Refugees, migrants and social work

Abstract

Social work has a long history of work with and alongside refugees and migrants. Throughout the profession’s history, there have been workers who have considered such work as essential and non-controversial – part of the profession’s DNA, a reflection of its commitment to human rights and social justice. Equally, there have been practitioners wedded to notions of eugenics, happy to collude in the processing and regulating of vulnerable migrant communities. In this chapter, we look at the contemporary ‘refugee crisis’. Comprehending the scale and cause of the present crisis is necessary to inform social work theory and practice – and provides the basis for essential policy and practice demands that should be at the heart of any internationalist social work. The last decade witnessed a developing, and unprecedented, refugee crisis across much of the globe. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 2015d), 59.5 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced at the end of 2014, 8.3 million more than the year before. Those who were displaced were overwhelmingly the victims of persecution, war, civil unrest and a range of human rights violations. This figure represented the highest number of displaced people on United Nations (UN) records, though these figures were dwarfed by those from 2015 and 2016. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), 2014 also saw 38 million people around the world forced to flee their homes by armed conflict and generalised violence, being pushed into internal displacement (moving to an alternative location within the borders of their normal country of residence); this figure is a 15% increase over the previous 12 months (IDMC, 2015).