Migrant vulnerability or asylum seeker/refugee vulnerability? More than complex categories

Abstract

The current theoretical socio-legal approach to vulnerability and vulnerable individuals, groups and populations is complex and wide-ranging. Unlike other traditional categories of “vulnerable groups”, the specific dimensions of migrant vulnerability raise issues that have not been properly resolved by laws, policies or judicial interpretation. This paper seeks to review and explain the reasons for the black-and-white legal categorical distinction between two types of people who migrate: “voluntary” migrants (economic, undocumented), and forced migrants (asylum seekers, refugees), based on their presumed internal or external “vulnerability”. It also reviews European asylum law to analyse the complex classification of asylum seeker/refugee vulnerability. This can help explain why some “particularly vulnerable categories” in compounded situations of intersectional vulnerability risk falling between the cracks. There is an urgent need to reassess the bivalent categories and the compact dimensions of migrant vulnerability, in order to find balanced internal coherence in the regulations that manage heterogeneous migration processes.

Vulnerability, Embedded Agency, and Downward Social Mobility of Young Asylum Seekers

“…In recent decades, the concept of vulnerability has entered more strongly into the academic debate on human rights-and forced migration-in institutional policies and programs and in nonprofit organizations' (NGOs) practice of using it as an analytical tool for evaluating inequality and social injustice. For refugees and asylum seekers, the status of vulnerability is caused by the country of origin, as stated in article 14 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and article 33 of the 1951 Geneva Convention (La Spina, 2021). The UN (2001, pp.…”