Refugee resettlement is in the news. At a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, speakers from both ends of the political spectrum called on the country to admit some of the 2.3 million Syrians who have become refugees. “While the United States has led the world in resettling and providing humanitarian assistance to refugees from conflicts around the globe, we’ve not done enough to address the current Syrian crisis,” said Senator Dick Durbin.
Across the Atlantic, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has just conceded the need for the UK to resettle Syrian refugees. Having previously refused to establish such a program because of the country’s high rate of immigration, on January 29 he announced, “we will be coming forward with a scheme to help the most needy people in refugee camps and offer them a home in our country."
If and when the Syrians are resettled, they will join a very substantial number of refugees who have benefited from this solution. In the last decade alone, well over 750,000 refugees have been resettled, most of them going to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and a small number of European states.
The merits of resettlement programs are not difficult to discern. They provide refugees with an opportunity to leave the camps and urban centers where congregate immediately following displacement, often living in very difficult conditions for years on end, waiting for the time when it is safe to repatriate. They provide protection to people who are in urgent need of it, especially when targeted at the most vulnerable groups in the refugee population.
Most significantly, perhaps, resettlement programs avert the need for refugees to make long, dangerous, and sometimes illicit journeys to distant asylum locations. And when admitted to a country by means of resettlement, refugees can expect to get financial and social support, help in finding a job, education for their kids, and the prospect of becoming citizens.
And yet resettlement is a controversial issue amongst humanitarian workers, a significant proportion of whom consider that its drawbacks equal or outweigh its advantages. The resettlement process, they argue, is labor intensive, expensive, and increasingly slowed by the extensive security checks undertaken by resettlement countries.
Furthermore, because the demand for resettlement places is so much higher than the supply, bribery and corruption can easily arise in the refugee selection process. It is often suggested that those refugees chosen are not the most vulnerable, but rather the most entrepreneurial and assiduous in navigating the procedure. And even those people often find that the going is tough when they arrive at their destination, unfamiliar with its language and culture.
Finally, critics of resettlement point to the fact that so few countries are prepared to make this solution available to the world’s refugees. In the Syrian context, for example, countries such as the U.S. and UK are under mounting pressure to resettle refugees from politicians, advocacy groups and the media.
Yet few people have even raised the possibility of resettling Syrian refugees in nearby Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. As Amnesty International recently pointed out, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council “have not offered a single resettlement to refugees from Syria.” Indeed, far from welcoming refugees, Saudi Arabia recently expelled a massive number of foreigners, including 200,000 from Yemen and 150,000 from Ethiopia, two countries which are poorly placed to absorb such an influx.
Resettlement has a limited but nevertheless important part to play in providing protection and lasting solutions for refugees. In Syria, as in other crises, providing humanitarian aid and local integration for refugees will have the greatest and most immediate impact. But if a broader range of countries were to commit themselves to resettlement, its role could become even more significant.