Conclusion

Abstract

The current international regime of the protection of refugees has, quite rightly, been subject to sustained criticism. Many millions of refugees find themselves warehoused for years in refugee camps, where multiple generations are unable to work and are denied many of the minimum rights of a normal human life. While talk of tackling the ‘root causes’ of refugee crises is commonplace at an international level, the number of refugees worldwide has dramatically increased in the last decade, more than doubling between 2010 and 2020 from 10 million to over 20 million. Emma Haddad’s argument that refugees are ‘an inevitable if unintended consequence of the international states system’ seems borne out, although this cannot itself explain why the numbers of refugees have risen so swiftly in recent years. Crises in Syria and Venezuela had given rise to around seven million refugees and four million other forcibly displaced people but, similarly, cannot wholly explain the overall increase. Meanwhile, thousands of refugees, shut out by non-entrée policies, die attempting to reach more prosperous countries of asylum. An estimated 40,000 refugees and other migrants died between 2014 and 2020 in the process of moving between countries around the world, with over half of those deaths occurring by drowning in the Mediterranean. Refugees have become a hugely controversial issue in contemporary politics in the Global North. A very substantial portion of public opinion in prosperous countries of asylum considers that the refugee protection regime is too generous and that fewer, not more, refugees should be admitted.