Migrant vs. refugee: what this semantic, media and political debate implies

In late July, Fati Dosso and his six-year-old daughter Marie were found dead of thirst on the border between Tunisia and Libya. Their image then made the rounds of social networks. Like hundreds of other people from sub-Saharan Africa, they had been driven out by the Tunisian authorities and abandoned in the desert without water or food.

A few months earlier, the Tunisian head of state, Kaïs Saïed, had expressed his openly xenophobic positions during a public speech in which he deplored the arrival of “hordes of illegal immigrants”source, according to him, of “violence, crimes and unacceptable acts”.

His words were not trivial. In recent years, similar anti-immigration discourses have become increasingly audible, often accompanied by repressive immigration policies. At the heart of this hostile rhetoric, the word ” migrant », accused, in this context, of negative representations.

In response, associations like Utopia 56prefer that of “ exiled people “. Vain semantic battle or essential political struggle? Answers from experts.

Interview with Laura Calabrese, professor at the Department of Information and Communication Sciences (Free University of Brussels).

To miss. Where does the word migrant come from, what does it mean?

Laura Calabresi. Words often don’t have a fixed meaning, especially when it comes to common names that serve to explain a status (therefore a social construction that is the result of human institutions).

The term migrant it is a very old generic term, in French as in other languages, and its stabilized meaning (that of the dictionary) refers to the movement of people from one region or country to another.

Unlike the term refugee, it has no legal definition, but it does have statistical value and a definition for international organizations.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), immigrants [contrairement aux réfugiés] choose to leave their country not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives by finding work and, in some cases, for education, family reunification or other reasons “.

For the International Organization for Migration (IOM), migrant is a generic term” not defined in international law which, reflecting common usage, designates any person who leaves his or her habitual place of residence to settle temporarily or permanently and for various reasons in another region or country.

Which reality(s) does it reflect?

The meaning of words is not limited to their established definition. The term migrant it expresses a desired mobility (contrary to the forced mobility of the refugee) but precarious.

He thus distinguishes himself from the tourist, expatriate or Erasmus student, who chooses to leave and return (desired mobility) and who is welcomed wherever he settles (welcome mobility).

It is therefore obvious that language needs more criteria to express mobility: desired/undesired, welcome/unwelcome. Currently, given the words available in French to express the mobility of people, the term migrant refers to people moving from developing to developed countries for economic reasons, in a population movement that is often unwelcome in the receiving countries.

It is clear that the meaning is much more complex than the dictionary definition or international organizations would suggest.

What criticism(s) can we make of it?

The term itself is not pejorative. Until the 1970s it was used as an adjective in the denomination ” commute », and therefore associated with agreements between countries for the transfer of work. With the restriction of migration in the West and the criminalization of unwanted migration, the term has gradually taken on negative representations.

Does using the term migrant dehumanize the experience of the populations it designates?

It all depends on the context. In political discourse, the term is often used criminalize international migration by pitting illegitimate economic migration against legitimate forced migration in the event of armed conflict or democratic deficit, for example, best summarized in the statute of refugee.

It is not the term itself that dehumanizes, but the way it is used in association with other words. Any term (including refugee) can be used in a dehumanizing way.

Should we continue to use it or prefer another term?

In our research, we have found that many terms are used to express mobility in a positive or negative way. These words can be exploited in the political realm, or reinvested with positive representations, or even misdirected.

For example, associations working for the rights of displaced persons use the terms refugee OR migrant (always in a positive sense), but also an obsolete term like exilea generic term like Nobodyor meaning neologisms like guestor even in a form like vwe used by the citizens’ platform in Belgium. It is a contraction of ” you ” AND ” we to talk about volunteers, platform employees and refugees.

The term migrant in itself it does not necessarily have a negative orientation, except that it expresses the mobility of those who do not have the means to be desired where they are going.

What does the semantic, media and political debate reveal around the word migrant?

This debate reveals two types of fractures: on the one hand, the fracture between nationals and foreigners (in a society where the foreigner is a cultural but also an economic threat, because he would usurp the rights of the welfare state), and on the other an economic division between poor countries and rich countries (which does not necessarily correspond to a North-South or West-East divide, many of these rich countries are outside the Western world).

The political exploitation of the migrant/refugee status (the first assimilated to a gold digger whose life project is illegitimate, the second to a vulnerable being who has no choice and therefore has the right to protection) reveals the aversion of nation-states to migration, their defensive reflexes in the face of the inevitable population movements that are the result of the socio-political (including climatic) instabilities of the contemporary world.

These debates show the contradictions of our world: unstable, on the edge of the abyss, but which preserves the illusion of economic, identity and cultural stability.

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