What this subject covers and how it differs from neighbouring fields
Migration and refugee studies examines why people move, stay or are prevented from moving, how states and international bodies categorise and govern them, and how migrants and refugees themselves shape the places they leave and arrive in. Courses are usually titled either migration studies or refugee studies, and the distinction matters for what you write.
- Migration studies tends to treat all forms of mobility together: labour migration, family and student migration, internal migration, return, remittances, diasporas, integration and citizenship. Evidence about economic drivers, labour markets, settlement, identity across generations or the politics of immigration control fits well here.
- Refugee studies centres on forced displacement: asylum systems, the legal category of the refugee and who falls outside it, encampment and urban displacement, statelessness, internal displacement, protracted exile and durable solutions. Evidence about protection, the experience of asylum procedures or the gap between legal definitions and lived reality fits better here.
Read the course descriptions you are applying to and check which framing dominates. An applicant who writes only about humanitarian rescue for a migration course that emphasises labour, citizenship and data may seem not to have grasped its scope. An applicant who treats refugees simply as one type of migrant may miss what a refugee studies course considers distinctive.
The field also overlaps with neighbouring subjects, and your statement should show why you chose this one rather than them:
- Compared with international development and humanitarian studies, the focus is mobility and status rather than aid delivery or poverty reduction in general.
- Compared with peace, conflict and human rights, conflict matters here mainly as a driver of displacement, and rights matter in relation to borders, asylum and belonging.
- Compared with politics or public policy, immigration policy is one object of study among several, alongside the agency, networks and experiences of people on the move.
- Compared with international relations, the state system is examined from the point of view of who it includes and excludes, as well as from inter-state bargaining over borders and burden-sharing.
Interests that make a strong focus
The most useful interests are specific questions, not a general wish to help. A question can be developed and tested against reading. A wish to help cannot. Examples of workable starting points:
- Why certain categories exist. For example, why someone fleeing persecution is protected while someone fleeing environmental collapse or extreme poverty often is not, and what follows from that line.
- How policy produces the situation it claims to respond to. Deterrence measures, visa regimes, externalised border control, or detention and their effects on routes and risk.
- Integration and belonging. Language provision, recognition of qualifications, housing dispersal, the right to work while awaiting a decision, or how second-generation identity is negotiated.
- Representation. How media, political speech or charity campaigns portray migrants and refugees, and how terms such as “illegal”, “economic migrant” or “crisis” do political work.
- Mobility and economy. Remittances, seasonal or care-work migration, brain drain arguments and their weaknesses, or student migration.
- Methods and ethics. How researchers count populations who may avoid being counted, and the ethics of interviewing people whose legal status may depend on how they tell their story.
Pick one or two and show how your thinking developed. A statement that names five issues in a sentence each shows less than one that follows a single question through what you read, what complicated it and what you now want to study.
Academic preparation worth mentioning
There is no single required background. People come to this field from politics, law, sociology, geography, history, anthropology, economics, languages and other subjects. What matters is linking what you have studied to questions about mobility.
- Geography: population change, push and pull models, and why those models are often criticised as too simple. Saying where a model failed to explain a case you studied is stronger than restating it.
- History: partition, decolonisation, post-war displacement, or the history of a particular community. These can show you understand that current categories have origins, but avoid implying that one historical case explains every present situation.
- Law or politics: the refugee definition, the idea of non-refoulement, or how domestic asylum procedures work. Show you know the difference between what law says and how it is applied.
- Sociology or anthropology: identity, community formation, racialisation, or ethnographic method. These connect well to integration and lived experience.
- Economics: labour market effects, fiscal debates, remittances. Explain how you handled contested evidence rather than repeating one side’s conclusions.
- Languages: useful if you can say what language access revealed about services, interpreting or community life. Fluency alone is not the point.
For postgraduate applicants, a dissertation or extended essay on a related topic is often the clearest evidence. State the question, the sources or data, one finding and one limitation you recognised. If your degree was in an unrelated subject, identify the concrete skill that transfers, such as statistical analysis, archival work or close reading of legal texts, and connect it to a migration question you want to pursue.
Independent reading and engagement
Reading is the most accessible preparation, and it is more useful when you can describe a disagreement within it. Possible approaches, all optional:
- Read reports from international organisations, NGOs and governments on the same issue and compare how they frame it, what they count and what they leave out.
- Follow how one asylum or immigration policy was debated and implemented, then look for research on its effects.
- Read first-person accounts, memoirs or oral history projects alongside academic work, and notice where testimony and research agree or diverge.
