Saunders, Natasha. "Paradigm Shift or Business as Usual? An historical reappraisal of the 'shift' to securitisation of refugee protection". Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol.33, No.3 (2014): 69-92.

Saunders, Natasha. "Paradigm Shift or Business as Usual? An historical reappraisal of the 'shift' to securitisation of refugee protection". Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol.33, No.3 (2014): 69-92.

• There is a growing trend in contemporary scholarly literature on refugees to characterize the refugee regimes developed during the 1990s as 'securitized' compared to supposedly humanitarian regimes during the Cold War. This argument sees post-9/11 refugee policy as motivated primarily by security concerns, which betray the humanitarian spirit of the 1951 Geneva Convention (70).
• This is an ahistorical reading of refugee policy. In fact, the refugee crisis of the Interwar period demonstrates that there has always existed a tension between the rights of refugees and states' desire to protect national security, national interest, and sovereign borders; state during the 1920s and 1930s often ignored rights in favour of other concerns (71).
• Critical refugee scholars argue that a plethora of recent practices of 'externalizing' refugee policy through pre-screening of passagers or the creation of detention and processing facilities on foreign soil represent a new securitization of refugee policy based on national interests in contrast with an earlier  humanitarian and refugee rights-centric regime (72).
• The conception of history of this group claims that in response to the floods of stateless refugees emerging from the dissolution of empires after First World War, the League of Nations created a corpus of international protections and legal provisions for refugees which provided the basis for the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees (73-75).
• This began in the early 1920s when a group of nearly 1 million Russian soldiers claimed asylum after being stripped of citizenship by the Bolshevik government. When similar scenarios emerged in the Balkans and Turkey, the League of Nations began the practice of distributing international certificates of refugee status (74).
• The definition of refugee evolved again following the 1935 plebisite in the Saar, following which hundreds of Germans fled the territory out of fear by persecution by the Nazi government. By the late 1930s, it was determined that persons with citizenship but fleeing persecution should also be considered refugees (74-75).
• These legal rights were cemented by the International Refugee Organization established in 1946 to protect the rights of all persons facing violence or persecution in their home countries -- ethnic Germans were automatically excluded from its protections. The documents from this period seem to reflect a profound humanitarian concern for the well-being of refugees (75-76).
• An actual examination of state reactions to refugees between 1918 and 1951 demonstrates that actual policy was motivated by a desire to limit the number of refugees and pass the 'burden' to other states. Actual enforcement of humanitarian policies was limited to cases where they coincided with national interests (76-77).
• The first instance of a European refugee crisis during the Russian Civil War featured deep concern about the ability of Russian refugees to be integrated into European societies, with many -- the Finnish representative in particular -- expressing concern that they would have a demoralizing and destabilizing effect on society due to lack of discipline (77).
• Instead of integrating the Russian refugees, the Finnish representative argued that the refugees should be placed in concentration camps to make sure that they did not pose a military or political threat to hosting governments due to an assumed propensity for violence, idleness, and political radicalism (77).
• Discussions of the Russian refugees, even among humanitarians like Fridtjof Nansen, were based on conceptions of refugees as a burden, with the main concerns of the League of Nations being an equal distribution of the 'burden' of caring for refugees among European states (77-78).
• Concerns about the burden of refugees are raised in a number of different contexts. The Italian and American delegates both express concern about foreign refugees distrupting ethnic homogenity in Europe, and thus causing conflict. The French and British delegates complain that refugees are very expensive, especially since they are considered unable to become contributing or employed members of society (78-79).
• Refugees became a more expressly European problem following the Great Depression beginning in 1929, as other League of Nations members refused resettlement abroad. International cooperation among European states on refugees intensified during the 1930s not out of concern for new refugees, but because no state wanted to be stuck with a disproportionate number of refugees believed to be useless, costly, and posing potential social and political danger (79-80).
