Month: September 2026 (Page 1 of 8)

As conflict reignites in northern Ethiopia, questions around accountability ensue across borders.

Every evening after work, Mekdi Yilma calls her mother, Seble Beyene, in Addis Ababa from her home in Palo Alto, California. For the past five years the calls have followed the same pattern: first the news from the north of ongoing conflict between the Amhara and Tigray region, followed by a daily catch up on the lives they lead apart. 

Nearly four years after the Pretoria peace agreement ended the 2020–2022 Tigray war, Ethiopia is sliding back into large-scale conflict. On Sept. 20, seven armed groups, including the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the Amhara Fano militias that once fought alongside federal troops against it, and the Oromo Liberation Army, announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, with the stated aim of overthrowing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government. Four days later, the TPLF declared Tigray to be in a “full blown war” with the federal government.

Beyene has been following the fighting through the evening news via her satellite TV and reports from neighbors since phone and internet service across Tigray went dark last Friday, “The last time we have seen conflict reach this level, we lost two years of our country to war.” This harsh reality has been top of mind for her daughter Yilma who has not last visited Ethiopia since she immigrated to the states 14 years ago to become a machine learning engineer. Despite her distance from the conflict, it has touched every corner of the Ethiopian community back home and those who migrated to the States.  “During the war nobody outside Ethiopia seemed to take notice, the pandemic was taking hold of the media outlets, and I am afraid nobody is watching what is taking place now,” Yilma said.

Fighting has since spread into Amhara and Afar. Tigrayan forces seized three regional airports and Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights. The UN Human Rights Office reported that federal airstrikes, some reportedly carried out by drones, hit five schools in Tigray on September 22. It has also documented allegations that the TPLF is forcibly recruiting civilians, including children. In Afar alone, a humanitarian source estimated that at least 150,000 people have been displaced.

The renewed fighting lands on a population that never recovered from the last war. A two year conflict that killed up to 600,000 people, by some estimates, yet drew a fraction of the global attention given to wars in Syria or Ukraine. For many Ethiopians, the answer to war and economic collapse has been to leave. That has been something Yilma has thought deeply about, “Bringing my mother to the US has been a constant battle, even now that I hold a green card it is difficult for me to reconcile with and convince my mother to abandon the only life she knows.” 

In 2025, the International Organization for Migration recorded nearly 1,000 deaths and disappearances along the “Eastern Route” from the Horn of Africa through Djibouti and Yemen toward Saudi Arabia, double the year before and the deadliest year since monitoring began in 2014 with Ethiopians making up 97% of migrants tracked on the route. In 2023, Human Rights Watch accused Saudi border guards of killing hundreds of Ethiopian migrants attempting to cross from Yemen, a charge the Saudi government has denied.

“I was privileged in the sense that I came with a visa, a plane ticket, and a university to call home to,” Yilma said. Beyene expressed how proud she is of her daughter but worries about abandoning her country. “Mekdi was lucky. She had a way out that was safe, but most young people here are not as fortunate.” 

The Ethiopian government has turned around to blame foreign powers for the escalation. Abiy’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, said the alliance had been operating with financial backing from neighboring Eritrea, and the army chief has accused Egypt and Sudan of supporting the rebels.

For Beyene, the question is not who is to blame but whether anyone will be held accountable this time, “After the last war, we were told there would be justice. That was quickly forgotten. Instead, there is another war and the world should not look away again.”

Sources:

“As Fighting Intensifies, Humanitarian Source Estimates at Least 150,000 Displaced in Afar, Tigray TV Hit by Drone.” Addis Standard, 28 September 2026. Addis Standard article

Council on Foreign Relations. “Conflict in Ethiopia.” Global Conflict Tracker, updated 25 September 2026. CFR Global Conflict Tracker

“Former Enemies Form Alliance to Overthrow Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed.” Agence France-Presse, via inkl, 21 September 2026. Inkl Article

International Crisis Group. “Arresting the Dangerous Descent Back into War in Northern Ethiopia.” International Crisis Group, September 2026. Crisis Group statement

“Seven Ethiopian Armed Groups Announce Anti-Government Alliance.” Reuters, via U.S. News & World Report, 21 September 2026. U.S. News article

On September 14, 2026, New York City joined the City of Chicago, the City and County of San Francisco, and three others in a lawsuit against the Trump Administration’s new public charge rule.

