Interview with a kidney buyer and seller in Syria

Here's an interview with a displaced person in Syria (an internal refugee) and the Syrian woman to whom he sold his kidney:
The woman in need of a kidney and the man willing to sell one to her: ‘I’m at the end of the line’

Here's the prolog:
"Regime forces burst into a village in the east Homs countryside last November to drive the Islamic State out. Fadi a-Salamah, 36, fled Mahin with his family and headed 160 km south to Damascus.

When he arrived in the capital, a-Salamah began working the graveyard shift in a fast food restaurant. After four months, he was stopped and interrogated one night at a checkpoint.

Fearing for his life, a-Salamah quit his job.

Unable to find work, he exhausted his SP400,000 savings (about $2,000). His landlord threatened to kick him, his wife and his three young children out of their house.

Desperate to keep his family off the streets, a-Salamah turned to what he considers all he has left to sell—his kidney, for $4,000.

A-Salamah went to a nearby hospital where he conducted a kidney screening and tissue-type test. He left his number with the doctor in the event a patient with compatible blood and tissue types needed a kidney.

On June 20, a-Salamah received a call from a 50-year-old Damascene woman with failing kidneys. The woman is the aunt of Syria Direct’s Bahira al-Zarier, and asked that her name not be published.

After 20 years of kidney disease, the woman says her doctor told her that weekly dialysis treatments were no longer effective.

When the doctor told her that her and a-Salameh’s tissue were 100 percent compatible, “I almost couldn’t contain my joy.”

“At the same time, I feel guilty because I’m taking advantage of someone’s financial need.”

At the time of the interview, a-Salamah and the woman were waiting for the doctor to set an appointment for the operation."

HT: Jonathan Spencer

Matching refugees and landlords in Sweden, by Tommy Andersson and Lars Ehlers

 After refugees have found a country of asylum, there's still work to do. Here's some help on how to do it in Sweden:

Assigning Refugees to Landlords in Sweden:Stable Maximum Matchings
 Tommy Andersson and Lars Ehlers
June 2016

Abstract In Sweden, asylum seekers are either deported or granted a residence permit. Refugee families with a residence permit are assigned to the different local municipalities. Since almost all accommodation options are exhausted in Sweden, households in some municipalities are asked to state their willingness to accommodate refugee families. In line with the European NGO “Refugees Welcome”, a refugee family and a landlord (household) are mutually acceptable if they have a language in common and if the number of offered beds of the household exceeds the number of beds needed by the refugee family. This paper proposes an algorithm that finds a maximum matching (filling the maximal number of beds) which in addition is stable.


Theorem 1. For any profile R, there exists a stable maximum matching

British immigration: more time combating clandestine immigrants means less time investigating scams

What do immigration inspectors do?

The Telegraph has the story: Overwhelmed border guards diverted from other immigration scams to deal with threefold increase in migrants arriving by lorry and Channel Tunnel

“It's worrying that problems at the border meant that that organised crime and sham marriages were not properly investigated. In addition overstayers were not returned and illegal working was not tackled."

Refugees from Central America

The NY times has the story: U.S. to Admit More Central American Refugees

"The White House on Tuesday announced a substantial expansion of a program to admit Central American refugees to the United States, conceding that its efforts to protect migrants fleeing dangerous conditions had left too many people with no recourse.

The administration said it would broaden an initiative that currently lets unaccompanied Central American children enter the United States as refugees, allowing their entire families to qualify, including siblings older than 21, parents and other relatives who act as caregivers.

It is unclear how many refugees might be eligible, but during its two years, the program for children has drawn 9,500 applicants, which could eventually grow to many times that with the broader criteria.

The expansion was denounced by Republicans and it sharpened a contrast with Donald J. Trump, who has centered much of his presidential campaign on a call to shut out immigrants.

Republicans said the Obama administration should be focused on tackling what they called a border crisis. The expansion would instead essentially open an entirely new channel for Central American families escaping endemic violence to gain legal entrance to the United States.

