What is the difference between a \u201crefugee\u201d and a \u201cmigrant\u201d? And why does it matter?<\/p>\n
The basic difference between the two designations, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is that \u201crefugees\u00a0are persons fleeing armed conflict or persecution\u201d, while migrants \u201cchoose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives by finding work, or in some cases for education, family reunion, or other reasons\u201d.<\/p>\n
That, indeed, is the barest of explanations and does not capture the full impact of how the designations impact people.<\/p>\n
Dr. Ben Whitham, a lecturer in international relations at the UK\u2019s De Montfort University, recently kicked off MMP\u2019s Guest Authored series with\u00a0On seeking asylum from poverty: why the refugee\/migrant paradigm cannot hold<\/em>. Dr. Whitham\u2019s paper explores the \u201cpolitics of labelling\u201d in the UK that was spurred by the increased movement of refugees and other migrants to Europe between 2014 and 2016.<\/p>\n Whitham was inspired to write about labelling after seeing stories with dramatic images in the British media in 2014 and 2015. In those stories, politicians and commentators were \u201ctalking about the comparative status of people who were arriving very visibly in boats\u201d, Dr. Whitham said in a recent conversation with MMP.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cWhat became increasingly entrenched in those media representations was that everyone had to fit into one category or another \u2013 they were either asylum seekers or economic migrants\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n He sensed \u201ca repurposing of the word \u2018migrant\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there was a moral shading of economic migrants as doing something bad because they were being represented as making a choice of leaving behind their country as opposed to staying and improving the economy in their country\u201d, Dr. Whitham said.<\/p>\n When British politicians and others use the label \u201cmigrant\u201d in that way, they are implying that people who flee without the backdrop of a civil war are making an immoral choice by abandoning their country. This type of demonising, of setting up an unrealistic binary choice based on definitions of \u201chero\u201d and \u201cvillain\u201d, is a game that politicians have played for years.<\/p>\n \u201cThe tactic is extremely effective. \u2018You\u2019re either this or you\u2019re that\u2019 is a well-evidenced and old way of winning people over. It goes back to religion\u2026good and evil\u201d, Dr. Whitham said.<\/p>\n Other factors, including racism, might also contribute to the definitions and the feelings behind them.<\/p>\n He offered one example: The many Brits who have moved to Spain for what they hope will be a better life are referred to \u201cas expatriates or expats\u201d, which conjures an image of people enjoying an exotic, prosperous life.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s racism involved in the general way migration is portrayed in Europe and the wider Western world and the US as well\u201d, he said. \u201cIt comes partly in the form of the dehumanising of people who are travelling to Europe or to the US\u201d.<\/p>\n In other academic research, Whitham looks at representations of Muslims amid the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the West. In the most negative depictions, people from majority-Muslim countries are portrayed as potential terrorism threats.<\/p>\n Dr. Whitham does see glimmers of optimism amid this politics of labelling.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile the present political crisis presents many dangers \u2013 to various minorities, to women, to people on the move \u2013 it nevertheless also represents an unprecedented\u00a0opportunity\u201d, Dr. Whitham said. \u201cCritical positions and radical\u00a0social movements, from the new feminisms\u00a0to trans rights, anti-racist, and anti-colonial\u00a0movements, are being mainstreamed as never\u00a0before\u201d.<\/p>\n This multitude of perspectives makes it harder to perpetuate the refugee\/migrant paradigm.<\/p>\n \u201cThese kinds of binaries\u201d, he said, \u201cdon\u2019t capture real life\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is the difference between a \u201crefugee\u201d and a \u201cmigrant\u201d? And why does it matter? The basic difference between the two designations, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is that \u201crefugees\u00a0are persons fleeing armed conflict or persecution\u201d, while migrants \u201cchoose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,86,89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-compact","category-policy","category-refugees","region-global","region-middle-east","writer-davis"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2501,"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions\/2501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.maisoninteractive.com\/mixedmigrationcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}