Chapter 4: Rhetoric and Practice: Advancing Human Rights Literacy in Adult Education

With more than 250 million people living outside their country of origin, migration is a ubiquitous worldwide phenomenon (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2017). The challenge of helping migrants successfully transition is especially important for those countries prosperous enough to attract a disproportionate share of migrants, such as the United States and Germany, who with 19% and 4.7% respectively of total migrants, are two of the top three migrant destinations (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2017). (Saudi Arabia is tied with Germany at 4.7%.) The way that countries help migrants integrate into society reveals much about their underlying premises and values concerning human life. This challenge poses important questions for the host country, not only about such issues as societal structure and role expectations, but perhaps most important, conceptions of what it means to be human, regardless of whether or not a person has a migration background.