1. A
N IMMIGRANT IS A
PERSON who comes to live
in a country foreign to them.
They may have a variety of
reasons to emigrate, such
as being offered a job, or
the rest of their family is
already living there, or a famine, for
example, is making life hard.
A refugee is a person who is fleeing for their life; a
person who is in imminent danger of being wrongly
persecuted, imprisoned, tortured or killed.. They are not
choosing to leave as a convenience. They usually leave
all their worldly possessions behind, pick up their
children and run.
For one example, a well-known group of individuals who
are persecuted in Africa are albinos. African albinos
have long been dismembered and killed because their
body parts are thought to have magical powers, or
because of the belief that albinos are bad luck.
Because of the brutality of human upon human, there
are all sorts of vulnerable populations around the globe
that would qualify as refugees if they were to flee their
country. Many organizations that support refugees have
arisen around the globe as a result.
The International Refugee
Assistance Project
The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) is
one such organization. Founded in 2008 by five
students at Yale Law
School, IRAP is a
nonpartisan organization
located in New York that
organizes law students
and lawyers to develop
and enforce legal rights for
refugees and displaced
persons. Shortly after
being founded, law student
counterparts at New York
University and U.C.
Berkeley founded IRAP chapters.
What began at a single law school at Yale has bloomed
into a legal movement. The law students realized the
importance of engaging pro bono attorneys to provide
direct legal representation to refugees over-seas who
never had access to counsel. The unique model of
partnering law students with pro bono lawyers allows IRAP
to leverage every dollar contributed into ten in legal aid.
In 2010, IRAP joined the Urban Justice Center, a public
interest organization headquartered in New York. Since
that time, IRAP has established offices in Jordan and
Lebanon. The network of legal represen-tatives has
grown to 29 IRAP chapters at law schools in the U.S.A.
and Canada, and is supported by over 75 international
law firms and multinational corpora-tions that provide
pro bono assistance.
IRAP serves many
different populations of
refugees, but it serves
Iraqi refugees because of
the clear obligations of
Western countries, and
the U.S. in particular, to
provide relief to
unintended victims of the
Iraq War. IRAP has
expanded to assist
refugees from
Afghanistan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan,
Kuwait, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan,
Syria, Turkey and Yemen. Increasingly, IRAP is
providing service to more people from Syria because of
civil conflict, and also many Somalis and Sudanese.
Their mission is to mobilize direct legal aid and sys-
temic policy advocacy. IRAP focuses on and prov-ides
RESPONDING TO THE
REFUGEE CRISISTHE INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE ASSISTANCE PROJECT
BY MARY MELDRUM
(Pub. Note: The names of our local contacts for this
article have been withheld at their request.)
A REFUGEE is a person who
is fleeing for their life; a person
who is in imminent danger of
being wrongly persecuted,
imprisoned, tortured or killed.
No, they are not; not at all. And yet, a lot of people refer to them like they are the same,
grouping them together like they are all piling through our “open borders.”
We don’t have open borders.
Immigrants & refugees
are the same thing, right?