Refugees Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

A refugee, as delineated by the text of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, is an individual or group of individuals, who, due to reasonable fear of being persecuted on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion are outside the country of their nationality and are unable, on the account of such fear, or are unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of their former habitual residence as a result of such events, are unable, or on the account of such fear are unwilling, to return to it.

The term refugee, has existed ever since the start of wars, armed conflicts, political upheavals, ethnic intolerance, religious discriminations, and all the human rights abuses that can coerce an individual or group of individuals to leave their homeland and seek asylum in another country where they are protected from the abuses, intolerance, persecutions, or natural disaster that they were evading. Once recognized or granted refugee status by the host nation, a refugee is entitled to basic rights such as emergency medical care and food supplies, and afforded the option of eventual voluntary repatriation, third country resettlement, or local integration in the host nation. The latter option although fairly common is often problematic as many nations have increased their restrictive immigration and citizenship laws or lack the space and resources to accommodate extensive populations of refugees.

The word refugee was first recorded in France as refugie, in 1573, in the context of granting asylum and assistance to the nonnative Calvinists fleeing persecution from the Spanish rulers of the Low Countries, which encompasses modern Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany. Ironically, a century later the word refugee was adopted in the English language when French King Louis XIV persecuted the same Calvinists Huguenots in France in 1724 for forty years and they fled to England. The Huguenots were refugees as a consequence of their association to a religious group being targeted by the sovereign authorities of their country, and in peacetime without any provocation on their part. This distinguished them from an aggregate of individuals in flight. Historically, religious refugees proliferated throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily due to emerging popular reformations challenging previous church powers. Major streams include the Muslim Spaniards expelled after the fall of Grenada in 1492, culminating in the deportation of 275,000 people across the Mediterranean to North Africa. In the same year, 150,000 Iberian Jews were forced to leave Spain for refusal to convert to Christianity.

These movements halted toward the mid-seventeenth century, when absolutism surrendered to benevolent despotism.

The eighteenth century gave birth to a new type of refugee flow: political refugees. The revolutionary conflicts of the late eighteenth century were fought in the developing language of political ideology with the intent of advocating and implementing a particular regime. The French Revolution (1789–1799) produced about 129,000 refugees, who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the revolutionary constitution. The American Revolution (1775–1783) created a similar movement, with a conservative number estimating sixty thousand British loyalists who left for Canada or England. The refugee figures from the American Revolution were five times higher than the French Revolution, based on the refugee ratio to total population. The eighteenth century refugees differed from the previous type, since they were displaced because of their political opinion and the threat they carried to the current regime or the ruling government.

The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries gave rise to nationalism and a consolidation of state boundaries, which led to the introduction of immigration laws, passports, and other legal barriers to enter or leave a country. Thus, in the aftermath of World War I (1914–1918), Europe was faced with a great humanitarian crisis due to the restrictive measures systematized on personal movement. The war had considerable consequences for the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires. Thousands of people were displaced and stateless, they could not go home and yet were unable to find sanctuary elsewhere. It was against this background that the League of Nations established the High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR), to assist refugees and successfully negotiate refugee rights, including travel documents, education, and employment. HCR was the first international agency to help define the refugees as a population with rights.

World War II left Europe with an even bigger refugee crisis, as the six years of war between 1939 and 1945 left thirty million people displaced. At the end of the war, eleven million survivors were refugees and in dire need of assistance. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created in 1951 to assist those refugees and help states carry out their obligations toward providing asylum for these refugees.

The twenty-first century refugee definition constitutes the classic definition with an added category of the refugee as a victim. This adds people who are displaced by societal or international violence that is not particularly directed toward them, but makes life difficult for them to remain in their own country. Because so many twenty-first century armed conflicts and ethnic persecutions occur within third world countries, many of today’s refugees often seek asylum in neighboring countries of equal or lesser financial straits, creating further economic burdens on themselves and the host nation.

Bibliography:

Barnet, Michael, and Martha Finnemore. Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.
“Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.” Article 1.Geneva: UNHCR, 1951.
Zolberg, Aristide R., Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo. Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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