 I'm Salvatore Bobona since today's lecture is Refugees and Economic Migration. Though refugees are protected by international law, economic migration is a matter of national policy. This creates strong incentives for aspiring migrants to seek classification as refugees. It also creates strong incentives for anti-immigration politicians to seek to deny refugee status and instead relabel people as economic migrants. The truth is that nearly all refugees seek to migrate for a combination of reasons, which makes refugee policy much more difficult and much more political than perhaps it should be. To illustrate this, let's think about the refugee flows from Africa to Europe between 2014 and 2016. There are many poor countries in Africa. If the root cause of refugee flows were economic migration, then people would be coming from all of them. But instead, most of the African refugees arriving in Europe between 2014 and 2016 were coming from places like Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, from Northern Nigeria, from Mali, from places where there are active civil wars going on. People are leaving these countries because they need a safe place to go. Other similarly poor countries are not major sources of refugee flows, so places like Niger, like Burkina Faso, even countries that were affected by Ebola, like Liberia, are not major sources of refugee flows. To zero in on this, let's take the example of Sudan. Now there is a civil war still going on in the Darfur region of western Sudan. People in the Darfur region have every reason to want to escape Sudan and have absolutely a perfect legal claim to statuses refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention 1967 amendments to that. They are largely non-Muslim in a Muslim majority country that enforces Sharia law. They tend to be black African in a country dominated by an Arab African majority, and they tend to have tribal identities that are severely repressed by the government in Khartoum. On at least three different counts, refugees from Darfur are severely persecuted in Sudan and have every right to refuge in other countries. When they leave Sudan going north, the first safe country they encounter is Egypt. In principle, under the 1951 Refugee Convention in the 1967 protocol, in principle they should apply for refugee status in Egypt, and then hope that someday some other country may relocate them out of Egypt. The reality, however, is that very few refugees ever get the ability to relocate out of the country where they first claim refugee status, because so many countries are so hostile to taking in refugees. As a result, if they do claim refugee status in Egypt, they're likely to be stuck there, and they're likely to be stuck in a country that has 40 or 50% youth unemployment, a country that in which they would also be a minority facing discrimination, a country that has no real social safety net for refugees. I mean, Egypt is not a palatable place for Sudanese refugees. It may be the first safe country where they won't get killed, but it's certainly not somewhere where they would want to settle and raise their families. That's why so many of them take the central Mediterranean sea route from Egypt. They go across the border to Libya and then cross the Mediterranean to Italy. When they arrive in Italy, they are in a country that does have a robust refugee support system. Not they tend to be socially excluded in Italy. There are few jobs in Italy. While they might get some recognition and some basic social security as a refugee in Italy, they're very unlikely ever to get jobs and integrate into Italian society. Thus, there's an incentive to continue north up to Germany. In Germany, there's a robust economy, jobs are available, and many refugees have a chance to settle in Germany and start new lives. But even in Germany, it's unlikely that they speak the language or that they have family connections. After all, Sudan was once a British colony. The chief second language spoken in Sudan is English. There are already many people of Sudanese background who live in the United Kingdom. Refugees have a further incentive, perhaps, to travel on from Germany to the United Kingdom. This mythical or imagined Sudanese refugee has multiple reasons for going to Italy, Germany, or the United Kingdom. But that doesn't mean that they're not refugees. After all, a refugee is someone who flees due to well-founded fear of persecution, and Darfuris in Sudan are among the people in the world most legitimately in well-founded fear of persecution. But they're also seeking a better life than they would have in Egypt or one of the other countries surrounding Sudan. In a way, they're also economic migrants. An economic migrant is someone who moves in search for a better life, or more often a better life for one's children. We don't really have a good term for someone who's doing both at the same time. Someone who's a refugee who's also seeking a better life. We could perhaps call that a selective refugee, or maybe even a refugee plus. The confluence of multiple motives for refugees falls outside the law. The law just doesn't accommodate that, but that is a social reality that good social policy still has to deal with. The existence of multiple motives also makes the morality of refugee policy even more difficult than it would otherwise be. So consider the Syrian refugee crisis. Those who made it to Germany from Syria in 2015 and 2016 were not the poorest, the sickest, or the neediest refugees from Syria. In fact, they were disproportionately the well-educated children of the middle class. After all, you can't pay a people smuggler to bring you from Syria to Germany unless you have money, and most refugees don't have money. Understandably, these people, the Syrian refugees, want to continue their education. They'd like to go to a country where they have good educational opportunities. Many universities in Germany have classes taught in English. Again, Syrian refugees are unlikely to speak languages like Polish or Hungarian. They're much more likely to speak English, and they'd much rather have a degree from a German university than from a Hungarian university. The poorest, sickest, neediest Syrian refugees were left back in the camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. They're not the people who are able to fund a trip to Europe and physically face the rigors of the trip to Europe. Now those poor, sick, and needy refugees would benefit more from the in-camp refugee relocation plan proposed by the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. The Cameron plan was very sensible. It was that every country should set a number of Syrian refugees it was willing to take, and it should recruit those refugees from among those most in need in camps in the region. The basic idea was that people would be attracted to the camps rather than be attracted to making a perilous sea journey. Unfortunately the Cameron plan simply has not been put into practice. So we have to ask, is it right for countries to cherry-pick the youngest, richest, smartest, healthiest refugees? Because that's the unintended consequence of simply taking in those who make it, those who are able to fund their way and to physically make the journey to rich countries. Those people are a highly select group of the most resourceful, best-resourced refugees. Of course, once integrated into host societies, those are exactly the people who are at least likely ever to leave. Somebody who gets a degree from a German or Australian university is much more likely to want to stay in the country, find a high-paying job, and ultimately to move other family members to join them in their new country of resettlement. That's, depending on your perspective, not necessarily a good or a bad thing. It's