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.