This interdisciplinary article focuses on the phenomenon of voluntary (migrant) and forced (refugees) originating from the Horn of Africa, traversing the Saharan Desert and the Mediterranean Sea bound for Europe. The European politics and migration discourses are inclined towards the “push-pull” theoretical model where refugees are driven by war and natural famine-related disasters while migrants’ decisions to migrate are influenced by a simple cost-benefit response to actual/perceived economic disadvantage at the origin (negative) and economic opportunities at the destination (positive). Such policy discourses and institutional practices have contributed to the normalization of extensive and systemic human suffering, establishing arbitrary hierarchies of suffering as a mechanism for legitimizing international protection in specific regions and for particular demographic groups, while simultaneously structuring, institutionalizing, sustaining, and normalizing the suffering of others. This article argues that the socioeconomic, political, and environmental variables that influence individuals’ decisions to migrate are characterized by non-binary, interdependent, and mutually overlapping dynamics that it highlights the futility of categorically differentiating voluntary (economic) migration from forced (political) migration through simplistic binary frameworks. Both migrants and refugees navigate analogous pathways, utilize comparable modes of transportation, depend on the same social networks and agency, and share the same status of illegality that renders them susceptible to the process of exclusion, criminalization, detention, and expulsion. The binary distinction often invoked to invisiblize or as justification to deny access to asylum and protection on land and rescue at sea.