There are few instances, for example, of Bangladeshi migrants to Assam or New Delhi or Mumbai marrying local Assamese speakers or even Bengali speakers or Hindi or Marathi speakers of the same faith. But the preference is for partners from the same country, same religious and linguistic identity and even from the same neighbourhood. In addition, few ‘locals’ would want their children to marry immigrants from another country, despite a common religion or language. It is seen as an undignified diminition of one’s status.

Refugees as Migrants

At this point we must make a distinction between migrants and refugees. The two are related but they are also very separate, with their own categories and sub-groups. Thus a refugee is, for purposes of argument, also a migrant. But a migrant is not necessarily a refugee.

Definitions have become more complicated with the international acceptance of the term ‘environmental refugee’ which is different from internally displaced persons. An internally displaced person in India, for example, is one who is forced to move from his home and village to another place within the country because of a development project such as a large dam or the building of an embankment along the river. Or he/she could have been harmed by natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes. Of course, man-made disasters such as unplanned industrialization, the poor location of hazardous industries are other reasons for such displacement.

Extreme care needs to be taken about the how such descriptive terms are used. The Norwegian social scientist, Astri Sukhre, warns against the dangers in using these terms loosely, when she compares the problems of what she describes as Minimalists and Maximalists.3 Opinion is divided between these two groups of thought. One school, the Minimalists, holds out that it is enonomic growth, especially employment-related motives, which predetermine and dominate the way people move within and outside a country. Environmental factors are but one of a series of factors which force people to move.

On the other hand, the Maximalists take the position that environmental refugees are people who have been uprooted from their homes by a natural calamity such as flooding and drought. Circumstances may well force them to seek shelter in a neighbouring region or a neighbouring country.

The most prominent of the Maximalists—and they are better known and perhaps more articulate and media-savvy—is Essam El-Hinnawi, whose work on environmental refugees4 is very influential. In 1985, in Environmental Refugees, his innovative book for the United Nations Development Programme, El-Hinnawi wrote that ‘all displaced people can be described as environmental refugees, having been forced to leave their original habitat (or having left voluntarily) to protect themselves from harm and/or to seek a better quality of life.’ He further elaborated by specifying three sub-categories:

• Those who temporarily have to leave their traditional habitat due to a natural disaster or similar event
• Those who have been permanently displaced and resettled in a new area and
• Those who migrate on their own.