>> I'm Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels. I'm the Director of the Master's in International Migration at the University of Kent at Brussels, the Brussels School of International Studies, where I'm Senior Lecturer in migration and politics. 

>> Today what I want to do is to challenge you a little bit on some of the ideas that you might have, or perhaps you've just seen in the media. Ideas that you might have on migration or refugees.

>> We've heard a lot about the various challenges that migrants or refugees might pose for the UK, for Europe, for North America and what I'm going to argue is that we don't have the whole story. That we don't have a refugee crisis, we have an information or a communication crisis, that we simply don't hear enough in order to be able to really draw a proper conclusion.

>> Do you know what percent of the world's population are actually migrants? It's 3%. That's not just refugees. That's all people who are currently living outside the country of their birth or nationality. And that's not a significant proportion of the world's population. 

>> It turns out that most people do stay at home and most people want to stay at home. They either want to stay at home or they're not able to leave, certainly people are forced out, forced out by war, forced out by poverty, forced out by persecution, but at the same time a certain number of those people are not able to leave. 

>> They might not be able to leave because they are aged, because they're disabled. They might not have the resources they need to be able to move, so networks, either family or friends, who are living abroad. They might not have the financial capital to be able to move. And it turns out if people are forced out they actually don't want to go very far away from home.

>> Now, for voluntary migrants; partnership, jobs and study are all three key reasons that they move overseas. That tends to be moves that are originally intended to be short, and often becomes longer, very much for refugees the same thing. Refugees who move outside their country remain in a neighbouring country hoping to be able to go home. 

>> Voluntary migrants also, very often, go for a short period of time thinking that they'll come back. I came to Berlin on a 10-month research fellowship to do research for my PhD and that was 20 years ago and I'm still in Europe. And it turns out I'm pretty typical. 

>> I used to think that there was something special about my experience but it turns out that I'm pretty representative of a lot of migrants. 

>> Now migrants and refugees contribute to the countries they move to. They contribute economically, they contribute intellectually, they contribute culturally but those aren't the stories that make the great front-page news right? 

>> Those aren't the ones that that sell the newspapers. The alarmist stories do. And those are the ones that then people tend to hear more often, but that's not representative of the entire population. That's not representative of the entire experience, and so what I want to do is to challenge a little bit of that widespread narrative about migrants and refugees and talk a little bit about two groups of migrants today. 

>> One you've heard quite a lot about - Syrian refugees - the other I bet you've never heard of, or you've never thought of them as migrants, and that's US citizens living outside of the United States - American migrants. I've done quite a bit of research on American migrants, I do use the term American and US citizen interchangeably. I realise it's not quite accurate, it includes Brazilians, Canadians, and Mexicans of course as well, but I do use the terms interchangeably. 

>> I've written several articles and I've written a book: 'Migrants or Expatriates? Americans in Europe'. And to look at this particular group of of migrants. Now, what I want to do is, I want to suggest by looking at these two groups of migrants that what you've heard about either group is at best cherry-picking particular aspects and at worst is a complete misrepresentation of the entire population.

>> Now you've heard a lot about the refugee crisis, in the UK, in Europe, but what if I told you that Europe only hosts 6% - yes, that's right - 6% of the world's refugees and that the EU just hosts 10% of the Syrian displaced individuals. 

>> Now a refugee of course is a very particular term, it's not a catch-all term, it's a very particular legal term defined by the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees. And of the six million refugees who are currently outside of Syria, about 5 million remain in the neighbouring countries around Syria. About 2 million are in Turkey, about 1 million are in Lebanon. 

>> Now Lebanon is the country whose population pre-Syrian crisis was 4 million, it's now gone up to 5 million, so from 2011 to 2015 the Lebanese population increased from 4 million to 5 million because of an influx of Syrian refugees.

>> In that same time period five hundred and sixty thousand Syrians filed asylum applications in the entire EU, 360,000 of them did so in 2015, but in that same time period from 2011 to 2015 you had a million people go to Lebanon increasing the population from 4 million to 5 million and you had five hundred and sixty thousand make us asylum claims in the three hundred million population European Union. That's quite a difference and that's of course not the entire story that we hear.

>> In the UK there are currently just under three thousand Syrian refugees and that's of a total pledged places of twenty thousand places over the next five years. Again, eighty percent of Syrian refugees, obviously outside of Syria, are in the countries surrounding surrounding Syria.

>> In fact, most refugees don't go further afield than neighbouring countries. Eighty six percent of the world's 21 million refugees are in developing countries and that means largely their neighbouring countries so they are in in the poorest countries in the world.

>> The top refugee hosting countries are not, as you might think from the media; France, Germany, Sweden, the US, UK, but actually they're Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran and Ethiopia - those are the top five refugee hosting countries in 2016. At the beginning of 2014 there were 9,000 Afghan refugees in the UK but there were 800 thousand in Iran. 

>> That's quite a difference. And that just gives us a little bit more more context.

>> Now refugees have a lot in common with you and with me, they're human beings, they're trying to do the best for themselves and for their families. 

>> And speaking of me, an American in Europe, I want to talk a little bit about this other group of migrants. The US State Department's most recent estimate is of nine million US citizens living outside the United States. Main host countries are said to be European countries, Canada, Mexico and Israel.

