Working Paper
Iraqi Forced Migrants in Jordan

Conditions, Religious Networks, and the Smuggling Process

This paper describes and analyses the case of Iraqis who, in the 1990s, have arrived in Jordan as forced migrants, and have continued to Western Europe or Australia as asylum migrants. The argument put forth is that trends of asylum migration cannot be fully understood without looking at a set of interrelated issues in the countries of first reception of the forced migrants: reception standards, the migrants’ poor socio-economic conditions, further violations of their human rights, but also the functioning of the migrants’ social networks and of human smuggling rings.