In the universe of gross human rights violations, the abuses experienced by migrants—refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, or economic immigrants—are among the most intractable. Migrants leave their homes out of despair, they flee violence, and they look for a better life for themselves and their children abroad. Yet, the problems migrants face may only begin with migration; they rarely end with it. Migrants are not wanted in their new countries. They face abuse, discrimination, and a new cycle of violence. They are separated from their children. They enjoy no state protection. And the international system that is supposed to regulate the rights of migrants is weak, inconsistent, confusing, and contradictory.

Two recent books, Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement by Alexander Betts and Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age by Jacqueline Bhabha provide a welcome analysis of the international migration regime and its profound failings. The two books tackle different types of migrant abuses and have ultimately different purposes. While Betts is concerned with the strength and implementation of existing international refugee regimes in the case of a new type of “survival migration,” Bhabha describes an international regime in complete disarray, leaving the most vulnerable migrants – migrant children – without even the basic expectations of fairness and justice. The two books also differ in their theoretical ambition and audience. Betts places his theoretical framework within the established scholarship on normative and institutional diffusion, and he aims to contribute to this literature by focusing on the implementation of international norms that are already domestically institutionalized. Bhabha’s theoretical home is somewhat more difficult to ascertain because her ambition lies elsewhere: She is interested in exposing the depths of the current international child migration regime pathology, in the hopes of changing the norms, institutions, and practices that continue to place millions of children in danger.

Survival Migration’s principal question is, “when and why do international institutions adapt to new circumstances at national and local levels and when and why do they not (p. viii)?” Specifically, Betts is interested in international institutional responses to “survival migration”—migration from collapsed, collapsing, or weak states where people face complex human rights emergencies and where basic state protections have failed. The focus on survival migration is important because it points to the inadequacies of the existing international refugee policies, which recognize refugee status in cases of persecution or armed conflict. However, as Betts demonstrates, most refugees today flee a far more complex environment where armed conflict and persecution may not be the only reason why life at home is no longer livable.

The principal theoretical argument of Survival Migration is that international regimes are implemented according to interests of elites in host country governments. Whether or not a host government will “stretch” the international refugee regime to accommodate survival migrants is not the result of the way in which international norms were institutionalized domestically, but of whether regime stretching is in the domestic, as well as in the international, interest of the ruling elites. If domestic elites are receiving positive incentives (such as domestic political support or international financial aid), they will stretch the refugee regime. If they are receiving negative incentives (domestic political opposition, international sanctions), the refugee regime will not stretch, and the survival migrants will not be provided with expanded rights.

In his argument about how the international community treats or fails to treat specifically vulnerable populations, Betts selects three paired comparison cases from Africa: the treatment of Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa and Botswana, of Congolese refugees in Angola and Tanzania, and of Somali refugees in Kenya and Yemen. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with institutional analysis, Betts finds that Tanzania and Kenya stretched the international refugee regime to offer more protection to survival migrants because the positive incentives to do so outweighed the negative ones. Angola and Botswana, on the other hand, did not show flexibility, and offered no protection to migrants. South Africa and Yemen remain somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

Betts’s analysis is deeply reported and nuanced. He provides a trenchant critique of the international refugee regime and points to inconsistencies and failures of bureaucratic classification that have real life and death implications for millions of destitute migrants around the world. Survival Migration, however, wants to provide answers to theoretical questions bigger than the issue of international migration. The key question it tries to address is, why is there variation in implementation of international norms in practice, even when states have signed and ratified international treaties? This is a critical question for the scholarship of norm diffusion, especially the “second wave” of this literature, which has moved away from the identification of new norms and their paths of diffusion to a deeper analysis of normative adoption and implementation on the ground. It is here that Survival Migration contributes to the larger literature on national contestation of international norms and their domestic use. While I found Survival Migration’s claim of theoretical novelty in exploring normative implementation somewhat overstated (there is already a robust literature on domestic contestation of international norms, their political use by elites, and their instrumentalization in pursuit of alternative policy goals) Betts does contribute an interesting twist to this debate. Instead of portraying normative implementation as the time of domestic normative abuse, Betts sees implementation as the moment of opportunity. In his framework, “regime stretching” is a positive outcome – where domestic elites add flexibility to international institutions and produce more beneficial results. What Betts, therefore, argues for is creative implementation of international norms at the domestic level, and not another round of international regulation that stifles local innovation and ties the hands of governments that want to help. This positive potential of international regime “shirking” at the domestic level is a very interesting claim that scholars should pick up and examine in other issue areas, away from the international refugee regime.

