Agier, Michel. "The undesirables of the world and how universality changed camp". openDemocracy, 16 May 2011.

Agier, Michel. "The undesirables of the world and how universality changed camp". openDemocracy, 16 May 2011.

• After the mass displacement caused by the Second World War, the UN High Commission on Refugees [UNHCR] was created in 1950, followed by measures to add treatment of refugees to the Geneva Convention.
• In the aftermath of the Holocaust, and faced within a steady flow of refugees from Communist Eastern Europe, the states of Western Europe and America declared themselves to be open and welcoming to foreigns -- in contrast to the insular, xenophobic, communist East.
• Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Europe has steadily reversed its opinions on immigration, as the issue of migration become restructured to reflect increased south-north migration and decreased migration from the ex-Communist East. By the early 2000s, Europe had gone from 85% acceptance of immigrants, to refusing 85% of applications.
• Since the late 1990s, the creation of readmission agreements between certain countries has become a popular method of containing immigration. Under these agreements, the destination country can immediately return a failed application for asylum to their home nation.
• Control over refugee populations is primarily a non-governmental issue and delegated to NGOs, on the basis that these population are not included in the regular state and thus require irregular treatments. Often laws, like in Australia or France, declare illegal immigrants to be permanently extraterritorial, permanently excluding them from the protection afforded by domestic laws.
• "We can now recognize the figure of the untouchable, the supernumerary, the bare life or human superfluity previously advanced by Hannah Arendt in her concept of the stateless. In a world that pretends to be unique, homogeneous and consensual, these marginalized people are experienced simply as a form of excess. The most prosperous states, particularly European states, create for these undesirables a fiction of the externality of the world, a process that accords them a physical life without ever recognizing their social existence".
• Globally, in 2011, there were over 75 million displaced persons worldwide, with 75% of this displacement in the Southern Hemisphere. 12 million of these people are registered as refugees with the UNHCR, and 25 million of them live in temporary refugees camps. 30 million of these people are internally displaced, of which only 6 million live in refugee camps.
• "The refugee depends on politics recognizing his or her status as an asylum or assistance seeker. The demand for access to  minimal assistance creates a strange and humiliating situation where the exile now has to beg for refugee status, in order to prove his good faith but also his innocence, as the figure of ‘victim’ is now elided with  one of ‘guilt’. A paradox of the new century after the fall of the Berlin Wall has been that refugee or migrant status went from being a desirable privilege to a matter for ‘negotiation’, and no longer a universal right".