seekers' symptoms of psychological distress, using mental health screening questionnaires (N = 29) and asylum seekers' subjective experiences of the asylum process, its potential impacts on their mental health, and participants' suggestions for tackling mental health needs, using in‐depth interviews (N = 8). Asylum seekers, refugees and practitioners working with asylum seekers were consulted from the outset regarding the cultural sensitivity of the measures used. Given the potential limitations of using ‘idioms of distress’ across cultures, interview data provided rich descriptive accounts which helped locate the mental health needs that the asylum seekers experienced in the specificities of each participant's social context. Asylum seekers originated from 13 countries. The results revealed that psychological distress is common among asylum seekers (for example anxiety and post‐traumatic stress), but so are post‐migratory living difficulties (for example accommodation, discrimination, worry about family back home, not being allowed to work). They also report mixed experiences of health and social care services. These results suggest that asylum seekers' unique social position may affect their mental health. Implications for practice are presented and potential limitations highlighted.

This review aims to examine the literature on refugees’ and asylum seekers’ resilience, its historical evolution, key principles, assumptions and recommendations, while focusing on the Canadian context.

A narrative literature review has been applied to this manuscript. This approach allows the integration of a wide scope of literature and perspectives, from academic literature to grey literature (e.g. governmental reports and dissertations). Nevertheless, the limitations of this type of review were also discussed.

In spite of the gaining popularity of the resilience lens, which emphasizes an individual’s ability to overcome adversities and stressful events, more work is required for its effective integration into health practice, programs and policies, particularly as it relates to refugees’ and asylum seekers’ mental health care.

Careful consideration of refugees’ and asylum seekers’ mental health needs and Canadian mental health service delivery and policies is a critical first step in reaching such a goal.