Bhabha’s Child Migration has a very different agenda, one less overtly interested in theory building and more in arguing for a profound shift in how the international community thinks of children, and specifically of children migrants. At the core of Bhabha’s interests are complex challenges facing “children on the move”—young children and adolescents who are trying to reunite with their families or are fleeing deprivation at home. The book is organized around three types of child migration: family migration (family reunion, family-related deportation, and international adoption), exploitation migration (child trafficking, child soldiers), and survival migration (refugee and asylum migration, economic or survival migration).

Bhabha starts with the claim that the issue of child migration is not a lack of awareness about the plight of this exceptionally vulnerable group. Instead, she argues, the problem is one of deep-seated ambivalence to migrant children. Bhabha writes, “as a society, we are stymied by a fundamental contradiction in our approach; we view the state as having a protective obligation toward vulnerable children in its role as parens patriae, parent of the nation; but we also expect the state to protect us from threatening, unruly, and uncontrolled outsiders, even if they are children” (p. 11). This deep societal ambivalence, Bhabha argues, explains the inconsistent and contradictory policies toward migrant children, who represent both “vulnerability (‘poor and innocent children’) and otherness (not really like our children)” (p. 13).

Writing firmly from the position of the children’s rights movement, which has in the past few decades come to replace the children’s protection approach, Bhabha argues that “child migrants need to be viewed as agents whose aspirations are relevant to institutional decision making” (p. 10). She criticizes, at length and in depth, the many ways in which children’s wishes, aspirations, and concerns are routinely ignored by domestic and international laws, including the manner in which adolescents are treated the same as very young children, even when their needs and capabilities are so dramatically different.

Bhabha makes a very strong case about the urgency of this global human rights disaster. She presents evidence that migration to developed countries has doubled over the past 35 years, while 11% of that migration consists of children and adolescents. Even with such population pressures, the international response has been woefully inadequate, especially in cases of survival migration that, as Betts has shown in his book, is still not internationally understood as a human rights emergency that needs a proper and consistent response.

The legal narrative of Child Migration is interspersed with a series of interconnected vignettes from actual cases of migrant children stuck in some type of an institutional maze from which they cannot extricate themselves. The stories are heartbreaking and often difficult to read. The profound insecurity these children face after being separated from their parents, the bureaucratic cruelty they are subjected to, and the often completely illogical solutions immigration authorities come up with, are enraging. Bhabha weaves these stories into her work with passion and empathy and an appropriate sense of utter human rights indignation. Her call for an establishment of a consistent international ethics of children’s human rights is timely and necessary. Unfortunately, what is less clear is how we get there. Bhabha supports designing “inclusive policies that foster access to opportunity and reward” instead of “the current ambivalent strategies of short term protection followed by rejection, exclusion, and punishment” (p. 15). What she does not offer, however, are clear, workable examples of an international legal architecture that would provide such desirable social benefits. This lack of a “final push” is especially notable by the end of the book, which ends quite abruptly with the discussion of adolescent survival migrants. A conclusion with summary theoretical findings and international institutional recommendations would have been extremely useful and would have rounded up this volume nicely.

Richly researched and passionately argued, Survival Migration and Child Migration have both presented compelling arguments for why we should care about the plight of today’s migrants and what, if anything, exists at the international level to mitigate the worst abuses these migrants face. The two books will find eager audiences in undergraduate and graduate courses in human rights, and will be required references for human rights scholars working on migration and the broader issues of international human rights regimes, institutions, and challenges of human rights policy change.