Communities commonly immigrate to foreign countries only when they think that it is extremely necessary. Refugees and economic immigrants relocate from their home countries to foreign countries for different reasons. However, the groups of immigrants also frequently experience various challenges in the host countries. Apart from different challenges that face individual immigrants, there are similar experiences, such as assimilation, ethic pluralism, among others that different immigrant communities encounter.
Refugees are immigrants who flee from their home countries due to political or ethnic persecutions. On the other hand, economic immigrants flee from their home countries for economic reasons. Host governments do recognize them. However, this is not usually the case with refugees. Asylum seekers often arrive to the host countries illegally.
Refugees encounter several severe issues. These issues include living in temporary and sub-standard camps, difficulty in returning home voluntarily, unlike economic immigrants, and making dangerous trips. Another distracting experience in the lives of refugees is frequent denial of asylum status due to lack of relevant documents. In addition, sometimes, lack of documents make refugees wait for many years before getting asylum.
The delays usually force them to return to their dangerous countries, seek asylum in other countries, or stay illegally in the host countries. As opposed to refugees, economic immigrants do not experience these challenges, because they usually plan their immigration before departing for their destinations.
Economic immigrants are people from all over the world. Refugees, on the other hand, commonly originate from politically unstable countries. The refugee migration phenomenon does not touch upon solely poor people. The representatives of wealthy political elites often become political refugees when there is change in their countries’ political leadership that is not favorable for them and can be a threat to their lives.
Nations have developed mechanisms to help internally displaced persons (IDPs) and cross border refugees. Rich and powerful countries frequently intervene during refugee crises. The international community helped refugees in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, in Rwanda in the late 1990s, and in Darfur, Sudan, a few years ago. The UN requires signatory nations to defend the basic human rights of refugees. They prohibit compelling refugees to return to their home countries when their lives and freedoms are still in danger.
Additionally, the UN recognizes the universal right of refugees to claim asylum and endeavors to communicate the same to their member countries. The UN also allows refugees to migrate to First World countries and settle there.
The First World countries, including the US and Europe, have policies that govern the admission of refugees from affected regions of the world and help settle them in their countries. In 2004, over 84, 000 refugees were settled in the United States, Australia, Canada, and European countries. Economic immigrants do not have access to such high-level local and international organizations, because economic immigrants usually live almost normal lives in foreign countries, as they would if back home.
The number of economic immigrants has increased in the last decade. On the other hand, the number of refugees has dropped drastically. The number of refugees declined between 1993 and 2004 by 37%. This is partially due to the fact that conflicts have been decreasing significantly during the past decade. It is also because the number of asylum seekers has reduced considerably, as some governments are less willing to grant asylum to refugees. The rate of economic immigration is increasing steady due to opportunities that globalization offers.
Notably, both refugees and economic immigrants experience a number of issues in common. The issues that affect both of them relate to their adaptation to the way of life of their host countries. These issues are identity assimilation, ethnic pluralism, transnationalism, and citizenship challenges. Identity assimilation is a stage of conformity into the culture and beliefs of the receiving countries. Researchers say that first and second generations of immigrants cannot attain identity assimilation.
However, economic immigrants assimilate faster than refugees do because they freely interact with their host communities. Economic immigrants face more challenges of ethnic pluralism than refugees do. This commonly happens when economic immigrants maintain their home cultures yet work hard to remain socially relevant to their new countries. For refugees, they lead their ethnic lifestyles without pressures to conform. Normally, refugees with similar ethical or political backgrounds dwell in the same camps.
However, refugees do not face issues related to transnationalism, because they do not traverse international borders and do not have positive relationships with their home countries.
The other problem that refugees face is that they are not easily identifiable. Therefore, they experience difficulties with obtaining citizenship in their host nations. Economic refugees, on the other hand, have their relatives and friends back at home, and they are free to travel back home and interact with them. They can also apply for citizenships anywhere and obtain it easier since they are easy to identify.
Economic immigrants enjoy their rights to movement and association. They easily adopt cultures of their host nations. However, they also meet challenges before adapting to the new lifestyles. Refugees can lead better lives if they acquire asylum or citizenship status.