Abstract
In the face of the worst refugee crisis since the second world war, the leaders of Europe are slamming the doors, enacting exclusionary policies which daily become more brutal. The controversial book Refuge by Collier (ex-World Bank) and Betts (academic in refugee studies) provides, according to the reviewer, their moral justification. Collier and Betts argue that allowing refugees into Europe is wrong and counter-productive, denying states in conflict the people they will need to rebuild post-conflict, and that refugees’ need for dignity and autonomy is best met by extending special economic zones in nearby host countries to provide opportunities for work.
Keywords
Feted by governments and by big business at gatherings such as Davos, the authors of a highly dangerous new book offer the leaders of the rich world glib corporate solutions for the global refugee crisis. But both diagnosis and treatment are based on denial of that crisis’ true causes, and wilful blindness to the role of the rich world and its institutions in creating it, making the proffered ‘solutions’ useless and dangerous.
Whether or not the politicians and civil servants of the EU and its member states have ever believed in the values underlying the Refugee Convention, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Directives setting out minimum standards for refugee reception and decision-making procedures, their policies and practices have increasingly mocked the humanitarian pretensions of these documents. Since the late 1980s a ‘fortress Europe’ policy has prevailed, which regards spontaneous migration of refugees from outside Europe as ‘disorderly’, irregular and undesirable. Measures designed to stop their travel have included visa requirements and penalties for carriers in all member states, militarised border controls and a maritime naval presence in the Mediterranean, externalised immigration controls to states in north and sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and other ‘neighbours’ near and far, large-scale deportation programmes to countries in the grip of civil war or repression (Afghanistan and Turkey) and the destruction of boats carrying migrants in the Mediterranean.
The arrival of a million refugees on the continent in 2015, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea, made the global refugee crisis more visible – and the securitised, inhuman response to it more shocking. The European Commission discussion document on Afghanistan dated March 2016, which describes war and conflict not in terms of the human suffering caused, but solely as drivers of ‘migratory flows’ which must be prevented; the description of life-saving search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean as ‘pull factors’ encouraging more migration, and their de-prioritisation in favour of military missions to search and destroy smugglers’ boats; the deals done with dictators, warlords and wanted war criminals in Turkey, Libya and Sudan to prevent refugees leaving for Europe; the hollowing-out of human rights guarantees of decent conditions and fair procedures for refugees, as children are detained and ‘reception’ becomes squalid, rat-infested, overcrowded ‘hotspots’ in Greece and Italy or fields of filth and mud in Calais. Europe’s open internal borders have been violently closed against refugees, who face not only razor wire but dogs, tear gas, beatings and sometimes torture at the hands not just of border ‘hunters’ in Hungary, but also police in Calais. Greece’s left-wing Syriza government, bullied by EU leaders into more privatisations, more austerity and more misery for its people as the price of loan extensions, was also bullied into abandoning its laissez-faire policy towards refugees (the new government had banned the detention of refugees and allowed them to move on towards northern Europe) for one of large-scale detention and deportation to Turkey. Meanwhile, the EU’s ‘solidarity’ or ‘burden-sharing’ with the southern European countries receiving the refugees has become a mockery – in April 2017 the EU was forced to revise its 2015–2017 relocation target from the ‘front-line’ states of Greece and Italy down from 160,000 to 30,000, because of the low take-up rate by member states.
In this securitised climate, those actually providing solidarity, in the form of rescue, refuge or humanitarian aid, are increasingly criminalised. In the camps springing up again around Calais, diseases like trench foot have appeared because of the lack of clean water – but the distribution of food and clean water to refugees has been banned by the mayor, as it has in Ventimiglia, on the Italian border with France (in July, the French Council of State upheld a ruling by the Lille Administrative Tribunal ordering the mayor to provide access to clean water, toilets and showers to hundreds sleeping rough in Calais since the bulldozing of their camps). Giving lifts to refugees is a criminal offence in Denmark, France, Greece and Italy. Rescue itself is not exempt: early in 2016 reports began to emerge of volunteers on Lesbos being harassed by police and even arrested for bringing refugees to shore. Since then, NGOs which attempted to fill the gap caused by the EU’s retreat from search and rescue operations have found themselves accused, at worst of actual collusion with the smugglers, at best of being a ‘pull factor’ which increases crossings and makes them more dangerous as smugglers overload boats. It is Frontex, the EU’s border force, which has led the chorus of vilification of volunteer rescuers. (The arguments have been clearly and trenchantly rebutted by the Forensic Oceanography group in its report Blaming the Rescuers, June 2017.)
