Refugees
Refugees
Refugees are a subset of immigrants often termed political migrants. They are pushed out of their homelands, typically by war or government persecution due to religion, ethnicity, or political activism. For example, Albert Einstein (1879-1955), often considered the most influential scientist of the twentieth century, was among the Jews who left Germany during the 1930s due to Nazi anti-Semitism. The Buddhist monk His Holiness the Dalai Lama is an internationally recognized advocate of human rights for Tibetans; he fled Tibet in 1959 following the brutal crackdown by China against Tibetans opposing Chinese rule.
In contrast to refugees, most immigrants are pulled from their homes by the prospects of better jobs in other countries, or to join family members who already reside abroad. These economic and social forms of international migration allow time for a considerable amount of planning and preparation. Such immigrants often believe they will return to their homelands at some point in the future. Refugee migrations, however, are unanticipated and forced, and will keep the émigrés away from home for a very long time, possibly for the rest of their lives.
Since the mid-1990s the world has averaged between 11 million and 15 million refugees per year. The majority are women and children. The United Nations (UN) first defined a refugee in 1951 as a person who “owing to a well founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of that country.” This definition is contained in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which was developed in the aftermath of World War II (1939-1945) and only pertained to people in Europe. The 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees broadened the policy to include people in the rest of the world. Today there are five refugee populations numbering 500,000 people or more: those from the former Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar (Burma), and Sudan.
The 1951 convention and the 1967 protocol establish the rights of refugees in exile, including the rights to protection, movement, and work. They specifically prohibit refoulement —the forced return of refugees to a country where they would be persecuted. One hundred forty-five countries have signed the convention and/or the protocol, but forty-four countries, including India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, have not. Some governments use the UN definition of refugee in their national laws, as the United States did when it passed the landmark Refugee Act of 1980. Nonetheless, foreign-policy interests often determine to what degree signatories of the convention and protocol actually abide by them. The U.S. government historically has given a very favorable reception to political migrants from Cuba, but uses the U.S. Coast Guard to interdict those leaving Haiti.
There have been several global trends in refugee migrations since World War II. European decolonization produced intense ethnic conflict in newly independent states in Africa and Asia (e.g., the 1947 partition of India), and it was a major cause of refugee crises from the late 1940s through the 1960s. The cold war between the United States, the former Soviet Union, and the client states of each superpower was the main cause of refugee crises from the 1960s through the 1980s. In the United States the best known cold-war refugees are the Cubans and the Vietnamese.
Since the 1990s a new cause of refugees has been the total collapse of national institutions in some countries (termed failed states ), leading to perpetual social conflict and disorder. This occurred in Somalia during the early 1990s, and other countries in Africa have followed this same pattern. In the western hemisphere, Haiti shows many signs of being a failed state and Colombia has some symptoms as well. Two catastrophic ethnic conflicts occurred almost simultaneously in the mid-1990s: More than 1 million Bosnian refugees fled Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and about 2 million Hutus fled Rwanda when Tutsi forces regained power following the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis at the hands of Hutu militias.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, created in 1950, is the primary international body charged with advocating for refugees and providing them with assistance. Many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also assist refugees, such as the U.S. Committee for Refugees, U.S. Catholic Conference, and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). NGOs lobby states for more favorable policies, provide services in refugee camps, and facilitate adaptation when refugees resettle in host countries or repatriate to their homelands. But refugees often endure years of waiting in impoverished, segregated camps, a situation termed warehousing. If the root political problems remain unresolved for a long time, warehousing creates multigenerational refugee populations. Nearly 2 million Afghani refugees reside in Iran and Pakistan, a legacy of the Soviet invasion in 1979 and subsequent wars. About 2.5 million Palestinians throughout the Middle East receive assistance from the UN Relief and Works Administration for Palestine Refugees. The Palestinians were originally displaced by the wars that followed the creation of Israel in 1948.
