Philosophers On The Syrian Refugees

Philosophers On The Syrian Refugees


Since 2011, over 10 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes, and over 4 million have fled their homeland, seeking refuge from the violence and chaos of the civil war wracking their country. The war has reportedly left between 140,000 and 340,000 dead, including (by some estimates) up to 12,000 children. Prisoners, including children, have been tortured by the Syrian government, and Amnesty International reports that the regime has “disappeared” more than 65,000 people. The situation in Syria and with its refugees has been described as “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.”

Many of those fleeing Syria sought refuge in nearby states such as Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq. Others traveled further, to North Africa and Europe. Countries have varied in their response to the refugee crisis. While there are clearly very strong humanitarian reasons to allow the refugees to enter and make new homes and lives for themselves, some politicians and others have objected because they prefer the cultural make-up of their country as it happens to be right now, they have worries about refugees being terrorists or other security issues, or they are concerned about the economic impact of refugees. Recently, the United States agreed to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees to enter in 2016, but even that modest accommodation was met with political backlash, as governors of several U.S. states announced they would refuse to cooperate with the plan (leading John Oliver to point out: “there was only one time in American history when the fear of refugees wiping everyone out did actually come true… and we’ll be celebrating it on Thursday”).

Here’s a list of how many refugees have been accepted by different countries.

The Syrian refugee crisis has been the subject of widespread debate, with political rhetoric escalating in recent weeks since the Paris attacks. What would a more careful conversation about the issues look like? To find out, I asked philosophers and political theorists to contribute some brief remarks on the crisis to an installment in the “Philosophers On” series. These are not comprehensive statements, but rather focused thoughts on specific issues, meant to prompt further discussion. Contributing are:

Thanks to each of them for taking the time to participate in this post.

The idea of the “Philosophers On” series is to explore the ways in which philosophers and theorists can add, with their characteristically insightful and careful modes of thinking, to the public conversations about current events, as well as prompt further discussion among philosophers about these events. All are welcome to join the discussion.

Also, if you come across particularly valuable relevant philosophical commentary elsewhere, please provide a link in the comments.


Max G. Cherem — Understanding the Structural Issues

The public is confused on even basic refugee policy. Instead of debates like “refugee institutions have flaw X, and need changes Y and Z” we get false-dichotomy-cheerleading akin to “compassion vs. security”. I wish to refocus and prompt debate on structural issues.

First, what is a refugee? The Refugee Convention defines them as people outside their country who have had (or, on return, will have) membership repudiated by persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition covers needs of those who have lost membership in a certain way. It tracks a unique harm. Refugee status entitles one to a remedy fitting this harm: protection from return (“nonrefoulement”) and new membership. This status was born out of concern over the effects such membership loss has on people and the state system. Even the “Nansen passport” precursor to refugee law arose from concern for both individuals and managing the destabilizing movement of persecuted masses.

Public debate is disconnected from even this definitional part of existing institutions. The oft-used catchall of “migrants” blends refugees with both immigrants and refugee-like persons fleeing other perils (for whom other complementary protection statuses exist). Such framing maintains the status quo by directing indignation into table-pounding about value commitments instead of into informed activism for structural reforms.

Second, refugee camps are not in the Convention. They are extralegal. De facto practice has created camps, and with them an odd difference between refugees independently arriving in a new state and “camp refugees” (whether in a camp or “temporarily” housed in a city). Camp refugees get status recognition from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and (tenuous) non-return protection. But no state is required to secure their membership. They have status but no institutional support for the protection and fulfillment of their rights. In 2004 UNHCR estimated the average span of major refugee situations was 17 years—all of which a refugee may spend in a camp. Camps gut the Convention by driving a long-term wedge between non-return and membership. In contrast, refugees coming on their own have claims against a state to status adjudication. If successful, they are entitled to non-return and membership secured by that state. This is as the Convention envisioned. But states are also gutting the Convention with respect to these refugees through “extraterritorial migration controls”: unilaterally declaring their migration laws (and protections) do not apply to excised bits of territory and ports, claiming the same for high-sea interdictions, placing officers in foreign ports to deny onward travel, outsourcing migration authority to companies with incentives to deny claims, or brokering “readmission” agreements with rights violating regimes through whom desperate people may transit; Italy had such an agreement with Gaddafi’s Libya. These methods create spaces wherein states essentially claim the Convention doesn’t apply.