The silent underlying logic of both deterrence and criminalisation is the attempt to shore up the status quo in European societies which neoliberal policies have made increasingly unequal, insecure, fragmented and polarised, by resorting to, or failing to challenge, nationalist, nativist and anti-immigration agendas. Refugees hold up a mirror not only to global inequalities, but also to the profound dysfunctionalities in increasingly unequal and undemocratic neoliberal ‘market states’, manifested in the deterioration in the quantity and quality of social housing, the disappearing welfare state, the underfunding and creeping privatisation of health services and education, the increase in poverty and its diseases, in street homelessness and the proliferation of food banks. Refugees, whose needs (initially at least) are absolute, show up the crumbling welfare infrastructure in supposedly wealthy societies where the basic needs of too many for decent housing and financial security are unmet. Their arrival demands a shift in values, from social Darwinistic individualism – or a retreat into nativist protectionism – to social solidarity, universalism, the idea that all have an equal claim to decent housing, education, health care, work and security.
The Europe-wide response to the photograph of Alan Kurdi in the summer of 2015 was a moment when a shift towards such values seemed possible, with crowds in Germany applauding the arriving refugees. Since then, hope of such a transformation has been kept alive – by the armies of volunteers across Europe who work with the new arrivals, or who spend time in the ad hoc transit camps near the borders: Calais, Ventimiglia, Belgrade, Lesbos, Lampedusa, and by the June 2017 general election in the UK, which has reawakened the belief that change is possible. But apart from German chancellor Angela Merkel in her summer 2015 opening of the borders to Syrian refugees, no European leader has attempted to reflect values of humanitarianism, let alone universalism, in refugee policies.
Khaled Khalifa, a Syrian who has chosen not to leave his country, but has watched with bemused shock European leaders’ attempts to close the borders to refugees, reflected: In the last 100 years, Syria has taken in large numbers of refugees, displaced people and people fleeing death, not to mention ancient migrations that have long made Syria a country that draws refugees. At the beginning of the last century, the Syrians took in Armenians, Chechens and Albanians who were fleeing massacres and wars, and they later received more than half a million Palestinians after the disaster of 1948 and the war of June 1967 . . . Syria accepted more than three million displaced Iraqis in 2003 after Baghdad was occupied by the US. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Syria took in hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, and Syria has not closed its borders to refugees for a single day since the beginning of the 20th century.
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The failure of the EU and virtually all of its member states to respond humanely to the crisis has, as many commentators have noted, called into question the leaders’ commitment to the universal Enlightenment values of respect for human rights. In this situation, the politicians need theorists, reputable intellectual cheerleaders to show how policies of securitisation, deterrence and exclusion are in fact the best, most humane and most sustainable response. Enter Sir Paul Collier, an economist and former director of research and development at the World Bank and adviser to the IMF. Collier’s previous books have proposed neoliberal solutions to world poverty (The Bottom Billion) and international migration (Exodus). Undeterred by the lack of success of his prescriptions in these books, he turns in Refuge, with Alexander Betts, a political scientist and director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford, to the task of solving the problem of refugees.
The tone of the book, apparently bursting with righteous anger and compassionate good sense, could not be more different from the dry, cold language of EU official documents. In clear, non-academic prose uninflected with jargon, the authors describe the waste of life and human potential represented by the nine-tenths of the world’s refugees who do not travel outside their own continent, but wait in limbo for years, or decades, in vast camps in Africa and Asia – a tragedy no less scandalous than the loss of life in the Mediterranean, although less dramatic and largely hidden from view in Europe. Humanitarian aid designed for short-term emergencies, they argue, is cruelly inappropriate for today’s long-term displaced, whose dignity and autonomy are trampled by a life of dependency and rightlessness in the camps or of insecurity and illegality in slums and shanty-towns. The refugees need to be given a future. They need work. Their children need education.
