Instead of rejecting ‘migrant’, we should reclaim it from those who have worked to turn in it into a term of abuse. The term migrant ought to be accepted as a neutral descriptor which covers the situation of everyone who migrates, whether in exercise of a positive right as a citizen through to the desperate search for a safe haven. When we need to be more specific, ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum’ provide more of the detail of the phenomenon that must be understood.
In a world of globalized politics and economics an objective terminology is needed that gets us beyond the demonology of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ frontier crosser, and helps us to understand just how interconnected are the realities of people movement in all the circumstances in which it occurs.