Who Is a Refugee?

The term "refugee" conjures up a melange of bleak images: a teeming boat adrift on the South China Sea, a bloated child in Bangladesh, a shantytown reduced to rubble in Beirut. Determining conceptually (if not politically) who is, or is not, a refugee would appear to be a relatively simple matter. A refugee, we might say, is a person fleeing life-threatening conditions. In daily parlance and for journalistic purposes this is roughly the meaning of refugeehood. Predictably, in legal and political circles, among those officials who formulate refugee policies for states and international agencies, the meaning is considerably more circumscribed. The predominant, generation-old conception advanced by international instruments, municipal statutes, and scholarly treatises identifies the refugee as, in essence, a person who has crossed an international frontier because of a well-founded fear of persecution.' Given such broad agreement, the conceptual problem would appear to be resolved. But these appearances are deceptive.