But as the argument develops, readers’ expectations are cruelly destroyed. The compassion is a corporate con, like the empathy-washing of vast global corporations which hijack humanitarian crises to tout their commitment to humanitarianism. 2 We soon discover the limits of the dignity and autonomy the authors would accord to the refugees – which keep them well away from Europe’s borders. For as far as refugee movement to Europe is concerned, the message is in fact the same as that of the EU leaders. Refugees from outside Europe have, according to Collier and Betts, no moral claim on Europe, whose admission of refugees should be limited to a symbolic few. The rest should be hosted in the ‘havens’ where the vast majority already stay, close to home, where the difficulties of cultural integration don’t arise, where support costs a fraction of the costs in Europe ($1 for every $135 spent in Europe, they claim), and from where they can easily return when, post-conflict, their country needs them. Once they have moved to a neighbouring country, the authors argue, they are safe. Their further movement to Europe makes them ‘economic migrants’ and no longer refugees. Angela Merkel is not praised, but reviled for her short-lived open-door policy towards Syrian refugees in 2015, when she waived the rule requiring refugees to seek asylum in the first EU country they reached (as the Dublin regulation allows any EU government to do, for humanitarian reasons). The authors describe her policy as a ‘headless heart’, motivated by sentimentality, self-indulgent and wrong. The list of evils which the authors cite as ‘perhaps’ caused by Merkel’s reckless gesture include the intensification of attacks on civilians by Assad, a surge in people-smuggling and trafficking, more deaths in the Mediterranean, the surge in right-wing populism across Europe and even the Brexit vote. Worst of all, they argue, she has robbed Syria of its brightest and best brains. (The authors assume, citing no evidence, that the refugees admitted to Germany and other EU states will never return – although according to the UN, over a quarter of a million have done just that since 2015, despite the fact that conditions have not improved since they left). 3
These judgments are justified through recourse to a number of rhetorical devices, including the ‘thought experiment’ representing the plight of refugees as analogous to that of a child who has fallen into a pond, and the role of rich countries as innocent bystanders who happen along, are willing to jump in and rescue the child in accordance with basic moral obligations, but whose duty thereafter is limited to drying her off, giving her a hot drink and packing her off home. The scenario only needs to be written out to see how false the analogy is, in respect of both participants. If such analogies are useful, then it would accord more with global realities to represent the refugee as an orphan whose home has been destroyed, and the rescuer as implicated, to some extent at least, in the loss of her parents and the destruction of her home, as well as in her drenching. The moral resolution can no longer hold once the terms of the ‘thought experiment’ are made more realistic.
Misrepresenting the causes
Surely it is now trite that the economic liberalisation demanded by the World Bank and the IMF, in the structural adjustment programmes imposed as conditions for loans or debt repayments in the 1980s and ’90s, played a huge role in driving increasing inequality, insecurity, states’ fragility, conflict and refugee flight. Of the main refugee-producing countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Russia, Iran, China, Colombia, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Eritrea, Cameroon, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan, all either accepted WB/IMF structural adjustment programmes or adopted similar neoliberal economic policies to encourage foreign investment. Economic liberalisation has immiserated hundreds of millions, with its ‘labour reforms’, cuts to public health, education and subsidies of basic foods. Privatisation of health and other sectors has led to massive forced displacement of labour activists and trade unionists fleeing death threats in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Trade deals and market reforms have destroyed the livelihoods of millions through cheap imports. At the same time, land grabs by multinationals for palm oil plantations and oil and mineral extraction have pushed more people into the cash economy, as well as producing conflict, with frequent killings of local farmers and environmental activists (the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment referred to ‘an epidemic … a culture of impunity, a sense anyone can kill environmental defenders without repercussions, eliminate anyone who stands in the way … [in] mining, agribusiness, illegal logging and dam building’). 4 Governments in receipt of loans have been fatally weakened in their ability to provide for their people and protect their welfare by the privatisation programmes, the ending of subsidies and the public spending cuts they have been forced to adopt.
The authors will have none of this. Structural adjustment programmes hardly rate a mention in the book. Global inequality has in fact, they assure us, ‘fallen fast’ since the 1990s, and cannot have been a driver of conflict and so of refugee flight. To say otherwise is a ‘lingering vestige of colonialism’, they chide: ‘guilt over colonialism or racism’ whereby ‘Western commentators are inclined to explain whatever happens anywhere as being due to Western actions’.
Collier is a specialist in African economies. The World Bank report Poverty and Prosperity 2016 reveals that sub-Saharan Africans have not benefited from the drop in global poverty, which is largely confined to the Asia-Pacific region. Much of Refuge concerns sub-Saharan Africa. This makes the assertion of decreasing global inequality disingenuous, to say the least. But the airy nonchalance of the statement is matched by similarly breathtaking assertions, backed by no evidence whatever, throughout the book. According to these authors, the causes of fragile states, conflict and displacement include democratic elections, the end of the cold war, technology, resource booms and Islamist extremism. The list is eccentric: some of the phenomena appear to be symptoms, some by-products, some peripheral, some partial, but none have the explanatory force of neoliberal globalisation. (Western military adventures do not appear in the list of causes of refugees, either, despite Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.)