just a fact that they're unlikely to ever want to move back to their much poorer countries of origin. This gives rise to some very troubling logic. So for example, a recent op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald emphasized the point, Syrians are just like us, doctors, nurses, accountants, teachers, construction workers, farmers, engineers, entrepreneurs. They are just like us. And that's become the refrain of many articles in favor of accepting more refugees. They are just like us argument. I've heard that argument coming out of Germany, out of Western Europe in general, out of Australia, and also in some cases out of the United States. But there's a flip side to they are just like us. So this is a feature article from Foreign Policy Magazine. Syrian doctors are saving German lives. And that's a problem. More than 1,500 Syrian physicians are now working in Germany. Could this be the death knell for Syria's medical system? Before the Syrian Civil War, Syria had a very effective medical system that attracted patients not only from Syria but from around the Middle East. Well that whole system has been hollowed out exactly when it's needed most. The medical needs of Syria after the end of the Civil War will vastly outweigh the medical needs of Germany. That all the doctors will be in places like Germany. Even now when there are no doctors available to work in refugee camps where Syrian refugees live and those camps have to be served by volunteer Western doctors working for organizations like Medicines, Suns, Frontiers, the Syrian doctors who in theory could be in those camps caring for other Syrians are instead being found in places like Germany working their way up through European medical systems. And as a reminder, those return rates are in long term decline. This is a problem that's becoming worse and worse, not a problem that's being solved. The incentive structures set up by today's refugee system strongly encourage people to combine refugee status with economic migration rather than encouraging them to return to their home countries to rebuild them after the Civil Wars are over. The conflation of refugee and economic migration flows and the rationales for accepting refugees or economic migrants has made the politics of refugee policy very complicated. The very common, just like us, argument is in many ways politically appealing, but let's face it, when you think about it, it's morally untenable. The idea that the most privileged refugees, those least in need of assistance, are the ones who should be helped is morally indefensible. What's more, when we do admit refugees for economic reasons, well, in some sense they cease to be refugees at all. So the idea that people should be admitted from Syria and other civil wars who are just like us, that is educated, decreed professionals, well, that conflates helping refugees with allowing and economic migrants. And finally, there's a very troubling undercurrent of the just like us argument, should we reject refugees who are not just like us? The implication that refugees should be let in because they're just like us, well, what about refugees who are malnourished subsistence farmers who are of different religions and different races? Well, they're not just like us at all. Virtually nobody in Australia is a subsistence farmer, nobody in the United States or in Western Europe. Well, should those people who are not just like us not be allowed in? It's the distasteful undercurrent of the just like us argument. But the neediest first argument may be morally appealing, but it's politically untenable. Let's face it, many voters don't want to pay for the care and education of the world's most disadvantaged people. A malnourished subsistence farmer, a malnourished illiterate subsistence farmer from sub-Saharan Africa is a very expensive person to integrate into Western society. The person has to be educated, the person needs dental work, the person needs healthcare, the person probably needs years of psychiatric assistance. That's an expensive proposition that most voters are not predisposed to support. What's more, the neediest refugees are also more likely to carry serious diseases like drug resistant tuberculosis. It's hard to imagine any politician supporting a policy that would bring people most in need of medical care into countries where they're already struggling to pay for public health systems. It's just politically a non-starter. So we have the problem that one argument, just like us, is politically appealing but morally untenable. A second argument, neediest first, is morally appealing but politically untenable. So what do we do? From a social policy standpoint, probably the most effective practical policy is simply to support more refugees in place, that is to support them as internally displaced persons within their countries of origin, or to support them as refugees in neighboring countries. Consider this refugee camp in Jordan. This is home to 80,000 people and growing, and this is just a massive array of shacks in a big desert dust bowl. This is a city of 100,000 people that lacks decent schools, that lacks hospitals, that lacks sanitary infrastructure. Sometimes these camps even run out of food and water. When a refugee camp runs out of food, that's when people leave to find a better place. Probably the most effective way to handle the world's refugee crises and to encourage people to return home after the crisis is over, is to provide services in the places where they initially flee. So to do that, of course provide food and water, also builds basic urban infrastructure, provide K-12 education, provide basic healthcare, and as an added incentive, provide scholarships so that refugee children coming out of those high schools in refugee camps are able to go directly to attend universities in places like Germany, Sweden, UK, Australia, and the United States. This would be a much cheaper policy that would also be a much more effective policy. So for example, if there were decent services in refugee camps, those Syrian doctors could be employed within the refugee camps as doctors serving a local population in preparation for returning to Syria once the civil war is over. By creating miserable conditions in the camp, we create a situation in which those who can get out, and that's what's created the huge refugee flows out of Turkey and Lebanon and Jordan and towards Western Europe, also the huge refugee flows from Africa and towards Italy and up to Germany. If those people had somewhere decent to go in the neighborhood, most of them would choose to do so. In fact, most of them do go first to refugee camps in the neighborhood. They only leave those camps when they face the bleak future that they can either consign their families to live in foul, dusty refugee camps with no education for the rest of their lives, or they can find a better life, even if it means moving away from home and from relatives. Key takeaways. First, someone can be both a refugee and an economic migrant at the same time. After all, refugees want better lives too. Second, the poorest, sickest, and neediest are generally not visible in the populations of refugees who make it to rich countries. And that should give us pause for thought. Where are those poor, sick, needy people? If they're not here, they must be somewhere else, and that's where they most need help. From a social policy perspective, the best way to help refugees is probably via the provision of better services in situ, on site where the refugees initially flee, not to create incentives for refugees to make dangerous journeys to richer countries. I'm Salvatore Bobonis, thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at SalvatoreBobonis.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asia newsletter.