INTRODUCTION

The influx of migrants seeking protection in the European Union (EU), at levels unprecedented since the Second World War, has given rise to a question about the capability of EU Member States to host them. According to prevailing opinions, the majority of incoming migrants cannot be granted refugee status in the light of the Geneva Convention of 1951 because they are ‘economic refugees’, i.e. individuals who do not arrive in order to find shelter but, rather, to improve their economic situation. The purpose of this chapter is to explain who economic refugees are and why they should not be identified with economic migrants. This is especially important as, in the view of the authors, the term ‘economic refugee ’ has been wrongly and incorrectly applied both in the political discourse and media as a synonym of economic migration.

Although many scholars deal with the issue of economic migration, relatively few works have been devoted to the phenomenon of economic refugees taking place in parallel to economic migrants. Economic migrants are persons who migrate in order to improve their economic status by finding employment in a host country. It should be emphasised that economic migrations are voluntary and unconstrained and such migrants are free to return to their country of origin. Economic migrants migrate not because they have a bad life but because they want a better one. On the other hand, an economic refugee is defined in the relevant literature as a person who treats migration as an escape from economic oppression. They are persons who escape from their country because the immense poverty they live in prevents them from satisfying their basic human needs. This situation concerns people who leave their countries due to threats that can be assimilated to those encountered by political refugees. The latter may flee due to terror, whereas economic refugees fiee due to hunger. Toilsome conditions that frequently imply mental and physical suffering make economic refugees leave. However, the threat they experience is not individual in its nature, and that is why they cannot be granted political refugee status. The ensuing conclusion is that an economic refugee can be granted neither economic nor political refugee status within the meaning of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.