Scholars at Risk and the Rise of the Crypto-Refugee
Concurrently with the rise of anti-refugee sentiment throughout (what used to be) “the liberal West,” we are witnessing the rise of the crypto-refugee. The crypto-refugee, as the moniker suggests, is a person who is a refugee in the popular and international legal sense of being a person who is persecuted for their religious or political views, but nevertheless rejects the label and never applies for refugee status (cf. Szigeti 2026:61-63). Their refugee-ness, if you like, is a hidden and perhaps shameful secret. Their immigration status is strictly legal, but strictly something else: a student visa, a temporary foreign worker visa, an EU Blue Card, perhaps even a longer-term tourist visa or, for those who can afford it, an investor-immigrant visa (e.g. Moscow Times 2014; Tulett 2017).
At the University of Turku in particular, the prevalence of crypto-refugees as both a phenomenon and a way of thinking was on full display a few days ago. On September 29, the University of Turku hosted “Diversity, Freedom, and Scholars at Risk in Finnish Academia”, a day-long event on the Scholars at Risk initiative and the experiences of individual scholars at the University of Turku. Scholars at Risk is an initiative started at the University of Chicago in 1999, dedicated to “offer[ing] safety to scholars facing grave threats [by] arranging temporary academic positions at member universities and colleges.” Using transnational university networks, Scholars at Risk arranges for one-year temporary (visiting) positions for scholar-refugees in the country where they have found refuge, or helps persecuted scholars gain the right to immigrate by offering them a job and a reason to stay in the country.
There were many fascinating thoughts and testimonies about the insufficiency of the program, the difficulties of being an academic without a functioning passport, and the compounded uncertainties of fixed-term academic jobs alongside precarious immigration status. One word, however, was conspicuously missing from the discussion: the word “refugee”. Hanna Mazheika, a Belarusian historian and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS), mentioned in passing that “curiously, I never felt like a refugee ”, but neither the feeling nor the concept was spoken about in more detail beyond this remark.
At the same time, the scholars who were presenting clearly were all refugees, as defined by and codified in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Article 1 A (2) of the Convention defines a refugee as “any person who… owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” Needless to say, this is true of basically all scholars at risk, and certainly the ones presenting at the event on September 29: all of them have been threatened with imprisonment by the authorities in their home countries if they ever returned.
None of the presenting scholars were pleased with the program as such, or the perceived blasé attitudes of their colleagues and the Finnish public towards their precarity, or the uncertainty of being able to continue their work after a year or two. But nobody had anything more constructive to suggest, or asked for any other authority to become involved, besides the Finnish universities. The “R-word” remained unmentioned. Nobody spoke about the real culprit: the inaccessibility of refugee protection for those who are, by any account, refugees in the strictest legal definition of the word. Despite critiques of arbitrary decision-making, discrimination against African and Middle Eastern applicants, and the closure of the Russian-Finnish border, Finland still has a functioning refugee protection regime in most respects. It is certainly doing well in comparison with the bêtes noires of the European Union: Poland, which has depicted Iraqi refugees as destructive weapons in and of themselves, while threatening them with deadly force (Majetschak & Riemer 2021); Hungary, which has made claiming asylum impossible within the country, and has denigrated asylum-seekers at every turn (e.g. Kilibarda 2017; Hoffmann 2022; Kovács & Nagy 2022); or Greece, which has engaged in deadly pushbacks of refugees on the Aegean Sea (e.g. Keady-Tabbal & Mann 2021; Mann 2022). Nevertheless, the recent prohibition on pursuing employment-based immigration status parallel to applying for refugee protection has dissuaded many of the persecuted scholars present at the September 29 event.
The singular focus on Scholars at Risk puts way too many expectations on this one civil society initiative. Scholars at Risk cannot guarantee safety or long-term employment, especially in an academic environment where most Finnish academics are themselves struggling to find permanent positions. In the words of Martin Cloonan, the outgoing director of TIAS and the former chair of the Scholars at Risk Finland section (and a recipient of Scholars at Risk’s Distinguished Service Award), the entire Scholars at Risk program “is like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound.”
