Migration is often analysed through an exclusively “humanitarian” lens that highlights the dire and widespread nature of human need to argue for urgent relief. This can be problematic for a variety of reasons. First, humanitarianism prioritises immediate charitable aid over justice-based institutional reforms. In so doing it may disempower aid recipients, subject them to domination, or encounter them in other objectionable ways—aid recipients may be treated as supplicants rather than as applicants for what they are (supposed to be) entitled to. Relatedly, if we identify human need as the sole standard for aid we can easily overlook preexisting duties and entitlements that people have as a matter of right. For example, while refugee protection always entails both “traditional protection” through diplomatic and legal representation (e.g. assessing refugee status) as well as “relief protection” through socio-economic aid (e.g. food, shelter) there is a worry that overemphasis on the latter (especially in the context of camps) can make the former less likely. Moreover, while humanitarian duties are typically discretionary, most migration crises involve specific remedial duties. When humanitarians step in where truly responsible, rights-violating actors resist discharging their remedial duties then, absent efforts to compel these actors to do the right thing, they are basically “let off the hook”; this can even give bad actors incentives to manipulate or intensify mass migrations. Finally, humanitarianism can make us neglect the root causes of mass migrations or solutions that are more institutional and political in nature. While this can be an unintended side effect of humanitarianism it may also be precisely what is intended by certain actors: by structuring discourse in terms of discretionary humanitarian charity, other more ‘politically difficult’ possibilities that involve structural and rights-based reforms are either downplayed or removed from discussion.