Exploring risky health behaviors and vulnerability to sexually transmitted diseases among transnational undocumented labor migrants from Bangladesh: a qualitative study.

BACKGROUND: In Bangladesh, remittances constitute a substantial portion of the country's foreign exchange earnings and serve as a primary source of income. However, a considerable number of Bangladeshi citizens reside overseas without proper documentation, exposing them to significant challenges such as limited access to healthcare and socioeconomic opportunities. Moreover, their irregular migration status often results in engaging in risky health behaviors that further exacerbate their vulnerability. Hence, this study aimed to investigate the risky health behavior and HIV/STI susceptibility of Bangladeshi irregular international migrants residing across the globe with undocumented status. METHODS: Using a qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological Approach (IPA), 25 illegal migrants were interviewed who are currently living illegally or returned to their home country. The author used a thematic approach to code and analyze the data, combining an integrated data-driven inductive approach with a deductive approach. Concurrent processing and coding were facilitated by employing the Granheim model in data analysis. RESULTS: The study identified four risky health behaviors among irregular Bangladeshi migrants: hazardous living conditions, risky jobs, suicidal ideation, and tobacco consumption. Additionally, the authors found some HIV/STI risk behavior among them including engaging in unprotected sex, consuming alcohol and drugs during sexual activity, and having limited access to medical facilities. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study can be used by health professional, governments, policymakers, NGOs, and concerned agencies to develop welfare strategies and initiatives for vulnerable undocumented migrant workers.

Accidental traffickers: qualitative findings on labour recruitment in Ethiopia.

BACKGROUND: The growth of labour migration and associated risks of human trafficking and exploitation remain significant global human rights and health challenges. There is increasing policy interest in addressing structural determinants of adverse migration outcomes such as migrants' use of informal employment recruiters. In Ethiopia, "safe migration" policies have introduced regulations for registered private employment agencies and penalties for anyone else placing migrants into work overseas. Yet migrants continue to use informal facilitators who are often demonised as traffickers without evidence of their motivations, experiences or perceptions. We conducted qualitative interviews with 28 informal facilitators as part of a study into how recruitment practices shape risks for female migrants seeking domestic work in the Middle East and Gulf States. We present the realities of irregular recruitment on the ground, and how these practices are affected by policies that dichotomise recruiters into legal/safe and illegal/unsafe categories. RESULTS: We identified four main themes. First, arranging migration from rural areas differs from in the capital, Addis Ababa, where laws and regulations originate. Outside Addis Ababa, registration was difficult for facilitators to arrange, with little incentive to do so due to its lack of importance to prospective migrants. Second, the ability to circumvent legal requirements was considered an advantage of informal facilitators because it reduced costs and expedited migrants' departure. Third, facilitators did not work alone but operated in long "chains" of diverse actors. This meant migrants' safety was not determined by any given individual, but spread across numerous people involved in sending a migrant abroad, some of whom might be registered and others not. And finally, facilitators did not believe they could realistically safeguard migrants once they were outside of Ethiopia and working under different laws and employers. CONCLUSIONS: Findings from this study add to a growing body of work demonstrating the diversity of people involved in the migration process, and consequent oversimplification of popular policy solutions. A more effective approach might be to constructively engage informal facilitators and identify ways they could assist with referring migrant workers to registered agencies and safe employment, rather than criminalising their participation.

Legal Status and Fertility Patterns: Regulation-Induced Disruption Among Previously Undocumented Immigrant Women in Italy.

We explore, using a unique survey dataset containing retrospective information on immigrants' legal status, the relationship between previous irregular experience-from arrival up to the first residence permit achievement-and fertility patterns among non-EU immigrant women in Italy. While competing hypotheses explaining migrants' fertility behaviour have been recurrently offered, there is a substantial lack of knowledge on the role of undocumented experience as a contextual barrier in shaping international migrants' family formation processes. We adopt a life-course approach, employing event history analysis and Poisson regression modelling, to investigate how irregularity among immigrant women intertwines with the timing of the first childbirth and the total number of births occurred in Italy. We find that irregular experience-as a time-dependent process-delays the transition to childbirth post-migration. Furthermore, having experienced irregular status reduces completed fertility, offering few possibilities to catch-up over the life-course with fertility levels of women continuously having the legal status. Findings suggest long-lasting effects of irregular status and the potential disruption of migrant's fertility induced by migration policies, admission systems, and regulation factors. The reduced possibility of legal entry channels and lack of migration policies for planning and managing migration into Italy may thus have an impact on family formation trajectories among international immigrant women.

Irregular migration in the time of counter-smuggling.