“What we have seen is that our current efforts to date have been insufficient to address the number of people who may have legitimate refugee claims, and there are insufficient pathways for those people to present their claims,” Amy Pope, a deputy Homeland Security adviser, said in a conference call to announce the changes. She said the revisions showed a recognition that “the criteria is too narrow to meet the categories of people who we believe would qualify under our refugee laws, but they just don’t have the mechanism to apply.”

The White House also said it had reached an agreement with Costa Rica to serve as a temporary host site for the most vulnerable migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras while they wait to be processed as refugees. These migrants would first undergo security screening in their home countries. Costa Rica would accept up to 200 people at a time among those who are found to be eligible, for periods of six months.


The United Nations high commissioner for refugees has agreed to set up an unusual process to review requests from potential refugees while they are in their home countries. Administration officials also said they would begin reviewing applications from refugees in their home countries, a step they hoped would discourage people from making the dangerous trip to the United States border.

Republicans said the expansion was the latest example of the White House’s misuse of its authority."

Investing in countries of first refuge, in return for integrating refugees into their economy

The NY Times has a story about Jordan: If a Carrot for Jordan Works, Syrian Refugees Will Stay Put

"Jordan, which has 650,000 Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations inside its borders, has long made it nearly impossible for them to work legally, citing concerns about high unemployment among its citizens. But under the new experiment, the government has given out 13,000 work permits to Syrians, and is promising to issue up to 50,000 by year’s end — and tens of thousands more in the future.

"In exchange, the World Bank is giving Jordan a $300 million interest-free loan, the likes of which are traditionally reserved for extremely poor countries in Africa. Western nations, including the United States, have offered roughly $60 million to build schools to accommodate Syrian children. And Jordan is close to clinching what it wants most: tax-free exports to the European Union, especially garments stitched in its industrial export zones.

"In short, Western leaders are using their financial and political leverage to convince Jordan that it is worthwhile to help refugees improve their lot in this country so they do not cross the Mediterranean Sea in flimsy rafts in search of a better life in Europe. It is a stark shift for both donor countries and Jordan, which, after absorbing generations of refugees from wars across the Middle East, had tried to keep Syrians from establishing a permanent foothold.

“Some may say this is the one shot that the government has to extract a lot of money,” Stefan Dercon, a professor at Oxford University and the chief economist at the British government’s development aid agency, which supports the effort in Jordan. “I would say it is also the only shot that it will have to really reform its economy and create jobs, with substantial international funding.”

"Jordan is not the only country trying to leverage Europe’s anxiety about refugees and migrants. Turkey has negotiated a deal that involves taking back most of those who traveled across the Aegean Sea into Greece in exchange for $6.6 billion in European aid and a proposed waiver of visas for Turks entering Europe.

"Europe is also promising over $4 billion in aid to several African countries in exchange for their help in stemming the exodus out of the continent. Even Sudan, long under European and American sanctions for its human rights record, is reaping money as part of the package. Libya is getting assistance from Europe to keep migrant boats from crossing the Mediterranean, an approach that Human Rights Watch describes as outsourcing “the dirty work to Libyan forces.”
...
"The Jordan deal, announced in February as part of the Jordan Compact, is described optimistically by its framers as “turning the Syrian refugee crisis into a development opportunity.” Its goal is to draw new foreign investment and create jobs for both Jordanians and Syrians. The risk, its proponents privately point out, is that no new investments will pour in, Jordan’s economy will continue to languish and local resentment will grow.

"Until recently, barely 5,000 Syrian refugees had work permits. The International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency that supports and devises work policies, estimated that 50,000 people in Jordan worked off the books — roughly the number that the government is promising to legalize this year alone.

For Jordan’s leaders, grappling with debt and an economy growing at an anemic 2.4 percent, access to the European market is a critical incentive."

The global system of refugee protection

I'm at the Center for Migration Studies (CMS*) in New York, attending a conference on the global system of refugee protection, and how it interacts with a myriad of related concerns, among which security has become prominent.

