Stefan Schlegel is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the law faculty of the University of Bern, Switzerland who specializes in refugee and immigration law.
The migrants trapped in the overcrowded Moria refugee camp that burned down earlier this month were waiting for a decision that really shouldn’t matter: Are they political “refugees” meriting protection? Or “economic migrants” who deserve to be sent back home to suffer in poverty after their perilous journey to Europe.
This artificial distinction — between the supposedly virtuous and the allegedly duplicitous — deserves to be done away with. Given that political and economic drivers for migration are nearly always intertwined, our attempt to cut a clean line between them is unnecessarily burdensome and ultimately futile. It’s also a practice that causes unnecessary suffering, as the events on the Greek island of Lesvos, where the camp was located, have demonstrated.
To be sure, governments have strong motives for trying to make this distinction — and ever stronger motives for letting other governments, such as the Greek government, try to make the distinction for them. They are legally required to host people who fled their countries because they face political persecution back home, but free to expel those who would only be subject to crushing poverty and hunger.
(There is also a third category for which a special status of admittance has been vividly debated in the last decade: People whose perceived reasons to migrate are related to climate change.)
It is impossible to pinpoint just one reason a person decides to leave their country. The necessary questions have multiple answers, not just one.
And yet, there are good reasons for taking a different approach.
To begin with, checking a person’s reasons to migrate is expensive and time-consuming. The inevitable backlog creates the kind of humanitarian disaster we’ve seen in Greece and elsewhere, with vulnerable people languishing in camps with little hope.
There’s a fundamental reason why the process is so arduous: Authorities are asking a question that makes little sense in the current global political context.
It is impossible to pinpoint just one reason a person decides to leave their country. The necessary questions — of why, and why now, and why somebody has chosen to come to this place in particular — have multiple answers, not just one.
People have mixed reasons to migrate. Poverty is created and perpetuated by dysfunctional political settings. Persecution is often foreshadowed by economic marginalization, and poverty leaves people substantially more vulnerable to political pressure.
Climate change complicates things further. It typically leads to poverty long before a region becomes outright uninhabitable. And the poorer a population, the less resilient it tends to be to the pressure created by a changing climate.
Even when it is possible to isolate a specific reason a person has fled their country, it’s impossible to classify that reason as political or economic.
Sometimes there may be a clear triggering event: a civil war, an economic collapse or an extreme weather event, for example. But are those events political, economic or ecological?
Many armed conflicts have ecological roots that contribute to their outbreak and their intensity. All armed conflicts have an economic ratio. Many extreme weather events do not lead to any displacement, but those that do usually displace politically and economically deprived communities.
There is a better way: Drop the distinction between “political” and “economic” and instead focus on the necessity to migrate in the first place.
As such, the question that migration officers ask when admitting migrants for humanitarian reasons should become: Is migration essential to improving this person’s life? The clearer the lack of alternatives to migration in a person’s life, the stronger their claim to special protection should be.
A girl stands amid the rubble of the Moria camp on Lesvos | Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images
Refugee lawyers tend to cringe at such a suggestion, because it challenges the special protection granted to refugees, a group of people defined by their persecution for specific political reasons. Yet this proposal would strengthen the protection of victims of persecution — because persecution is especially corrosive to alternatives to migration — while extending the umbrella of protection to other migrants of necessity.
Most importantly, it would save us from the pitfalls of making arbitrary moral distinctions between groups of migrants, which — beyond being impossible to identify — create the kind of moral disasters we witnessed on the island of Lesvos.