The U.S. public charge rule allows the Department of State to deny visa applicants deemed “too reliant” on public benefits. DOS says the rule is part of government efforts to prioritise immigrant self-sufficiency.

While “public charge” has long been part of U.S. immigration law, who falls under this category is up to the presidential administration. In his first term, President Donald Trump expanded the discretionary capacity of individual immigration officers, suggesting anyone who used public benefits or qualified for them based on income could be deemed a public charge. The Biden Administration then ruled to standardise the principle as someone who relied on government aid as their major source of income.

On July 17, the Trump administration undid it.

Too Expensive to Live Here

For the recently arrived, becoming self-sufficient takes time— and money.

Jennifer Chacón, a case manager providing job placement services at Catholic Charities, knows it firsthand.

“I had to find out on my own; what do I do? Is my title valid here? Looks like it doesn’t; Is there a way to validate it? Oh, you can’t”.

Now she helps newcomers navigate these questions.

“Not everyone knows that they can do it […] and secondly, not everyone can access these services”. Professional accreditation is one example: “We’re talking about a process that could cost you five to six hundred; only to validate a bachelor’s”, Chacón says.

But, as Chacón says, many cannot afford to support their livelihoods, much less validate their degree. “They can’t just survive on their salary […] a household earning a minimum wage in New York City, which is seventeen dollars an hour, to pay rent food, and everything else is simply not possible.”

Chacón estimates that “ninety-eight, to not say a hundred, per cent of our clients receive public benefits”. Yet, many have been increasingly deterred from getting them. Indeed, researchers estimate loss of coverage will have a disproportionately higher impact among eligible noncitizens.

“Many are scared,” she says. “Our legal team mentioned that while the law says they are not subject to public charges, anything can happen, and it can change tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.”

Too Expensive to Support You Here

The agencies providing Refugee Resettlement Services are bearing the weight of budget cuts.

As recently as September 25, the Trump Administration proposed a ‘Pocket Rescision’ of $810 million targeting funds that directly support refugee and immigrant services. The breakdown: $567 million for the Refugee and Entrant Assistance account, which funds Office of Refugee Resettlement programs under HHS; and $10 million from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Citizenship and Integration grant program that provides ESL services.

For resettlement organisations, the cuts are mounting on years of financial stress. As Chacón puts it, “The little funds we still have are provided by the state. We were a team of between 100 and 80 people; today we are 15.”

Too Expensive to Care?

For newcomers, refugee resettlement organisations are a vital source of support.

Father Fabián Arias, a volunteer at New Sanctuary Coalition and Saint Peter’s Church, where budget cuts have reduced legal-clinic services, continues to build community.

Increasingly, he fears, the “Trump administration has targeted sanctuaries”. Arias not only worries about providing basic services, but also about a sense of security.

To him, these rulings are preventing “the community from feeling that it is a safe space, that ICE will not enter there”.

Though his eyes water, he still jokes about the importance of accepting help: “I’m sorry for whoever thinks of themselves as Superman, who thinks they don’t need to be taken care of”.

When Jackie Chan’s parents moved from Davao City in the Philippines to New York around 1965, tennis was not a sport they followed. Earlier this month, they sat in the stands at the U.S. Open for the first time to watch Alexandra “Alex” Eala, the 21-year-old who has become the Philippines’ first major tennis star.

“It was a really special experience for our family,” said Chan, 46, a hair salon owner in Queens who went to Eala’s second- and third-round matches with her parents.

Eala’s season has drawn Filipinos to a sport many of them had never watched, both in the Philippines and among the roughly 10 million Filipinos living abroad. Her matches in Melbourne, Dubai and New York this year have filled with fans carrying Philippine flags, many of them overseas workers and immigrant families.

On Monday, Eala beat Thailand’s Patcharin Cheapchandej 6-1, 6-0 at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, to reach the quarterfinals. She chose to represent the Philippines there instead of playing the WTA’s China Open, a mandatory tournament, and could be fined up to $10,000 for skipping it.