The Convention’s dual ground in concern over rights and managing destabilizing movement suggests it can be seen as an attempt to resolve coordination and moral coordination problems. Coordination problems are when mutual benefit depends on what others choose, such that behavior needs coordination by a mechanism fixing expectations and consistent action. Moral coordination problems are when moral values underdetermine to whom one has obligations and to what extent they are obliged. In the first type of coordination the goal is mutual benefit and in the second it is the specification and discharge of duties. For example, we may all have a duty to give to the needy. But there are so many givers and receivers that who we owe what to is indeterminate and partly depends on others’ provisions and obligations. In an indeterminate moral domain like generalized giving (or resettling refugees from camps), we might think the content of each giver’s obligation can change with that of other givers’ provisions and obligations and that this is set by embodiment in institutions. If so, then coordination is not simply a tool for discharging what we owe others but an ineliminable part of it.

Why is seeing the Convention this way important? It helps show that the aforementioned gutting involves states defecting from our only viable solution. This is worrisome if one thinks refugee issues can only be solved via both types of coordination. Apparently, political leaders calculate that they can subscribe to the convention in name, defect in practice, and that their publics won’t notice or care. So far, the sloppiness and level of our public discourse hasn’t proven them wrong.


Thomas Christiano — Morality Is Not Risk Free

In thinking about the situation of refugees two main considerations should be taken into account. First, refugees, insofar as they are fleeing violence and persecution, have rights to be given domicile in a safe place where they are able to engage in some kind of productive activity. This may not imply that they be given rights wherever they happen to be outside the country from which they are fleeing.  But the international community has a duty to cooperate in resettling refugees in a place that is safe and welcoming. These rights are based on the fundamental interests of persons in avoiding violence and persecution by their fellow human beings.  And it is based on the duty of the international community to make sure that these interests are properly realized. It is also based on the duty of the international community to do what it can to stop people from being treated as if they were mere things to be used or gotten rid of.

The second consideration is that states must be assured that they are not given unsustainable burdens in helping refugees. This is where the international community needs to act as a kind of unified political entity to make sure that refugees go to states that are able to help them; if a state is already overburdened by refugees or some other issue, the refugees can be settled elsewhere. Here the cooperation of many states is essential. When the burden on some states becomes too great it is a requirement on other states that they either take in or help with the taking in refugees in states. This is why we have to speak in terms of an international community and not merely the duties of states taken one by one.

Furthermore, states are still the most important institution in the modern world for protecting the fundamental interests of persons. No other institution is available that can do this.  NGOs and international institutions can help in the protection of persons but it is still fundamentally states that have this job. So the international community, in addition to having duties to settle persons in places where they no longer fear violence and persecution, has a fundamental interest and duty to protect the viability of the states that make up the international system.

When we take these two considerations into account, we can see why it is that the international community has a basic role in solving large scale refugee problems such as that which is now occurring in Syria. It is only the international community that can simultaneously take into account the two fundamental considerations that I have outlined.

For example, in the contemporary case of the 4 million Syrian refugees who have managed to escape violence and persecution in Syria by fleeing to neighboring countries such as Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, there is a genuine danger of unsustainable numbers of refugees present in these countries. This might involve large scale unemployment, overstretching of government budgets, administrative chaos, mistreatment of the refugees and perhaps even social unrest. Here is it essential that other states, particularly wealthy states, step in to ease the burden. And they may have to step in to ease the burden either by providing aid to the countries or, more likely, by offering to take in many of the refugees. But in at least the case of Jordan and Lebanon, which have taken on enormous burdens in helping refugees from Syria and Palestine, it is necessary that large numbers of people be relocated to wealthy countries where they can be welcomed. European states such as Germany and France have and continue to undertake the lion’s share of this resettlement. And they continue to do this. But they are also bringing a very large number of people that may be economically sustainable but not politically sustainable. Even if these political limitations are grounded in unsavory motives and attitudes, it is necessary to take them into account.

