But these refugees are not to be confused with economic and environmental migrants. Across the world, the number of political refugees continues to swell. At last count it was not less than 20 million. But it is still less than the number of environmental refugees. According to one estimate,9 there are not less than 25 million environmental refugees worldwide, of people forced to move by environmental reasons beyond national boundaries. And not less than 100 million move voluntarily, within nations and outside their borders, by ‘virtue of being drawn (not driven) by economic opportunity.’10 The number of illegal migrants still remain, guesstimates at best. The fact is no one really knows! Alarm sirens are now shrieking across communities and countries as nations seek to put up barriers of fences and laws to stop the desperate and the impoverished from coming in. Fears of a ‘swamping’ are voiced, especially by the extreme right-wing.

Myron Weiner outlined a set of ideas which sought to end the confusion in the popular perception and among some academics and activists. He tried to separate concepts of refugees and migrants, by classifying two categories of people who moved across international boundaries: Rejected Peoples and Unwanted Migrants.11

The Rejected Peoples

The Rejected Peoples were taken to be political refugees. Such groups would comprise, for example, the Tibetans, who have been driven out by the Chinese and leave their country out of fear of persecution and threat to their lives because of political and religious beliefs. A majority of the 120,000 Tibetans who have left Tibet since the 1959 flight of the spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, live in India. They use a number of travel documents, including those use a number of travel documents, including those indicating United Nations refugee status and those issued by the country where they have settled. The more affluent and resourceful have settled in developed countries where they have acquired citizenship, making international access so much simpler.

There are other large populations which have fled genocide and threats to life and liberty, the most vivid being the flight of refugees from Afghanistan and from the civil war in Rwanda in Central Africa. In the case of Afghanistan, the direct military intervention of the Soviet Union to overthrow a leftist despot led to the beginning of anarchy and civil war which continues today although the Russians have long since left. In Rwanda, a series of economic factors led to the mass killings. The country’s grainland acreage per person shrank to less than 0.03 hectares per person, less than one third that of Bangladesh which is the world’s standard bearer for poverty and land scarcity.

This was disastrous for a nation which was entirely rural. The land could not sustain the huge population that it was carrying. From 2.5 million in 1950, Rwanda’s population went up to 8.5 million in 1994. Old ethnic hatreds between the Hutus and Tutsis came to the fore. Once ignited, there was no stopping the fire and more than half a million Tutsis were slaughtered.