Migrant vulnerability or asylum seeker/refugee vulnerability? More than complex categories

Encarnación La Spina

doi:10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1225

Authors

Encarnación La Spina University of Deusto https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0423-0674

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1225

Keywords:

Vulnerability, migrants, refugees, legal categories, intersectionality

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.

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Author Biography

Encarnación La Spina, University of Deusto

Encarnación La Spina is currently Researcher Ramón y Cajal post-doctoral scholarship programme (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation) at the Faculty of Law and Pedro Arrupe Human Rights Institute of the University of Deusto. She obtained a degree in Law (2004) and her PhD in Law from the University of Valencia in 2010. She also completed a M.A. in Human Rights, Democracy and International Justice (2010) and two postgraduate diploma (2008). Over the last decade, She has conducted academic activities about migrant rights, discrimination and integration policies in the framework of four highly competitive, internationally renowned post-doctoral scholarships: Vali+d GVA at Paris Ouest La Défense University (2011-2013), Fernand Braudel-IFER incoming/Marie Curie COFUND at Aix Marseille University (2014-2015) Juan de la Cierva MINECO at the University of Deusto (2015-2017) and Ramon y Cajal MICINN at the University of Deusto (2018-2023).

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