Refugee protection/resettlement is a wicked problem, in all the senses of the word. After the first day of discussion I have to admit its complexity is head-breaking.

Everything having to do with refugee resettlement is complicated by the highly charged political environment in which it is now discussed, and the big consequences this can have. For example, Fiona Adamson of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies showed some refugee/migrant-inspired posters from the recent Brexit campaign to take Britain out of Europe, like this one.

*************
*As it happens I began the week at the other CMS, in Baltimore, talking about kidney exchange.

Matching refugees to towns in Britain: Tim Harford in the FT

In the Financial Times, Tim Harford writes about resettling refugees: The refugee crisis — match us if you can--‘However many refugees we decide to resettle, there’s no excuse for doing the process wastefully’

"By balancing competing demands, good matching mechanisms have alleviated real suffering in school systems and organ donation programmes. Now two young Oxford academics, Will Jones of the Refugee Studies Centre and Alexander Teytelboym of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, are trying to persuade governments to use matching mechanisms in the refugee crisis.

Most popular discussions of the crisis focus on how many refugees we in rich countries should accept. Yet other questions matter too. Once nations, or groups of countries, have decided to resettle a certain number of refugees from temporary camps, to which country should they go? Or within a country, to which area?

Different answers have been tried over the years, from randomly dispersing refugees to using the best guesses of officials, as they juggle the preferences of local communities with what they imagine the refugees might want.

In fact, this is a classic matching problem. Different areas have different capabilities. Some have housing but few school places; others have school places but few jobs; still others have an established community of refugees from a particular region. And refugee families have their own skills, needs and desires.

This is not so different a problem from allocating trainee doctors to teaching hospitals, or children to schools, or even kidneys to compatible recipients. In each case, we can get a better match through a matching mechanism. However many refugees we decide to resettle, there’s no excuse for doing the process wastefully.

There is no perfect mechanism for matching refugees to communities — there are too many variables at play — but there are some clear parameters: housing is a major constraint, as is the availability of medical care. Simple systems exist, or could be developed, that should make the process more efficient, stable and dignified."

Refugees: "no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land"--from "Home" by Warsan Shire

I only belatedly came across the poem “Home” by Warsan Shire, from which the iconic line that is the title of this post comes...

“Home” by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Refugees and Passover

And you shall not mistreat a stranger, nor shall you oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

כוְגֵר לֹא תוֹנֶה וְלֹא תִלְחָצֶנּוּ כִּי גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם:

Matching for refugee resettlement in the Washington Post

An interview in the Washington Post with Will Jones and Alexander Teytelboym about building a matching market for refugees in Europe:
Europe’s asylum system serves neither the refugees nor the countries. Here’s a new way of thinking about it.

********
See my coverage of the earlier coverage of their proposal:    Refugee resettlement as a matching problem in the NY Times

EU to set out proposals for overhaul of European asylum rules

The Guardian has the story:
EU to set out proposals for overhaul of European asylum rules
European commission will publish paper suggesting changes after migration crisis left current Dublin regulation unworkable

"EU authorities in Brussels will unveil long-awaited proposals to overhaul European asylum rules, following the arrival of more than 1.1 million refugees and migrants last year.

The rules, known as the Dublin regulation and dating back to the 1990s, require refugees to seek asylum in the first country they arrive in. 

This system has been under strain for years, and was finished off last August when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said all Syrian refugees would be eligible to claim asylum in Germany.

A policy paper to be published by the European commission on Wednesday and seen by the Guardian states that the current crisis has exposed “significant structural weaknesses and shortcomings in the design and implementation of European asylum and migration policy”.

...

"The European commission will propose two options, which still have to be agreed by EU member states. The widely trailed option of scrapping the Dublin rules remains: under this proposal the EU would have a mandatory redistribution system for asylum seekers based on a country’s wealth and ability to absorb newcomers.

A second option would preserve the existing Dublin rules, but add a “corrective fairness mechanism” so refugees could be redistributed around the bloc in times of crisis to take the pressure off frontline arrival states.

