Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. I'm delighted to say I'm joined by David Miller Band.

We're sitting on a sofa somewhere in London and we're going to talk to David about his new book, which is called Rescue.

Refugees and the political crisis of our time is based on a TED talk but there's a lot more in it than in the original talk.

And we are going to talk about that crisis and the crisis of politics.

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David, can we start with, I guess, what's the tension at the heart of the book which is between the politics of immigration,

which is having a pretty profound effect on Western democracies and the refugee crisis.

They're clearly not the same, but they intersect in all sorts of ways.

How do you pull them apart before we put them back together again?

How do you pull them apart? The refugee crisis is distinct in what ways?

I think it's really important to recognize that the politics of, let's call it migration and the politics of refugees are intertwined in a very dangerous ways.

The policy agenda needs to be distinct because the rights of refugees and the responsibilities of states towards them are completely different than the rights of immigrants and their responsibilities of states towards them.

Obviously, the key thing to understand is that a refugee is someone who can't safely be sent home.

That was established in the 1951 refugee convention, which I was struck to find when I took up my job at the International Rescue Committee that that was originally only for Europeans.

The 1951 convention, it was then extended to be a global set of rights in 1967 and it has that famous phrase, a well-founded fear of persecution,

according to grounds of politics or religion or ethnicity.

Obviously, in the modern world, the politics of migration and the politics of refugees are confused by two things.

One is that some people leave for both political and economic reasons.

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