"refugee" a bad word

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 2, 2005, at 8:32 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> This is the first time I've heard the notion that you perforce had
> to be international (i.e., a "foreigner" - now a very bad word) to
> be considered a refugee.

certainly it didn't used to be so.  here's the beginning of Woody
Guthrie's "Dust Bowl Refugee"

Dust Bowl Refugee.

I'm a dust bowl refugee,
Just a dust bowl refugee,
 From that dust bowl to the peach bowl,
Now that peach fuzz is killing me.

i'm pretty sure that the phrase didn't originate with Guthrie.
certainly it was widely used to refer to those who trekked west from
the dustbowl in the 1930s.

> Sounds to me like more "political correctness run etc."

not necessarily.  if people hear "refugee" used frequently, but
almost always with reference to those displaced across national
boundaries, they're likely to think that this sort of displacement is
part of the denotation of the word.

i imagine that if you asked people to give examples of refugees,
you'd get references to the Irish potato famine, the Holocaust, the
Vietnam War, and so on, all involving transnational displacement.

Michael McKernan also mentions the NGO usage "internally displaced
person", which may have encouraged people to think of refugees as
transnational only.  in fact, UNHCR distinguishes "IDPs" from
"refugees" (the website -- http://www.unhcr.ch/flash/IDPs.htm --
admits that IDP is a "clumsy bureaucratic acronym") on just this
basis; refugees, in this sense, are "eligible to receive
international protection and help", while "assistance and protection
is much more problematic for IDPs".

the point is that there's an important conceptual distinction to be
made here. aid agencies have pressed the ordinary-language term
"refugee" into service as a technical term (restricting it to only
the prototypical uses of the ordinary-language term) and coined a new
technical term "IDP" opposed to it.  you can argue that this was a
bad move terminologically, but *some* terminological distinction was
needed.  (i suppose they could have gone for "TDP", for
"transnationally displaced person", though i suspect that many people
would have found that objectionable.)

in any case, this distinction in technical terminology has probably
now fed back into ordinary language and reinforced people's
inclination to interpret "refugee" in terms of its prototypical
exemplars.

but wait!  there's more!  the prototypical cases of refugee
migrations not only are transnational, but also involve "civil
conflict or persecution" (as the UNHCR site puts it), rather than
natural disasters.  (the Irish potato famine is then a borderline
case, since people disagree as to how much of the disaster was due to
nature and how much to government policies.)  as a result, many
people are reluctant to extend "refugee" to those fleeing natural
disasters (like the flooding of New Orleans) -- though there's no
good word to cover just these cases.

finally, all these types of fleeing people are distinguished, in
ordinary language and in bureaucratic language, from plain ol'
"migrants" -- "economic migrants", in technical language -- who are
on the move merely to better themselves, although the line between
betterment and fleeing life-threatening circumstances (of whatever
cause) is notoriously hard to draw.  the dust bowl refugees could be
seen, and were indeed seen by many people, as mere economic migrants
(and so deserving of no particular protection).

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)