ABSTRACT
The term "refugee" conjures up a melange of bleak images: a teeming boat adrift on the South China Sea, a bloated child in Bangladesh, a shantytown reduced to rubble in Beirut. The contention is that neither persecution nor alienage captures what is essential about refugeehood. Persecution is a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for the severing of the normal social bond. For many concerned with refugee affairs, raising the standard of basic needs is a frightening specter. Perhaps the criterion of persecution is too narrow, but, they would argue, a conception of refugeehood tied to basic needs is surely too broad. Refugee status should only be granted to persons whose government fails to protect their basic needs, who have no remaining recourse other than to seek international restitution of these needs, and who are so situated that international assistance is possible.