It seems to me in this context that it is a fundamental duty of the United States to step in to help ease the refugee burden of the neighboring states of Syria and the European states. Perhaps Russia and China should step in here as well. But the United States has the size and economic power that enables it to bring in large numbers of people with relatively small effects on its economy. It also has a reasonably well off Arab community that is capable of helping refugees settle reasonably easily. The conditions seem very good for this kind of resettlement of refugees.

The fear, expressed by some, that this could risk an increase in terrorism, seems massively overblown. First of all the refugees are fleeing terror and hence are not part of the problem. Second, though there may be some who enter who may be tempted by extremist action, the general effect of bringing in many refugees from Syria should be to diminish the probability of terror. This is because the US would be bringing in people who would be extremely grateful and who would be generally deeply averse to this kind of action and so they would have the effect of lessening the temptations to this kind of activity. So while there may be some risk that some persons who enter as refugees might be inclined towards extremism the general tendency should be to diminish that risk. Finally, if it is a fundamental duty of the United States to help out with the refugee problem, this means that one must accept some risk. Morality is never costless or risk free. But we do owe it to our fellow human beings.


Elizabeth Cohen If Not Idealism, At Least Pragmatism

There are many reasons that have been offered for turning away refugees fleeing political conflict. Inevitably suspicion is cast on people who have become enmeshed in politically charged and violent circumstances. Moreover, the mass influx of refugees spurs some to worry about whether newly arrived groups destabilize long-standing social and political arrangements. And people fear that migrant populations will rely on public assistance or take jobs that native-born citizens might want.

Equally affecting are arguments in favor of accepting refugees that cite the low likelihood that someone with malign intent could slip through the screening process, the high likelihood that the US invasion of Iraq triggered the rise of ISIS that precipitated our current refugee crisis, and the certain fact of the refugees’ abject need.

Ideally countries should take in refugees because everyone’s existence is fragile, even when a person is born with one of the most sought after political statuses in human history: US citizenship. We are all one hurricane, one stolen identity, or one armed vigilante away from being displaced persons ourselves. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all counting on the fact that if our family, friends, and compatriots cannot help us, strangers will. And in fact they already have. Strangers of different nationalities help each other all the time. This makes our stubborn insistence that being born in the US earns a person affluence and citizenship, while being born elsewhere earns other people destitution and oppression, quite difficult to defend. Show me an infant who did something to earn her fate and I’ll reconsider. Until then, it seems like an untenable position.

But America is not a nation of idealists. It is a nation of people who aspire to pragmatism. And the pragmatic solution to refugee crises in politically charged environments has already been identified. Here I refer to the commitments our country has made to refugees for almost 70 years. Those commitments originated following WWII, at the beginning of the Cold War. In 1948 the US Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, offering safe haven to people fleeing repressive regimes. The individuals and families identified by the Act were in some cases people who had fled Nazis and were left stateless after the war. But at the outset it was clear that many of the people who would be helped by the Act were fleeing communist dictatorships. Indeed, well after Western Europe was rebuilding itself and throughout the Cold War, the US continued to welcome people who escaped Eastern bloc autocracies. The result: even as anti-communist hysteria peaked in the US no disastrous plots against America were accomplished. More consequentially, the iron façade of U.S.S.R eventually crumbled, revealing not a powerful military force on the verge world domination but a creaky bureaucracy sinking under its own weight. We can’t know if or how much our refugee policy contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union but we can know that it did not weaken the US position.

If we can’t be idealists we can at least live up to our pragmatic past. To do this we need to set aside our most self-destructive paranoid reflexes and trust the choices our grandparents’ generation made. Providing refuge to people fleeing communism worked in everyone’s favor. So too will providing refuge to people fleeing ISIS.


Chandran Kukathas — The Legal and Moral Conceptions of “Refugee”

Political leaders and media commentators routinely refer to the Syrian refugee crisis, even if only to deny that all of those trying to get into Europe are anything other than ‘economic migrants’. The distinction between refugees and migrants is a well-established one both in political discourse and philosophical debate, the presumption being that refugees have a greater claim upon host societies for assistance or sanctuary than do migrants, who are simply seeking a better life. This distinction is to be found in international law in the form of the 1951 Refugee Convention, whose signatories are obliged by accept into their countries people who can demonstrate that they are indeed refugees.

