Refugees Deeply | 21.03.2018
While the legal distinction between refugees and migrants is vital, these categories often overlap in reality – a fact poorly reflected in aid programs. Lucy Hovil and Melissa Phillips argue that an integrated approach is possible without diluting protection.
Lucy Hovil, Dr. Melissa Phillips
The division between refugee and migrant remains a powerful legal tool. But in today’s world of hypermobility, compartmentalization of international aid along the same lines is illogical and wasteful. Worse, it threatens to exclude many people from much-needed aid because their experiences don’t match strict criteria.
That is not to dispense with the term “refugee.” In this era of record levels of displacement and shrinking protection space, refugee status is crucial for maintaining focus on a specific legal category of people: those who can demonstrate credible fear of persecution. Yet realities on the ground have shown that refugees have multiple identities, deploy various coping strategies and often defy tidy categories.