Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-230) and index.
Contents:
Coming Full Circle: Indochina, Legislative Reform, and the Post-War Legacy. Overcoming Restriction: Religious Groups and the Post-War Refugee Policy Process -- Continuous Chain of Efforts: Issue Networks and Policy Communities -- Shifting Alliances: Refugees, Human Rights, and Policy Reform -- Coming Full Circle: Indochina, Legislative Reform, and the Post-War Legacy.
Summary:
"This book traces the evolution of refugee resettlement policy in the United States and Canada from the end of the Second World War to 1980. During this period, both countries transformed previous policies of refugee deterrence into the two largest resettlement programs in the world. Explanations for this transformation have typically focused on Cold War foreign policy, but there was another domestic force that propelled the rise of resettlement: religious groups. After the war, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant groups mobilized to promote refugee resettlement--first for their co-religionists, and then on a non-sectarian basis. The book explores a counter-intuitive part of this history: where Canada developed a system of private sponsorship, in which organized groups chose refugees to resettle and paid a portion of their costs, refugee policy in the United States developed as a corporatist arrangement, in which a handful of religious groups were subsidized to implement the state's quotas; this is surprising because the United States is a more classical liberal state that does not typically favour such coordinated and managed approaches to policy implementation. The reason lies in part in the different decision-making venues in each country. In the US, immigration policy was created by Congress and the White House, and the cooperation of religious groups was instrumental to the process of passing the first legislation to admit European refugees. In Canada, immigration policy making was concentrated in the Immigration Department and private sponsorship was created as a reluctant partnership between bureaucrats and religious groups, who were granted sponsorship privileges in exchange for assuming some financial responsibility for settlement. Once these different policies, processes, and networks were established, they established pathways that have remained largely unchanged. Ultimately the manuscript offers an explanation for the development of refugee policy that challenges prevalent narratives and offers a fresh analysis of the influential roles played by religious groups in policy-making."-- Provided by publisher
Series:
McGill-Queen's refugee and forced migration studies ; 4
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.