Who are the vulnerable migrants?

In light of the polarised debate surrounding the limits of ethical state responses to migration, two radical discourses can be identified. On the one hand, it is deeply worrisome how the notion of the deviant and dangerous migrant ‘other’ in the societal imagination bears an intimate link to the ‘moral panics’ underlying national security discourses and increasingly stricter ‘crimmigration’ laws (Aas, 2010). The ascension of this derogatory stereotype resonates with Nils Christie's (1986) assessment that the more foreign and less human a perpetrator is, the closer they are to the notion of the ‘ideal offender’. On the other hand, I suggest that an expansion of globalised networks of solidarity has propelled a powerful albeit double-edged discourse on migrant vulnerability in human rights advocacy, framing ‘vulnerable migrants’ as ideal victims of human rights violations and thus taking a diametrically opposed stance to the anti-migrant discourse.

Against this backdrop, I attempt to analyse how the notion of the ideal victim can help explicate promising achievements, as well as uncover potentially exclusionary dimensions, of human rights discourse on migrant vulnerability, leading to the normalisation of invisible harms. To fulfil this purpose, Christie's ‘ideal victim’ theory underpins a critical analysis of the recognition of human rights victims in the context of migration, focusing on how regional human rights courts adopt the notion of vulnerability as a legal heuristic. My argument is threefold. First, I adopt the ideal victim as a conceptual framework to build a critical assessment of how vulnerable migrants are framed as such in human rights decision-making. Second, I discuss the potential effects of vulnerability by showing through illustrative cases that whereas some migrant groups are categorised as vulnerable, others might have their vulnerability selectively recognised depending on intersecting factors, for instance, age, gender or ethnic and national affiliation, creating a doubly exclusionary mechanism. Third, I suggest that these exclusions reveal the power dynamics underlying the complex intertwinement between legal and political discourses on vulnerability, indicating not only the promise, but also the potential pitfalls, of human rights courts’ practice of identifying vulnerable migrant victims. To conclude, I argue that the vulnerable migrant is often labelled as such by virtue of association with the characteristics of an ideal victim, such as weakness, frailty and passivity.