Turning back THE TIDE
WHY CANADA’S REFUGEE POLICY MAY BE DOING MORE HARM THAN GOOD. Jonathan Kay,
On Dec. 10, 2015, Justin Trudeau appeared at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport to personally greet the inaugural planeload of Syrian refugees arriving in Canada. “Welcome home,” he told the first travelers off the plane — a couple with a 16-month-old child. Outside the terminal, ordinary Canadians dropped off gifts of plush toys, hats, mittens and parkas.
The sight of Syrians being personally greeted by the most powerful man in Canada — after having fled a county ruled by a regime that drops poison gas on its own population — ranked among the most moving scenes in modern Canadian history. It was all the more powerful when set alongside developments in the United States, where Republicans were demonizing refugees as inveterate terrorists. ( New Jersey governor and GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie went so far as to promise that under his watch, the United States wouldn’t even admit orphans under the age of five.)
The pronounced contrast on refugee policy became one of the main reasons why Canada’s stature in the international community has spiked in recent years. “Much of the world is reacting to the refugee crisis … with hesitation or hostility,” The New York Times reported in a front-page 2016 story. “(But) the Canadian government can barely keep up with the demand to welcome (refugees). The Toronto Star greeted the first planeload by splashing ‘ Welcome to Canada’ in English and Arabic across its front page. Eager sponsors toured local Middle Eastern supermarkets to learn what to buy and cook and used a toll- free hotline for instant Arabic translation.”
By my anecdotal observation, these accounts are not overblown. At Toronto dinner parties, it’s become common for upscale couples to brag about how well their sponsored refugees are doing. ( Houmam has a job! The kids already speak English! Zeinah bakes the most amazing Syrian pastries — I’m going to serve some for dessert!) Syrian refugees aren’t just another group of Canadian newcomers. They’ve become central characters in the creation of our modern national identity as the humane yang to Trump’s beastly yin.
Given all this, it seems strange to entertain the thought that — contrary to this core nationalist narrative — our refugee policy may actually be doing more harm than good. Yet after reading Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World, a newly published book jointly authored by Paul Collier and Alexander Betts, I found that conclusion hard to avoid. When it comes to helping victims of Syria’s civil war, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The authors of Refuge — both of them Oxford University professors — start by explaining the historical roots of the current system, which took root during the early years of the Cold War, when the prototypical refugee was a political dissident. This system was designed to handle individuals and small groups, not the great swathes of humanity that civil war, jihad and ethnic cleansing have propelled wholesale across Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The international community’s response has been a grab bag of humanitarian outreach, the scope and nature of which
WE LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT GENEROUS REFUGEE-ADMISSION POLICIES ARE AN ANTIDOTE TO THE PERILS THAT CLAIMED ALAN KURDI’S LIFE. THE EXACT OPPOSITE SEEMS MORE LIKELY TO BE TRUE.
fluctuates on the basis of optics. When a photographer captured the washed- ashore body of 4- year- old Alan Kurdi two years ago, many Western nations — including Canada — responded with open arms. But in the case of other tragedies, such as that of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, the response is more muted.
For the migrants themselves, life is a lottery. Only about one in every 200 refugees is selected for formal resettlement in a developed country. Even counting the hordes who migrate spontaneously as asylum- seekers, the proportion is less than one in 10. The other 90 per cent exist in an endless limbo as residents of refugee camps, or as an undocumented underclass in large cities.
In theory, the camps offer a short- term refuge, from which families can soon return to their native country, or to safe permanent homes. But the reality for most is that these camps are the permanent homes: Over half of the world’s refugees exist in what is known as “protracted refugee situations” — and for this group, the average length of stay is more than 20 years. During this time, refugees typically are unable to work, gain citizenship, travel freely or start legal businesses. As Betts and Collier emphasize, these “humanitarian siloes” represent an epic waste of human capital.
