The Foundation's International Affairs program encourages independent critical thinking on major global issues. Support goes to institutions and individuals for research, training, policy analysis, and the dissemination of information on five major topics: the worldwide movement of refugees and migrants; the strengthening of international peace and security; the problems of the world economy; the formation of U.S. foreign policy; and international and regional relations, particularly in the Third World. The aim of this work is to stimulate imaginative reconsideration of issues critical to the maintenance of peaceful coexistence in a world grown increasingly interdependent.

REFUGEES AND MIGRATION

The global movement of peoples seeking better lives or escape from oppression has swollen to massive proportions in recent years. As a funding agency long concerned with the plight of refugees and migrants, the Foundation supports work in this area under three of its programs (see pages 7 and 33). The International Affairs office supports research on the causes and consequences of population flows and dissemination of information on refugee and migrant issues. Efforts to strengthen the planning and management of refugee relief operations are also assisted.

Despite a growing literature of refugee- and migrant-related research, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the causes of population movements and their impact on both sending and receiving countries. Several studies on those topics were funded this year.

A grant to the New School for Social Research assisted a group of researchers who are trying to develop a framework for handling future refugee crises by analyzing refugee flows in Third World countries since 1960. The researchers will attempt to show that since these movements are related to tensions in sending countries, the final outcome, whether repatriation or resettlement, can be correlated to the conflict that produced the flows.

The Foundation also provided funds to the University of Maryland for research and a conference of experts on the links between economic development in the Caribbean and the flow of migrants to the United States. Since the end of World War II, more than 1.5 million people from the Caribbean (exclusive of Puerto Rico) have entered this country legally and up to 1 million illegally. In addition, about 2 million Puerto Ricans have migrated to the mainland. Researchers will examine such issues as the effect on Caribbean emigration of different development strategies and U.S. government efforts to inhibit the flow of migrants. Another grant, to the East-West Center in Hawaii, covered the costs of a conference of Asian specialists and policy makers on the migration of laborers from South and East Asia to the Middle East and its effect on families and social structure in the countries sending them.

Another area in need of research is the rehabilitation of refugees who have sought temporary asylum in Third World nations. With a grant of $200,000 to the American Council of Voluntary Agencies, the Foundation assisted a project that will help the Somali government develop self-help activities for the approximately one million refugees in Somalia. Ethopian, Somali, and American scholars are collecting socioeconomic and cultural data on the refugees so that the activities can be tailored to their backgrounds and needs.

A rich source of information on the recent social and political history of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam are the 600,000 Indochinese refugees who have settled in the United States since 1975. The Foundation granted $300,000 to the Social Science Research Council for an oral history project that will add to knowledge of the region from this important source. The council will award some fifteen grants annually to American and Indochinese scholars who will interview refugees about their experiences.

To increase the flow of timely information on refugee matters to practitioners and policy makers in the field, funding was provided to the U.S. Committee on Refugees (through the American Council for Nationalities Service) and to the Center for Migration Studies of New York. The U.S. committee publishes World Refugee Survey, a comprehensive year-book of statistics on refugees around the world; Refugee Reports, a newsletter for resettlement workers; and papers on specific topics. The center—which publishes the International Migration Review, the major scholarly