This special issue of Trends in Organized Crime brings together recent empirical research on migrant smuggling. Challenging the overemphasis on 'organized crime' and criminal networks that has long characterized mainstream discussions on smuggling, the contributions refocus our attention towards critical but underexamined dynamics present in the facilitation of irregular migration in a variety of geographic contexts, and shed light on the roles lesser examined elements in smuggling like race, ethnicity, gender, sex and intimacy play in irregular migration.

The Two Emergencies of Migrant-Related Policies in Italy During the First Wave of COVID-19: the Spread of the Virus and the Workforce Shortages.

Italy was the first European country touched by COVID-19 and one of the most severely affected, with a death toll that overtook China's by mid-March 2020. As a result, lockdown measures aiming to mitigate - and eventually interrupt - the spread of COVID-19 proliferated during the first wave of the pandemic. The vast majority of these concerned the resident population, regardless of their status or country of origin, and mainly involved the closure of public offices and proscription of private activities with the aim of reducing mobility and social and physical contacts. Only a few concerned the foreign population and arriving irregular migrants. This article analyses migrant-related policy measures taken by the Italian government during the first wave of the pandemic that aimed to prevent infection and reduce the impact of COVID-19 among the population. These measures addressed two emergencies: the spread of COVID-19 that hit the resident population hard, regardless of origin or nationality, and the workforce shortages in some key economic sectors with a high number of irregular migrant workers. The former aimed at containing the spread of the virus (sections 4 and 5) and targeted foreigners already residing in Italy as well as irregular migrants arriving along the Mediterranean route; the latter aimed at addressing workforce shortages (section 6) as a result of borders that were closed to external seasonal migration. This article is a contribution to the debate on changes to migration and migrant policy, and how these impacted on migration and foreign populations during the pandemic.

Migrant Women's Health and Safety: Why Do Ethiopian Women Choose Irregular Migration to the Middle East for Domestic Work?

BACKGROUND: Low-wage labour migration is an increasing determinant of global health, associated with risks of exploitation, abuse, and unsafe conditions. Despite efforts to prevent irregular migration and initiatives to warn individuals of the risks of trafficking, many migrants still opt for irregular channels, particularly women seeking jobs as domestic workers. Ethiopia is one of the largest source countries for female migrants entering the domestic labour market in the Middle East. This qualitative study explored migration decision making by Ethiopian women traveling to the Middle East for domestic labour, focusing on the use of irregular channels. METHODS: We conducted semistructured interviews with policy stakeholders, migration recruiters, and returnee domestic workers. RESULTS: We identified three main themes that help explain decision making by female migrants and their communities. First, women were not always clear whether they were using legally approved processes, particularly because of the range of individuals involved in arranging migration plans. Second, irregular migration was seen to be quicker and easier than regular migration procedures. Third, study participants believed the risks between irregular and regular migration were similar. CONCLUSION: Our study highlights challenges associated with antitrafficking initiatives that discourage irregular migration and suggests new perspectives to address the health risks linked to labour migration.

The prevalence of drug use and illicit trafficking: A descriptive cross sectional study of irregular migrant returnees in Nigeria.

The study assessed the prevalence of drug use and drug trafficking among Nigerian returned migrants from Libyan detention centers in the transit or destination along the Mediterranean irregular migration route. This is a descriptive cross sectional study. The study population was restricted to migrants who returned from May 2017 and April 2018. A total of 382 (238 male and 144 female) were contacted and provided information for this study. These participants were recruited using judgemental and snowballing techniques. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection were used. Results showed that 61.3% of the respondents used drugs during their migration. Drug use was predominant among those in the younger age group (26-30) accounting for 24.9%. The study revealed reasons for respondents' drug use which were as a result of migration frustration and trauma, or compulsion. The findings on drug trafficking revealed that 15.7% of the respondents engaged in drug trafficking during their migration, and 28% of the respondents that trafficked drugs had previous experience of arrest or detention by law enforcement agent (in Libya). Findings from this study showed high prevalence of drug use among irregular migrants. Experience of migration frustration and trauma were among the factors that contribute to drug use among the migrant population. The study also discovered that some of the migrants who got into illicit drug trafficking were to raise money for survival while some were compelled into the business. The high prevalence of drug use among irregular migrants from findings draw attention to the important implications for public health and social security, while drug trafficking in existence among migrants calls for need of social reintegration.

Migration infrastructures and the production of migrants' irregularity in Japan and the United Kingdom.

