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This paper aims to understand the discrepancy between Germany’s immediate positive response to the so-called “Europe 2015's refugee crisis“ and the strict asylum legislation adopted in Germany in the following year.

The discrepancy is attributed to external and internal forces. The external force is Germany’s obligation to adhere to the Common European Asylum System. The internal force is the role of the different policy actors. The paper focuses on the role of the media as an example of a private policy actor. Through adopting the theory of the social construction of target populations, the paper studies how the media constructs “asylum seekers”, the target of the new asylum legislation. The role of the media is analyzed using the methodology of qualitative content analysis of a selected number of newspaper articles.

The majority of the studied articles problematized receiving and hosting refugees and focused on the reason behind migration differentiating between asylum seekers fleeing conflict areas and all others who might be abusing the asylum channel. The findings of the content analysis, as such, resonate with the amendments that focused on facilitating the integration of accepted “refugees” but restricted further entry. As such, it could be argued that these findings explain the influence of the media on the amendments and as such provide an explanation to the discrepancy between the initial response and the amendments.

The analysis focused on one newspaper. The findings, as such, are not representative. The aim is only to provide an example of how the German media dealt with the refugee crisis and to suggest using the theory chosen by the paper to analyze the link between asylum legislation and the construction of asylum seekers. To understand how asylum legislation is influenced by how asylum seekers are constructed, more studies are needed. Such studies could analyze the role played by other media outputs and/or the role played by other policy actors in constructing the target of the policy.

The media’s response is based on analyzing a sample of newspaper articles published by a German newspaper following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. Accordingly, the findings represent an original endeavor to understand how the media reacted to the crisis.

Uncontrollable movement of people across international borders is one of most pressing contemporary challenge encountered by nation-states. Their response to this challenge is often rooted on a reconceptualisation of (in)security from a state-centric to a non-state-centric one. This has been the case with Australia where insecurity from asylum seekers, or what is referred to as the ‘boat people’, dominating the country's discourse on protecting its borders. Such conceptions are rooted on historical anxieties from ‘foreigners’, resulting in exclusionary policies of ‘White Australia’ to recent assertions of exclusive sovereignty over the refugee intake. In this context, while reviewing government documents, reports and other secondary sources, the chapter examines Australia's policy towards asylum seekers domestically as well as at the regional level, while placing them within the broader debate between deterrence and human rights. The chapter is significant as it provides an important case study of the inherent contradictions that come into light in a nation-state's response towards refugees on the one hand and undocumented arrivals, in this case, the ‘boat people’ on the other. This chapter provides analytical support to the primary assertion that while Australia has been an active international player regarding refugee issues, there is bipartisan exclusivity and hard-handedness towards asylum seekers.

In this article focused upon the UK context, the authors sought to better understand how political elites shaped public debate to reinforce rather than challenge the hostile policy environment for those seeking asylum.

The authors undertook a political claims analysis (Koopmans and Statham, 1999) focussing on a venue that has been pivotal in shaping the discourse around asylum issues in the UK, namely the print media. This work adopts a theoretical frame informed by the work of Stuart Hall to uncover the extent to which debates on asylum during the key period of the refugee emergency in Europe were shaped by political elites.

The study’s findings reveal the extent to which political elites acted as “primary definers” of the “crisis” and utilised that position to cast those arriving in Europe as a threat to be managed.

This research offers a contemporary worked example of political claims analysis in a topical subject area that colleagues across disciplines and contexts may find informative for their own research agendas.

This article aims to explore the engagement of refugees and asylum seekers (RAS) in informal and precarious jobs from a civil society actors' perspective. Despite a burgeoning literature on refugee integration and a focus on institutional integration programmes, little is known about the early insertion of RAS into informal and precarious employment as an alternative to subsidised integration programmes, when these are available.

This article draws on rich qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews with social workers, volunteers and other professionals supporting migrants.

Data analysis shows that migrants' insertion in informal jobs and their rejection of integration programmes may be the result of people's need to access financial capital to cover actual and future needs. Although such an engagement may be criticised for hampering RAS’ integration, it can be seen as an important source of agency against insecurity surrounding one's legal status.

This article highlights the importance of legal status precarity in shaping informal workers' agency and perceptions of them, opening up a debate on the relevance of informal work in terms of long-term integration and future migration trajectories.

This paper aims to identify health-care entitlements that exist for asylum seekers with chronic non-communicable disease (CNCD) that promote their health and self-care, and to explore health policies, initiatives and programmes with the potential to foster self-care in this populace.

Narrative review of literature conducted by searching EMBASE, CINAHL, WEB OF SCIENCE and PSYCINFO databases for articles published from 2010 to 2021. Included articles focussed on policies, programmes or initiatives with the potential to promote health in adult asylum seekers residing in high-income countries. Studies inclusive of other migrant groups such as undocumented migrants and those with mental health conditions were excluded. Eleven studies fitting the inclusion criteria were assessed against the study objectives.

Free access to health-care services and pharmaceutical products, free access to food banks and supermarket model food banks, English and cooking lessons, community integration training sessions and culturally competent health-care workers were found to promote health and self-care. There is little research on self-care and health promotion in adult asylum seekers with CNCD. CNCDs represent high burden of disease in asylum seekers but have a low priority in reported research.

This narrative review is the first to explicitly focus on asylum seekers in high-income countries with CNCD, excluding mental health conditions, and to explore initiatives, programmes and policies that enhance health promotion to facilitate self-care in this populace.

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.

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.

The UK has long heralded itself as ‘beacon of hope’ for those who need it most: people seeking sanctuary from persecution. Recently, this mythology has been exposed as just that – a myth – replaced by the reality that the UK is in fact a hostile environment for people seeking asylum. Although this is increasingly publicly acknowledged, interventions and support are generally maintained by grassroots organisations, struggling law firms and dedicated activists – many of whom themselves receive limited or no support. This chapter charts the development of an activist strategy on which the authors collaborated to counteract the harms of the British asylum system. The Right to Remain Asylum Navigation Board was produced to ensure consistent, accurate information about the process of seeking asylum, but also as a means to bring together people who often experience internalised feelings of failure when asylum claims are rejected. A form of consciousness raising (CR), and developed from working with people seeking asylum, the authors aimed to create a tool that supports people to recognise they are not failures: they are embedded in a system which is set up for people to fail. Here, the authors outline how and why we did so, and address the value of moving criminological research into activist intervention to support groups who are most structurally disenfranchised.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the benefits of co-creation methods when designing information and communications technology (ICT) solutions to aid migrant integration by outlining the process of co-creating an innovative platform with migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, and non-governmental organisation representatives and public service providers.

The study used mixed methods and was divided into three stages. Researchers carried out an extensive literature review and case studies, whilst data were collected via surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviews.

The paper demonstrates that co-creation methods are essential in the development of ICT solutions for vulnerable groups like migrants, asylum seekers and refugees enabling researchers to counter the adverse effects of eurocentric bias by improving inclusiveness and trust in the platform vis-à-vis migrant users.

The research reflects on the development of an innovative platform, created and validated in situ with migrants and other end-users. It provides an often-unexplored analysis of the link between methodological approaches in ICT tools development (co-creation), and real-life impacts for migrants in terms of mitigating digital exclusion and white ethnocentric bias. The article complements two whitepapers and other policy briefs written on the results of this research that have informed EC policy-making in the area of migration, including the EU action plan on integration and inclusion 2021–2027.