ABSTRACT
In legal, normative, and institutional terms, refugees and international migrants comprise quite distinct categories. There is a widely ratified international convention on refugees that defines clearly who refugees are, provides a legal and normative framework for protecting and assisting them, and that forms the basis of the mandate for a specific United Nations agency devoted to refugees. In contrast there is no UN migration organization; rather, there is a network of intergovernmental organizations within and outside the world organization that focus on specific aspects of international migration. Similarly, the legal and normative framework pertaining to international migrants cannot be found in a single document, but is derived from customary law, a variety of binding global and regional legal instruments, non-binding agreements, and policy understandings reached by states at the global and regional level.
