'An inborn restlessness': Migration and exile in a turbulent world

Abstract

Global media are agonizing over this question. More than 72,000 people recently petitioned the BBC to use the term ‘refugee crisis’ but it continues to use the term ‘migrant crisis’. 9 The reason is that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees asserts that refugees and migrants are ‘fundamentally different’. 10 There are good reasons for insisting on this strict distinction, but also a perverse outcome, because it lets people say, ‘before we help, we must make sure these are the bodies of real refugees and not just migrants’. 11 This raises an important point: the real issue here is not how to describe the people, it is how to describe the crisis . Movement is the basic condition of humanity: it is not accurate or helpful to call it a crisis. The numbers of migrants as a proportion of the global population have been remarkably stable over the decades, 12 and the proportion of migrants in European populations is not high by global standards. On the other hand there are more refugees than at any time since World War II 13 and it is quite clear that there is a crisis of the global refugee system for handling these flows. For this reason, ‘refugee crisis’ is more accurate than ‘migration crisis’ or ‘migrant crisis’.