NUMBER 148 • ISSUE 4 • 2007 WHY IT MATTERS THE EDITOR’S DESK REFUGEE or Migrant ? n the case of the man on the cover of this movement is justified may depend on what lies between their magazine, at the moment when the picture was taken, country of origin and the country where they eventually the question was irrelevant. Whoever he is, he deserved make their asylum claim. to be saved – and that is precisely what the coastguards There is, of course, nothing new about people moving. were trying to do after a boat of would-be migrants Migrations of people for both refugee and non-refugee reasons Ioverturned off the coast of southern Spain, drowning several have been taking place since before the beginning of recorded of its occupants including at least two pregnant women. time. And if we were to trace our ancestors back far enough, all However, once he was safely on shore, the question of of us would find that we originated somewhere else. whether he was a refugee or a migrant may well have come Nor should voluntary migration – economic or otherwise – immediately to the fore. necessarily be viewed as negative (even 5 As a refugee, fleeing persecution or 0 though it is usually seen that way). 0 2 • P S armed conflict, he would have been E Migrants often fill the gaps in the work - / S entitled to “international protection” in E force, rather than take other workers’ R E M an asylum country – in this case most . jobs – but they still make the perfect A / S probably Spain. On the other hand, if he R scapegoat for a society’s ills, and their E T U E was someone moving for financial R contribution is often hidden or ignored. reasons – to earn a better living than he © The linked issues of migration and could at home – then he would be classi - asylum are probably more widely de - fied as an economic migrant, and would bated (and confused) today than ever quite likely be sent back to his home before: perhaps because the number of country. people on the move has increased; This is a judgement that many coun - perhaps because the planet – or certain tries around the world make in varying countries on it – feel overcrowded; numbers of individual cases every day. perhaps for a host of other reasons, Sometimes the decision is relatively both real and imagined. straightforward, and sometimes it is an And, as the 21 st century progresses, it extremely difficult call to make. There is likely to become even more compli - are countries that produce lots of eco - Too soon to tell: a migrant or refugee cated, with more people forced – one nomic migrants, and very few refugees. picked up in the Mediterranean. way or another (war, economics, climate But they do produce some, and it is the change) – to pull up their roots and job of asylum adjudicators to spot them. move somewhere else. There are asylum seekers without documents who are Over 200 million people are believed to be living outside refugees, and there are asylum seekers with valid travel their original homeland already. Relatively few of them are documents who are most definitely not. There are people refugees. But, yes – taking the trouble to find out which ones who articulate a false story well, and people who articulate a are does still matter. true story badly – or not at all (because it is too painful and To undermine the system that identifies a refugee, and too personal). prevents him or her from being sent home, would in some And there is a grey zone: people who are leaving a country cases be like the coastguards in the cover photo cutting the where persecution and discrimination are unquestionably rope instead of hauling it in. It should be unthinkable – and it occurring, and the economy is also dire. Are people leaving is unthinkable, when one looks at asylum seekers and such countries for refugee reasons, or economic ones – or do refugees as individual human beings. both sets of reasons fuse into one that is, in many cases, almost But when they are reduced to statistics, and described in impossible to unravel? pejorative terms such as ‘floods,’ ‘waves,’ ‘unstoppable tides’ And what about the people who leave their country for (and other watery metaphors that bear a certain tragic irony refugee reasons, and then keep on moving for economic ones given the number of would-be refugees and migrants who (so-called ‘secondary movers’)? Whether or not their onward drown), they are all too easy to cast aside and ignore. 