For his first Dialogue on Protection Challenges, held in Geneva on December 11-12, 2007, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, chose the topic of refugee protection, durable solutions, and international migration. The High Commissioner had no shortage of potential topics to choose from, making his decision to focus this first-ever dialogue session on the difficulties of identifying and protecting refugees among the millions of people on the move in this era of globalization even more significant and pressing.

Background

While the number of refugees worldwide has stabilized at around 10 million, with only the conflict in Iraq producing a massive outflow in recent years, overall vulnerability, especially for new asylum seekers, is increasing. The twin fears of terrorist infiltration and inundation from illegal immigration have combined to create an environment in which countries of first asylum assume the worst when individuals seeking protection arrive on their door step. The United States has its Patriot and Real ID Acts, with their unreasonable restrictions on entry for people who may have given “material support,” even if as little as a bowl of rice and even if under duress, to armed groups, including ones supported in the past by the US government, such as Hmong who aided US military forces in Laos during the Vietnam War era. Australia has its “Pacific Solution,” which dumps asylum seekers on remote islands off the coast before they can establish any claim to protection. Until very recently, Thailand had insisted that Burmese must have fled fighting, defined as literally running from a hail of bullets, to qualify for refugee status.

Ironically, the Cold War era now appears to be the golden age of refugee protection. The core assumption of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees – that persecuted individuals fleeing tyranny would be welcome in the freedom-loving countries of the world – reflected the reality of state conflict between two opposed blocs. As long as generosity to refugees provided fodder to propaganda campaigns in the global ideological struggle, countries adhered to the Refugee Convention. The provisions were even expanded, as in the case of the Organization for African Unity, which in the 1960s at the height of the anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles added the qualifying criterion of fleeing conflict and “events seriously disturbing the public order” rather than just targeted persecution.

For the United States and many of its NATO allies, the end of the Cold War has deprived the refugee protection regime of its primary rationale. Since they are no longer fleeing communist persecution, the moral claim of refugees to care and protection has weakened, forcing them and refugee advocates to base their claims on legal grounds embodied in the Refugee Convention. They are at the mercy of states often reluctant to fulfill their legal duties. In the meantime, numerous complicating factors have arisen: the rise in intra-state conflicts; the exponential growth in the power of multi-national corporations and the extent of their capital investment and the resulting displacement and disruption of societies based on traditional means of production; rapid urbanization. With an estimated 200 million people now living outside their country of origin, the justification for the High Commissioner’s focus on refugee protection amid large-scale migration is clear.

The Reality of “Mixed Flows”

From the vantage point of the industrialized world, migration is fundamentally a problem of movement from countries where poverty is the norm, mainly in the global South, to those with the greatest wealth, located in the North. But this view is distorted and self-serving. With high levels of economic imbalance within developing regions and with poverty often associated with internal conflict and human rights abuses, refugee flows amidst the movement of economic migrants are a common phenomenon within the South. China, Thailand, Malaysia, India, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt are among countries that are magnets both for individuals fleeing persecution and for those seeking employment and greater economic opportunity.

Refugees International (RI), a Washington-based organization that advocates for solutions to refugee crises, recently completed assessments of the situations for Burmese in Thailand and Zimbabweans in South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia. RI has also had a long-standing commitment to advocating for recognition of North Koreans in China as refugees. In Thailand, RI found that the government restricts access for asylum seekers to the few refugee camps established for Burmese; those outside camps are under constant threat of arrest and deportation. Many end up working for poor wages in terrible conditions on construction and other infrastructure projects. In southern Africa, Zimbabweans are considered illegal economic migrants, which restricts their ability to obtain work, while the lack of recognition and visibility makes it difficult to organize humanitarian assistance programs, though some local churches and international non-governmental organizations attempt to assist them. China is similarly restrictive in the case of North Koreans, and the few agencies trying to help either work clandestinely through local church groups or combine low-key support for refugee shelters with work with local communities.

The scale of these crises is especially challenging: there are at least two million Burmese in Thailand; at least 1.1 and as many as three million Zimbabweans in neighboring countries in southern Africa; and while the number of North Koreans in China does not exceed 50,000 at any one time, several hundred thousand North Koreans have left the country since the famine in the mid-1990s. Each of these cases presents the dilemma of identifying individuals in need of international protection in the face of the host country insisting that most, if not all, of them are economic migrants.

For many, the decision to leave their home country is not about the dream of finding a better life elsewhere, as implied in the label of economic migrant. Rather, the motivation for flight is indeed survival. For this very reason, in many situations it is impossible to draw a clear line between refugees and economic migrants. Refugees have pressing economic needs as well, making it easy for the countries of first asylum to classify them as economic migrants while ignoring the aspect of political persecution. Governments use refugees’ legitimate economic needs to delegitimize their asylum claims, further weakening the application of international refugee law.