| Summary: | Refugees dominate contemporary headlines. The migration “emergencies” at the southern U.S. border and the southern
borders of the European Union, as well as the “crisis” in the Bay
of Bengal, have drawn global attention to the dire inadequacies of the
international refugee regime, even as extended through various principles of
non-refoulement, in governing modern migration flows. Political
responses to these mass movements, from the Brexit vote to the election of
Donald Trump and his executive order halting the refugee resettlement process in
the United States, have threatened the viability of refugee law's
protections. At the policy level, numerous high-level stakeholders have convened
in different constellations, through the United
Nations
and other
bodies; many
commentators
agree
that these meetings have accomplished little thus far in terms of law
reform. The refugee law paradigm consumes so much space in the
imagination of international lawyers and policymakers that it is hard even to
begin to conceptualize an alternate approach to global migration law. The fear
of losing even the narrow ground staked out to protect refugees stiffens the
resistance to change. Proposals for reform tend to follow the tired old path of
suggesting ways in which the refugee definition can be expanded to include new
groups of migrants (ranging from climate change refugees to anyone fleeing
serious human rights abuses) rather than critically evaluating the structure of
global migration law more broadly.
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