2 REFUGEES N°148 • 2007 Editor Rupert Colville French Editor Cécile Pouilly 6 0 0 COVER STORY 2 4 Contributors • M Angel Suárez, Anja Klug, Francesca O S / States are having increasing difficulty Fontanini, Giulia Laganà, Ligimat Perez, R E T S Nazli Zaki and unhcr staff worldwide. B distinguishing between refugees and migrants. E W . Editorial Assistant A / R Manuela Raffoni C H N 12 WORSE THAN THE SHARKS Photo Department U Suzy Hopper, Anne Kellner Migrants and refugees The smugglers operating between Somalia Design take the same routes, and Yemen are among the most vicious in 4face the same hazards. Vincent Winter Associés, Paris the world. Production Françoise Jaccoud Distribution 15 MALAWI’S DILEMMA John O’Connor, Frédéric Tissot Many refugees and migrants only stay for a Photo Engraving 2 9 9 short while before moving on to South Africa. 1 Aloha Scan, Geneva - 1 9 9 1 Maps • A S unhcr Mapping Unit U / D 16 THE DEEP BLUE SEA R Historical documents A U G T Anti-immigration policies, reckless smugglers unhcr archives S A O REFUGEES is published by the Media Relations C and cold commercial calculations may be S U and Public Information Service of the United © endangering lives at sea. Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Protecting refugees opinions expressed by contributors are not in the Caribbean is 22 a challenge. necessarily those of UNHCR . The designations 22 CARIBBEAN CONUNDRUMS and maps used do not imply the expression of any opinion or recognition on the part of Every year, thousands from within the UNHCR concerning the legal status of a region – and beyond – try to reach the US territory or of its authorities. via the Caribbean. REFUGEES reserves the right to edit all articles 0 before publication. Articles and photos not 0 0 2 covered by copyright © may be reprinted without • N U 23 MIGRATION TO THE NORTH prior permission. Please credit UNHCR and the H / Y photographer. Requests for copyrighted photos K Z The route via Mexico to the US is fraught S L should be directed to the agency credited. E D with risk for refugees and migrants alike. N A Z English and French editions printed in Italy S . B by AMILCARE PIZZI S.p.A., Milan. / R C Circulation: 121,000 in Arabic, English, H 25 CONTROL VS. PROTECTION N French, Italian and Spanish. U Migration controls Within the EU, there has been a marked shift issn 0252-791 X make it hard for of focus from protecting refugees to halting 25 refugees to find safety. Front cover: Coastguards rescue a migrant irregular migration. or refugee off the coast of southern Spain. ©REUTERS / A. MERES / ESP•2002 Back cover: Some migrants and refugees 29 DIVERTED TO NAURU are killed, or badly injured, attempting to How different treatment, based on the way cross borders. people arrive, became a central feature of ©SERGIO CARO / MAR•2005 Australia’s asylum policy. UNHCR P.O. Box 2500 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland 31 IS TOLERATION ENOUGH? www.unhcr.org Relatively few Asian countries have established formal asylum systems. REFUGEES 3 VSTATiES AtREaHAVINlG INCRDEASINGIDIFSFICULTT Y DIS BY J EFF C RISP a distraught and emaciated Chechen woman carrying a two-year-old baby boy. She begged the n 13 September, Polish border guards border guards to come with her to find her three patrolling the mountainous border area daughters, whom she had left behind as she went O near the border with Ukraine came upon tolookforhelp. Afewhourslater,aroundmidnight, 4 REFUGEES TIINGNUISHINGCBETWEENTREFUIGEOES AND MIN GRANTS. X-ray and thermal imaging systems are now in use in several countries, including the US and ports in the Mediterranean and northern France. they found the bodies of the three girls, aged 13, 10 and 6, Jamaldinova told Polish investigators that she had paid some huddled together and covered in fern leaves. Dressed in Moscow-based smugglers us $2,000 to get herself and her fam - 1 0 0 2 summer clothes, they had died of exposure after spending ilytoAustria.Butattheborder,theirguidehadsimplypointed • A S U four days wandering disoriented in the mountains. inthegeneraldirectionofPolandandabandonedthemtotheir / P F A While being treated in hospital, their mother Kamisa fate–justastemperaturesintheBieszczadymountainsplunged © REFUGEES 5 How the TID E has They had a dream – a dream of escaping Between 1946 and 1958, a total of some misery, or political oppression, and finding a 180,000 Spaniards emigrated, mainly from new El Dorado on the other side of the world. Galicia and the Canary Islands, to Venezuela, There were no Africans, Arabs, Asians or Latin a country the islanders sometimes refer as Americans among them – just desperate the “The Eighth Island” ( La Octava Isla ), Europeans, impoverished by the economic because of the large community of their slump that followed the end of the 1936-39 compatriots who still live there. Venezuela Spanish civil war. was not the only South American destination: “If you had breakfast, you had no supper,” in 1950 alone, some 60,000 Spaniards set sail remembered José Abreu, “and the only exit for Argentina, while thousands more went to [we] could think of was to emigrate.”Abreu, other countries in the region.