Together or Separately: The Human Face of Displacement Analytics

Laura E. Bailey: Since the invention of the sail and the wheel, humans have moved in search of new and better lives for their families or to escape peril or disaster. That mobility—the push and pull of displacement and migration—has caused both economic dynamism and political and social concern, as migration interacts with diverse social, political, and economic dynamics. Migration is a story of economies, of policy, of global negotiations, attracting the involvement of development actors as well as humanitarian agencies. Migration is a tale told by data and charts, illustrated by stark emotions. Migration is also a story of individual human beings.

Sarah Linh Bailey Kuehne:

I am an immigrant, born in conflict and now an American by choice. A product of the Vietnam War, I was plucked out of an orphanage in Saigon by an American Army officer when I was five months old. While my soon-to-be adoptive father served the remainder of his second tour of duty, I spent the next eight months in the care of a Canadian doctor and his wife who were in Saigon with World Vision, establishing care centers in support of Vietnamese people affected by war. I was very lucky.

LEB:

One hundred years ago, in the aftermath of global conflict, the nature of immigration was fundamentally transformed. During World War I, European nations set up border checks to prevent enemy spies from entering their territories. In many countries, this was the first instance of the use of documents recognizable as passports. The scale of postwar displacement in Europe was startling, but American perception was of chaos and threat. Americans "came home" from the war, but Europeans kept moving: some moved to new countries because borders had been redrawn, others found themselves in a "new" country without having moved at all, and still others fled from states that ceased to exist. In this context, concerns about the political character of potential newcomers and the risk of being overwhelmed by mass movements of people captured the American public's attention. The potential entry of immigrants sympathetic to the newly established Soviet state was used by some political actors as an argument for tighter controls over the numbers and nature of migrants. In 1921 Congress passed a law that capped overall immigration into the United States for the first time and placed limits on how many immigrants would be allowed from each foreign nation. As Europe adjusted to a new postwar map, the United States turned inward.

In the intervening century, the world saw even larger-scale displacement: in the aftermath of World War II, an estimated 60 million people were displaced, and subsequent regional conflicts and disasters drove dramatic displacement, disrupting the lives of millions at a time.¹ Global and national institutions were established to address humanitarian, legal, policy, and logistic aspects of both migration and displacement, with a distinct separation between migrants moving voluntarily and refugees and asylumseekers being forcibly displaced. Charitable organizations expanded their programming to include assisting refugees and asylumseekers, and new ones were established with these goals in mind. As the founders of what would become the World Bank and International Monetary Fund prepared to gather in Bretton Woods to define the scope of these new institutions and their mandate to support economic stability around the world, views about migration and displacement were a strong undercurrent. Reconstructing the infrastructure of war-ravaged Europe was on the top of the agenda, but so too were the needs of emerging nations less damaged by the global war but whose economic growth could be boosted by similar investments in infrastructure. Considerations of the humanitarian needs were equally pressing, and the initial proposals penned by the American delegation proposed an international bank for reconstruction, relief, and development, edited with the humanitarian aspects removed only when the decision to create a separate relief agency under the United Nations was taken.

SLBK:

I grew up with my adoptive Army family, moving from place to place, afforded every opportunity of our circumstance and enjoying my parents, sister, and two...