Ship Aquarius Ends Migrant Rescues in Mediterranean’. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46477158.8 8. Visit https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean.
Introduction
We commit to a more equitable sharing of the burden and responsibility for hosting and supporting the world’s refugees.
New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (2016)
Today, as people flee civil wars, authoritarian states, persecution by state and non-state actors, famine and environmental disaster, the international refugee regime that was forged in the aftermath of global war and extended in the context of the independence struggles and post-independence conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century is creaking, perhaps cracking, under the strain. The images that we see, of overcrowded boats crossing the Mediterranean and drowned bodies washed up on Europe’s holidays beaches, or of caravans of displaced people trekking to the Mexican border with the United States – and the images that we generally don’t see, of people dying in desert crossings in Libya and Mexico, or of families warehoused in refugee camps across Africa and Asia1 – have led the UN secretary general to speak of a global crisis of solidarity. Many in need of protection do not receive it, and even those who reach camps (or urban spaces) often fail to find security.2
Acknowledgement of the failings of our current political framework for responding to refugee crises and the need for a renewed approach to refugee protection found expression in the United Nations’ 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, which highlighted the need for greater international cooperation and responsibility sharing.3 But what exactly is the nature of the responsibility that states owe to refugees? And what kinds of international cooperation are required? To raise these questions is to ask how we should approach refugee protection today. Who should count as a refugee and what is owed to persons with that status? Is it sufficient for the international community to provide funds to meet the basic humanitarian needs of refugees in the (typically neighbouring) states of immediate refuge? What weight should be given to the refugees’ own choices – exhibited, for example, in embarking on dangerous journeys to Europe or the United States? Under what conditions can refugees be repatriated to their own states? These are among the most pressing ethical questions in contemporary politics and it is the task of this book to provide a framework for addressing them.
One pragmatic response to these questions can be found in the Global Compact on Refugees, a nonbinding agreement that the New York Declaration tasked the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) with drafting.4 Its objectives are to ease pressures on host countries and to expand access to the resettlement of refugees in other states, as well as to enhance refugee self-reliance and support conditions in countries of origin for the safe return of refugees. The adoption of this compact is a significant diplomatic achievement, although the challenge of securing the voluntary cooperation among the relevant actors that is required for implementing the compact will be considerably more demanding. But, if we are to evaluate responses to the contemporary predicaments of refugee protection, we need to step back from our immediate political context and engage in a deeper investigation of the institution of refugeehood.
Such a project is necessary not simply because the established refugee regime is under strain as a result of failures of international cooperation. One reason why it is necessary is, more fundamentally, that the figure of the refugee in contemporary politics (as well as in academic literature) is caught between two distinct and incompatible pictures of refugeehood – humanitarian and political – that give rise to rather different accounts of who is entitled to refugee status, of the obligations owed to refugees, and of the appropriate international organisation of refugee protection.
Two Pictures of Refugees
The humanitarian picture identifies refugees as forcibly displaced persons who have typically crossed an international border – that is, people who have a compelling reason to flee, or not to return to, their home state on the grounds that return would pose a threat to their basic needs. This picture of refugees and our relationship to them ‘pervades the public imagination and academic literature’:
The term ‘refugee’ connotes people fleeing war, famine, and failed states. They are portrayed as victims waiting in camps until they can return or be resettled. These are the ‘neediest’ of the needy such that ‘a refugee’s plight appears morally tantamount to that of a baby who has been left on one’s door-step in the dead of winter’. Characterizations like this represent what has been called a ‘humanitarian’ conception of refugees where a foreigner’s need for protection – regardless of whether that need results from persecution, civil war, famine, extreme poverty, or some other cause – grounds a claim for asylum. The more serious and urgent is the need for protection, the stronger is that claim.5
A clear example of the humanitarian picture is provided by Betts and Collier in their recent book Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System, where they argue that ‘Syrians forced to flee their homes by violence’ are ethically analogous to a ‘drowning child’ and ‘we have an unambiguous duty of rescue towards them’.6
By contrast, the political picture argues for the distinctiveness of refugees by comparison to other forced migrants:
Refugees are special because persecution is a special harm. Refugees ‘are targeted for harm in a manner that repudiates their claim to political membership’; their ‘rights go unprotected because they are unrecognized’ rather than for other reasons…. Refugees are distinctive because their country of origin has effectively repudiated their membership and the protection it affords. The status on which almost all their other rights hinge is gone.7
This picture draws a sharp distinction between refugees and what Michael Walzer calls ‘necessitous strangers’:
Both are distinct from [voluntary] immigrants. Necessitous strangers are ‘destitute and hungry’ people fleeing generalized catastrophes. Their needs can be met ‘by yielding territory’ or ‘exporting wealth’ while withholding membership. Yet refugees are ‘victims of … persecution’ whose ‘need is for membership itself, a non-exportable good’.8
Whereas ‘necessitous strangers’ require humanitarian aid, refugees require asylum. The humanitarian and the political pictures of refugeehood thus diverge in their responses to the question of who should be entitled to refugee status; so, for example, from the humanitarian perspective there is no essential moral difference between people fleeing persecution and people fleeing famine, or between those who flee across international borders and those who are forcibly displaced within their state of nationality, whereas from the political perspective only persons outside the state and threatened by persecution should be entitled to refugeehood. Even more, the two pictures also shape distinct understandings of what obligations are owed to persons with that status; and these understandings, in turn, have significant implications for how such obligations should be shared and for how we think about the nature of the grant of refugee status as an expressive act. For the humanitarian picture, the underlying obligation is a moral duty to prevent undeserved suffering; this obligation takes the form of providing a refuge within which basic needs can be secured and protected as long as the costs of doing so are not unreasonably burdensome. Hence the focus of international cooperation is on sharing the burden of protecting refugees from serious harm, while the act of granting refuge (and of providing resources for refugee protection) is a communicative act that expresses moral solidarity with vulnerable strangers. By contrast,