The “corrective fairness mechanism” would be based on an existing scheme, where member states have agreed to resettle 160,000 Syrian refugees from Greece and Italy to other EU countries. But in the first six months of operation, barely 1,000 refugees have been resettled under the scheme, raising questions about its viability."

A proposal to give refugees legally recognized financial claims against the countries that persecuted them, by Joseph Bloger and Mitu Gulati

When I recently visited Duke Law School I had the pleasure of talking with Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati about their very innovative thoughts on resettling refugees, by giving them legally recognized financial claims against the countries that made them refugees, that could be pursued by their host countries.  Here's a link to their paper:

Competing for Refugees: A Market-Based Solution to a Humanitarian Crisis

Joseph Blocher 

Duke University - School of Law

G. Mitu Gulati 

Duke University School of Law
January 26, 2016

Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Forthcoming
Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2015-48 
Abstract:      

The unprecedented scale of the modern refugee crisis demands novel legal solutions. As a matter of national incentives, the goal must be to design mechanisms that discourage countries from creating refugees, and encourages other countries to welcome them. One way to achieve this would be to recognize that persecuted refugee groups have a financial claim against their countries of origin, and that this claim can be traded to host nations in exchange for acceptance. Modifications to the international apparatus would be necessary, but the basic legal elements of this proposal already exist. In short, international law can and should give refugees a legal asset, give host nations incentives to accept them, and give oppressive countries of origin the bill.

German press coverage

One of the themes that has struck a chord with the German press during my visit is that refugee resettlement is a matching problem:

Handelsblatt „Die Flüchtlingskrise ist ein Matching-Problem“ ("The refugee crisis is a matching problem")

Die Welt "Staaten sollten Gebote für Flüchtlinge abgeben"
From google translate:

From because of cooler economist - Alvin Roth has indeed studied hard subjects with mathematics and computer science. But he loves not only the numbers, but also the people. It shows the same. He greeted with a winning smile, leaving a to an exciting conversation about refugees and donor kidneys, financial markets and future presidents.

The World: Some economists want to apply to the distribution of refugees in Europe your design markets. Is this a good idea?

Photo: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND / AFP / Getty ImagesStanford Professor Alvin Roth

Alvin Roth: Essentially, yes. The distribution of refugees is a so-called matching market - on the right pairing it depends, in this case of people and place. The people themselves have preferences where they want to live. At the same time they should be able to be easily integrated into the economy. For that we should allow an orderly exchange of information. According Dublin procedure an applicant must his application but ask in the country where he first arrived. This does not add up.

Lit.Cologne photo:

James Hathaway: Plan for, rather than simply react to, refugee movements

Mitu Gulati points me to this piece by James Hathaway:
A global solution to a global refugee crisis
JAMES C. HATHAWAY 29 February 2016

His summary:

 How should we proceed?

A team of lawyers, social scientists, non-governmental activists, and governmental and intergovernmental officials, drawn from all parts of the world, worked for five years to conceive the model for a new approach to implementing the Refugee Convention. We reached consensus on a number of core principles.

1. Reform must address the circumstances of all states, not just the powerful few.

Most refugee “reform” efforts in recent years have been designed and controlled by powerful states—for example, Australia and the EU. There has been no effort to share out fairly in a binding way the much greater burdens and responsibilities of the less developed world, even at the level of financial contributions or guaranteed resettlement opportunities. This condemns poorer states and the 80% of refugees who live in them to mercurial and normally inadequate support—leading often to failure to respect refugee rights. It is also decidedly short-sighted in that the absence of meaningful protection options nearer to home is a significant driver of efforts to find extra-regional asylum, often playing into the strategies of smugglers and traffickers.

2. Plan for, rather than simply react to, refugee movements.

The international refugee system should commit itself to pre-determined burden (financial) sharing and responsibility (human) sharing quotas. Such factors as prior contributions to refugee protection, per capita GDP, and arable land provide sensible starting points for the allocation of shares of the financial and human dimensions of protection. But, as the recent abortive effort to come up with such shares ex post by the European Union makes clear, the insurance-based logic of standing allocations can only be accomplished in advance of any particular refugee movement.

