This book sheds light on the complex experiences of asylum seekers and refugees in Poland, against a local backdrop of openly anti-refugee political narratives and strong opposition to sharing the ...responsibility for, and burden of, asylum seekers arriving in the EU. Through a multidimensional analysis, it highlights the processes of forced migrant admission, reception and integration in a key EU frontier country that has undergone a rapid migration status change from a transit to a host country. The book examines rich qualitative material drawn from interviews conducted with forced migrants with different legal statuses and with experts from public administration at the central and local levels, NGOs, and other institutions involved in migration governance in Poland. It discusses both opportunities for and limitations on forced migrants’ adaptation in the social, economic, and political dimensions, as well as their access to healthcare, education, the labour market, and social assistance. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, policymakers, and practitioners in migration and asylum studies, social policy, public policy, international relations, EU studies/European integration, law, economics, and sociology.
Water scarcity and management of this problem are increasingly acknowledged in development policies as well as in adaptation and migration discourse. In South Mediterranean countries, insufficient ...water supplies in oases are the biggest limitation on yields of sufficient quantity and quality and increase in arable land, in short, the development of agriculture. Insufficient income from agriculture, when it is the main source of revenue, can push people to migrate. However, migration does not have to be the measure of last resort. Proper adaption to this limitation, including proactive migration, can reduce forced movements from this region in the future. The main aim of this paper is to identify and analyse household strategies, including migration, to cope with and adapt to the impact of environmental changes and limitations on agricultural development in the South Mediterranean. This paper is based on field research carried out in the El Faouar oasis area in Tunisia using a mixed-method approach. The results show that the inhabitants of El Faouar must cope with unforeseen crop destruction limiting their daily expenses by selling livestock or, in years of drought, migrating to look for additional sources of income. The results also show that local households try to increase their resistance to climate change, environmental limitations, and permanent migration by developing their agricultural capacity, provided they have additional resources from such endeavours as work outside El Faouar or remittances. Moreover, migration has become part of a wider process of socio-economic transformation in which people leave in order to cope with or adapt to environmental changes.
Northern Africa’s oases are fragile agroecosystems that, through environmental limitations on agricultural development, such as insufficient amounts of water for irrigation, have had to face a ...profound transformation of the environment on which livelihoods depend. A common strategy in such a situation is mobility. Though mobility responds to similar environmental limitations, the varying economic, social, demographic, and political contexts lead to divergent forms of it. Based on the mixed-method research conducted in the three oases located on the edge of the Sahara Desert (Mhamid in Morocco, El Faouar, and El Ferch in Tunisia), this paper explores the complex interplay of environmental and non-environmental factors shaping mobility. It highlights the need for a contextualization analysis of the mobility-environment nexus, illustrating how different factors’ constellations make mobility part of adaptation, coping, or escape strategies. The results reveal the dynamics of intertwined factors influencing mobility in the oases, sometimes dominated by environmental factors, other times by economic ones, and so forth. This makes their residents subject to fluid categorisation as environmental migrants, and the mobility-environmental nexus itself is highly complex.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
4.
Gdy środowisko skłania do mobilności Orłowska, Justyna; Sobczak-Szelc, Karolina
ACADEMIA. Magazyn Polskiej Akademii Nauk,
08/2023
Journal Article
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Areas located within the hot, arid zone are characterized by extremely low availability
of fresh water. In the Tunisian regions of Kébili and Medenine, deep-water sources and connate groundwater ...constitute its main sources. Surface waters, as well as shallow groundwaters found in those areas, are affected by a high level of salinity, which significantly reduces their use for either drinking or agriculture. Due to intensifying droughts the rainwater accumulation system, neither fulfils the needs of residents nor the developing agriculture. Waters in the oases of El Faour (Kébili) and Beni Kchedeche (Medenine) were analyzed in 2017 to find out their chemical composition, as well as their suitability for irrigation. The chemical composition of the investigated waters is dominated by the Na+, Ca2+, Cl– and SO4 3– ions.