Eala began the year ranked No. 53 in the world and has since climbed to No. 18. At Wimbledon in July, she beat defending champion Iga Swiatek to reach the fourth round. In August, she beat Jessica Pegula in the DC Open final and became the first Filipino to win a singles title on the WTA Tour.

At the U.S. Open, Eala reached the third round for the first time. Chan and her parents were in Louis Armstrong Stadium for her second-round win over Ukraine’s Oleksandra Oliynykova, when Filipino fans filled the stands with flags and chants.

“It was amazing seeing how many Filipinos showed up,” Chan said. “You could feel the support throughout the stadium, and it made the match feel like more than just a tennis match.”

Eala lost her next match to American Iva Jovic. Chan said her family was disappointed but still proud. “Seeing a Filipino player make it that far meant a lot to us,” she said. “Though this was my family’s first time really supporting tennis, [we] will definitely keep following her.”

Nicolas Wright, 20, a Filipino-American sprinter who runs the 60-meter dash for the University of Connecticut, had not watched much tennis before Eala. He started following her through watch parties hosted by a Filipino student club on campus.

“I’m only half Filipino, but being involved with the Filipino club at UConn has helped me connect with that side of myself,” Wright said. “Seeing Eala compete at that level made me proud.”

Wright said his family now watches her together when they can, especially during big tournaments. “It’s something that gives us another reason to connect with our Filipino side,” he said.

Eala faces Joanna Garland of Chinese Taipei in the Asian Games quarterfinals on Wednesday. The winner of the women’s singles event will earn a spot at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, provided she stays in the top 500 through June 2028.

Chan said she would go see Eala play again. “I hope she keeps improving and gets more experience playing against the best players,” she said. “I’d love to see her make another deep run at the U.S. Open and represent the Philippines at the Asian Games.”

NEW YORK– NY 

On September 23rd, leaders in the humanitarian sector convened at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York City for a panel discussion on conflict and disaster recovery as international funding diminishes. The session, called “Rewriting the Humanitarian Playbook,” featured International Rescue Committee executive director David Milliband, actress and humanitarian Carey Mulligan, and CEO of The LEGO Foundation Sidsel Marie Kristensen, among other speakers.

“Humanitarian needs are outpacing resources,” said Barham Salih, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in his opening address. “We are speaking today at a time when there is an unprecedented record of forcibly displaced people around the world. Nearly 25 million refugees have been displaced for 5 years or more and around 14 and a half million remain dependent on humanitarian assistance for basic needs.”

As the refugee crisis grows, donor governments are retreating. In July of 2025, President Trump officially dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), exacerbating humanitarian crises worldwide. Just a few months before, the UK government announced a reduction in their foreign aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of the gross national income, the lowest level in decades.

Philanthropists are stepping up where they can. Several foundation leaders announced new commitments to action at the Clinton Global Initiative on Wednesday. 

Dr. Nahla Gadalla, CEO of the Sudanese American Medical Association, spoke about establishing a permanent humanitarian relief center in eastern Chad, which will provide essential services to over 1 million Sudanese refugees who fled the ongoing civil war. Laura Miller, CEO of the War Child Alliance, revealed a $100 million grant going toward mental health and wellbeing for 10 million children affected by conflict, to be distributed over the next decade. Direct Relief CEO Amy Weaver is launching a $40 million campaign to allocate towards maternal health in conflict and disaster zones.

Initiatives that focus on long-term recovery and delivering resources beyond food, water, and shelter, are a newer development in the humanitarian sector, where “emergency” is narrowly-defined, explained Carolyn Makinson, former executive director of the International Rescue Committee UK and the Women’s Refugee Commission. In an interview, she described early challenges she faced fundraising for maternal health. “In most places, they didn’t even have help for women with childbirth,” she said. “There was a kind of mindset in the humanitarian community that this was inappropriate for emergencies.”

At the conference, Salih encouraged the UNHCR’s partners to take the long view on recovery. “I do believe strongly that we really need to move beyond the concept of managing displacement year on end. We need to have a pathway to giving people the agency they deserve.”

But with budgetary restraints, long-term recovery might have to take the backseat. The rollback of foreign aid has problematized meeting even basic needs for survivors of war and disaster.    