An important legal distinction for political migrants is whether they seek refugee status before or after arriving in a host country where they hope to permanently reside. The United States, Canada, Australia, and the countries of the European Union allow people with a well-founded fear of persecution to apply for entry while still living in their homelands or in adjacent countries to which they have fled. Since passage of the Refugee Act of 1980 the United States has accepted more than 2.5 million refugees in this way. Congress and the president establish an annual refugee admissions quota, and refugees who arrive are eligible for social welfare programs operated by the federal government, state governments, and NGOs. Since 2000 the former Soviet Union, Somalia, and Iran have been the leading source countries of refugee admissions to the United States.
Actual or imminent persecution can be so dire that people flee without waiting for permission to resettle in a host country. When political migrants cross into another country without legal authorization and then apply for refugee status they are called asylum seekers. China, Haiti, El Salvador, and Guatemala are the sources of about 45 percent of all asylum seekers who have entered the United States since 1989. In western Europe most asylum seekers come from Turkey, Africa, and the Middle East. The United States and other western countries use legal proceedings, which often are hasty and haphazard, to determine whether asylum seekers have credible reasons to fear persecution if deported to their homelands. U.S. asylum officers approve fewer than half of all asylum requests. U.S. immigration judges adjudicate claims initially denied, but the success rate of these appeals is even lower.
People who flee persecution but stay within their native country rather than crossing an international border share many of the same experiences as refugees. They are termed internally displaced persons (IDPs). The term displaced persons gained prominence in Europe after World War II, when it was used to describe Poles, Germans, and other people who were outside their homelands due to the war; in some cases they did not wish to return home. IDPs now is used to refer to people who have fled persecution or war but who cannot avail themselves of the 1951 convention or the 1967 protocol because they are still within the jurisdiction of the state which regulates their citizenship.
There are more IDPs in the world than refugees: about 25 million compared to 11.5 million. Five countries have more than 1 million IDPs: Sudan, Colombia, Uganda, Congo-Kinshasa, and Iraq. International protection and aid for IDPs conflicts with national sovereignty and requires asserting that a state is unwilling or incapable of protecting its own citizens. For a brief period during the 1990s the UN undertook such humanitarian intervention in northern Iraq, Bosnia, and Somalia. Unfortunately, the humanitarian crisis that began in 2003 in the Darfur region of Sudan did not produce a similar response from the international community. In 2005 the UN adopted guidelines for assisting internally displaced persons by creating a division of labor among its various agencies. Social scientists are divided over whether or not to extend the concept of IDPs to the survivors of catastrophic natural disasters, such as the South Asian tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. Many of the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina were offended when the media described them as “refugees,” believing that the label equated them with “foreigners” who did not merit the protections granted to “citizens.” Whether to use the term environmental refugees to describe people who flee the environmental problems caused by deforestation and global warming is also a matter of debate.
There are two solutions to a refugee crisis. Voluntary repatriation occurs when homeland conditions have improved and the refugees return from abroad. They require economic development assistance similar to that provided for other projects in the developing world. Resettlement in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the European Union is a second though less frequent outcome for refugees. Resettled refugees share with other immigrants many of the same adaptation challenges, such as acculturation and finding employment. But refugees have some distinct adaptation concerns, including mental health problems and often a particularly intense interest in homeland politics. Given the trauma of forced migration, it is not surprising that refugees carry lifelong vestiges of their experiences.
SEE ALSO Refugee Camps
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hein, Jeremy. 1993. Refugees, Immigrants, and the State. Annual Review of Sociology 19: 43-59.
Immigration and Refugee Services of America. 2004. 2004 Statistical Issue. Refugee Reports 25 (9): 1-13.
Massey, Douglas S., Joaquín Arango, Graeme Hugo, et al. 1998. Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 2000. The State of the World’s Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
U.S. Committee for Refugees. 2006. World Refugee Survey 2006. Washington, DC: Author.
Yin, Sandra. 2005. The Plight of Internally Displaced Persons. Population Reference Bureau Web site. http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=13240.
Zolberg, Aristide R., Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo. 1989. Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jeremy Hein