Panel discussion with migration experts from Europe and the USA

This panel goes beyond the headlines to assess the historical context of contemporary displacements, the reception of refugees in neighboring countries and beyond, and the comparison between the reception of Ukrainians in 2022 and Syrians in 2015.

The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego and the Center for the Study of International Migration at UCLA hosted a webinar on "Refugees and the War in Ukraine" on April 29, 2022. The webinar was co-sponsored by the Center for European and Russian Studies at UCLA and the International Institute at UC San Diego. You can watch the recording of the webinar here on our website as well as on our YouTube channel.

ABSTRACT

By April 1, more than 4 million refugees had fled the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Millions more have been internally displaced or are forcibly immobilized by sieges. These dynamics come on top of existing displacements from the war in Donbas since 2014 and movements of asylum seekers and other migrants. This panel goes beyond the headlines to assess the historical context of contemporary displacements, the reception of refugees in neighboring countries and beyond, and the comparison between the reception of Ukrainians in 2022 and Syrians in 2015.

PANELISTS

Marta Bivand Erdal

Research Professor in Migration Studies, at Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway, where she is Co- Director of the PRIO Migration Center. As a Human Geographer she is interested in the impacts of migration and transnationalism in both emigration and immigration contexts, including questions of voluntary/forced migration and geographies of displacement.

Rana Khoury

Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University,
and an incoming assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Marta Pachocka

Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies, the Institute of International Studies of the Collegium of Socio-Economics of SGH Warsaw School of Economics and Head of the Migration Policies Research Unit at the Centre of Migration Research (CMR) of the University of Warsaw.

Raphi Rechitsky

Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at National University in San Diego. His primary research has explored the intersections of experiences and policies of forced migration within, to, and through post-Soviet Ukraine, with a focus on lived experiences of asylum seekers in Ukrainian cities and EU and international refugee politics.

Martin Rozumek

Executive Director of the Organization for Aid to Refugees (OPU), Prague, Czech Republic. He is a lawyer and
holds a doctoral degree in international public law from the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

AUDIO AND TRANSCRIPT

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Duration: 01:53:52