What’s in a name? The complex reality of migration and human rights in the twenty-first century

A road to the Libyan coast. Wikimedia/Koperczak. Public domain.Raisa Abdul Azim was eight months old and Aylan Kurdi was three when their families boarded unseaworthy boats within days of each other, seeking a future for their children in Europe. In their uprooted lives, and in their tragic, heart-breaking deaths at sea, they were very similar. But Raisa was the daughter of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Libya, while Aylan was the son of Syrian refugees in Turkey. We are told that these are fundamentally different kinds of people.

But are they?

In the absence of a universal, legal definition, the word ‘migrant’ merely describes a diverse array of people who move to and live in a country that is not their own. The data tell us that of some 232 million international migrants in the world, around 19.5 million are refugees who have fled their countries because of conflict and persecution. However these stark numbers do not tell us about the motivations and needs of migrants, particularly those migrants who are not refugees but are nonetheless marginalised, excluded and vulnerable to harm.