Book review of Maja Grundler’s Irregular Migration, Refugee Status and the Law: Protection from Dangerous Migratory Journeys by (Routledge, 2025)

This book offers a bold reconceptualisation of refugee law through the lens of irregular migration and the deadly journeys it entails, treating harms experienced during journeys themselves as a protection issue. Grundler’s central thesis is that the harm experienced during dangerous migratory journeys can constitute persecution and that a risk of irregular a person having to undertake a dangerous journey again if returned home could ground a claim to refugee status. Her work engages deeply with refugee law doctrine, vulnerability theory, and comparative case law on protection of victims of trafficking.
Grundler makes clear that many individuals who travel irregularly face harms as serious as, or even more serious than, those endured by refugees in their home countries. Yet, if they are deemed not at risk in their country of origin, they are typically classified as “economic migrants” who supposedly travel voluntarily and so fall outside the protective scope of asylum law. She contests this voluntariness as largely illusory: many travel under conditions of vulnerability and desperation. She uses the term “irregularised migrants” to capture that irregularity is produced by legal and policy choices rather than ideas of the criminal circumvention of migration controls.
Traditional interpretation assumes the feared persecution occurs in the country of origin. Grundler’s reconceptualisation posits that persecution can also occur in transit or on return, via the peril of irregular re-migration. The harm encountered on dangerous routes, physical violence, sexual assault, trafficking, enslavement, is likened to persecution for the purpose of refugee status. A refugee’s fear must be forward-looking and assessed in light of anticipated harm, therefore, if return today means a high likelihood of another life-threatening journey tomorrow, the future harm lies not only in the country of origin but in the risk of being driven to repeat the journey.
The dichotomy between trafficked vs. smuggled is not justified by the realities on the ground. Indeed, smuggling and trafficking frequently overlap in practice, a journey that begins with consensual smuggling may turn into trafficking through coercion and abuse, and vice versa. The key distinction is: trafficking is framed as a crime against the person, whereas smuggling is framed as a crime against the state’s borders, leading to markedly different legal outcomes. To close this gap, Grundler invokes vulnerability theory. She introduces “consequential vulnerabilities” (arising from prior migration experiences) and “route causes” (factors and experiences of the journey that increase the likelihood of irregular re-migration). These concepts show how dangerous routes and state policies combine to generate ongoing risk. If states create the conditions that make journeys deadly, then refusing protection to those harmed exposes a serious legal lacuna.
This analysis shifts the narrative away from blaming migrants for “choosing” dangerous routes and toward understanding how personal and structural vulnerabilities converge to compel them. Drawing on psychological research on trauma, Grundler explains why trafficking survivors may remain susceptible to re-victimisation despite awareness of the risks, tracing how UK jurisprudence developed to recognise this and extended recognition to male victims. Her legal analysis is enriched by interdisciplinary research from psychology, sociology, and international relations, giving a fuller account of trauma, migrant agency, and border governance. With this vulnerability-based rationale in place, Grundler turns to persecution, responsibility, and protected characteristics.
Refugee law already accepts that cumulative harms can amount to persecution; she extends this to sequential harms of cycles of exit, return, and re-exit with repeated exposure to border violence, exploitation and other harms. Drawing an analogy with refugees sur place, whose risk arises from events occurring after departure, she argues that persecution need not be fixed to a single place or moment and proposes that the prospective dangerous journey itself be recognised as the site of persecution. On responsibility, Grundler maintains that a state’s failure of protection at origin includes its inability to prevent nationals from facing serious harm through repeated dangerous migration. If a state cannot provide basic safety or conditions that make staying viable, it is failing to protect against a known cycle of harm. In trafficking-related cases this is clearer: where a state cannot shield a survivor from re-trafficking, it fails to protect them from persecution by traffickers.
Anticipating the objection that no one “persecutes” migrants who voluntarily undertake risks, she further dismantles the idea of free choice by stressing the role of destination-state policies in producing perilous conditions. Extraterritorial controls by other states such as strict visa regimes and carrier sanctions funnel migrants onto more dangerous routes. Grundler stops short of calling European states “the persecutors” as it remains that countries of origin are aware of the dangers that people would face if they leave in the same way that the dangers of trafficking are understood. Additionally, in the conclusion she refers back to this subject, arguing that making the case for the persecutory nature of dangerous journeys will incentivise states to reverse the harmful effects of migration control policies.
Many “route causes” are rooted in protected characteristics: migrants taking dangerous routes may belong to marginalised social classes or ethnic minorities amounting to Particular Social Group (PSG), come from war-torn regions (imputed political opinion or nationality), or be women challenging social norms (PSG of women in a given society). For those whose initial migration appears purely economic, she turns to social group formulation such as “people with past experience of irregular migration”. She frankly acknowledges the doctrinal difficulties, especially concerns about circularity and lack of particularity if groups are defined directly by dangerous-journey experience. She also notes the potential for a political opinion ground, where irregular migrants are viewed as having a political character in challenging state authority by defying border.
Grundler’s approach is radical in that she seeks to significantly stretch the Convention. One might view her thesis as an attempt to close the gap between “Convention refugees” and those who currently rely on complementary forms of protection or fall outside of protection altogether. The most immediate question is whether refugee law institutions (courts, tribunals, UNHCR) will accept Grundler’s reconceptualisation. There is a risk that courts might view this as a bridge too far, more appropriate for legislative change than judicial interpretation. Even if risk of irregular re-migration is accepted as persecution, establishing a Convention ground, most plausibly PSG, remains challenging It is unclear whether having undertaken a dangerous journey is an immutable characteristic or fundamental aspect of identity, but it may be comparable to being a former gang member or former victim of trafficking, which many courts have accepted as PSGs because of the lasting effects. However, as with the general claim of the book, expanding PSG in such a way could be too broad and encompassing too many disparate individuals.
The thorniest issue is state attribution, as she seeks to apply refugee law to structural vulnerability. While she insists that her model is applied case by case, based on concrete vulnerabilities and credible risks of re-migration, it is unclear how courts would make a distinction between risk of remigration and experience of poverty – stretching the refugee definition entirely. Resistance to such an expansion is likely. Nonetheless, despite the idealism and political unfeasibility, the proposal is grounded in the Convention’s ethical reasoning and in the need to address harms caused by migration control (largely with impunity) and by climate- or disaster-induced movement. Her work is intentionally challenging states’ migration control policies.
Rather than promising a sudden transformation of refugee law, the book offers doctrinal tools and normative arguments that could, over time, reshape it. Some readers might prefer more discussion on whether alternative solutions (like humanitarian visas or expanded complementary protection regimes) might address the issue without redefining “refugee.” Grundler touches on complementary protection in Chapter 6, and her stance seems to be that while complementary or temporary protection is a stopgap, true refugee status, with its stronger rights, should not be denied to people whose plight is equivalent to that of refugees as traditionally understood.
Overall, this book is a significant and ambitious contribution to refugee law scholarship. It compels a re-examination of who deserves international protection in an era of brutal realities of mobility restrictions. Clear, methodical, and doctrinally rigorous, the book moves from concept to theory to doctrine and to application. The framework of “route causes” equips scholars, practitioners, and policymakers with tools to show why neat binaries, voluntary vs. forced, poverty vs. protected characteristic, and territorial harm vs. extraterritorial harm, fail those whose suffering unfolds on dangerous migratory journeys.