Before a migrant becomes a legal category, they are a human being

The first line of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not say some members of the human family are entitled to dignity. It says all. That word – small, unambiguous, radical – has never been more important to recall than when we talk about migration.

Human dignity, as scholar Otto Spijkers puts it, is “the state or quality of being worthy of honour or respect by virtue of being human”.

Not by virtue of holding the right passport.

Not by virtue of having crossed the right border.

It is simply inherent. It travels with us, even when everything else has been stripped away.

And yet we keep forgetting the human.

We forget the human when migrants build our roads, clean our homes, care for our elderly, and staff our bakeries and construction sites – yet are underpaid, overcrowded, and silenced. We forget the human when a child who has crossed every conceivable danger is processed first as an immigration case and, only later, if at all, as a child. We forget the human when a woman forced into exploitation is seen as complicit before she is seen as suffering.

When we forget the human, migration governance may become administratively efficient. But it loses its soul, leading us to question whether the system aligns with the principle the forefathers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights so clearly stated – human dignity is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.

Here is why that matters in practice.

Many migrants do not arrive only with luggage. They arrive with invisible wounds. Some have survived wars. Some have survived trafficking. Some have watched loved ones die in front of them. Trauma changes the way people function: it alters memory, it distorts timelines, it can make a person go silent precisely when they are being questioned most intensely. If the systems designed to assess them are not trauma-informed, we will consistently misread pain as dishonesty, shock as non-cooperation, silence as guilt.

And so the victim becomes, once again, the accused.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration already enshrines a human rightsbased approach. That is progress. But rights on paper are only as strong as the human interactions that give them life. It is time to go a step further and ask whether our migration systems are genuinely trauma-informed – not as a luxury, but as a baseline for any system that claims to be just.

What does a trauma-informed approach actually look like?

It begins with different questions. Not “what is your visa status?” as the opening line to someone who has just survived a sea crossing, but: “Are you safe? Do you need water, food, rest?” It means private interview rooms rather than open counters. It means childsensitive procedures that account for how young people process and recount experience. It means ensuring that a victim of trafficking who finds the courage to report their exploitation is not then criminalised and deported for irregular entry. It means, above all, establishing trust before demanding a coherent narrative – because once trust is established, the story will unfold.

None of this requires abandoning border governance. A traumainformed approach is not an open-borders argument. It is an argument for making governance more accurate, more humane, and, ultimately, more just. And it does not necessarily have to cost more money. What it requires is a fundamental shift in the way we train the people who stand at the intersection between the state and the migrant: immigration officers, police, labour inspectors, social workers. National human rights institutions are wellplaced to become a bridge between governments and civil society in building that capacity.

We should also stop underestimating the resources already present in our communities. Diaspora groups and faith associations provide enormous, largely unrecognised support to migrants navigating this transition. A fragmented approach – where government agencies, NGOs, and community networks operate in silos – is no longer tenable. Coordination is not a bureaucratic nicety; it is what transforms a system of processing into a system of care.

The debate around migration is rarely short of heat. What it is often short of is humanity. Before we debate quotas, categories and compliance rates, we might pause to remember what the founders of the post-war international order understood clearly: that human dignity is not merely a value among values. It is, in their own words, “the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world”.

A migrant is a human being first. Everything else – the paperwork, the procedures, the policy frameworks – comes after.