“This is painful. Lives are being lost. Lives will be lost because donors don’t want to put in sufficient funding to provide basic life-saving and life-sustaining aid to people,” said Princeton lecturer Doug Mercado, who has decades of experience directing emergency operations and post-conflict recovery.

He emphasized the importance of reestablishing a disaster response agency. “I’m not talking about USAID with all of this development programming, peace-building, economic development. I’m talking about an agency that’s solely dedicated to emergency response overseas.” 

During this week’s readings, I kept noticing how much someone’s life was dependent on the label they are assigned. Whether you’re a “vulnerable Afghan,” a deportee with a criminal record, or a Dublin case that belongs to Sweden decides almost everything that happens to you next, and it seemed like those labels were often settled before anyone took a close look at the actual person.

The Reuters numbers made this pretty concrete. Approval rates for Afghan asylum claims dropped from 74 percent in 2024 to 52 percent in early 2025, even though the government says it has no policy of cutting Afghan numbers. Lawyers told Reuters there’s an assumption that Sunni men aren’t really at risk under the Taliban, and a Berlin legal adviser said the outcome was “simply about luck.” That’s a hard thing to hear about a system that is supposed to assess each case individually. Meanwhile Kimia, the artist waiting in Islamabad, had her embassy interview cancelled with no explanation of when it might come back. She said her whole life comes down to that interview, and I believe her.

The Times piece on church asylum in Steglitz surprised me, mostly because of Pastor Martens. I went in expecting a progressive activist, and instead he’s someone with fairly conservative views on migration who has pushed back on the AfD trying to claim his work. Amir’s story also shows how the categories stack on top of each other. He lived in Sweden for ten years and worked as a nurse, then got swept up in a Swedish policy aimed at young Afghan men, and under EU rules Germany could send him right back there. What also stood out to me was how small the numbers are. There were fewer than 3,000 church asylum cases last year against roughly 250,000 applications, and yet it turned into a public fight between the mayors of Hamburg and Berlin. Since we’re going to Berlin, I’d be curious to see how people in that neighborhood actually feel about the church and what it’s doing.

Azmat Khan’s investigation felt like the odd one out at first, but I think it ties the rest together. So many of the deaths she documents came from the military seeing what it expected to see, like a family’s car read as a car bomb or a cotton gin read as an explosives factory. The Band-e-Timor section hit hardest for me, where young men who ran from raids to avoid being held for ransom were killed from the air as suspected Taliban. It made me think about how Germany’s resettlement program only existed because of the West’s twenty years in Afghanistan. I don’t see how that obligation just ends because the politics at home shifted.

Reading these side by side, I also noticed how differently the outlets handled the same policy. The Euronews piece mostly passed along what the Interior Ministry said and gave critics a sentence or two towards the end of the article, whereas Reuters and Politico built their stories around people on the ground like Kimia and Shakerah Baresh. Khan’s story came entirely from checking what the official government—in the case the Pentagon—records say.

Throughout these readings, I noticed that help for Afghans more often came from journalists, courts, and organizations than from the governments that had made commitments to them.

Alissa Rubin describes The New York Times scrambling in August 2021 to protect both former and current Afghan staff, since the Taliban would not care that someone had left the paper years earlier. Abdul Wahid Wafa, whose family got out through a joint effort by the Times and the Mexican government, calls the U.S. withdrawal “hasty” and “irresponsible.” He says Afghan journalists “were helped, finally, by these individuals, companies, and the civilian side. Not the American government.”

Germany’s admission program fared little better. Reuters reports that fewer than 1,600 Afghans arrived through it in two years, and it was suspended in 2025 after Friedrich Merz took office, leaving about 2,400 approved Afghans waiting in Pakistan. Kimia, a 25-year-old artist in Islamabad, told Reuters, “It’s like you just breathe, but you don’t live.”

Politico explains the reasons behind the German suspension, including pressure from the AfD and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment spurred by widely publicized attacks blamed partly on Afghan migrants. I was struck by the mixed messaging – Germany’s foreign minister promising to keep “legally binding admission commitments” while a spokesperson from the interior ministry said they were trying to “terminate voluntary admission programs to the degree possible.”

