And despite definitions like this one, movement is complicated and so the distinction between refugees and migrants isn’t always a straightforward one. Someone might flee war in their home country, arrive in another as an asylum seeker, and be granted refugee status. But after months or years of trying to find work or survive in this new country, they might decide to move somewhere in Europe, where they’re told there’s a chance of work, or where their family lives. Then they might be seen as a migrant.48
The ground is constantly shifting under people’s feet; like a carousel, the debate moves from ‘good refugee’ and ‘bad migrant’ to ‘bad refugee’ and ‘good migrant’, as politicians reacting to and feeding global and national events determine who’s acceptable and who isn’t. Rarely is one category of people considered entirely welcome, and there aren’t always unambiguous distinctions between asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, especially not in the public debate, where the potential differences and similarities between different people and their experiences are muddied; the sheer complexity of it all is lost.
Anti-asylum language feeds anti-immigrant narratives in an ongoing negative feedback loop, and regardless of their legal status, everyone who is seen as an ‘illegitimate’ outsider becomes a threat to the nation. Particular people are deemed undesirable, as the media and politicians conspire to give the impression that people who have come to live in the UK are undercutting wages, driving down conditions and diluting ‘British culture’.
But often, amid all this complexity, liberal politicians, some of whom are relatively relaxed about advocating for more refugees to be allowed into the country, claim to have some kind of clarity: the real problem, they say, is economic migrants. Even some parts of the immigration sector have helped sustain a ‘hierarchy of migrants’, Fizza Qureshi, director of Migrants’ Rights Network, says. Some organisations more comfortable with advocating for refugees have sometimes failed to tackle the stereotypes about migrants irrespective of what job they do, where they’re from or how much they earn.
‘Economic migrants’ are thought to choose to move for better wages or a better standard of life, and it’s according to this logic that they’re problematised; it’s assumed they are here to ‘take’ from the UK, out of no real necessity. Not in the country ‘illegally’, they’re still considered illegitimate. But overlooked in the mix of hostility and hysteria about ‘economic immigration’ is an understanding of why people migrate to begin with.
Relocating all over the world, packing up their possessions, making journeys within countries, across oceans and whole continents, people are complex, there isn’t always one single reason they emigrate. It might be for adventure, a new job, to be with family or a change of scenery. They are making these trips with their loved ones or leaving family behind to settle in countries entirely new to them or cities they’ve known only from news bulletins. Choosing whether to leave can be as much to do with where you are as it is with where you want to go.
Money in its most crude form of notes and coins isn’t the only motivation for migration. If all movement were just a case of following the money, author and professor Arun Kundnani writes, ‘everyone in Greece would have moved to Luxembourg where they could instantly double their wages’.49 Many people can’t scrape together enough money to move, and many others might not want to move in the first place. The frenzied discussion about ‘mass migration’ ignores that the vast majority of people stay where they are or move within countries. In 2016, estimates suggested only 3.2 per cent of the world’s population were international migrants; in 1960 it was 3 per cent.50 The world’s population has grown substantially in this period, so although this amounts to more people moving, it’s not a significantly higher proportion than in the past. What’s also changed over this almost sixty-year period is that the countries people leave are more diverse and the number of destinations is far smaller. The EU, one of the richest parts of the world, is one of the most popular destinations.51 But, even then, only a small proportion of the population of Europe are immigrants.52 I don’t write this to offer reassurance, as if movement is bad, but to provide context.
But as long as 4.2 billion people live in poverty and the income gap between the Global North and South is still growing, people will have to move.53 ‘What they’ve managed to do is create this idea that people are simply moving for economic reasons,’ says Asad Rehman, director of global justice charity War on Want, when describing the term ‘economic migrant’. ‘And in people’s minds that means you’re moving from one wage to another, you’re simply moving for a higher salary, rather than actually saying that people are survival migrants. What people are surviving is global inequality.’
We talk about poverty like it’s natural. Global leaders hold grand summits where they lay out everything that needs to be done to reverse extreme inequality, as if extractive capitalist economies, colonial histories and racialised hierarchies of power haven’t produced it.54 Through crippling debt and colossal interest rates, unfair trade deals, war and global corporations being given carte blanche to plunder natural resources all around the world,55 money flows out of poorer countries into richer ones. In 2008, Angel Gurría, secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid.56 When the world is designed this way, it’s not surprising that some people feel the best option is to move.
Originally from the Philippines, Marissa Begonia ended up in the UK when she couldn’t find a job that would give her and her three children a decent standard of living. ‘It was the most difficult and painful decision to leave my family behind in search for a decent job in a foreign land where I was even unsure of what kind of life awaits me but this was the only way I could think of.’57
As a last-ditch option, Marissa became a domestic worker at the age of twenty-four. Trying to find decent employment, she shuttled back and forth between countries. First, she worked in Singapore, where her wages were so low it wasn’t worth it. Then she went to Hong Kong, where an abusive employer made her life unbearable. When she quit, she was so scared of what her employer might do that when she went to hand in her resignation, she did so holding a knife behind her back. She returned home to the Philippines, but nothing had changed; any work she could find paid so little she could barely afford to look after her children. And so she decided to try again. She went back to Hong Kong, and from there her employers moved her to London, where she still lives and where she is chair of the Voice of Domestic Workers, a grassroots organisation established in 2009 to empower migrant domestic workers to stand up to discrimination, inequality and abuse.
In the end, people like Marissa should have the right to stay and live a decent life in the country they are born in, as well as the right to move if they so choose. The problem is that, for some people, staying becomes an option they can no longer realistically entertain, even if moving, in a world hostile to migrants, can be dangerous. Many migrants, even if they only move temporarily, aren’t poor as a result of laziness, stupidity or inability: they are trying to make a life for themselves in a global economy that is deeply unequal and that is destroying the places they call home.
Climate breakdown is increasingly going to make it impossible for people to stay where they’re born, and it’s likely people of colour will be disproportionately impacted. Set against a long history of decimating indigenous communities, who are imagined as unable to master the environment for profit as the ‘superior’, ‘civilised’ world can, extractive, growth-obsessed capitalism is destroying the planet. But under the legal definition of the refugee, written in the 1950s, people aren’t protected: there are no internationally recognised rights for people who have to leave their home because of climate change.
Inequality and climate degradation meet