Forced Multi-Stage Migration: The Decision-Making of Sociological Refugees

• In Event: 20862 - Section on International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Migration Aspirations and Decision-Making

Abstract

Forced migration journeys are typically years long processes fraught with various precarities, including, but not limited to, precarious legal status(es), access to education and employment, where to find financial, material and social support. Forced migrants must make difficult decisions of whether to wait for the limited chance of resettlement, remain indefinitely in the country of asylum, return home, or attempt to move further independently. While there is a growing literature that investigates clandestine refugee journeys to seek asylum in Europe, there is less research on the migration journeys of those who use ‘legal’ migration channels to settle in the Global North. I use the analytic category of sociological refugees to interview Iraqis displaced in the years following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the subsequent occupation, and ensuing sectarian war who settled in Canada as refugees, economic migrants, and family migrants. These interviews reveal the strategies that this group used over the changing course and conditions of their years-long displacement. Drawing from the from the new economics of displacement and stepwise international migration theories, I outline the involuntary multi-stage international migration trajectory that sociological refugees take to secure permanent residence in Canada.

Author

• Alicia Poole, McGill University