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A Systems Approach to Displacement

When violence threatens, some people flee. Others remain. How do families decide to leave, where to relocate, and whether to keep moving? What conditions and government policies shape their limited options? Departing from refugee studies based on isolated siloes of knowledge about just one setting, our sociological approach explains the entire refugee system. Changes in one part of the system reverberate elsewhere. Earlier migrations shape later movements. Blocked paths of mobility in one place redirect migration along other paths. Government policies today are shaped by historical legacies, behaviors of other states, and the actions of displaced people. All these processes are forged by deep inequalities of power.

The Salvadoran refugee system is a case in point. El Salvador's economy has long been dependent on the United States, but it did not have a strong tradition of migration to the United States until the onset of its civil war in 1979. The Salvadoran population in the United States increased from 94,000 to 465,000 between 1980 and 1990, during a civil conflict that included a Cold War dimension of a proxy fight between the United States and communist adversaries such as Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Only 2.6 percent of Salvadoran applicants during this period were granted asylum in the United States, which favored asylum for people from countries led by communist governments rather than rightwing US allies like El Salvador. Many Salvadorans lived in the United States without papers or under a tenuous temporary status. Few voluntarily returned after the war ended in 1992.1

Some Salvadoran youth formed new gangs for protection from established gangs. Deportations of gang members by US authorities inadvertently spread groups such as Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street back to El Salvador, where they prospered in a social fabric weakened by civil war. Criminal violence, forced gang recruitment, extortion, and bloody reprisals by police became new reasons for Salvadorans to flee abroad. With little chance of obtaining visas to travel legally to the United States, most attempted to cross Mexico as irregular migrants. Mexican government crackdowns at the behest of Washington drove Salvadorans to travel through remote areas that left them more vulnerable to violence from gangs, including offshoots of the same organizations that had been transplanted earlier from the United States to El Salvador. Salvadorans who reached the United States to ask for asylum usually had to make their case based on the threat of violence from nonstate actors, such as gangs, if they were returned to El Salvador. Along with other Central Americans, they sometimes traveled north in caravans to achieve safety in numbers. Spectacular images of hundreds of people walking down the highway fed into restrictionist narratives in the United States of a migrant "invasion," which generated further US pressure on the governments of Mexico and Central American countries to stop the caravans.2

The Salvadoran experience demonstrates several lessons drawn out by a systems approach to displacement. Intervention by a powerful state in the core of the world system (the United States) in the system's periphery (El Salvador) generates the movement of people in the opposite direction. Forced displacement subsequently channels migration for work and family reunification, as well as coerced movement back to El Salvador in the form of deportations. New push factors then generate migration, as people flee from criminal violence and economic precarity. The core state uses a transit state (Mexico) to try to block further movement. A systems perspective shows this interactivity among states, sequences of migration, and feedback loops in which past outputs of displacement processes become inputs into new iterations.

By contrast, accounts of refugee movements in the news usually tell simple stories about isolated events that cause people to flee their homes for safety wherever they can find it. "Few refugee news stories make the connection between 'there' and 'here'," finds researcher Terence Wright. "Sympathetic coverage of those in far-off lands affected by disaster and war appears in stark contrast to the media treatment of those seeking asylum in the West."3 Photographs of Syrian refugees taken in tented settlements in Lebanon suggest that such dire conditions make them worthy subjects of humanitarian aid, while asylum-seekers in Europe, from the Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos to the "Jungle" in the French port of Calais, are characterized as disorderly, defiant, and dangerous. These diverging interpretations of camp settings privilege the perspective of rich host countries, while neglecting the drivers of displacement. An analysis of World Refugee Day coverage in US newspapers found that "the media are overwhelmingly more likely to address refugees as locally situated, often totally divorced from the circumstances and context which led to the refugees' arrival in the United States."4 The intervening period between flight from the country of origin and arrival in a country of resettlement is also forgotten, even though most resettled refugees were displaced for years in transit countries. People born into a stateless refugee status may have never even seen their country of origin.

International organizations try to avoid the political embroilments of assigning blame for conflicts that produce refugees by glossing over the reasons for displacement. For example, an account published by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in 2019 explains how the "Iraqi refugee crisis" unfolded:

The Iraqi refugee crisis is the result of decades of conflict and violence in the region. In 2014, an escalation of violence surged when the Islamic State (ISIS) launched attacks in northern Iraq. As a result of the conflict, millions of families were forced to flee their homes and half of the country's infrastructure was destroyed.5

The report does not mention state actors involved in displacing Iraqis, such as the Iraqi government or the US-led invasion in 2003, which resulted in the displacement of millions of Iraqis and the emergence of ISIS. Critiques of the United States may jeopardize an important relationship with the top financial supporter of UNHCR operations. Naming the Iraqi state might jeopardize the UNHCR's access to internally displaced people in Iraq. By contrast, holding ISIS rhetorically accountable does not threaten relationships with donors and states of origin.

Similarly, when the Bali Process, an international forum led by Australia and Indonesia to combat human trafficking and smuggling, analyzed the 2015 Andaman Sea emergency in which members of the Muslim Rohingya minority fled ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, its report avoided even using the name Rohingya. The report only noted "the events of May 2015, specifically the movements of mixed populations." In this account, "mixed populations" simply appeared, and the focus of states in the Bali Process was how to manage them.6 These accounts deliberately ignore why refugees fled in the first place.

The systems approach to displacement breaks not only with popular representations of refugees, but also with scholarly and advocate narratives insisting that "refugees are not migrants."7 The boundary between refugees and migrants is rooted in legally consequential distinctions, not always sociological realities, as discussed in the following chapter. By avoiding the tendency to separate migration, refugee, and conflict studies, we can examine the interplay among different kinds of immobility, movement, and their governance.8 By refugees, we mean a subset of migrants who have crossed an international border in large part to escape the threat of violence or persecution, or people who have crossed a border and are afraid to return home because of such a threat. At the same time, our analysis incorporates individuals who fall outside official refugee labels and are on the fringes of studies of forced migration. An approach toward the decision-making of people facing violence and persecution, which we call the new economics of displacement, illuminates linkages between systems of economic and refugee migrations. Moving beyond a narrowly circumscribed definition of refugees makes it possible to draw on highly elaborated theories of international migration that show how movements are shaped by links among places of origin, transit, and host societies within a global system of control.

The refugee system

This book draws on pathbreaking work on systems approaches to migration to explain the refugee system. We build on foundational studies of rural-urban migration systems by geographer Akin Mabogunje, regional migration systems by demographers Mary Kritz, Hania Zlotnik, and Douglas Massey and colleagues, and theoretical elaboration by demographer James Fawcett and development studies scholar Oliver Bakewell.9 Our approach is closest to that of Escape from Violence, published in 1989 during the waning days of the Cold War, by political scientist Aristide Zolberg and colleagues. We assess developments in the more than three decades since its publication, historical evidence of the construction of the refugee regime that went unrecognized in their seminal text, and greater attention to forced immobility and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Their macro approach is integrated with greater theorization of how...