The article examines the migration infrastructures and pathways through which migrants move into, through and out of irregular status in Japan and the UK and how these infrastructures uniquely shape their migrant experiences of irregularity at key stages of their migration projects. Our analysis brings together two bodies of migration scholarship, namely critical work on the social and legal production of illegality and the impact of legal violence on the lives of immigrants with precarious legal status, and on the role of migration infrastructures in shaping mobility pathways. Drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews with irregular and precarious migrants in Japan and the UK collected over a ten-year period, this article develops a three-pronged analysis of the infrastructures of irregularity, focusing on infrastructures of entry, settlement and exit, casting a comparative light on the mechanisms that produce precarious and expendable migrant lives in relation to access to labour and labour conditions, access and quality of housing and law enforcement, and how migrants adapt, cope, resist or eventually are overpowered by them.

Disciplining migration aspirations through migration-information campaigns: A systematic review of the literature.

In the past few years, governmental agencies have developed a diverse repertoire of migration-management measures to steer migration flows and discipline unwanted migration. Migration-information campaigns have become a prominent tool aimed at communicating directly to migration aspirations of the targeted population in transit and sending countries. Through these information campaigns the geographical locus of control is shifted toward where the receiving state seeks to steer migration flows. This review paper is a research synthesis on literature engaging with migration-information campaigns. The study is based on 17 peer-reviewed journal articles from the years 2010-2020. Articles were coded based on discipline, type of research, research perspective, geographic origin and focus of the campaigns, objectives and rationale of the campaigns, tools and methods used in those campaigns, campaign funding, actor constellations, and a general assessment of each article. Findings from this study identify prominent trends as well as blind spots in the current research and indicate that there is still little research available on information campaigns concerning irregular migration, and even fewer studies report on their effectiveness. By implication future research is advised to focus on empirical studies on the impact of information campaigns on migrants' aspirations.

Too precarious to walk: an integrated "three delays" framework for modeling barriers to maternal health care and birth registration among stateless persons and irregular migrants in Malaysia.

This study extends Thaddeus and Maine's (1994) "three delays" framework to model the interrelated barriers to maternal health care and birth registration. We focus on stateless persons and irregular migrants, populations that are especially at risk of being "left behind" in United Nations member states' efforts to "provide legal identity to all" as part of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Sabah, Malaysia, we model delays in accessing maternal health care and birth registration as an integrated, cyclical process. We identify the political and legal barriers that stateless or migrant families confront while deciding to make institutional contact (Phase I), identifying and reaching health or registering institutions (Phase II), and receiving adequate and appropriate treatment (Phase III). We find that exclusion from one system raises the risk of exclusion from the other, resulting in a range of negative consequences, including increased health risks, governments' impaired ability to monitor population health, and the perpetuation of intergenerational cycles of legal exclusion.

Surveillance at sea: The transactional politics of border control in the Aegean.

The relationship between vision and action is a key element of both practices and conceptualizations of border surveillance in Europe. This article engages with what we call the 'operative vision' of surveillance at sea, specifically as performed by the border control apparatus in the Aegean. We analyse the political consequences of this operative vision by elaborating on three examples of fieldwork conducted in the Aegean and on the islands of Chios and Lesbos. One of the main aims is to bring the figure of the migrant back into the study of border technologies. By combining insights from science and technology studies with border, mobility and security studies, the article distinguishes between processes of intervention, mobilization and realization and emphasizes the role of migrants in their encounter with surveillance operations. Two claims are brought forward. First, engaging with recent scholarly work on the visual politics of border surveillance, we circumscribe an ongoing 'transactional politics'. Second, the dynamic interplay between vision and action brings about a situation of 'recalcitrance', in which mobile objects and subjects of various kinds are drawn into securitized relations, for instance in encounters between coast guard boats and migrant boats at sea. Without reducing migrants to epiphenomena of those relations, this recalcitrance typifies the objects of surveillance as both relatable as well as resistant, particularly in the tensions between border control and search and rescue.

Cycles of judicial and executive power in irregular migration.

This article argues that power struggles between judiciaries and executives are fuelled by tensions of securitisation, border control and human rights over the issue of irregular migration. The article juxtaposes three paradigm court cases to render the argument concrete, focusing on two Australian High Court decisions (M70 v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and CPCF v. Minister for Immigration and Border Protection & Anor) and one decision from the European Court of Human Rights (Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy). An examination of these cases reveals each step of this cycle: the executive attempts to produce a buffer to avoid or minimise migrants' protections and judicial review, yet such manoeuvring is countered by the judges. Following this, new steps of the cycle occur: governments display disappointment to courts' interventions in an effort to discredit the exercise of judicial power while the judiciaries maintain the focus on the rule of law. And so the cycle continues. The key argument of this paper rests on the paradox resulting from the executive's attempts to curb judicial intervention, because such attempts actually empower judiciaries. Comparing different jurisdictions highlights how this cyclical power struggle is a defining element between these two arms of power across distinct legal-geographical boundaries. By tracing this development in Australia and in Europe, this article demonstrates that the argument has global significance.