Migrants Refugees & Development

Catalog description

This course provides students with the opportunity to consider the implications of global population movements – 258 million in 2017, exclusive of internal migrants – and the events they reflect. We examine internal and external migration flows, their political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental causes and consequences. Moreover, we consider whether migrants may be an engine of development, a hindrance, or both. Success stories of migrant integration, upward mobility and thriving businesses go alongside with tales of discrimination, crowded slums and refugee camps where disease is rampant, education is scarce, and youth widen the ranks of the unemployed and revert to crime as a way of living and violence as a means of surviving. Based on migration theories and case studies, this course aims at understanding these patterns and exploring how the pace of migration may be slowed and conditions improved in order for migrant populations to better integrate their new societies and become positive agents of change.