The U.S. had a much more robust evacuation and admissions program, enacted through Operations Allies Refuge, Allies Welcome, and Enduring Welcome, through which over 70,000 Afghans were initially evacuated from Kabul and nearly 200,000 in total were resettled in the U.S., compared to 36,400 in Germany.

But as I witnessed first-hand working in military-run refugee camps during Operation Allies Welcome, there was a major gap between official process and reality – and particularly after reading Azmat Khan’s series, I question how much credit should be given for a messy solution to a crisis the U.S. had a major hand in creating.

Regardless, the U.S. has now sharply restricted Afghan migration, suspending refugee admissions and barring Afghan nationals from entry. In contrast, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled earlier this year that admission pledges cannot be revoked en masse.

For me, these readings highlight the importance of watchdogs and third-party oversight. A government commitment, whether a casualty review process or an admission pledge, means little without journalists, advocates, and courts to hold officials accountable. Meanwhile, people like Kimia remain stuck in dangerous situations with their lives on hold.

Written by Leila Leibert

Reading this week’s passages provided a glimpse into how institutions determine what is considered a threat as well as how little accountability and questioning follows once those decisions are made. What struck me most was Azmat Khan’s investigation into U.S. airstrikes, built on more than 1,300 of the Pentagon’s confidential civilian casualty assessments and visits to more than 100 casualty sites. Particularly, how the records repeatedly point to a pattern of confirmation bias. The incriminating lens in which seemingly normal activity, such as ordinary family routines, distorted real enemy activity from the innocent daily realities of civilians stood out most. People streaming toward a fresh bombing site were assumed to be ISIS fighters rather than rescuers, and in Ramadi, an “unknown heavy object” dragged into a building was discovered to have been an innocent child. The military’s own investigation estimated 7 to 24 civilian deaths, while Khan’s reporting found that more than 120 villagers were killed. Yet not a single record included a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action, and the families left affected were left largely unnoticed. I found his reporting revealed what happens when corrections are never made, the current methodologies of these investigations, and the stakes are human lives. 

The Reuters podcast “Drone Wars” left me wondering how political leaders could hold machines accountable as warfare becomes more autonomous. Khan’s reporting suggests the problem began much earlier, and in many cases, the command that approved a strike was also responsible for examining it. The Times, by contrast, did what military officials admitted they had not done: analyzed the assessments in aggregate to uncover patterns of failure. As we turn toward an AI-driven future, the harder question is how targeting systems built on assessments like these will be diligenced for bias, and whether their errors will ever be corrected or simply just iterated upon. 

This “due diligence” carried into this week’s reporting on Germany. Euronews reported the deportation of 81 Afghan men on a flight coordinated with Qatar, with the Interior Ministry stating that all of them had criminal records and were legally required to leave. Each was given up to €1,000, a legal loophole, since German courts can block removals if returnees face destitution, a detail that says a great deal about the conditions awaiting them. Likewise, Politico described Afghans who had been promised resettlement left in limbo in Pakistan as German migration policy continues to harden. In both cases, decisions about who is safe enough to welcome and who should be removed leave little room for the voices of those affected to be heard.

Across these readings, the Times piece on church asylum offered a different picture providing readers a look into ways communities have fought to protect these groups. As the state moved to deport refugees, communities of faith opened their doors and sheltered them. It left me wondering what happens when the only accountability left comes not from governments, but from journalists like Khan and congregations willing to take people in and provide a voice to their stories.

Azmat Khan’s reporting in the New York Times on the miscalculations, confirmation biases, and failures by the American Military in its airstrike campaigns in the Middle East reveals a horrifying reality of American zealousness and disregard for excessive collateral damage. 

Khan explains how the military operates on the protocol that expected civilian casualty must be ‘proportional’ to military advantage gained. Considering American weapons are incredibly precise and accurate, it should be anticipated that civilian casualties would be extraordinarily low in aerial strikes. Yet, recklessness from the military can result in civilians going unidentified (for reasons such as Ramadan fasts), falsely identified as threats, being seen in footage yet not noted in communications directly prior to strikes, or for being, for redacted reasoning, hit in rogue strikes. The images portrayed and revealed by Khan demonstrate the military at what I would hope is its most careless, though I fear that may be optimistic. 