Yet according to international law, almost none of the people leaving Syria are refugees. By the terms of the Convention, refugees include only those who leave their country of nationality out of a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted’—and persecuted ‘for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group or political opinion’. Those fleeing war, famine, or natural disaster—or indeed persecution for reasons other than those specified in the Convention—do not count as refugees. Yet if the Syrians trying to get into Europe are not refugees, what are they? Strictly—legally—speaking, they are simply migrants. Indeed they are merely people moving to find a better life, albeit because almost anything is better than being bombed or shot at.

We seem to be faced with an odd choice. We could deny that the Syrians are refugees, because the law says so; and insist that they are simply economic migrants, who therefore have little claim on our assistance – unless we invoke some other norm, such as humanitarianism. Or we could maintain that they are refugees but be forced to admit that the legal and philosophical distinction between a refugee and an economic migrant is not a meaningful one, since it flies in the face of everyday usage, and common sense.


José Jorge Mendoza — Accepting Refugees: A Moral Obligation, Not an Act of Charity

In the past two years, the United States has had to deal with two refugee crises. The first occurred during the summer of 2014, when thousands (mostly unaccompanied children) trekked from Central America to the United States in the hope of being granted asylum and escaping the gang violence that is ravaging their home countries. The second is happening today, as people (mostly women and children) flee the violence that is taking place in the Middle East. In both cases, there are these persisting assumptions that (a) granting refuge to these people is somehow supererogatory not obligatory. In other words, that it is an act of charity and not of justice. And also (b) that these refugees somehow present a danger to US national security and that this risk outweighs any obligations (if there are) to take in these refugees. Paul Ryan, the new House Speaker, exemplified this view when he recently argued that it is “common sense” to stop taking in refugees from Syria and Iraq because, in light of the recent attacks in Paris, it is “better to be safe than sorry.”

People like Paul Ryan are profoundly mistaken. Their mistake rests on a belief that these refugees are somehow analogous to random hitchhikers on the side of the road. Where stopping to pick them up would constitute a magnanimous gesture, but also where good “common sense” should speak against such action because in those sorts of cases it might be “better to be safe than sorry.” The case of Central American, Syrian, and Iraqi refugees is not at all like this. These refugees are fleeing extraordinarily dangerous circumstances and our country is, at least in part, responsible for creating those conditions. We therefore have a morally weighty obligation, and not simply a charitable inclination, to take these refugees in. In these cases, it’s more like being responsible for breaking the hitchhikers’ car and then leaving them stranded by the side of the road as a snowstorm approaches. Sure, there is never a 100% guarantee that these hitchhikers pose no risk to us, but it is a risk justice demands we incur because of our prior actions and the facts of the situation.

With that said, the actual risk that these refugees pose to us is minimal. The vetting process that refugees trying to get into this country have to go through is extensive and if drug cartels and terrorist organizations want to get their operatives into the US there are far easier, quicker, and less scrutinizing ways of doing so. What worries me, however, is apparently much different than what worries people like Paul Ryan. I worry that these are actually the easy cases. There is really nothing morally challenging about them. If climate change remains unabated, however, then the truly difficult cases might be waiting for us around the corner. If, as a country, we are feeling morally squeamish at the prospect of letting in a few thousand refugees, then what will we be like when faced with the prospect of a few million? People with literally nowhere else to go, either because their homes are underwater or they lack safe drinking water, and who can also say to us that this is the result of our overconsumption of fossil fuels. If today we are badly failing the easy tests, what hope do we have that in the future we will rise to the challenge of truly difficult moral dilemmas?


