Research
Database

This Study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE-Committee), takes stock of the main developments that have occurred in the Schengen Governance Framework since 2016. It analyses the legitimacy of a number of States’ decisions to maintain internal border controls. Also, most recent policy proposals in the field of internal police checks are assessed in light of relevant EU legal standards. The paper also questions the legality of the border walls and fences, which have been recently erected at the EU external borders and within the Schengen area.

The study sets out to provide a better understanding of the emerging challenges in policy targeting the labour-market integration of refugees. What are the strategies and practices implemented in different EU Member States to facilitate access into employment? What do we know about their effectiveness? What are good practices and lessons learned in different countries? The study is based on nine detailed country case studies of the following EU Member States: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It has been produced by the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) at the European University Institute in Florence.

Over the last four decades since the initial mass resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975, principally in the US and France, the Southeast Asian communities in Europe and the US have registered a demographic shift with the emergence of diaspora-born generations with different experiences, access, mobility, ties to the ancestral homeland, and notions and claims to citizenship and belonging in multiple contexts. Despite the long history of migration to France, dating back to the colonial period, there is little scholarly attention paid to the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian communities (heretofore referred to as "Southeast Asian") in France. French preoccupation remains largely fixated on Asia and on the antiquities, rather than on the diaspora. This is particularly noteworthy given that Southeast Asians collectively constitute the second largest Asian population in France, a close second only to the Chinese. Despite the resurgent attention to immigration issues in Europe in recent years, we know little of the integration experiences of these earlier but relatively recent refugee communities in Europe. In particular, we have virtually no knowledge of the post-refugee generations that are an integral part of French cultural, political, economic, and social fabric. These knowledge gaps deprive us of critical insights that would be relevant and invaluable in view of the current refugee situations in Europe, and the intensifying debates engendered by demographic and cultural shifts both in the US and in France. Though relatively more prolific, scholarship on Southeast Asians in the US remains uneven, with more studies available on Vietnamese Americans than on other communities, and comparatively little on the post-refugee generations. With their different historical relationships with Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and different philosophies about immigrant incorporation and cultural pluralism, the US and France make for a rich comparative study that is at the center of our proposed collaboration. This two-part initiative proposes, firstly, to bring together an interdisciplinary group of European and American researchers working on Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian diasporas to engage in critical, cross disciplinary discourse on the post-refugee generations. Among other concerns, the researchers on the project are particularly interested in their social, cultural, political, and transnational negotiations with regards to identity politics, networks, and public engagement, as guided in part by the following questions: What are the experiences of the Southeast Asian post-refugee generations in Europe? What forces and factors in the receiving contexts shape their experiences, and how, and what are the differences and commonalities among the contexts of reception? How, if in any way, does historical memory inform their identity constructions, socialities, and diasporic consciousness and engagement? What, if any, are their relationships with the ancestral homeland? How are those ties maintained or made manifest? The ultimate aims of this project are as follows: - to map the landscape of research on contemporary Southeast Asian migration to Europe - to share research methodologies, trends, and findings - to broaden and deepen our comparative understanding of refugee resettlement and incorporation experiences in America and in Europe that are the two principal refugee resettlement hubs - to foster cross and trans-disciplinary discourse on migration and diasporas - to advance and widen the transnational fields of critical refugee, migration and diaspora studies - to transnationalize the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, which is a University of California-based network of critical refugee studies scholars. Secondly and as an extension of this larger conversation, Um and Le Bail also propose to begin ethnographic research on post-refugee generations of Southeast Asians in France, with particular attention to the Sino-Vietnamese community that is their shared research interest and that constitutes an underexplored research terrain.