Immigration Article of the Day: Rethinking the Refugee: from Migrant Hierarchies to Migration as a Human Right by Roni Amit
Rethinking the Refugee: from Migrant Hierarchies to Migration as a Human Right by Roni Amit, Seton Hall Law Review, volume 56, issue 3, 2026[10.60095/JRJB4827]
Abstract
State responses to migration and to socially constructed “migration crises” highlight the nature of refugee protection as a legal fiction. The refugee framework elevates an idealized notion of the refugee that excludes a range of human rights violations and sets up a dichotomy between “good” and “bad” migrants. Carving out a special humanitarian category for an idealized refugee deserving of protection enables states to classify virtually all migrants as falling outside of this category, recategorizing them as bad migrants through labels such as criminal, security threat, or economic migrant. Maintaining the fiction of a humanitarian protection system, states advance their exclusionary preferences through the refugee framework. While some individuals are denied any access to human rights protections, many who do gain refugee status are forced into extra-legal spaces. They are confined to a bare, liminal existence, unable to live out a fully realized life of dignity. Those who seek to reclaim their dignity lose their idealized victim status and are recast as economic migrants. Not only are refugees denied rights-bearing status in the Refugee Convention, but the refugee protection framework itself also continues to reflect the features present at its creation: racism, colonialism, and international power dynamics. Discussions around reforming the refugee system often fail to consider this underlying sociopolitical context. Referencing the refugee protection framework in law and practice, this Article re-envisions mobility through a human rights lens. The argument challenges proponents of maintaining a limited, privileged refugee category and advances a right to migration as a focal point for domestic and transnational activism to reassert the rights claims of migrants.
