With no end in sight to the mass exodus of Syrian refugees from the war-torn region they once called home, border policy has been shoved to the forefront of political discourse well beyond American soil.
But while U.S. presidential candidates grapple with whether physical barriers should be erected to further cut down on already declining instances of undocumented immigration, European and Middle Eastern nations are weighing the economic, political and ethical ramifications of opening their borders to the millions of Syrian refugees desperately trying to escape regional violence.
The United Nations’ humanitarian aid branch estimates 7.6 million people in Syria have been displaced internally since 2011, while another 4.1 million have fled the country. Although President Barack Obama has said he wants to open America’s borders to roughly 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year, that total is only a drop in the bucket compared with the total number of refugees in need of asylum.
The risks associated with traversing a violence-ridden region and fleeing to a foreign country are great, but sticking around might be riskier. A U.N. report published earlier this year found that 210,000 people have been killed and another 840,000 have been injured as a result of the Syrian civil war. Combined, that’s 6 percent of Syria’s total population, according to the report.
“Equally horrendous is the silent disaster that has reduced life expectancy at birth from 75.9 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.7 years at the end of 2014, reducing longevity and life expectancy by 27 percent,” the report said.
The study also estimated 80 percent of Syrian citizens in 2014 lived in poverty, while about 30 percent lived in abject poverty without the ability to meet basic food needs for their households. The Syrian economy declined at an annual rate of more than 30 percent in 2012 and 2013 and was projected to have shrunk by about 10 percent in 2014, according to the report.
“The contraction, fragmentation and deterioration of the economy continued throughout the country in 2014, as the traditional sources of income were diminishing, while the government was increasingly dependent upon external support, including loans and aid,” the report said.
The violence and poverty that exploded in Syria are expected to drive out-migration for the foreseeable future. Humanitarian pressure has now been heaped upon nearby European nations to open their borders to the displaced refugees, and European officials on Monday met in Brussels to discuss the potential distribution of the steadily growing refugee population, as well as the establishment of refugee camps in Italy, Greece and other areas outside of the European Union.
They ultimately decided to voluntarily share 40,000 refugees who have already flooded into Italy and Greece. Another 120,000 refugees could be redistributed among European Union members at some point later this year.
“We have seen more than 4 million people fleeing their [country] and are now being accommodated,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said last week in an interview with London’s ITV News. “This has created unexpected and very terrible issues, not to mention refugee and migrant issues, which are now engulfing the European continent.”
However, redistribution processes, refugee caps and physical barriers could potentially prevent hundreds of thousands of refugees from immediately entering European countries. Hungary on Tuesday deployed riot police and sealed its southern border with Syria in an attempt to stymie a massive influx of refugees, according to The New York Times. Plans also are reportedly in the works to extend an existing razor-wire fence along Hungary’s borders, despite protest from Serbian and Romanian government officials.
German officials, meanwhile, had expected to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees by year’s end, but that number has since been revised upward to about 1 million. And although the country seemed initially open to bringing in refugees and is one of Europe’s most accepting countries in terms of immigration, it is also among a handful of European Union members that have beefed up border security in an attempt to better control the influx of displaced Syrians.
“The aim of these measures is to limit the current inflows to Germany and to return to orderly procedures when people enter the country,” Thomas de Maiziere, Germany’s interior minister, said during a news conference, suggesting that refugees shouldn’t be able to ” choose” the country that hosts them.
But such a stance may ultimately prove to be Germany’s loss. While a huge number of refugees could potentially strain host countries’ capital and resources, a growing pool of research suggests refugees aren’t necessarily the economic leeches they’re often made out to be.
In Cleveland, for example, local refugee services agencies spent about $4.8 million in 2012 as they helped refugees get established in the area, according to a study conducted by Chmura Economics & Analytics. But the economic impact those refugees had on the community weighed in at about $48 million, roughly 10 times the initial resettlement costs.
“Refugees are more likely to be entrepreneurial and enjoy higher rates of successful business ventures compared to natives,” the report said. “At the local level, refugees provide increased demand for goods and services through their new purchasing power and can be particularly revitalizing in communities that otherwise have a declining population.”
Also worth noting: Research has shown annual earnings growth among refugees living in the U.S. has outpaced pay increases among economic immigrants, or individuals who haven’t been displaced by disaster, persecution or violence.
“I find that refugee immigrants in 1980 earned 6 percent less and worked 14 percent fewer hours than economic immigrants,” Kalena Cortes, who was then a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University, wrote in a 2004 study that compared refugee and economic immigrant labor market performance. “By 1990, the two groups had made substantial gains; however, refugee immigrants had made greater gains. Refugees in 1990 earned 20 percent more, worked 4 percent more hours, and improved their English skills by 11 percent more than economic immigrants.”
A separate 2014 study found that refugee populations in Denmark ultimately had a positive impact on local wage gains, although such groups aren’t exactly one-size-fits-all economically. The aggregate costs Jordan incurred by taking on Syrian refugees totaled nearly $8.2 billion in 2012 and 2013, while economic benefits clocked in at only $5.8 billion.
All told, the influx of refugees cost Jordan roughly $2.4 billion and strained the country’s limited water supply.
“The persistence of the Syrian crisis shows that it will not be solved in the short term, with continuing impacts on the socio-economic situation of the country projected in the medium- and long-terms for at least, the researcher believes, the next five to 10 years,” the report said.
Studies suggest developed nations with plentiful employment opportunities that can effectively bear the steep upfront costs associated with getting refugees on their feet could potentially benefit economically from opening their borders.
And though there are no real winners when millions of civilians are displaced from their homes, it may ultimately behoove the U.S. to take in more refugees.
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Would Syrian Refugees Be an Economic Boon or Burden? originally appeared on usnews.com