3. Embrace common but differentiated state responsibility.  

There need be no necessary connection between the place where a refugee arrives and the state in which protection for duration of risk will occur, thus undercutting the logic of disguised economic migration via the refugee procedure. And rather than asking all states to take on the same protection roles, we should harness the ability and willingness of different states to assist in different ways. The core of the renewed protection regime should be common but differentiated responsibility, meaning that beyond the common duty to provide first asylum, states could assume a range of protection roles within their responsibility-sharing quota (protection for duration of risk; exceptional immediate permanent integration; residual resettlement)—though all states would be required to make contributions to both (financial) burden-sharing and (human) responsibility-sharing, with no trade-offs between the two.

4. Shift away from national, and towards international, administration of refugee protection.

We advocate a revitalized UNHCR to administer quotas, with authority to allocate funds and refugees based on respect for legal norms; and encouragement of a shift to common international refugee status determination system and group prima facie assessment to reduce processing costs, thereby freeing up funds for real and dependable support to front-line receiving countries—including start-up funds for economic development that links refugees to their host communities, and which facilitate their eventual return home. Our economists suggest that reallocation of the funds now spent on domestic asylum systems would more than suffice to fund this system. And since as described below positive refugee status recognition would have no domestic immigration consequence for the state in which status assessment occurs, this savings could be realized without engaging sovereignty concerns.

5. Protection for duration of risk, not necessarily permanent immigration.

We should be clear that this is a system for which migration is the means to protection, not an end in and of itself. Managed entry regimes should be promoted where feasible, though the right of refugees to arrive wherever they can reach without penalization for unlawful presence must be respected (thus undercutting the market for smugglers and traffickers). Some refugees—such as unaccompanied minors and victims of severe trauma—will require immediate permanent integration, though others should instead be granted rights-regarding protection for duration of risk. Creative development assistance linking refugees to host communities would increase the prospects for local integration, and many refugees will eventually feel able to return home. But for those still without access to either of these solutions at 5-7 years after arrival, residual resettlement would be guaranteed to those still at risk, enabling them to remake their lives with a guarantee of durable rights—in stark contrast to the present norm of often indefinite uncertainty.

If we are serious about avoiding continuing humanitarian tragedy—not just in Europe but throughout the world—then the present atomized and haphazard approach to refugee protection must end. The moment has come not to renegotiate the Refugee Convention, but rather at long last to operationalize that treaty in a way that works dependably, and fairly.

Refugee resettlement as a matching problem in the NY Times

A lot of thought will be needed about how to customize matching tech to refugee resettlement, but a discussion may be beginning.

Here's the NY Times article: Ending the Refugee Deadlock By DALIBOR ROHACJAN. 29, 2016.

It seems motivated in part by this article in the Forced Migration Review:
Choices, preferences and priorities in a matching system for refugees
Will Jones and Alexander Teytelboym

Here's an earlier post of mine:
Thursday, September 3, 2015 Migrants aren't widgets: refugee resettlement is a matching problem, and here is my set of posts on refugees to date:  http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/search/label/refugees 

Bob Shiller on the need for economists to study the system for saving refugees

Economists on the Refugee Path

He concludes: "Under today’s haphazard and archaic asylum rules, refugees must take enormous risks to reach safety, and the costs and benefits of helping them are distributed capriciously. It does not have to be this way. Economists can help by testing which international rules and institutions are needed to reform an inefficient and often inhumane system." 

