Not everyone who is crossing the Mediterranean or otherwise showing up at a European or American border is a refugee; many are migrants coming for other reasons. That gets to the distinction between refugees and migrants.
Refugees are people who have been forced out of their home country against their will. The word "migrant" can mean someone who moves to a foreign country voluntarily, or it can be used as a broader umbrella term that includes refugees as well as voluntary migrants. For example, a Syrian man fleeing war is a refugee, whereas a Cameroonian man seeking economic opportunity is a migrant.
Whether someone is considered a refugee or a migrant effects what sorts of legal rights they have: Refugees can apply for asylum and are protected by international and domestic law, for example, while economic migrants cannot. There is no such thing as an "illegal asylum-seeker" — refugees can seek asylum in another country without obtaining a visa or resettlement authorization first. Economic migrants, by contrast, are usually required to have a visa or other form of work authorization in order to immigrate legally.
There is also a meaningful symbolic distinction between the words, one that often becomes political. Calling a group of people "refugees" can be a way of describing them as legitimately deserving of shelter and care, whereas calling them "migrants" can be a way of accusing them of arriving for economic reasons, and perhaps even lying about their asylum claims. This is why anti-immigration politicians will sometimes insist that a group of refugees are actually migrants who have come to exploit Western entitlement programs. And it is why, in this article and many others on Vox, you will see us use the word refugee rather than migrant when we are referring to people fleeing persecution.
But this distinction, for all its legal salience, is actually quite blurry — and it can also imply, wrongly, that non-refugee migrants should be rejected, that only refugees deserve their rights. Jørgen Carling, a scholar at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, put this well:
The ‘two kinds of people’ argument is further undermined by the drawn-out trajectories of many current migrants. A Nigerian arriving in Italy might have left Nigeria for reasons other than a fear of persecution, but ended up fleeing extreme danger in Libya. Conversely, a Syrian might have crossed into Jordan and found safety from the war, but been prompted by the bleak prospects of indeterminate camp life to make the onward journey to Europe. Regardless of the legal status that each one obtains in Europe, they are both migrants who have made difficult decisions, who deserve our compassion, and whose rights need to be ensured.
Drew Hinshaw, a West Africa–based reporter for the Wall Street Journal, elaborated on Twitter. "In many places I cover, asymmetrical war makes it hard to tell where war/poverty end/begin," he wrote, citing as an example parts of Nigeria where low-level violence and bleak economic opportunities, combined, lead families to decide to try for a better life in Europe.
In such cases, of which there are a great many, the distinction between migrants and refugees — and the implied value of judgment of who does and does not "deserve" to seek a better life abroad — falls apart.
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