The Difference between Refugee and Migrant

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2. The Refugee Issue in the News

Before exploring how the participants interpreted refugee news, I would like to briefly discuss what kind of news they usually read. Local media in their home countries as well as global media were the major sources the students informed themselves. The German students tended to get the information from German online newspapers and TV news while many of the international interviewees had access to both. The global media included BBC, New York Times, and Bloomberg. It is interesting to note that only one participant read Deutsche Welle’s English website. The German broadcaster seemed did not reach most of my international participants since many of them did not know that it offered contents in various languages.

I now continue the discussion with the refugee issue in news.

2.1 The Difference between Refugee and Migrant

Previous studies suggests the term “refugee” or “asylum seeker” implies that the displaced people deserve international protection and social aid while the term “migrant” or

“immigrant” portrays people as “voluntarily” leaving their home countries and positions them as being unworthy of any help (Holmes & Castañeda, 2016). The choice of words in news articles might reveal the attitudes of reporters or of media toward the displaced people.

Furthermore, these terms might directly affect readers’ opinions. The interviews thus began with the discussion on the meaning of refugee and migrant.

Every participant agreed that people who came to Europe in 2015 are “refugees.”

Most of them defined refugee as “someone who flees from the country because it’s dangerous to stay.” An obvious difference between refugee and migrant is the “factors” triggering

people to leave their home countries. Refugees are usually facing severe living environment or life-threatening situations, such as war or persecution. On the other hand, migrants are struggling with less life-threatening environment such as lower wage rates in their home countries. Mona from Lebanon clearly described the difference between these two terms:

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I guess migration is when you leave your country like kind of forever. Like you go to a different country where you’re planning to stay even if things are okay in your country. Maybe you have the difficulty in living but it wasn’t like threatening your life or it wasn’t a war or something, but you keep looking for better opportunity and applying to stay there, like becoming a citizen from another country. This is called migration. But refugee, what’s happening now, is just like seeking a shelter because you’re in danger. (Mona, October 23, 2016)

Some participants referred to the “choice” a refugee and migrant has is different.

Refugees are “forced” to leave their countries while migrants can choose to stay back or to leave. For the refugee participants in my interview, migrants have more choices than they had.

Migrants were not only able to decide on staying or leaving, they were also capable of choosing when and where to go. Rafi who fled from the Syrian civil war compared his situation with migrants:

Refugee, not most of the time decides where to go. He just has some ways he can go to, like more negative situation. He doesn’t have any other choice. He just has one choice, two choices. And he must go. And immigrant, he chooses the place to go. He chooses the time when he wants to go. He has more choices. (Rafi, October 25, 2016) Omar, another Syrian refugee, mentioned the “mindset” of a refugee is different.

“Refugees are willing to take risks,” he stated. Omar further elaborated by saying that:

But the refugees in Germany, they took risks to come here. Not like immigrant, he just applies for visa. He gets it or not. It’s just like a life goal. But the refugees in Germany, most of them I can say, wanted to go through the sea, risked their lives to come here.

That may indicate I think, it’s my opinion, these people…it doesn’t matter for them if they live or not. Before they come, they’re willing to risk their lives and be lost at sea

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just to get here. That means they don’t actually care a lot about their lives. If they reach the point where if they’re still alive, so they decided: “okay, if we’re dying anyway, let’s try this chance. If it works, it’s good. If it doesn’t, that’s it.” (Omar, October 23, 2016)

When thinking about the sources that made them develop such differentiation between these two terms, some German participants mentioned “people surrounding them,” including their family, friends, the school, and the media, explained refugee and migrant the same way.

For the Middle-Eastern students, their immigrant relatives and refugee friends helped them know the difference in the situations of asylum seeker and migrant.

The statements of the participants parallel the United Nations’ definition of “refugee”

which highlights the “well-founded fear” in their home countries (Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951; Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1967). Besides the formal definition, the refugee participants broaden our viewpoints by illustrating their mindset and situation.

The being a refugee indicates the inability and weakness of the displaced people which could raise sympathy from others. As one participant depicted the refugees as “people that need help.” It is not clear whether the participants were influenced by the uses of the terms in news articles since most of them indicated that they were affected by their families and friends. One thing for sure is that the meanings of the terms have become common sense.

It is worth mentioning that in Turkey people prefer using the term “immigrant” or

“our brother” to describe refugees because the word “refugee” implies a more negative meaning: the person needs something or some places. Rafi depicted the situation during his stay in Turkey:

In Turkey people don’t say refugees. For example, Syrian, they say immigrated people or our brother. They consider it the same (with local people). Refugee is more

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negative. And these people they come they are not stable. They don’t know anything.

They don’t know the language. And there are immigrants coming. They don’t need anything from you. They can handle themselves. (Rafi, October 25, 2016)

This conflicts with what previous studies suggest that the term “refugee” is more appropriate when depicting the displaced people compared to the term “migrant” because “migrant”

implies the people do not deserve protection and social aid (Cardiff School of Journalism, 2015; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016). Rafi’s experience reveals that the use of these terms in different countries does not always follow the definition under international law.