Western journalists descend upon these camps and collect tales of woe, which become the founding narrative for government policy. Amidst comparisons to the Holocaust and the discredited policies of “None Is Too Many,” we imagine ourselves in the shoes of Oskar Schindler. Betts and Collier take pains to praise these humanitarian instincts. Yet they’re completely unsentimental about the actual effects.
The refugees who make it to Canada typically will have much better lives than those who don’t. But this comes at the expense of humanitarian funds that might be spent to better effect — and with greater efficiency — on the far larger number of refugees who still languish overseas. According to the authors’ numbers, “for every US $ 135 of public money spent on an asylum- seeker in Europe, just US $ 1 is spent on a refugee in the developing world, ( and) fewer than one in 10 of the 4- million Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan receive any material support from the UN.”
What’s worse, the lotterystyle nature of the system means that refugees have incentive to take enormous risks. German Chancellor Angela Merkel received lavish praise for admitting more than 1 million Muslim refugees in 2015. But the data cited in Refuge suggest the tantalizing prospect of first- world residency is precisely what motivated so many refugees to endanger their lives by setting out from Turkey in tiny watercraft. We like to believe that generous refugee- admission policies are an antidote to the perils that claimed Alan Kurdi’s life. The exact opposite seems more likely to be true.
Moreover, the refugees who make it to the West do not comprise a representative cross- section of displaced Syrians — because those who can afford to pay off human smugglers tend to be the richest and most well-educated members of their society. ( Betts and Collier cite the stunning statistic that fully half of all Syrian university graduates now live outside the country’s borders.) This has important policy ramifications, because refugees who remain in the geographical vicinity of their country of origin typically return home once a conflict ends — whereas those who migrate across oceans usually never come back. Insofar as the sum of humanity’s needs are concerned, where is the need for Syrian doctors, dentists and nurses more acute — Alberta or Aleppo?
This doesn’t mean the West should simply wash its hands of the Syrian refugee crisis. Far from it: The authors make the case for a completely new, internationally co-ordinated network that would offer support to the millions of anonymous refugees who are languishing in camps or scraping by in cities such as Beirut, Amman and Kilis. But crucially, they emphasize that this new architecture must represent a clean break from the old camp-and-lottery system.
Drawing on successful examples from Africa and Central America, they argue that refugees must be quickly integrated into local economies — and in such a way that benefits the existing local population. According to this model, Western aid wouldn’t just go to food, shelter and clothing, but also to the creation of farms, factories and free-trade zones. As well as making refugees richer, this silo-free approach would also make them safer, since communities at work are far less susceptible to extremism and indoctrination than those where young men have nothing to do.
THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS
The solution Betts and Collier offer is wells upported both by l ongitudinal historical data and the especially grim one- off case study of the Syrian refugee crisis. And as a matter of pure utilitarianism, it seems unconscionable that the world spends US$ 75 billion annually on the 10 per cent of refugees who make it to developed regions, but only about US $5 billion on the other 90 per cent.
It also must be said that focusing more of our efforts on helping refugees overseas would help head off some of the rising tensions that exist in all Western societies when traditionally minded citizens feel under siege from newcomers. While Canadians have thus far shown themselves to be admirably welcoming of Syrian refugees, attitudes could change if there is a series of terrorist attacks in this country. Even if the fears of right- wing nativists are imaginary, their impact on politics is not — as the examples of Brexit and Donald Trump’s America plainly show.
But logically sound as it may be, the authors’ argument also flies in the face of our national moral vanity. Scenes of refugees being greeted at the airport by our PM offer a powerful symbol of our humanitarian spirit. Having our PM cut cheques to foreign aid agencies? Less so. While focusing more on supporting Syrian refugees who’ve been displaced to other Middle Eastern countries would allow us to do more good with the same amount of money, we’d also be acting in a less intimate and personal way — and we’d get fewer of those heartwarming newspaper features about Arab children watching their first Canadian snowstorm.
And so we have to ask ourselves: In the end, what’s more important — doing good, or the appearance of doing good? If we’re as pure of heart as we like to imagine, we’ll seek out the policy that saves the most people, full stop. And Refuge supplies an outstanding road map for getting us there.