An attempt to stem the uncontrolled flow of migrants to Europe

The NY Times has the story: E.U. Offers Turkey 3 Billion Euros to Stem Migrant Flow

"Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, according to diplomats, will be promised 3 billion euros, or about $3.2 billion, in European aid and other inducements in exchange for Turkish action to stop migrants, most of them from the Middle East and Afghanistan, from reaching Greece and other countries on Europe’s outer fringe.
...
"Speaking to reporters in Brussels before the meeting, Ms. Merkel said Europe had many reasons to work closely with Turkey but that the essential part of the negotiations was the need to “replace illegal migration with legal migration.”
...
"Europe wants Turkey’s help in identifying genuine refugees, notably Syrians, who would be allowed entry in an orderly fashion, and in halting people fleeing poverty who do not have an obvious right to protection under international law.

"Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, the body representing European leaders, set out Europe’s objective in blunt terms: “Our main goal is to stem the flow of migrants to Europe,” he said, describing Turkey as a “key partner” on issues including counterterrorism and the civil war in Syria.

"But he stressed that Europe itself needed to do more to secure its external borders and that it could not “outsource this obligation to any third country,” like Turkey. Failing to protect the Continent’s outer borders, he warned, would mean that one of Europe’s most important achievements, the 26-nation visa-free zone known as Schengen, “will become history.”

"Later, as the meeting got underway, Mr. Tusk told the summit that 1.5 million migrants had entered the European Union this year."

Refugee resettlement, on Bloomberg Surveillance

Early yesterday morning, I was interviewd for 5 minutes about refugee resettlement on
Bloomberg Surveillance: Yergin, Alloway and Roth

Nov 13, 2015

Bloomberg Surveillance with Tom Keene and Michael McKee. GUESTS: Dan Yergin Vice Chairman IHS Inc joins Surveillance to discuss oil and commodities Tracy Alloway Executive Editor:Media Markets Bloomberg Editorial on What’s Moving Markets Alvin Roth Professor:Economics Stanford University Roth on matching markets and refugee resettlement.

Download

or here: http://media.bloomberg.com/bb/avfile/News/Surveillance/vwGKliX5qMZY.mp3

My five minutes are from minute 34:15 to 39:30.

All this happened hours before the terrorist attacks in Paris, which I fear will have a very chilling effect on refugee resettlment in Europe.

From Syria to Norway through Russia (by bicycle at the very end)

It is hard to stymie refugees: the NY Times has the story of a Northern route from the middle east to the EU: Bypassing the Risky Sea, Refugees Reach Europe Through the Arctic

Bicycles used by migrants to cross into Norway from Russia are piled behind a police station on the Norwegian side of the border at Storskog. Norwegian police confiscate the bicycles, which are mostly Russian-made, because they usually do not meet local safety standards.CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

"Some of them, including Mr. Arslanuk, are Russian-speaking Syrians who were already living in Russia and see the border with Norway as a path to a better life at a time when Syrian citizenship generally confers refugee status in Europe. Others, having heard of the new route into Europe, are traveling through Russia to the border rather than taking the more established but riskier paths.
...
"For those who make it, the oddity of the route continues to the very end. A Russian ban on pedestrian traffic across the border at Storskog, and Norwegian threats to prosecute motorists who give rides to people without visas, mean that migrants, even young children and the infirm, have to use bicycles to complete the last few dozen yards of an exodus that in some cases began thousands of miles away.

"Once in Russia, it costs migrants only a few hundred dollars to secure transportation to the border and a bicycle, far less than the more than $1,500 that Turkish smugglers often charge to ferry migrants across the Aegean Sea to Greece.

"The bicycle-borne flow into Norway underscores not only the dogged determination of migrants but also Russia’s curious role in helping to drain the population from Syria, a country that President Vladimir V. Putin views as a vital ally and whose leader, Bashar al-Assad, he is now helping with bombing raids against the opposition.

“Putin loves Assad and Assad loves Putin, but neither of them like Syrians,” ..."

Interview in Spanish on refugee resettlement as a matching problem

Here's an interview on matching and refugee resettlment, in Spanish, in Estrategia newspaper in Chile
Cuando Se Piensa en Refugiados Deberíamos Pensar en Comunidades y No en Individuos

We talked about the matching problem associated with relocating refugees in communities, rather than as individuals.

(Previous posts on refugees here.)