David Miller — Refugees, Free Movement, and Social Justice

The recent mass movement of people across the external and internal borders of Europe has thrown existing refugee policy into turmoil. That policy was evolved in the light of the Geneva Convention of 1951, which defines the refugee as someone facing persecution in her own country, and gives her the right to claim asylum in the first foreign country she enters. Once the claim to asylum has been validated, that state has a duty not to return the refugee to the country she has escaped, but has discretion over whether to admit the refugee or to send her to a safe third country. There is no right on the part of the refugee to choose which country she settles in. The Geneva Convention has proved to be workable in part because it limits the cost that receiving states have to bear when they accept asylum claims. This is appropriate since the receiving state is effectively being asked to provide a remedy for human rights violation perpetrated by others.

By allowing large numbers of people to move across borders and effectively choose where they will end up, European states have behaved with extraordinary generosity, admittedly in the face of a humanitarian emergency. But there must be some question about the effects on future immigration policy as a whole. A number of countries have over time developed successful refugee resettlement programmes that ensure that the new arrivals are properly integrated into the societies they join, avoiding the problems that arise when migrants cluster in the deprived quarters of cities like Paris and Brussels. Can these models be sustained if free movement across borders is going to be permitted? States committed to social justice need to be able to choose immigration policies that are consistent with the policies they have put in place to provide equal rights and equal opportunities for all their citizens.

Finally there must be a question whether the responsibility of rich states towards people who are displaced by intercommunal violence or civil war is best discharged by allowing large-scale immigration, rather than providing more generous support for temporary safe-havens in neighbouring countries. In the case of Syria/Iraq, not nearly enough has been done to provide decent living conditions, including work opportunities, in these camps. Refugee resettlement programmes could then concentrate on specific minorities who are very unlikely to be able to rebuild their lives in their home countries once the violence has ended.


Jennifer Nagel — Effective Altruism and the Syrian Refugee Crisis: A Canadian Response

Sometimes the philosophical question “What ought I to do?” slaps you in the face. Looking at the images of refugees fleeing Syria, anyone with resources would be driven to donate to the humanitarian organization leading the effort to help them. Somehow, typing my credit card number into a website didn’t feel like enough of an action. As a Canadian, there was something more I could do: our government has a program for the private sponsorship of refugees (my sources tell me this program is unique in the world). Any group of five or more Canadian citizens or permanent residents in the same geographical area can apply to sponsor a refugee (or family of refugees) to come and live in their community.

Out of the millions of refugees cared for by the United Nations, the most vulnerable are identified by the UNHCR and approved by Canadian consular officials as candidates for resettlement. Sponsors are financially responsible for their family; they also pledge to meet them at the airport, find them a place to live, enrol any children in school, find doctors, dentists, support them in finding work and becoming self-sufficient in Canada. I put up a note on facebook in search of fellow Canadians to do this, and Room for More was born. With some friends, a group name, and a promise to raise sufficient funds ($12,600 CAD for one refugee, $32,600 CAD for a family of six), any Canadian can fill out a simple two-page form and mail it to Winnipeg. The process was swift: we received logistical support and guidance from Humanity First, we were matched with a widow with five children, and we’ve been told they’ll arrive by the end of the year. They will be granted Permanent Resident status on arrival and will be eligible for Canadian citizenship four years later.

We wondered from the start if we were doing the right thing. Would attention to Syria worsen prospects for refugees elsewhere? We agreed that there was political significance to working with Syrians at that point: Canada was on the brink of an election in which the Syrian crisis was a major issue. The Liberals swept to power on a promise to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2015. We’ve since discovered that the attention to the plight of refugees in Syria has not been at the expense of refugees elsewhere: a contact at UNCHR told me there has been a surge of support for refugees for all regions since the Syrian story really hit the news.

Another question was harder: why spend that much money on one family settling in Canada, when it could provide subsistence to many families more overseas? Was our impulse to host refugees problematically sentimental? Worrying about this, I found real food for thought in Amia Srinivasan’s sharp review essay on William MacAskill’s book on Effective Altruism.

