At some point, it becomes difficult to argue for protection for these groups, and not for persons leaving an economy in ruins, extreme poverty or general conditions of civil disorder. We are getting closer to an understanding of refugee as anyone whose “survival” is at stake. And with the rise of the idea of “climate refugees,” the threatened harm will come from a non-human source. It is also now established law that the threat of persecution can come from private actors, not just the state. Furthermore, through very effective lawyering, refugee advocates have significantly enlarged the “social group” category to include, for example, LGBTQ claims, gender-based claims, and claims based on gang violence. Today virtually anyone fleeing conflict in their home state will be categorized as a refugee (e.g., more than 5 million Syrians), whether or not they can show a threat of individualized or group-based persecution. Thus migrants and refugees fell into fairly distinct, non-overlapping groupings-differentiated by their motives for movement, their place of origin, their politics, and also by humanitarian considerations.īut in more recent years, it has become gradually more difficult to distinguish migrants from refugees – and this for various reasons.įirst, the definition of refugee has expanded dramatically. Decades later, as the European Union formed, immigration policy was among the powers reserved to the constituent states. In the US, the “plenary power” of Congress to decide how many migrants to admit and on what conditions was affirmed by the courts-based on 19th-century cases grounded in strong notions of national sovereignty. They were guests who had no entitlement to stay, no claim to a need for protection, and no basis for being included in state benefits programs. Migrants by contrast were seen as coming for other reasons (primarily economic gain) admitting or excluding them served no obvious political interest and they might or might not be assimilable. So refugees were seen as innocent, or as political allies, and hence worthy of assimilation. Most of these early refugee groups (Europeans in Displaced Persons camps, Hungarians following the Soviet invasion) were white. Humanitarianism and politics combined to support the category of “refugee,” which was applied to defined groups identifiable by their persecution. That refugee regime was created with a recent past of horrendous persecution and a present and future of persons escaping from behind the Iron Curtain. But the majority of refugee scholars take a more moderate stance: we (and I include myself here) are not asserting a right of free movement for all persons, we can say we are simply saying that persons should not be returned to places where they will be persecuted.įor many decades, the post-war policy lines drawn between refugees and migrants seemed almost self-evident. Some migration scholars see “sovereignty” as an unjust claim to police borders, and would move beyond non-refoulement to a universal right to free movement. Non-refoulement – the international principle that forbids a country from returning asylum seekers to a country where they would likely face danger – is an aggressive incursion on state sovereignty. Holding this line is also justified on more pragmatic grounds: if refugees are put into a larger category of, say, “migrants” they run the risk of losing the special protections they enjoy-since no one thinks the nations of the world will extend the special rights that refugees sometimes enjoy to all persons on the move.įinally, keeping refugees separate from “voluntary” migrants supports the claim of refugees that their rights trump the traditionally recognized authority of states to regulate their borders. Other persons who have traveled from home, even if they share conditions of vulnerability with refugees, continue to have a state to which they can return. A UN agency and an international Convention singles them out for special treatment -from among the world’s needy billions-because of their effective statelessness. In a world of nation-states, they are particularly vulnerable and thus appropriate subjects of a legal regime established expressly to protect them. Refugees, so the traditional thinking goes, have not only been forced to flee they have been stripped of their rights to membership in a state (their “right to have rights”). Most (but not all) refugee scholars argue for such a distinction, both on conceptual and practical grounds. Rather, I am asking a conceptual question about the nature of refugee scholarship: does the line that separates forced migrants from other persons on the move continue to be theoretically sustainable? My title doesn’t refer to whether refugee scholars should help others fend off attacks from governments and populist parties that are intent on destroying the international protection regimes we study.
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