Complexity of Global Refugee Crisis: Needs for Global Transdisciplinary Collaboration

Abstract

People are on the move for many reasons such as war and civil war, human rights, violation, economic, social, climate, environmental, political, and individual reasons that create these changing aspects. In such complex situations, the need to ee (forcibly displaced) versus the choice to leave (migration)can be difficult to determine. The issue of refugee resettlement is complex and includes many factors to consider. Factors being considered for their impact on resettlement include budget and cost issues, federal law and policies, administration challenges, security screening process, education and training, health and housing, crime rate, socioeconomic issues and many others. The objective of this article is to discuss how the aforementioned factors relates and interact with one another using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM). ISM methodology implementation against this problem was consisted of a group of 25 undergraduate students in senior design class, all pursuing Mechanical Engineering degree at Texas Tech University, two Ph.D. students, one faculty member in design, four research engineers from different companies. This group recognized significant difficulties and challenges in carrying out successful refugee resettlement and sought to identify the main factors affecting the problem and how they were interrelated, with the goal of improving the rate of success for these displaced individuals.