The 'Red Carpet' Question: What We Have Learned from the West About Refugees

International Human Rights Day is meant to reaffirm a simple idea: dignity isn’t a favour granted by the state. Rights are supposed to attach to people because they are people, not because they carry the right passport, belong to the right religion, or arrive in ways that are convenient for border regimes. And yet, in refugee debates, we keep returning to a different script: that those who cross borders without permission are not primarily human beings in danger, but problems to be managed.

That is why a recent remark made by the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant posing the question of whether people who entered “illegally” should be welcomed with a “red carpet” – has struck such a nerve. A rhetorical question can do real political work. It doesn’t simply express doubt; it sets the frame for what counts as “reasonable,” what counts as “excessive,” and whose suffering counts at all.

The law is a door, and before the door sits a gatekeeper

Scholar Eddie Bruce-Jones asks a deceptively simple question: Does international refugee law belong to human rights law or immigration law? The question matters because it determines what we think refugee protection is. Is it a regime anchored in dignity and the restraint of state power? Or is it a managerial apparatus for regulating entry – where compassion is optional and exclusion is the default?

This question invites deeper reflection on the divergent – and sometimes convergent – logic underpinning these frameworks. I argue that immigration law is an infrastructure that enables and sustains colonial powers in a post-colonial world. It is a technology of sorting that decides whose mobility is normal and whose mobility is suspicious; whose movement is “travel,” and whose movement is “invasion.” It converts human beings into categories – legal/illegal, admissible/removable, deserving/undeserving – and then asks us to mistake those categories for moral truth.

International refugee law, as we know it, emerged in response to shifting European conceptions of “charity and humanitarianism to restitution, reparations, and responsibility” – key elements of Europe’s post-war and post-imperial reckoning, tied to the paternalism of the “white man’s burden.” It was formed amidst a specific historical and geopolitical context where states grappled with their roles in the aftermath of war and empire.

But this origin story contains a contradiction. Refugee law speaks the language of responsibility while operating in a world still shaped by colonial afterlives: uneven borders, uneven mobility, and uneven legitimacy. Immigration control becomes the mechanism through which old hierarchies reproduce themselves under new names – sovereignty, security, “orderly migration.” When immigration logic colonises refugee protection, refuge stops being a human-rights project and becomes border management with a humanitarian accent.

What the “red carpet” comment reveals about India’s refugee discourse

The Supreme Court hearing that produced the “red carpet” line concerned a petition alleging the disappearance of Rohingya persons from custody and seeking that if deportation occurs, it should be carried out through due process. Yet the exchange that travelled into public debate pivoted quickly from the state’s duties to the migrant’s supposed audacity.

As reported, the Chief Justice offered a hypothetical of illegal entry – “you cross the fenced border illegally, you dig a tunnel, and you enter India” – and then asked whether, after entry, a person can insist that “your laws must apply to me,” including show-cause notice, food, shelter, and entitlements for children, concluding: “Do we want to stretch the law like this?” The line that crystallised the posture was: “If an intruder comes, do we give them a red-carpet welcome…?”  

This is precisely the moment where the Bruce-Jones question becomes concrete. If refugee law belongs to human rights, then the purpose of law is to restrain the state – especially when the state’s power over a person is total and the person’s political voice is nil. If refugee law belongs to immigration control, then the refugee becomes a management problem, and the demand for legal safeguards can be framed as an unreasonable entitlement.

How India is learning from the West – deterrence, suspicion, and 'infiltration'

By framing migrants as illegal, a drain on resources and culturally incompatible, the state manufactures moral panic to justify exclusionary measures. Leah Cowan’s concept of everyday borders illustrates how these boundaries are reinforced not just through laws and policies but through cultural narratives that sustain public consent. She argues that Britain cultivates anti-migrant sentiment by positioning itself as a nation detached from its colonial past, fostering the belief that migration is an incursion rather than an entangled historical consequence. This erasure fuels both state and street-level racism, embedding the hostile environment not only in immigration policy but in the national psyche.

That same “incursion” logic is increasingly legible in India’s refugee discourse too – especially in the shared vocabulary of “infiltration.”

In the British imaginary, the migrant becomes an "infiltrator" of welfare, housing, and national identity; in the Indian imaginary, refugees – particularly Muslims – are routinely cast as "infiltrators" of territory, demography, and security. The word does similar work in both contexts: it militarises movement, implies conspiracy rather than survival, and turns the presence of displaced people into an offence against the nation. Once “infiltration” becomes the organising frame, rights are recoded as indulgence and protection is recoded as weakness.

This is the West’s most exportable political lesson: not rights, but deterrence – the governance of borders through suspicion, exhaustion, and performance. Western border regimes have spent decades teaching publics to experience compassion as naivety and legal safeguards as loopholes. The point is not only to exclude, but to make exclusion feel like common sense.

And it is hard not to hear the resonance when a refugee’s insistence that the state follow its own procedure is reframed as “stretching the law.” That rhetorical move – turning legal restraint into indulgence – is central to contemporary border politics everywhere.

'Safe country' designation and the illusion of safety

One of the most insidious legal tools in this politics is the language of the “safe country.” A state designates certain countries as “safe,” and that label does more than describe – it restructures the asylum process. It fast-tracks refusals, narrows appeal routes, and speeds up removals by turning “safety” into a presumption. In doing so, it treats safety not as a lived and uneven reality – shaped by caste, religion, gender, region, and politics but as an administrative shortcut. The burden shifts: the applicant must disprove a state-issued conclusion, often under compressed timelines and a climate of institutional disbelief. 

The UK has designated India as a “safe country.” When a country is designated as a safe country, asylum claims from its nationals are either automatically rejected or subject to a presumption of safety that the applicant must rebut. The underlying assumption is that countries with this status do not produce refugees, thereby legitimising discriminatory treatment in asylum adjudication. A central feature of bordering regimes is the implementation of practices, such as these, that regulate mobility through exclusionary legal mechanisms. 

The symmetry with India’s own refugee posture is hard to miss. While the UK uses “safe country” designation to render certain claimants presumptively unworthy of protection, India, often responds to refugee protection claims with a jurisdictional refrain: we have not signed or ratified the Refugee Convention, implying that protection is optional, external, or an unreasonable demand. Different legal techniques, similar result: formal positioning becomes a gatekeeping device that converts a human rights question into a technical refusal.

A better question

A democracy shows its truth at the edges – at borders, in detention, and in courtrooms where the unpopular ask that the law apply to them too. The Rohingya case is one such edge. It leaves us with a choice we should stop dodging: do we govern displacement through rights, or through suspicion? Do we meet human beings with due process, or with the rhetoric of red carpets and intruders? If immigration law is an infrastructure of postcolonial hierarchy, Human Rights Day is a moment to break its spell. 

Jayalakshmi Itla Ragiri is an international human rights lawyer. She recently completed her postgraduate studies at SOAS University of London on the prestigious Chevening Scholarship.

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