• The International Refugee Organization [IRO] established in 1946 was created not to protect refugee rights, but for the explicit purpose of employeeing refugees so that they would not constitute a drain on limited state finances and prevent the instability associated with idle populations (80).
• The UN High Commissioner on Refugees was actually created specifically to deal with the groups of 'unemployables' not being aided by the IRO. The limited goals of the IRO for employment meant that states refused to accept refugees who were sick, crippled, or outside of working age (80).
• The conditions of employment and social support provided by the IRO were also weighted in favour of states' interests  rather than refugee rights. Refugees were assigned to a specific company, and were not allowed to leave employment there for a number of years (85).
• The concern about burden-sharing, specifically the attempt of each state to limit its contribution to support refugees, meant that the League of Nations never directly supported refugees, instead forcing states to shoulder the burden and attempting to encourage equitable distribution. States often shirked on these responsibilities, leaving refugees to starve (81-82).
• States continually tried to diminish the actual care they provided for refugees. Some provided only food but no housing, while others simply did not distribute support to certain refugees. Almost no state provided transportion for refugees after they received asylum (82).
• The slack in state care for refugees was usually made up by private voluntary organizations, particularly the Red Cross, which took responsibility for providing for refugees abandoned by governments or invalid populations which would not be accepted by any country (82).
• What humanitarian measures were taken, particularly through the intervention of Fridtjof Nansen, were sold to the League of Nations as cost-saving measures to reduce the financial burden of refugees. The 'Nansen passports' given to refugees without travel documents was implemented in order to allow refugees to find employment in other countries, thus limiting the obligations of national governments for unemployed refugees (83-84).
• Actual treatment of refugee populations by national governments during the 1920s and 1930s was deeply shaped by the economic considerations of states. France, for example, was willing to accept able-bodied refugees in the 1920s to replace Frenchmen killed in the First World War, but restricting entry and working privileges after 1929. Similarly, impoverished refugees, like German Jews during the 1930s, were almost always rejected (85).
• Issues of national security have always predominated in discussions of refugees, with many countries by 1920 already reserving a national right to refuse refugees deemed harmful to national security. Once giving asylum, refugees were also carefully monitored and could be expelled at a later point if designated a security risk or hazardous to society (86-87).
• Even the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees contains many caveats allowing for national security interests, including the right to refuse refugees if they pose a considerable threat to national security. In particular, membership in political organization is not protected by the 1951 Convention and could result in the expulsion of refugees (88-89).
• The Swiss delegation to the committee charged with writing the 1951 Convention even made it explicit that his country expected refugees to never engage in political activity, and doing so would result in the termination of asylum. Other countries supported this position (89).
• The prioritization of national security severely compromised the effectiveness of the asylum system; as the Colombian delegate to the 1951 drafting committee argued, the 1951 Convention provided only the right to request asylum and did not constitute any obligation of UN members to grant asylum (90-91).
• States were reluctant to incorporate human rights legislation into their treatment of refugees. For example, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to a nationality. France, in a precedent followed by many other states, interpretated this right as preventing states from stripping people of citizenship not requiring that host countries grant citizenship or associated rights to refugees (90).
• The Chairman of the Standing Committee on Voluntary Associations [charities], Mr. Rees, at the UN notes the following of the 1951 Convention: "Its decisions had at times given the impression that it was a conference for the protection of helpless sovereign states against the wicked refugee. The draft Convention had been in danger of appearing to the refugee like the menu at an expensive restaurant, with every course crossed out except, perhaps, the soup, and a footnote to the effect that even the soup might not be served in certain circumstances. [...] It would be the refugees themselves who would [...] appeal to the Conference to ensure, [...] that its deliberations sounded a note of generosity and liberalism, not one of fear and niggardliness" (91).
• Many of the problems of the current refugee regime were built into the international framework when it was being designed, particularly the inability of the UN High Committee on Refugees to actually take actions to address the root causes of refugee crises. The disproportionate dependence on funding from charities and NGOs also has its roots in a system designed by countries which wanted to avoid the economic burden of refugees (92).