This paper examines the effectiveness of media literacy interventions in countering misinformation among in-transit migrants in Mexico and Colombia. We conducted experiments to assess whether well-known strategies for fighting misinformation are effective for this understudied yet particularly vulnerable population. We evaluate the impact of digital media literacy tips on migrants’ ability to identify false information and their intentions to share migration-related content. We find that these interventions can effectively decrease migrants’ intentions to share misinformation. We also find suggestive evidence that asking participants to consider accuracy may inadvertently influence their sharing behavior by acting as a behavioral nudge, rather than simply eliciting their sharing intentions. Additionally, the interventions reduced trust in social media as an information source while maintaining trust in official channels. The findings suggest that incorporating digital literacy tips into official websites could be a cost-effective strategy to reduce misinformation circulation among migrant populations.

This study addresses the mental health needs of refugees and migrants in the Netherlands, highlighting the urgent public health challenges they face. Unique psychosocial hurdles, exacerbated by cultural dislocation, language barriers and systemic inequalities, hinder their access to quality mental healthcare. This study explores how coloniality intersects with mental healthcare access, using a decolonial framework to challenge stereotypes and assumptions that marginalize migrant voices. Through semi-structured interviews with migrants and language service providers, this research reveals the complexities of navigating the mental healthcare system. Findings reveal that temporality, professionalism and language barriers are key issues in migrants’ mental healthcare journeys. We advocate for systemic changes that prioritize migrant perspectives. Ultimately, this study aims to inform policy and practice to enhance mental health services for migrant populations in the Netherlands and contribute to the broader dialogue on decolonization in mental health.

This paper draws upon the theoretical literature on migration policy and health, and empirical data on three European states with differing welfare models – Sweden (social democrat), France (conservative), and the United Kingdom (liberal) – during Covid-19, to highlight the often hidden and contradictory politics through which refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants were forced to navigate during the most uncertain period of the pandemic. Although migrants’ treatment during Covid-19 was generally better in Sweden with a social democrat welfare tradition, we see migration management priorities greatly undermining the extent to which welfare systems function overall for the benefit of population health. Furthermore, Sweden’s recent political shift to the right exacerbates those negative tendencies. As the paper shows, there was considerable effort by civil society and local government to fill the gap where national governments failed to protect this group, stepping in to provide health information, and support.

Organizations often face moral dilemmas. For example, in 2004 the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) needed to decide whether to help refugees in enclosed camps in Pakistan repatriate to Afghanistan. On the one hand, helping with repatriation might have made UNHCR complicit in forced returns, as refugees sought to repatriate just to avoid life without freedom in Pakistan. On the other hand, refusing to help with repatriation would leave refugees stranded in camps: perhaps repatriation was the best option if this was what refugees wanted. When organizations face this and other dilemmas, it is not clear how they should proceed. In other words, it is unclear which policy they should pursue when all feasible policies seem wrong. Some might think that, at least for hard dilemmas, every choice is just wrong, and so no choice is right. But that is not quite true. Even difficult dilemmas can be resolved using certain methods. One method is to ask those affected by potential policies what they think the most justifiable policy is. A second method is to choose what to do randomly. Randomly selecting a course of action can sometimes be the fairest way of determining what to do when every option seems wrong.

Migrants often experience psychological distress due to pre-, peri- and post-migration stressors. Scalable interventions like Doing What Matters in Times of Stress (DWM) and Problem Management Plus (PM+) have been developed to address these challenges. This study evaluates a stepped-care program combining DWM and PM+ for migrants in Italy, examining its context, implementation, and mechanisms of impact. A mixed-methods process evaluation was conducted alongside a randomized controlled trial (RCT), following the Medical Research Council (MRC) framework. Post-trial qualitative data were collected through individual interviews with intervention participants (n = 10) and stakeholders (n = 10), as well as a focus group with intervention providers (n = 8). Thematic analysis was performed using NVivo. Cultural stigma and practical barriers influenced engagement, while community leaders fostered trust and participation. Interventions were feasible and acceptable. Digital delivery improved accessibility for some but posed challenges for those with low technological literacy or private spaces. The stepped-care approach supported gradual engagement with mental health strategies, enhancing self-care and emotional awareness, while provider relationships were key to sustaining motivation. The stepped-care model alleviated psychological distress and was well-received. Findings underscore the need for cultural sensitivity, digital accessibility and community engagement to optimize migrant mental health support.

Migrant protest activity has been often analyzed from the perspectives of the protest nature and issues it addressed. A comparison of protest behaviour before and after migration is largely missing. It remains unclear whether people who were actively protesting in their home country continue to be engaged in protests after migration and why. This article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what made the Ukrainian migrants protest before leaving their home country and in Turkey as a host country. The analysis uses individual data from an original survey conducted in May 2023 among 935 Ukrainian migrants living in Turkey. The findings show that there are different migrants who participate in the protests organized in the two countries, and the strongest predictor for political protest is civic engagement. Protest in Ukraine is rooted in the orientation towards domestic politics, while protests abroad are driven by identitarian dimensions.

