“The language of immigration and refugees is insufficient to capture an emergent history”, sociologist Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, says on Open Migration.
Climate change, that is desertification, water scarcity, rising water, dying land due to heat, and a mix of other negative conditions, such as land grabbing and pollution, are leading to a massive loss of habitat across the world.
War is a cause of displacement, but it is not the only one, and there are displacements even when there is no war. For these contemporary migrations, the traditional concepts and policies concerning the immigrant and the refugee are insufficient.
Saskia Sassen underlines that we need to enlarge to other contexts the protection of “refugees” while designing and developing new tools to understand and protect these new global displacements. Saskia Sassen stressed in particular “the need for the governance of a range of very different types of actors generating displacement than those addressed by the humanitarian system […] Those displaced by mines and land grabs should be recognized as victims, and the blame should go to the mines and the land-grabbers. We need a broader conceptual map to trace and establish who or what caused the displacement”.

Read the complete article on Open Migration
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