This article examines and reviews the impact of China’s household registration system, hukou, as a legal and administrative basis of the legal and social personhood of North Korean refugee (NKR) women in China and their children born to Chinese fathers. It argues that China’s stringent nationality policy, along with the hukou system, left not only NKR women but also their intermarriage children with the precarious status of “nonexistence.” Recent hukou reform efforts are expected to lift legal obstacles for the children of intermarried couples to obtain hukou without penalty. This change, however, does not signal a fundamental shift toward inclusive policy. Rather, it demonstrates the Chinese government’s increased control over the bodies of these children for the purpose of mitigating the impact of demographic change.

This study investigates the extent to which the benefit levels of the North Korean Defector Settlement Support System (NKDSSS) have changed and differentially impacted the various groups of North Korean Defectors (NKDs). It employs a historical approach to policy analysis and uses datasets compiled, summarized, and converted with the Consumer Price Index by the author. Findings suggest a portion of Unconditional Cash Transfers decreased through the first pro-work reform period (2005-2014) and Conditional Cash Transfers conditioned on job preparation decreased through the second pro-work reform period (2015-2019). The changes may generate a blind spot of poverty and enhance inequality among the NKDs. For the NKDSSS to accomplish its goals of promoting socio-economic integration of NKDs in South Korea and preparing for a peaceful Korean unification, supplemental policies are required.

Poles exhibit contrasting attitudes towards absent Muslim refugees and physically present Ukrainian labor immigrants. Both groups have been historically seen as “Significant Others,” potentially perilous to the nation. Today, however, Muslims are rejected, while Ukrainians are accepted. This situation can be attributed to historical, ethnic, political, social, and economic factors, all of which are discussed here. The ethnic, linguistic, and religious superhomogeneity of Polish society affects the approach to the “culturally distant” Muslim migrants who were cynically rejected by the right-wing populist authorities during the 2015 refugee crisis. Economic necessity justifies the acceptance of the Ukrainians, who are perceived as culturally close. It is argued here that within the category of Significant Others, it is necessary to distinguish between Distant/Absent/Hostile and Familiar/Present/Tolerated Significant Others.

This article addresses the issue of schooling for refugees, as members of a stateless nation, in the context of Karen refugees in Thailand. The authors used ethnographic methods of in-depth, semi-structured interviews and participant observation with over 250 residents of Mae La refugee camp. Our conceptual framework draws on theories of pedagogy for liberation and grassroots development. We found that, due to overlapping sources of authority with divergent visions of the future for refugee learners, the existential crisis of being members of a stateless nation is the most pressing issue for education to address. We suggest that a top-down approach to refugee education relying on technical solutions, while ignoring issues of history, power, and meaning-making, will ultimately fall short of being fundamentally transformative.

During the 2015 refugee crisis, hospitality for migrants was frequently invoked as a European value, in both secular and religious contexts. Hospitality as a valued principle varies from actual instances of hospitality, which involve conditions and moral expectations. This article examines expectations of morality in humanitarian church organizations’ responses to the refugee crisis, based on a case study of an open café project for refugees in a German metropolitan city. Notions of hosting, being a guest, choosing a home, arrival, and integration play significant roles in considerations about the organization for this regular event. The line between volunteers and visitors becomes increasingly blurred with time, but moral discourses focusing on language, translation, self-formation, and personhood recur and reinforce the distinction of host and guest.

The arrival of many Yemeni people on Jeju Island in 2018 to seek asylum became a mega-political issue in South Korea. This article investigates two questions. First, how and why have Yemeni asylum seekers suddenly become the focus of securitization concerns in South Korea? And second, how have these concerns affected the government’s responses? We argue that three key factors—the influence of media on the refugee crisis in Europe, the Yemenis’ race, gender, and religious background, and South Korea’s internal political and economic situation—have intersected with each other and produced the securitization of Yemeni migration. Amidst highly contested political debates on the protection of forced migrants in South Korea, the state has strictly controlled the border but showed contradictory refugee policies.

The definition of refugee status and the right to seek asylum is based on international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Statues of refugees removed the geographic and temporal restrictions of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, these international conventions have been widely accepted and ratified by 147 countries(as of September 2019). While the principles were established half a century ago,the actual practice of granting refugee status has shown variability in different parts of the world, with continuous changes and transformations. Although transfigurations in the political conjuncture and changes in the implementation of international law—as well as alternating policy trends in international politics—represent significant contexts and undercurrents for migration and refugee studies, there are social practices which cannot be sufficiently comprehended exclusively with static insights on laws, rules, or principles.