Introduction: Significant world events in the first two decades of the twenty-first century have highlighted the impact of global mobility on the interrelationships between and within countries and communities. Factors such as the European refugee crisis, political turbulence in Venezuela, the growth of economic migrants and the general globalisation of human capital, has raised global awareness regarding movements of both voluntarily and displaced people. It has also engendered an ongoing debate regarding the impacts of these movements of people and it has created public disquiet regarding how to resolve the complex economic, political, social and cultural issues surrounding the integration of the world’s displaced people.
The plight of displaced people is nothing new, as humanitarian principles of offering refuge to such people dates back to the 17th Century (Bakewell, 1999). Currently ‘displaced people’ is a term used to describe those that have been victims of severe disruption within and between societies (Newman, 2003, p.5). Such displacement can be from conflicts such as civil wars (Fazel, Reed, Panter-Brick, & Stein, 2012), economic collapse of the state (Newman, 2003), political unrest (Miyares, 1998), persecution due to race, religion or nationality (Newman, 2003; Sulaiman-Hill & Thompson, 2013) and environmental displacement (Moberg, 2009). Newman (2003, p.9) reasoned that: “the distinction between different types of immigrants – including asylum seekers, economic migrants, and those displaced by war and in need of temporary protection – is often clearer in theory than in reality.” Current definitions have been criticised as excluding a great many of the world’s displaced people. For example, existing international legal instruments do not adequately deal with the current reality of asylum needs (Newman, 2003) or those displaced by natural disaster (Moberg, 2009). As a further cautionary note, there are also some concerns about validity regarding records of the number of displaced persons (Bakewell, 1999). Gemenne (2011) argued that estimates and predictions are often generated for media attention rather than being empirically grounded. They also contend that it can be difficult to provide accurate data from developing countries which lack the statistical capacity to monitor migration movements. To further complicate matters, there can be issues of people inhabiting borderless zones between countries (Tangseefa, 2006) and there is a lack of acknowledgement of persecution that occurs within private settings – especially those affecting women (Boyd, 1999). Despite disagreements on definition, there is broad concurrence that the worldwide measuring and classification of the various displaced people is significant from a sheer mass perspective. Within the world’s estimated migrant population of 258 million (United Nations, 2017), recent international data indicates that 68.5 million of these are forcibly displaced. These have been classified as: 25.4 million refugees, of which over one half of whom are under the age of 18; 3.1 million asylum seekers and 40 million internally displaced people. Eighty-five percent of these displaced people are in developing countries (UNHCR, 2019b). Furthermore, there has been a rapid increase in displaced people worldwide. Heilbrunn et al. (2019) have observed that internally displaced asylum seekers and refugees have increased from 17 million in 2000 to 67.75 million in 2016, with a major recent spike in numbers since 2014 (when they were estimated at 35.85 million), thereby recording the highest level of migration in the world’s history.