The majority of the research investigating environmental migration is focused on source areas and little on host countries. As a consequence, a common approach to finding environmental migrants in ...the destination country is lacking. The aim of this paper is to present a mixed method with a quantitative (survey) and qualitative part (in-depth interviews) that was used to find environmental migrants in Poland. The research was carried out among Egyptians, Moroccans, and Tunisians. For research purposes, the definition of an environmental migrant was extended to three generations. Therefore, under investigation were the motivations and history of migration of the migrant himself, and his father and grandfather as well. The results show that environmental migrants in the destination country are a hard-to-survey population, as they comprise a group that is hard to sample, identify, find or contact, get to cooperate, and to interview. It was found, moreover, that limited knowledge regarding their father’s and grandfathers’ migration history and motivations limited the possibility to analyse how environment influenced the migration decisions of previous generations. The migration decision of the investigated migrants was influenced by other factors, such as education, marriage, or looking for a job. Although none of the investigated persons was an environmental migrant, the Moroccan interviewees mentioned the environment as a factor influencing the departure of people from their areas of origin. In the case of Egypt, however, it was difficult to link the migration decision to environmental factors.
Until They Become Citizens Sobczak-Szelc, Karolina; Pachocka, Marta; Pędziwiatr, Konrad ...
From Reception to Integration of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Poland,
2023, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
This chapter discusses the fundamental role of rights and citizenship in the successful integration of refugees. The numbers of naturalisation of refugees in Poland are low since, considering the ...statistics of granting international protection, ten times more people have been entitled to apply for citizenship than actually acquire it. However, even without citizenship, refugees engage in various civic participation in the host communities. The chapter aims to present two important domains of integration, namely the fundamental principles of citizenship and rights, and belonging and civic participation as forms of social connection. It outlines the legal framework of access to citizenship and other rights for beneficiaries of international protection in Poland. It also contains an overview of the refugee naturalisation statistics in Poland. Furthermore, it brings the findings of the RESPOND empirical research and sheds light on the experiences and perceptions of asylum seekers and beneficiaries of international protection towards acquiring citizenship, belonging, and their participation in the political, social, and cultural life of Poland.
Introduction Sobczak-Szelc, Karolina; Pachocka, Marta; Pędziwiatr, Konrad ...
From Reception to Integration of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Poland,
2023, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
This book focuses on the complex situation of forced migrants in Poland, one of the Central and Eastern European Member States of the European Union since 2004 and a Schengen zone member since 2007. ...This specific case study is particularly important given that the country's eastern border serves as the EU external frontier and hence is prone to the inflow of forced and irregular migrants from third countries, although since the early 2000s until 2021 both categories of migrants were not a real challenge for the Polish authorities. For the purposes of this publication, we focus on forced migrants, by which we mean people seeking asylum, wishing to submit, or having already submitted an application for international protection in Poland (regardless of the outcome of the asylum procedure), as well as those already granted international protection. The latter are considered beneficiaries of international protection and include people granted refugee status or subsidiary protection. In this introduction to the book, we also discuss the main theoretical and methodological framework of our work and present the book's structure.
Access of Asylum Seekers and Refugees to Education Sobczak-Szelc, Karolina; Pachocka, Marta; Pędziwiatr, Konrad ...
From Reception to Integration of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Poland,
2023, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
This chapter is to present the legal and institutional aspects of the integration of asylum seekers and refugees in the domain of education and examine the actual practices of integration in one ...chosen area, namely Polish language learning. The focus is put on adult asylum seekers' and refugees' access to Polish language courses, together with their effectiveness and participants' motivations for starting and continuing their learning, in order to see what facilitations and barriers there are in host country language acquisition by applicants and beneficiaries of international protection. The chapter also seeks to investigate whether the practices of language education at each step of the integration process (reception during the asylum procedure and actual integration after being granted protection status) are coherent. In addition, by presenting the actual practices of Polish language learning by refugees, the shortcomings and good practices in this area are identified.
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