Public discussion of migration is dominated by unstable vocabulary. Terms such as asylum seeker, refugee, migrant, and immigrant are routinely used interchangeably across media narratives and socio-political discourse, despite each having a distinct legal and historical foundation. This conceptual blurring is not merely a semantic irritation: it shapes public attitudes, legitimises particular policy choices, and determines the rights available to individuals who cross borders.
In practice, the imprecision often functions as political propaganda, stripping displaced people of their legal protections and eroding their perceived humanity.
Restoring clarity is therefore a moral, practical, and equitable task. These categories are not fixed identities assigned to distant others; they describe circumstances that any person may unexpectedly inhabit at any point in their life. Understanding the vocabulary of movement accurately is essential if public debate is to reflect both the integrity of international law and the dignity of those it is designed to protect. Understanding the vocabulary is about fairness and defending the human rights of all of us.
Origins in international law
The modern definition of a refugee derives from the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, established to address mass displacement after the Second World War. Under Article 1A(2), a refugee is a person who is outside their country of nationality and has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group. This status confers specific protections, including access to work, education, and family reunion.
The concept of an asylum seeker emerges from Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines the right to seek asylum from persecution. An asylum seeker, therefore, is not a separate legal category but a procedural stage: the individual has requested international protection, and their claim is pending assessment. They are neither “illegal” nor “without status”—their legal position is defined precisely by the process underway.
Person flees persecution → seeks asylum → is assessed → may be formally recognised as a refugee.
By contrast, migrant and immigrant are not legal categories in international law. The International Organisation for Migration uses migrant as an umbrella term for anyone who moves across borders, voluntarily or involuntarily, for reasons including work, education, family, or environmental pressures. The term carries no guaranteed rights and no particular protective framework. An immigrant is generally understood as a person who moves to another country to settle, temporarily or permanently, usually through established visa routes. These concepts derive from administrative and labour-mobility regimes rather than human rights instruments.
Why these terms diverge
The divergence reflects the different histories from which these concepts emerged. Refugee law grew from post-war humanitarian commitments and is grounded in non-refoulement, the principle that individuals must not be returned to a place where they face serious harm. Migration terminology, by contrast, developed through post-colonial movement, global labour demands, and nation-state border control. Asylum sits between these: it is a narrow legal mechanism embedded within a broader landscape of human mobility.
Conceptual drift in political discourse
Global political discourse has progressively collapsed these distinctions. Government communications routinely conflate asylum seekers with “illegal immigrants”, despite the Refugee Convention’s explicit statement (Article 31) that mode of entry does not undermine the right to claim asylum. Public debate in the UK around “small boats”, for example, regularly treats individuals arriving on irregular routes as though they were voluntarily migrating for economic reasons which is an elision that erodes public understanding of the UK’s legal obligations.
Media coverage often exacerbates this drift. Tabloid reporting frequently adopts migrant as a catch-all descriptor, flattening legal categories and stripping away the urgency attached to protection claims. This creates a perception that all cross-border movement is voluntary, discretionary, or burdensome, which in turn legitimises deterrence-based policies and contributes to hostile public sentiment.
This blurring also has historical roots. Since the 1960s, in the UK for example, immigration debates have been marked by shifting public anxieties: post-Empire migration, economic restructuring in the 1970s and 1980s, asylum debates in the 1990s, counter-terror frameworks in the early 2000s, and the “hostile environment” policies of the 2010s. Each period reinterpreted or reframed mobility, reinforcing the idea that “migrant” is a racialised and politicised category rather than a neutral descriptor. As a result, legal distinctions hardened in international law have softened or vanished within domestic political rhetoric.
Conclusion
Accurate terminology is not pedantic; it is protective. The distinction between an asylum seeker and a refugee determines a person’s access to housing, employment, financial support, and procedural safeguards. Misuse of these labels shapes public attitudes, influencing everything from social cohesion to legislative design. When asylum seekers are rebranded as “illegal immigrants”, the moral and legal foundations underpinning the right to asylum are obscured, making it easier to justify restrictive or punitive policies.
Clarity also matters for public policy. Effective decision-making depends on accurately distinguishing between different forms of mobility, each of which requires different administrative responses. By collapsing all categories into a single narrative of “migration pressure”, political discourse obscures reality and hinders evidence-based policymaking. It also erodes human rights and ethical considerations that all of us need to protect and defend to make our world safer and fairer.
The vocabulary of movement is more than a set of descriptors; it is a framework that shapes how a society understands its responsibilities. The UK’s legal obligations under international law have not changed, but the terms used to describe displaced people have drifted in ways that distort public understanding and weaken the protection system. Reintroducing precision is not only a technical correction but a commitment to a moral and legal order in which individuals are recognised according to their rights, histories and circumstances. A just society depends on naming things accurately, especially when the stakes are life, safety and human rights for all.
King Advisory 
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