>> Now when I first started researching Americans overseas I assumed, like many others, I thought they would be wealthy expats on short term intra-company transfers, that they would live privileged lifestyles, be here for a short time and go back to the United States. Again, turned out I was wrong.

>> Turns out the main number one reason that US citizens leave the US is to be with a partner, and that's something that was a surprising finding when I started my research. And it's since been confirmed by further research. Work and study then are the second and third reasons and one of the other things that was a surprising finding is that nearly half have under a hundred thousand dollar gross household income, that's before taxes and so this is not a uniformly wealthy group.

>> Turns out, in terms of employment, many are freelance English teachers, they might edit, they might translate. A lot are IT consultants and these are people who mainly have a college degree but at the same time this is not uniformly a population which is quite what you might have imagined. 

>> One of the things I find interesting with respect to partnerships, prior to 2013, gay and lesbian Americans with foreign partners could not sponsor that partner for spousal green-card, and so any gay or lesbian American with a European partner who wanted to live with that person as a spouse, and to give that person a residence in the United States via a spousal relationship, was unable to do so. So gay and lesbian Americans with European partners often came to Europe to be able to live together here in Europe. Now of course that changed in 2013 with the Supreme Court decision, but until then that was the case.

>> Now it turns out overseas Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, they engage in homeland politics, they vote in Amer can elections, they remain closely linked to and they remain identified as belonging to the United States. Now they represent 3% of the US population, which is about the same as the percent of the world's population who are migrants. They're migrants, much as Turks in Germany, Moroccans in France or Belgium, Pakistanis in Britain, Mexicans in the United States, they celebrate cultural festivals, they engage in homeland politics and much more. Yet they're not usually seen as a migrant group and so that's something that I'm hoping to charge a little bit, and I would say that it really has more to do with how the media, the government and the population construct who is a migrant than it does with anything else.

>> One American told me that after she finished college in the United States she could go to New York and she could get a $5 an hour job in the publishing industry, she wanted to either write or be in the publishing industry, or she could move to Berlin, which was a city she'd visited while she was in college. And she realised that there, because it had lower living costs, that she could write the poetry that she dreamed of writing and be able to afford to live. And so that's what she does, and Berlin has become home and her English editing pays her living costs while she is able to be the artist that she dreamed of being. 

>> Now, she also became engaged in politics. She told me that during the Iraq war in Berlin, of course protests against the Iraq war were very common in Berlin, they were every Monday, and she organised a group of Americans to protest every Monday as Americans against the Iraq war. And so this was something that she really became engaged in. And again this is something that migrants do. But she's more likely to be called an expat than she used to be called a migrant. But she's a migrant like we all are. 

>> And one of the things that really defines a lot of this, is we don't hear stories about migrants like her, we hear partial stories about migrants, we hear partial stories about refugees.

>> Now there are certainly differences between migrant groups, that's absolutely clear. But one thing all migrants have in common, whether they're Syrian refugees, whether they're US citizen migrants,whether they're Mexicans in the United States or Turks in Germany or Moroccans in France or in Belgium, is that they react to how they are seen. 

>> If a population is welcomed, broadly speaking they're going to react positively. If a population is welcomed grudgingly, partially, they're not really welcomed at all, it's not a surprise that people want to withdraw into the population, into the communit,y that they they feel comfortable in. And that's something that really does define the interaction between a host population and a migrant population. Drawing on my research again, in terms of identity. 

>> One young man, who was born in Germany to an American mother and to a German father, told me that he didn't really know where he belongs. He felt like he had one foot in one country and one foot in another and he didn't know where he was going and that's something that's absolutely typical for children of migrants. Whether those are children of, again of Turks in Germany, of Mexicans in the United States, Pakistanis in the UK, is that this in betweenness that people feel, and this in betweenness is something that then also resonates with 'how accepted do you feel as a migrant?' During the Iraq war the United States was not seen positively by by many in Europe and that was something that really was very strongly felt by Americans living in Europe.

>> One woman in Germany told me that after President Obama was elected, that affected how she felt about herself and that how she felt about herself then enabled her to have better relationships with Germans.

>> And so this is really something, this is a universal point about the migrant experience, it's the interaction between the migrant and the host population and that's something, it does not matter where a migrant is from, it does not matter why that migrant has come, whether somebody has fled a war, whether somebody has come to search for a better job, whether somebody has come to be with a partner. That way that you are made to feel as migrant is something that really resonates and has an impact on integration on that continued day-to-day interaction. The more someone is accepted by the host country, the more they're able to be part of that society. The more they are rejected by that host country, the more difficult it is to be hard part of that society. 

>> Ultimately, migrants are human beings who've moved to another country. Maybe they've been forced out of their home country, maybe they've moved to be with a partner, maybe they're looking for a better paying or a more fulfilling job.

>> They're eager to fit into their new country. It might take six months, it might take a year or two but that's the ultimate goal, and some of these basic points about migration, the universality of the migrant experience, regardless of nationality, regardless of income level, regardless of visa status, they're lost when we have this excessive focus on one small group conceived of as problematic and we don't talk about other migrant groups.

>> And so that's my approach for you today, that's my challenge to you today, is to think a little bit about this and who migrants are and how we conceive of them.

>> Thank you so much for listening.