by Lily Tierney and Ernesto Castañeda* edited by Makenna Lindsay November 29, 2023

On Wednesday, November 15, 2023, the Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative (RAFDI) at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. hosted a roundtable discussion on forced migration. The panel of experts analyzed the effectiveness of the current refugee systems to address the predicaments refugees around the world face, and the underlying causes and drivers of forced displacement. James Hollifield, professor and director of the Tower Center for Public Policy and International Affairs at SMU introduced the program. Rina Agarwala, Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, moderated the conversation. 

David Scott FitzGerald, co-chair for the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and Professor of Sociology at UCSD, emphasized the limitations of silos within the academic bodies of knowledge that tend to think separately about migration, refugees, and conflict. FitzGerald recommends a systems approach that would look at all forms of migration and forced displacement within the same system and at the path dependencies and feedback loops that armed interventions and previous migration have on future population moves. 

Pieter Bevelander, director of Studies of Migration, Diversity, and Welfare at Malmö University, offered a European perspective to the discussion. Bevelander spoke of a new migration and asylum pact within the European Union (EU) that will hopefully be finalized next year. This pact will create new asylum and migration management regulations that will streamline procedures, create mandatory solidarity in the relocation process, and increase financial contribution to countries with many refugees. EU member states that do not wish to sign on have the option of paying 20,000 pounds per person due to solidarity reasons, however, this is still being negotiated. Bevelander also noted that the attitude towards Ukrainian refugees is more widely accepted than refugees from the “outside,” implying that refugees from non-western countries are less likely to be embraced by the EU governments.

Gerasimos Tsourapas, professor of International Relations at the University of Glasgow, works on the politics of migrants and refugees in the Middle East and the Global South. Tsourapas claims that an overlooked aspect of these discussions is how labor migration and forced migration flows are much more common in the Global South than in the Global North. Those who are forced to migrate are more likely to go from one part of the Global South to another than migrate from the Global South to the Global North. Tsourpas mentioned that it is critical to understand this point to decolonize the conversation of forced migration. He distinguishes two paradoxes: states that hosts most refugees are in the Global South and are not responsible for creating the refugee crisis because of the unwillingness of wealthy countries in the Global North, who often are the cause of the refugee crisis, Global North to accept refugees. The second paradox lies in the fact that most of the refugee-hosting states in the Global South are struggling financially and open their borders to the detriment of their economy and for the betterment of their diplomacy, most refugees are in the Global South. 

Kamal Sadiq, director at the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine, shared a shocking fact: confirmed that while “a majority of the signatories to the 1951 refugee convention are located in the Global North, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of the worlds refugees are located in states in the Global South, many of whom are not signatories to the refugee convention.” Sadiq states that the refugee regime is broken for several reasons: the first is policy uncertainty. Funding is limited, and short-term funds provide short-term services. Another flaw that Sadiq pointed out is that the refugee regime does not cooperate with non-state actors. This is highly problematic for internally displaced people living within corrupt domestic law and governance. The final weak spot of the refugee regime is documentation. Displaced persons need documentation to access formal work and services but getting documentation needed can be arduous. As a result, displaced persons have multiple documents and are uncertain as to which are legitimate. It is incredibly difficult to adjudicate between real and fake documentation because of how ubiquitous the identification paperwork has become for displaced persons. In a context where states deny documents, a market for false documents appears. 

The discussion closed out with a Q&A session where all speakers agreed on the issue of working in silos, the necessity for each state to host refugees, and the need for equitable responsibility in financing the cost of welcoming large numbers of newcomers. While some panelists and many in the media often mention that welcoming immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees entails large expenditures in terms of providing initial housing and food, we argue that this is one of the few ways that states can engage in creating economic development in the middle and long-term.

The panelists discussed the importance of differentiating refugees from economic migrants. Our view is that refugees should continue to have special protections and rights because of persecution from the state for political reasons or for belonging to a targeted social group or category. But analytically speaking, scholars should not reify these legal distinctions as they are not the most useful in terms of subjective integration, feelings of belonging, and public sentiment. Xenophobes in the streets do not care if one is a refugee, a documented, or an undocumented migrant when there is a climate of exclusion or racial profiling by the police.

Considering population growth, we are not necessarily seeing record numbers of either economic migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. We must normalize international migration and protection. Less than 4% of the world’s population lives in a country different from the one they were born in. The countries with the largest number of foreign-born people are among the wealthiest nations. People may move to rich countries because they have more job opportunities, but in doing so, they also make those countries even richer. Supporting newcomers is a good investment.

You can watch the full panel here: Driven Out: Global Response to the Plight of Forcibly Displaced People 

* Lily Tierney is a student in the School of Communications ’24 at American University.

Ernesto Castañeda is the Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, Immigration Lab, and the MA in Sociology Research & Practice.

Editing by Makenna Lindsay.