Some figures are staggering. When coming to accountability, in only one out of 1311 assessments did the Pentagon have investigators visit a strike site and in only two did investigators interview survivors. While safety risks should be considered, the overreliance on video footage, which at times has too much brevity, only frame the parts of footage the Pentagon wants to acknowledge (and keeping ‘bad targets’ out of the frame), or not capturing video footage to have reviewed. 

In Afghanistan specifically, Khan notes that “on average, each household lost five civilian family members,” largely as the result of airstrikes or American soldiers misinterpreting Afghan civilian men for Taliban. This rings particularly salient at the same time as, in many of the other articles such as those in EuroNews, Politico, Reuters, focused on Germany’s new policy under Chancellor Merz of deporting Afghans and attempting to minimize asylum application numbers. Not only is Afghanistan unstable and unsafe for many who have attempted to leave, such as the Christian converts described in The Times who were murdered by the Taliban after being deported back to Afghanistan, but it is also unsafe for civilians due to the carelessness of the American military. I wonder how the AfD or other right-leaning conservatives in Germany view the American military’s actions in the Middle East. Would the AfD fault the US for part of why asylum is sought while the Trump Administration is in power?

It is important to note that Khan’s reporting would not be necessary had the Pentagon revealed their own missteps through appropriate paper trails and accountability measures. Instead, such a burden falls on American journalists to carry out to the extent possible, often through incredibly dangerous measures, including those that could result in boots-on-the-ground civilian journalist casualties through the very practices Khan is investigating. This is one of the many reasons why the media scares militaristic regimes and autocrats.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has called for ending the refugee status of Ukrainians who fled Russia’s invasion, won the largest share of votes in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sept. 20. It was the party’s third state election victory and its second this month.

Anastasiia Yakovlieva, 25, a Ukrainian who has lived in Germany since March 2022, said the results raise questions for her. “That sometimes makes you think – do you want to stay in Germany or do you want to change your country?” she said. “Do you want to live in a society like this?”

The AfD’s national platform says refugees “need to leave Germany” and “return to their home countries.” The party’s Saxony-Anhalt chapter, which won 43.8% of the state’s vote earlier this month, has published its own manifesto calling for a mass-deportation campaign it calls “remigration” and encouraging businesses to use artificial intelligence rather than turn to “culturally alien” migrant workers, according to Reuters. Ulrich Siegmund, the lead AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, has said that “remigration applies to anyone who does not contribute to society” – a category that includes Ukrainian refugees without jobs, NPR reported.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union has ruled out working with the AfD. Germany’s domestic intelligence service monitors the party nationally as a suspected extremist organization.

Sofiia Patkanovtsiy, a Princeton University sophomore from Uzhhorod in western Ukraine, described the AfD’s victories as “distressing.” She said Ukraine is increasingly “used like a buzzword for pushing political agendas or anti-immigration sentiments.” Patkanovtsiy plans to return to Ukraine after graduating, under a commitment to the nonprofit Ukraine Global Scholars, whose scholars pledge to work in Ukraine for at least five years.

Yakovlieva is from Donetsk, which came under the control of Russian-backed forces in 2014. Her family fled to Kyiv and was living near Bucha and Irpin, outside the capital, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“I didn’t want to get encircled, and that’s why I decided to flee the war,” she said.

She left with her mother, stopping briefly in Poland before settling in Germany. Her father and brother later joined them, and her family now lives near Cologne.

Yakovlieva speaks four languages, holds project-management certifications, and is working on a second bachelor’s degree, but said, “I’m not that attractive of a worker in the German labor market.” German employers want German-issued qualifications, she said, and retraining can take years. Her first degree would qualify her to teach in Germany only after two more years of study.

Her mother holds a finance degree from a Ukrainian university and spent a decade caring for children. According to Yakovlieva, she completed a job-center training course and a month of practical training at a German kindergarten. The kindergarten then declined to hire her as an assistant because she lacked the required bachelor’s degree. Yakovlieva said some Germans work in such roles without a degree or certificate “just because they are German.”

“A lot of Ukrainians had to agree to work in lower positions than they used to work in Ukraine,” she said.

