A vital guide to American refugee policy, both historically exacting and thoughtful.
A remarkably comprehensive history of American refugee policy since the Vietnam War written by one of its chief architects.
Following the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the withdrawal of American military forces, a catastrophic humanitarian disaster loomed: the “systematic persecution and inevitable flight of multitudes of Indochinese,” a terrifying “refugee storm.” The predicament proved too dire for the existing agencies in the United States to manage, and, in 1979, Chas Freeman, a Foreign Service officer, issued a momentous report calling for the establishment of a Bureau of Refugee Programs, the “first standalone organization with refugees as its exclusive raison d’être.” Debut author Purcell was instrumental in the establishment of the agency and served as its director for several of its embryonic years. The author, with an extraordinary eye for painstaking detail that is by turns impressive and exhausting, tells the story of the agency’s founding, including the governmental barriers, its intramural “existential threats” and congressional antagonisms,” as well as the problems posed by a “lumbering” U.S. State Department. The Refugee Programs bureau expanded to manage refugee crises all over the globe—the Middle East, the Soviet Union, Latin America, and beyond—always in search of “durable solutions,” which included “voluntary repatriation, regional settlement, and third country resettlement.” With great analytical rigor and candor, Purcell depicts the RP’s missteps as well as its ultimate emergence as a rare bureaucratic organization, both nimble and motivated by a profound sense of moral purpose. “As I have tried to demonstrate, the United States succeeded in this mission by melding humane foreign policy with a can-do, coherent entity that quickly became one of the State Department’s most dynamic organizations,” he writes. The history the author furnishes is a sprawling one and includes an account of the nation’s shifting attitudes toward outsiders, from one of “guarded openness” through “isolation and self-sufficiency” to “global engagement in humanitarian solutions.” Further, he provides a searching discussion of the special challenges posed by the recent Syrian refugee crisis. This is an authoritative guide to the subject, consistently perspicacious and lucid, and includes a foreword by former Secretary of State George P. Shultz.
A vital guide to American refugee policy, both historically exacting and thoughtful.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6881-6
Page Count: 558
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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