Perhaps it is unsurprising that a former senior employee of the World Bank, steeped in its ideology and its destructive neocolonial sense of mission in the global South, should be in denial about the role of the global institutions set up to govern the world on behalf of and in the interests of the rich world, in the chaos and misery they leave behind in poor countries, through wholesale economic restructuring to serve corporate interests and the concomitant weakening of states’ ability to provide security for their citizens. But what was the director of the Refugee Studies Centre doing, putting his name to this farrago?
Neoliberalism is the solution
The solution offered by Collier and Betts to mass displacement and refugees struck them during a visit to Jordan, which took in both the Za’atari refugee camp, where refugees had no access to work or to education for their children, and a neighbouring Special Economic Zone which was crying out for workers, as Jordanians (for reasons the two failed to enquire into) did not want to work there. Why not, they mused, bring the refugees to the SEZ? So this, in a nutshell, is the Big Idea at the heart of the book. Refugees are a huge reserve army of labour just waiting for the chance to work. Multinationals need willing, conscientious workers. Bingo! A neat, practical solution, designed to maintain the status quo and so convenient and palatable to the rich world and its governments, it requires the countries which currently host the vast majority of the world’s refugees – their neighbours – to continue in this role, with enhanced support and investment in SEZs from the rich world, since they are best placed to do so, through geographical proximity, both for flight and for eventual return and post-conflict reconstruction, similar standards of living (removing ‘pull factors’ which drive movements to rich countries), and a similar culture, leading to easier integration.
Here, the authors draw on the old international trade theory of ‘comparative advantage’, which in the economic sphere has prevented poor countries developing their economies by moving from primary production (agriculture and mining) into manufacture. Countries such as South Korea, China and Brazil began building their industrial base and moved out of the dire poverty still suffered by many primary producers, says Behzad Yaghmaian, 5 by defiance of the doctrine and rich states’ instructions, and turning to local production of goods previously imported from the West.
As well as relying on outdated and Eurocentric economic doctrine, the authors fail to appreciate that these neighbouring countries offer little or no security – physical, economic or political – to their unhappy guests, and that just possibly, this total insecurity might be a powerful driver of onward migration to Europe. The same structural factors are at work in the host states, which are themselves often just as fragile as those the refugees have fled (and often produce refugees themselves; Sudan, Uganda, Turkey and Pakistan are cases in point). There is an irony in the concern expressed in the book at the diminution of organic reception of refugees, which used to occur in a number of countries in Latin America and in Africa, notably Uganda, where they used to be given parcels of land and seed, enabling self-sufficiency and integration into the local society and economy. One of the main factors now inhibiting this organic reception is the commercialisation of land resulting from economic liberalisation. Another factor is the closing down of options for easy migration for displaced people, as the EU demands ever stricter internal immigration controls within regions of Africa such as the Sahel and west Africa as a condition of continued trade, aid and development programmes.
So we return to the SEZs as the unpromising site for developing refugee autonomy and dignity. The authors acknowledge that SEZs are notorious for their poor labour conditions, but airily suggest that corporations and governments would ensure improvements. Once again this ignores corporations’ rapaciousness, their reliance on slave and super-exploited labour, their reversion to bottom lines after the initial fanfare for corporate philanthropy, and governments’ quiet abandonment of their pledges of support once the summits are over and the TV crews have gone.
The global evangelists cum snake-oil salesmen and their ideas have been taken up enthusiastically by the powerful. The authors were invited to Davos in January 2016, and the following month the King of Jordan, British PM David Cameron and World Bank representatives agreed the ‘Jordan Compact’, which promised to bring 200,000 jobs to Jordan for Syrian refugees, including in the SEZ, in exchange for improved access to European markets and a $300 million, virtually interest-free World Bank loan. (The book doesn’t tell us that within months the plan had faltered, with a fraction of the expected number of Syrian refugees being issued with work permits.)
It is hard to see the dignity or autonomy involved in working for a multinational in an SEZ in Jordan. It is breathtaking that a man from one of the institutions most strongly implicated in the loss of the livelihood, education, security, dignity and autonomy of millions, should now seek to tell the world how to solve the problems caused by their flight. It is tragic that a refugee studies specialist should be endorsing his solutions. It is not at all surprising that the two have received nothing but acclaim from the leaders of the rich world – feted at Davos … nor that their solutions should begin to unravel before the ink was dry.
Footnotes
Frances Webber, a former immigration barrister, is vice-chair of the Institute of Race Relations and writes on the law and politics of immigration, asylum and human rights. A review article of Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge: transforming a broken refugee system (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 288 pp. £20.00.