In July, EU countries agreed to extend temporary protection for people fleeing Ukraine until March 4, 2028. More than 4 million people have received that protection since 2022. The status stems from an EU-wide decision, not from national or state governments.

Yakovlieva holds a residence permit under that temporary-protection provision. She said her employer, an American company, cannot provide the documents she would need for a German work visa.

In about six months, she said, she will be able to choose between applying for German citizenship and seeking permanent residency, which would require changing jobs.

“It’s in [Germany’s] interest to keep the people here,” Yakovlieva said. “I think when the time comes, they will be trying to provide an opportunity for those who want to stay.”

On September 16th, Malta’s Ombudsman published a press release which highlights that Malta has not included the Department of Ombudsman in discussions/development of the Independent Monitoring Mechanism (IMM), reflecting broader trends of anti-immigration attitudes in Malta. The IMM is part of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum which was implemented last June to address concerns surrounding immigration and asylum. The IMM was included in this pact as a safeguard for the newly robust screening system for asylum seekers, and is to be independently developed by each country in the EU. 

Malta is a small EU country in the Mediterranean located south of Sicily, which has seen a rise in immigration over the past decade, with immigrants now occupying 31% of the country’s population. Most of these immigrants come from India, Nepal, and the Philippines. The Times of Malta reports that due to these growing numbers of immigrants, and the small geographic size of the country, Malta is the most densely populated country in the European Union, putting strain on the country’s infrastructure and economy. 

As explained by Katie Cordina, a nursing student at the University of Malta, immigrants are often looked down on and disrespected in Malta. Cordina is currently writing her thesis on the experiences of immigrant nurses at Mater Dei Hospital, Malta’s main hospital. When asked about the general view of immigrants in Malta, she explained, “Recently an immigrant choked a Maltese person, which broke headlines and everyone was complaining about the trouble that immigrants cause in the country.” 

Cordina clarifies that she does not hear many discussions about immigration policy in Malta within her University or hospital networks. However, she notes that she does notice more disrespect towards immigrants as there is a rise in laws restricting immigrants and refugees into the country. International Migrations professor Christopher Blair helps explain the link between legislative policies, and public opinion regarding immigration. “Some countries try to use policies to shape attitudes, and sometimes policies follow from attitudes,” he said.  

Princeton Professor Andrew Moravcsik, head of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination explained through an email response that there is nuance to Malta’s lack of action towards the IMM. Professor Moravsik explains that the lack of action may be a delay.  “The literature on EU compliance suggests that enormous cross-national differences exist in average speed of implementation driven by more or less efficient national bureaucracies,” he said. 

But this is not the only possibility, “A still more interesting possibility is that the countries (right now the four: Belgium, Italy, Malta, Hungary, for which this seems plausible) are engaged in willful non-compliance due to some internal conflict or particular political or economic cost to special interests of compliance accruing to that country, or specific opposition,” he said. 

Professor Blair explains that EU policy often provides an overarching framework, but leaves space for countries to delegate specific laws as demonstrated by the IMM. “Within the broad scope of EU rules, countries certainly implement different levels of policy liberality,” he said. In Malta’s case, the lack of the IMM reflects a trend of low liberality, as The European Council on Refugees and Exiles warns that the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum will further prevent asylum seekers from receiving legal help in Malta. 

Despite these social and legislative trends towards immigrants and asylum seekers in Malta, human rights groups such as the Aditus foundation, Jesuit Refugee Service, and Malta Refugee Council continue to advocate for refugee and immigrant rights in Malta. “Us immigrants stick together,” said Cordina. 

Sources:

Aditus Foundation. Country Report: Malta; Update on 2025. European Council on Refugees and Exiles, June 2026. AIDA Country Report on Malta

European Commission. 2024 EMN-ESTAT Country Factsheet: Malta. European Migration Network and Eurostat, 2024. 2024 EMN-ESTAT Malta Country Factsheet

“The 31% of Malta’s Population Made Up of Foreigners, as Country Received over 32,000 Immigrants in 2025.” The Malta Independent, 9 July 2026. The Malta Independent article

“Malta Remains EU’s Most Densely Populated Country, Eurostat Finds.” Times of Malta, 2026. Times of Malta article