Who is a Refugee?

The last several weeks have seen an increase in news about people on the move. These stories have laid bare, once again, the ways in which the label of “refugee” is used for some but not for others. Last month, the BBC released a video titled “The UK’s first climate change refugees?” This piece focused on the Welsh coastal village of Fairbourne, Gwynedd, whose inhabitants have been told that their community will be decommissioned by the year 2054 due to rising sea levels. The local county council will then rebuild the sea defenses several hundred meters inland, forcing the relocation of over 400 families. The Guardian also published a piece about Fairbourne last year, again calling the families “climate change refugees.” The forced move is, of course, tragic for those affected, particularly because they will reportedly receive no compensation for the loss of property.

According to media reports in early March, people began travelling from Turkey to Greece in order to seek protection. As most will remember, in 2015 nearly one million people landed on the shores of Greece and Italy. Many of them were fleeing war in Syria, which had become increasingly violent. Since this “migrant crisis”—as it was called by much of the media—images of people arriving to Europe have been used to rally support for far-right populist groups in Europe, as well as to form the backdrop of Nigel Farage’s infamous anti-EU “Breaking Point” poster. Five years on, Turkey has been encouraging refugees and asylum seekers to travel to Greece to seek protection, after Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan told them that the border to Europe was now open. However, despite having had time to learn from the mistakes of 2015, many news organizations and politicians refuse to call individuals fleeing war-torn countries to seek protection refugees.

The politics of recent events go back to at least March 2016, when the European Union and Turkey agreed to return anyone arriving irregularly from Turkey to Europe back to Turkey. The European Union then paid €3 billion to the Turkish government to help them keep refugees in their country and an additional €3 billion in 2018. In the past few months, Turkey has been pushing for Europe to support their military actions in Northern Syria. In doing so, they have repeatedly threatened to allow refugees to travel into Europe. Since an airstrike by Russian-backed Syrian forces killed 33 Turkish soldiers in late February, the Turkish government has been telling refugees that the European border is open. According to many refugee advocates, this outcome was inevitable. “People seeking asylum are once again being used as bargaining chips in a deadly political game, a predictable consequence of the EU-Turkey deal,” said Massimo Moratti, deputy director of Amnesty International’s European Office.

Large media outlets still apparently refuse to name these people fleeing Turkey as refugees. The BBC, for instance, prefers to call them migrants. “Child migrants sleep in pens at Mytilene port,” read the headline of one news video report from early March. The people of Fairbourne, however, have been labelled as refugees by numerous media outlets. So why do these people—who will eventually need to leave their homes in over 30 years—classed as refugees, but those crossing into Europe now are classed as migrants? In light of all this confused language, why is it that we use the label of “refugee” for some groups but not for others?

The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as “a person who is outside of her country of origin, and is unable or unwilling to return to her country of origin due to fear of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” Almost all normative theorists disagree with this definition of refugeehood, arguing that its focus on persecution is morally arbitrary. Instead, a refugee is someone who is forced to cross an international border to protect their human rights or basic needs, whether the result of direct persecution, indiscriminate warfare, or natural disaster.

From a legal and normative perspective, then, those being relocated from Fairbourne cannot be refugees. They have not crossed an international border and can therefore at best be considered “internally displaced persons.” However, insofar as the media convinces us to see them as refugees, we view them as worthy of our sympathy and protection. Those fleeing Syria, by contrast, are no longer obviously seen as deserving of protection, because so much work is done to determine what a “proper” refugee looks like. For instance, in 2015 images of refugees with smartphones went viral on the internet and caused a public outcry, because many believed refugees who owned phone weren’t actually in need of assistance.

How we understand refugeehood, then, seems to be grounded not in fact but in our predetermined views of who deserves our empathy. If we view someone as undeserving of protection, then we label them as such. The normative ideas of desert do the work, and then the language follows. The refugee label then helps to bolster someone’s claim to assistance. The migrant label, by contrast, often does the work of belittling it.

It is not a controversial point that language matters. But for many who require certain labels in order to receive protection, it can matter more than we would usually think. When individuals flee war torn countries for their lives, they are entitled to our assistance. Our language should do better to reflect and shape that fact.

Photo: Volunteers from the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms help Syrian and Iraqi refugees arrive from Turkey to Skala Sykamias, Lesbos, Greece (October 30, 2015).

Rebecca Buxton

Rebecca Buxton (@rebeccabuxton) is a researcher at the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford, focusing on the political rights of refugees. Her background is in political theory and philosophy, and her forthcoming book on women philosophers, The Philosopher Queens, will be published in June 2020.