Measuring Misery: The Science & Politics of Forced Displacement Statistics

Public talk by Prof David Scott FitzGerald, University of California San Diego jointly hosted by IRIS and POLSIS

We often hear that the world faces an unprecedented crisis of forced displacement. Organizations like the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), International Organization for Migration (IOM), and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) routinely make such claims. Humanitarian organizations, journalists, scholars, pundits, and politicians across the political spectrum then use this styled fact for competing purposes, from seeking greater protection and relief for refugees to demolishing those same programs. I argue that their shared premise of an unprecedented crisis is empirically inaccurate. It fails to understand the political and scientific processes of producing displacement statistics. An historical institutionalist analysis of the physical or virtual archives of UNHCR, IOM, IDMC, and UNRWA and interviews with 17 agency experts reveal how displacement statistics are created, the gaps between their original purposes and the way they are later used and interpreted, omissions of earlier displacements, expansions of displacement types that create the illusion of skyrocketing increases, and the need for researchers to avoid confusing the statistical record of an agency’s activities with a clearcut record of types of global displacement.

The lecture is jointly organised by the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity (IRIS) and Department of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS).

BIOGRAPHY

David Scott FitzGerald (PhD UCLA 2005) is Theodore E. Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations, Professor of Sociology, and honorary Sergio Vieira de Mello Chair in refugee studies at the University of California San Diego. His research analyzes policies regulating migration and asylum in countries of origin, transit, and destination, as well as the experiences of people on the move. FitzGerald’s books include The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach (Polity Press 2023), Refuge beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers (Oxford University Press 2019), Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard University Press 2014), and Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages its Migration (University of California Press 2009). His seven co-edited books include six volumes on Mexican migration to the United States and Immigrant California: Understanding the Past, Present, and Future of U.S. Policy (Stanford University Press 2021).

FitzGerald’s work has been recognized with the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Studies Association (ISA) Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section; the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Distinguished Scholarly Book Award and Midwest Sociological Society Distinguished Book Award; ten publication awards from sections of the ASA, American Political Science Association, and ISA; and the ASA International Migration Section Award for Public Sociology. He is currently writing Measuring Misery: The Science and Politics of Forced Displacement Statistics (under contract with Oxford University Press) and co-chairing a committee for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on “Global Forced Migration and U.S. Resettlement.”