Different agencies have emphasized the need to evaluate current serological methods for screening patients with suspected urogenital schistosomiasis. However, there is still a lack of evidence regarding the most appropriate methods for this purpose. Here we assessed the diagnostic efficacy of a newly developed serological technique that utilizes the recombinant protein Sh-TSP-2, applied to the urine and serum of migrants suspected of having urogenital schistosomiasis. The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of an in-house enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) using the recombinant protein Sh-TSP-2 were analysed and compared with other commercial serological methods. Due to the limitations of microscopy as a perfect reference method, a latent class analysis (LCA) and composite reference standard (CRS) approach was used to determine the sensitivity and specificity of each test. According to the LCA model, the commercial tests NovaLisa® and immunochromatography test (ICT) immunoglobulin G–immunoglobulin M (IgG–IgM) presented the highest sensitivity (100%), whereas the Sh-TSP-2 serum ELISA test had 79.2%. The Sh-TSP-2 urine and serum ELISA tests had the highest specificities among the serological methods (87.5 and 75%, respectively). CRS modelling showed that the ICT IgG–IgM, NovaLisa® and Sh-TSP-2 serum tests led in sensitivity at 97.1, 88.6 and 71.4%, respectively, with all tests except that the ICT IgG–IgM test having a specificity >90%. Sh-TSP-2 has been validated as a screening tool for patients suspected of having urogenital schistosomiasis. Although commercial serological tests have shown higher sensitivities, Sh-TSP-2 could be valuable for confirming results from tests with lower specificity. Nevertheless, further studies with larger patient cohorts are necessary to fully verify its potential.

While previous research has highlighted the significant role of language in conditioning migrants’ access to key institutions of the welfare state, the question of how individual migrants experience linguistic disadvantage has been less in focus. Drawing on a relational approach, the article moves beyond the idea of language barriers as a static structure of (in)equality or a matter of individual shortcomings. It demonstrates how language policies and language ideologies, and their entanglements with more general trends in welfare policies and ideologies, shape migrants’ relational experiences with the welfare states and their representatives, and what are the implications of such interactions – or the lack of interaction. Empirically, it builds on qualitative data collected in Belgium and Finland, showing how language barriers and discrimination can result in Kafkaesque administrative processes that produce both material and affective hardship for migrants in these national contexts.

The disappearance of migrants, which has reached preoccupying high numbers in recent decades, is related both to the particular vulnerability of migrants traversing dangerous migratory routes and to the high degree of impunity that characterizes investigation and search efforts required. This article argues that the disappearance of migrants at the hands of non-state actors in contexts of systematic impunity and in situations where the state had knowledge or should have had knowledge of a serious risk of such disappearance, but failed to act to prevent it, can be considered to have occurred with the acquiescence of the state. Thus, given that all further elements of the definition of enforced disappearance have been satisfied, this factual situation qualifies as an “enforced disappearance” for the purposes of international human rights law. Key to this demonstration is the concept of knowledge, which is an essential component of acquiescence. This article not only addresses the normative framework of acquiescence and its interpretation by international and regional human rights bodies, including how it relies on the element of state knowledge, but it also examines the extent to which this factor is critical to understanding states’ due diligence obligations to prevent, investigate, and sanction human rights obligations, including disappearances. In order to better understand the factors that should be taken into consideration while assessing a state‘s knowledge of migrant disappearances, including in the context of systematic impunity, it is then suggested to borrow from the international criminal law test related to the concept of “constructive knowledge” and to the doctrine of command responsibility. These considerations should inform a test for assessing whether disappearances of migrants occurring in contexts of systematic impunity can be considered as having been known by the state and as having occurred with its acquiescence and, thus, as constituting “enforced disappearances” under international human rights law.

Migrants and refugees face elevated risks for mental health problems but have limited access to services. This study compared two strategies for training and supervising nonspecialists to deliver a scalable psychological intervention, Group Problem Management Plus (gPM+), in northern Colombia. Adult women who reported elevated psychological distress and functional impairment were randomized to receive gPM+ delivered by nonspecialists who received training and supervision by: 1) a psychologist (specialized technical support); or 2) a nonspecialist who had been trained as a trainer/supervisor (nonspecialized technical support). We examined effectiveness and implementation outcomes using a mixed-methods approach. Thirteen nonspecialists were trained as gPM+ facilitators and three were trained-as-trainers. We enrolled 128 women to participate in gPM+ across the two conditions. Intervention attendance was higher in the specialized technical support condition. The nonspecialized technical support condition demonstrated higher fidelity to gPM+ and lower cost of implementation. Other indicators of effectiveness, adoption and implementation were comparable between the two implementation strategies. These results suggest it is feasible to implement mental health interventions, like gPM+, using lower-resource, community-embedded task sharing models, while maintaining safety and fidelity. Further evidence from fully powered trials is needed to make definitive conclusions about the relative cost of these implementation strategies.

The ways in which minority street-level bureaucrats construe their identities as state representatives and as representatives of minority clients are known to inform their discretionary behavior toward clients, thereby shaping policy outcomes. While existing studies have examined race and ethnicity as shared identities between minority bureaucrats and clients, the role of “migrant” identity has been overlooked. Focusing on the so-called European migration crisis of 2015–2017, this study addresses this gap. Drawing on qualitative interviews with migrant bureaucrats, it examines how being simultaneously a migrant and a migration policy implementer shapes bureaucratic discretion. This article introduces the notion of “migrant representative” and identifies four profiles of migrant bureaucrats, each corresponding to different degrees of identification with the local migration management system and the migrant clients. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on representative bureaucracy and the debate on the linkage between passive and active representation.