- Look at how a local newspaper covered a nearby asylum accommodation site or resettlement scheme, and compare it with national coverage.
- Attend public lectures, film screenings or community events on migration, if available. Say what you took from them, not merely that you attended.
When you mention reading, give a reaction: what argument you found persuasive, what you doubted, or how it changed the question you were asking. A list of titles shows very little.
Relevant experience and what it does and does not show
Direct experience is not a prerequisite, and it is not automatically strong evidence. Whatever you use, be accurate about your role.
Volunteering with migrant or refugee organisations
Work such as conversation clubs, food banks, drop-in centres, befriending or administrative help can show sustained commitment and give you concrete observations, for example how long people waited for decisions, how rules on the right to work shaped daily life, or what services people actually asked for. It does not make you an expert on asylum law, casework or trauma. Avoid presenting a few sessions as advocacy or casework. Reflect on what you noticed about systems and what you would need to study to understand it.
Personal or family migration history
This can be a strong source of motivation and insight, particularly into belonging, family separation, documentation or language. You do not have to disclose anything you would rather keep private. If you do, keep the focus on the questions it raised rather than on narrative alone, and be careful not to generalise one family’s experience to all migrants. Also be cautious about writing about relatives’ legal situations in detail.
Ordinary jobs
Work in hospitality, retail, care homes, agriculture, warehouses or cleaning often involves colleagues who migrated for work. If you noticed patterns such as which jobs relied on migrant labour, how visa conditions or agency contracts shaped people’s options, or language barriers in training, that connects to labour migration. The limit: you observed a workplace, not a labour market. Present it as the origin of a question, then show you read about it.
Caring responsibilities
Accompanying a relative to appointments, translating letters or dealing with services on someone’s behalf can give real insight into how institutions treat people with limited language or insecure status. It shows practical understanding of bureaucracy from the user’s side. It does not equal professional interpreting or advice work, so describe it plainly.
School projects and societies
A debate on immigration, a Model UN session on displacement, or a local history project on a migrant community can show how you handle contested topics. Strong reflection notes where your view changed or where evidence was thinner than the arguments built on it.
Travel and study abroad
Being a foreigner somewhere, or a student on a visa, can give a small sense of bureaucratic exposure, but it is very different from forced displacement. If you use it, acknowledge that difference directly. Holidays near border areas or visits to camps as an observer are best left out unless you can reflect critically on the ethics of that presence.
Professional experience for postgraduate applicants
Work in local government, housing, education, NGOs, legal support or international organisations can be central. Describe your actual responsibilities, a problem you could not resolve with the knowledge you had, and how the course would address it. Be careful with confidentiality and do not include identifiable details about service users.
What useful reflection looks like
Good reflection in this field usually does at least one of these things:
- Moves from an individual story to a structural question, for example from one person’s long wait to how asylum decision-making is resourced and organised.
- Questions a category, noting that someone you met did not fit neatly as a refugee or a labour migrant, and what that reveals.
- Recognises your own position, such as the difference between volunteer and service user, or between holding a secure passport and not.
- Shows you can hold competing arguments, for example on the economic effects of migration, without reducing one side to bad faith.
- Identifies what you do not yet know and why the course is the right place to learn it.
A weaker version simply reports what you did and states that it made you passionate. A stronger version says what you observed, what you thought it meant, what reading complicated that view, and what you now want to investigate.
Pitfalls specific to this subject
- Saviour framing. Writing as though migrants and refugees exist to be rescued, or centring your own emotional response, overlooks their agency, which is a central theme of the field.
- Loose terminology. Using refugee, asylum seeker, migrant and illegal immigrant interchangeably suggests you have not engaged with the subject. Use terms precisely and, where relevant, show awareness that they are contested.
- Using people as anecdotes. Opening with a vivid account of someone else’s suffering, especially if identifiable, raises ethical problems. If you mention an encounter, keep it brief and respectful and focus on what it led you to ask.
- Treating the field as purely humanitarian. Much of it is analytical: law, statistics, policy, history and theory. Showing interest in how and why, not only in helping, matters.
- Taking a campaigning stance with no evidence. Strong views are fine, but a statement that reads as advocacy without engaging with counter-arguments or data looks less suited to academic study.
- Confusing the course with a career. Studying migration is not the same as training as an immigration lawyer, caseworker or aid worker. If you mention a career, show how academic study relates to it rather than treating the degree as job training.
- Ignoring the course’s emphasis. A migration studies course and a refugee studies course may expect different interests. Make sure your main examples match the one you are applying to.
For general advice on planning, structure and editing, read our personal statement writing guide.