Refugee crisis

Lawfare Brief Reviews is pleased to note Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World (Oxford UP, forthcoming September 2017), by Paul Collier and Alexander Betts. Paul Collier is professor of economics at St.

The Middle East has been engulfed in chaos. Longstanding authoritarian regimes have been toppled; still other dictators have killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions in an effort to retain power. Iran’s Shiite proxy militias have spread throughout the region, fueling sectarianism and broadening the appeal of nihilistic Sunni Islamist jihadist groups. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Egypt—two longstanding pillars of Washington’s strategic architecture in the Middle East—have been shaken by economic troubles.

On Friday, President Donald Trump set into motion the fulfillment of one of his cornerstone campaign promises—restricting the entry of refugees and immigrants for the purposes of national security. Advocates for immigrant and refugee rights (and immigrants and refugees themselves) have taken to the streets and to the media, expressing their disappointment and fear, and they have also gone to court.

In a recent Brookings Institution report entitled “Cities and refugees: The German experience,” Bruce Katz, Luise Noring, and Nantke Garrelts warn that, in response to the refugee crisis,