Economic refugee

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term economic refugee (often also called poverty refugee or misery refugee ) is a political catchphrase - often used disparagingly - that is used in the context of debates about asylum and the right of asylum and describes asylum seekers who immigrate for purely economic reasons. This is seen as an abuse of asylum by immigration opponents in particular . Many opponents of immigration also believe that escaping economic misery and poverty is the real motive for fleeing for the majority of asylum seekers.

Use and origin of the term

The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany has provided privileges for politically persecuted people since 1949. With effect from June 30, 1993, the right of asylum was severely restricted by the new Art. 16a GG. However, paragraph 1 of this article also contains the wording: “Those who are politically persecuted enjoy the right to asylum.” As a result, since 1949, people willing to immigrate to Germany with motives other than the motive to avoid political persecution have appeared as second-class admission candidates, as they are not recognized by the Basic Law guaranteed human rights are protected.

Economic refugees are also not recognized as refugees within the meaning of Article 1 of the Geneva Refugee Convention (Agreement on the Status of Refugees) of 1951, as convention refugees . In the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 - still fully influenced by the events of the Second World War - this international law treaty explicitly bases an escape on purely personal and social reasons, namely “persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, affiliation to a certain social group or because of his political convictions ”. However, all external circumstances, such as natural disasters or war, and material personal emergencies, such as hunger or serious economic problems, are not recorded. The 1967 Protocol on the Legal Status of Refugees , in which the temporal and spatial limitations originally set out in the Geneva Refugee Convention were rejected, also follows this concept. These agreements have been ratified by around 150 of the around 200 countries worldwide and are therefore considered the international standard in asylum.

The term "economic refugee" was used briefly in the German public as early as 1965 for immigrants from the Eastern Bloc who had no political reasons to flee. However, he could not prevail. It was only picked up again in 1977/78 and was now mainly used in relation to asylum seekers from the Third World . Since then, according to Georg Stötzel and Martin Wengeler, it has been one of the most important linguistic means to " deny refugees the need to flee and accuse them of abuse of the right of asylum." In the context of the asylum debate in 1979/1980, the term was then used by politicians of the CDU / CSU used, in the course of which z. B. Lothar Späth from a " bogus avalanche " said and claimed "virtually uncontrolled admitting any economic refugee". In this sense, the use of the term is continued especially in conservative circles, e.g. B. by Peter Müller (CDU), with the formulation "The rather undesirable immigration categories do not include those actually entitled to asylum , but the economic refugees who come into the country with abusive recourse to the right of asylum." In 1999, the then Federal Minister of the Interior Otto Schily  (SPD) said that only 3% of the refugees are worthy of asylum, and further: "The rest are economic refugees".

The expression “misery refugee” is even more recent; it is intended to distinguish a generally understandable economic emergency from less urgent reasons for fleeing, such as a lack of future prospects for the person himself or his children.

Terms such as poverty immigration or economic migration and their respective derivatives are sometimes used synonymously .

Objectifiable content of the term

The German historian Klaus Weber analyzed the complicated mix of motives for migration and flight, with the result that the transition between economic migration and asylum-relevant flight is fluid and was also earlier in history, e.g. E.g. the Huguenots immigrating to Germany from pre-revolutionary France and Jewish refugees from Tsarist Russia towards the end of the 19th century. In the context of “environmental refugees”, the sociologist Manfred Wöhlcke found that different ecological, economic and also political aspects can play a role in motives for migration or flight, and that the causes of flight can only be roughly assessed in terms of their quantitative significance. With reference to the Syrian conflict , the refugee crisis of 2015 can definitely be seen as a phenomenon of war , economic and environmental / climate flight : Syria has experienced several years of extreme drought , and the civil war there is not least a struggle for distribution of water and cultivated land.

See also

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Economic refugee  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Ursula Münch: Asylum Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Development and Alternatives . Leske and Budrich, 1993, ISBN 978-3-322-92546-6 , pp. 105 f ..
  2. ^ A b Georg Stötzel, Martin Wengeler: Controversial terms: history of public language use in the Federal Republic of Germany . Walter de Gruyter, 1995, ISBN 978-3-11-088166-0 , p. 733 ff.
  3. ↑ Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz: Small Lexicon of Politics . CH Beck, 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-60411-9 , p. 24 f ..
  4. ^ The fairy tale of great abuse , Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 1, 2015
  5. ↑ Economic refugees : The fear of the poor , Die Zeit from October 15, 2013
  6. ↑ Duden editors: From “rebellious” to “expensive”: The “words of the years” 1971 to 2002 . Bibliographisches Institut GmbH, 2014, ISBN 978-3-411-90102-9 , pp. 102 f ..
  7. ↑ a b c Comp. to Nora Markard : war refugees: violence against civilians in armed conflict as a challenge for the refugee and subsidiary protection. Volume 60 of Jus Internationale et Europaeum ( ISSN  1861-1893 ), Verlag Mohr Siebeck, 2012, ISBN 978-3-16-151794-5 , chapter Meaning and interpretation of the Geneva Refugee Convention , p. 13 ff ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. ↑ Hanns Thomä-Venske: Words work like tiny arsenic cans. Frankfurter Rundschau , March 9, 1990, p. 10; quoted from: Georg Stötzel, Martin Wengeler: Controversial terms: History of public language use in the Federal Republic of Germany. Walter de Gruyter, 1995, p. 738.
  9. ↑ Martina Althoff: The social construction of xenophobia , p. 178., Springer, 1998, ISBN 978-3-531-13236-5 .
  10. ↑ Out with the people. In Der Spiegel , September 15, 1980 (online article).
  11. ↑ Future Forum Politics. Brochure series of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , No. 23, 2001: Immigration and Integration: From Immigration to Immigration Management - Plea for a National Program of Immigration Policy in Germany , pp. 5 ff;
    similarly in the same publication Wolfgang Bosbach : Our problem is not those who are actually politically persecuted, but those who wrongly invoke political persecution and are in truth poverty or economic refugees. P. 44.
  12. ↑ Matthias Krupa: Interior Minister: 97 percent are economic refugees: Schily expresses doubts about the asylum procedure. Berliner Zeitung, November 8, 1999 (article archive online).
  13. ^ Klaus Weber: Henning P. Jürgens; Thomas Weller (Ed.): Religion and Mobility: On the relationship between spatial mobility and religious identity formation in early modern Europe . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010, ISBN 978-3-647-10094-4 , pp. 137 ff.
  14. ↑ Manfred Wöhlcke: environmental refugees: causes and consequences . CH Beck, 1992, ISBN 978-3-406-34077-2 , p. 37.
  15. ↑ cf. Colin P. Kelleya, Shahrzad Mohtadib, Mark A. Canec, Richard Seagerc, Yochanan Kushnirc: Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 112 No. 11 (2015), pp. 3241-3246 ( Weblink Abstract, pnas.org);
    Discussion Stefan Rahmstorf: The security risk of climate change - first drought, then war. In: zeozwei 2/2015 (online, taz.de).