Responding to Needs: Increased Attention to the Rights of Non-Citizens in Times of Migration Spikes

Refugees’ and migrants’ rights are enshrined in dedicated treaties. Yet other UN TBs (TB) regularly monitor foreigners’ rights. This repetitive use of scarce TBs’ resources could exacerbate monitoring fatigue. Why, then, do TBs do this? This article measures and explains the repetition between TB’s monitoring practices. Utilizing previous research on foreigners’ rights in human rights shaming schemes, it hypothesizes that foreigners’ rights monitoring repetition is a response to migration spikes. The article also formulates competing explanations for repetition. It then describes the new data on UN TB’s monitoring of foreigners’ rights. It also explains the strategy used to test the hypotheses, which includes regression analysis and qualitative process tracing analysis of interview data. Finally, it presents the results that indicate that through their repetitive monitoring of foreigners’ rights violations, the TBs respond to increased needs for such monitoring due to migration spikes.