Some of the very same refugee-scholars who attended the September 29 event told me privately that even if the prohibition did not exist, they would never, ever apply for refugee status, mostly because of a perceived humiliation in the act and in the status. All of them were proud of having become TIAS fellows purely through scholarly merit, and never having accessed public welfare payments. At the same time, they were and still are desperate to get permanent status in Finland, and eventually to receive a passport that would make academic travel possible beyond the EU. But all discussion of wider responsibility beyond the Scholars at Risk program was absent.
The crypto-refugee is not a new figure in the history of migration law: indeed, it was the normal situation for centuries. The word “refugee” originated in the 17th century, during the expulsion of Protestant French Huguenots (Ther 2019:28), but until 1905, there was no law that mandated refugees’ right to entry (Bashford & McAdam 2014:310-312). Although London in particular was an international hub and haven for refugees, and for continental European revolutionary activity, its status was maintained through custom and foreign policy, not law (Freitag 2003). The same was true for the United States and Canada, which accepted large numbers of de facto refugees – primarily Jews escaping from pogroms and discrimination in the Russian Empire – from the 1870s up to World War I (Ther 2019:43-44). In Gerald Dirks’ words:
[N]either politicians nor officials made any distinction between immigrants and refugees. The reasons for people’s departures from their homelands seldom interested officials responsible for processing those who wanted to settle in Canada [or any other country] (Dirks 1995:61).
The exceptions for refugees were removed from the 1905 British Aliens Act and the 1917 U.S. Immigration Act during World War I, along with general restrictions on the right to travel, and they were not restored after the war (Becker & Wheatley 2020:193-208). Refugee protections were granted piecemeal to White Russians escaping from the Russian Revolution, and to Armenian refugees escaping from Turkish massacres after World War I, and much too slowly, from 1938 onwards, to Jewish refugees escaping from Nazi Germany in the 1930s (Marrus 1985:86-105; Caestecker & Moore 2010:202-204; Skran & Easton-Calabria 2024:3-37).
It was only in the 1951 Refugee Convention that a forward-looking, generalized, universal definition of the refugee was created and agreed upon, and only in the 1967 Protocol to the Refugee Convention that the territorial applicability of the Convention was extended beyond Europe, to all of the globe. This open-ended definition, which did in fact make it into the Convention in the end, was vividly opposed during the negotiation of the Convention by the U.S. representative in particular. “Too vague a definition… would amount to, so to speak, a blank check. … It was inconceivable that the United Nations should undertake responsibility in advance for all possible refugees who might become such as a result of unforeseeable happenings in the future ” (Bem 2004:612-613). The “blank cheque” to all refugees nevertheless became international law in the end, and by now it has been ratified by 146 states, that is, around three quarters of all the states in the world.
The era of the crypto-refugee is now back. The backlash against refugee law is undoubtedly strong, and often tragic and deadly (e.g. Gammeltoft-Hansen 2010; Ghezelbash 2018; FitzGerald 2019; Joppke 2020). But shame about the R-word may not be so closely correlated with the existence or absence of international legal protections. As Hannah Arendt wrote about herself and her social circle, the R-word was also avoided by refugees before and during World War II: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’ We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants.’ … [A]s far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees ” (Arendt 1943/1994:110).
It is understandable that scholars at risk want to refuse the label and the status of “refugees” – just as “expats” regularly refuse to be called “immigrants”. But refugee law still exists, and in Western states it is still largely observed, against all the odds. Having refugee status confers recognition and benefits that no association of universities, no collection of individual benefactors, no employer and no temporary worker visa can match. As Catherine Dauvergne recently wrote:
Most astonishingly, after three decades of concerted efforts by States – especially the most powerful States – to keep refugees from their territory, no State has sought to withdraw from the Refugee Convention. The constraint on sovereignty that the Refugee Convention represents… is purely legal. … States comply with the Convention, often in the narrowest and most begrudging possible ways, because they believe that they are required by law to do so (Dauvergne 2025:172).
Today’s scholars at risk should take advantage of the existence of refugee law – while they still can.
About the Author
Péter D. Szigeti is an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) and a Collegium Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Turku Faculty of Law (Turku, Finland). He researches and teaches in the areas of international law, property law, migration law and citizenship. Dr. Szigeti holds an SJD and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School; a Master 2 from Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne); and a Bachelor of Law from ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary. He has completed post-doctoral fellowships at McGill University, New York University and the European University Institute; and he has also held visiting professorships at Universität Wien and UCLouvain.
Heading image by Ralf Ruppert from Pixabay.