Effective altruism provides a formula for calculating the good that you’ll do: in its most basic form, by multiplying years of life saved by an index for quality of life (with some thought to counterfactuals concerning roads not taken). As an educated first-world millennial, if you’d save more lives by being a hedge fund manager donating large amounts of money to charity than by working at a Haitian orphanage, get that suit on. Efficiency is key, and frankly, pursuing a private sponsorship looks questionable on this metric. It’s not just a question of the number of bags of lentils we might have purchased overseas with our $32,600 CAD. There’s also a question about our time. Our whole team spent the last two weeks looking for housing, in search of a landlord willing to rent an affordable apartment to a family of six with no credit history. One day last week, as I stood in the windowless office of a building supervisor who insisted on telling me her own (very sad!) life story for an hour before explaining that the building owner would never go for this, I actually thought to myself: this is not very efficient.

Srinivasan observes that the effective altruism framework makes it easy to take for granted the perspective of the benevolent capitalist in a world of global inequality: the hedge fund manager can see that it will save more lives to buy lentils there than truffles here, without changing anything about the system of who has the power to do what. Invest in sweatshop labour in one country, give the profits to cure malaria in another: lives saved, and a plus in your moral ledger. In principle, the effective altruist could attempt to build algorithms that would take into account factors like freedom and self-determination, but it’s a messy philosophical problem how that would work, unsolved by any formulation of Effective Altruism we’ve seen so far. Would it be best for talented millennials to devote themselves to overthrowing the system of hedge fund managers? Srinivasan argues that here the philosophical power of Effective Altruism starts looking dubious: “It’s hard enough to quantify the value of a philanthropic intervention: how would we go about quantifying the consequences of radically reorganising society?” Not only is it hard to calculate in advance how much our radical actions can be expected to contribute to our goal, it’s hard to calculate exactly what the goal should be when we are so far away from it. Some of my nearest and dearest would say this whole utilitarian business misunderstands the nature of our duties of benevolence.

In any event, Canadian expenditures on private sponsorship are not just transfers of excess wealth to those in need, taking lentils out of one bowl to put in another. What is being shared, if that is the right word, is something deeper, and the sharing flows both ways between the newcomer and the host country. Many countries that accept refugees bring them in on temporary resident permits. By offering them a short path to citizenship, Canada asks newcomers to shape the course of our nation. It is striking how many of our newly elected Members of Parliament were themselves refugees, including my own MP Arif Virani, who came over from Uganda as a child, and Maryam Monsef, who came from Afghanistan at 10. As Cabinet Minister of Democratic Institutions — and any refugee from Afghanistan knows a thing or two about the value of Democratic Institutions — Monsef serves on the committee planning the implementation of the promise to bring over 25,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end. Canada’s new Minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship John McCallum remarked on this turn of events: “She is a minister who is actually a refugee herself,” McCallum said. “We talked about the fact that 20 years from now we may have one of the Syrian refugees sitting around the cabinet table.”

I’m not thinking that I’ll bring in this family so that they will serve some ideal of the good that I have figured out already, executing some algorithm I have programmed in my spreadsheet. Respecting their dignity, it’s not up to me what they will say, or how they will shape our country, whether they serve in Parliament, become mining company presidents, child care workers, or human rights advocates. They could also go back to rebuild Syria: globally, some of the strongest reformers are people who have spent time living outside their countries of origin. Given a few years of relative safety in Canada, what they do is up to them, and it’s up to them how, if at all, they will reorganize our world.

It remains hard to answer the question of what one ought to do. But in a context where many forces are fanning the flames of sectarian conflict, we in Canada have the chance to fight injustice by helping some of its most deeply affected victims. It is possible that the only way to stop Canadians from being insufferably self-righteous about this is for lots of other countries to follow suit, not only granting temporary asylum but enabling their own citizens to make the decision to share their citizenship with others.

Incidentally, we did end up finding an apartment for the family, and that story that the building supervisor told me about her life was unforgettable.


Serena Parekh — Challenging the Terms of the Debate

There has been something of a moral hysteria on the right in recent days when it comes to resettling Syrian refugees in the United States. According to Paul Ryan, “common sense” requires that we at least slow the process of resettlement, while for Donald Trump it requires that we monitor mosques and keep a database for Muslims in America. This fear is based on the now largely discredited idea that one of the terrorists involved in the attacks on Paris entered the country as a Syrian refugee. There are many sensible things that have been said against this point of view. Many have pointed out that pragmatically speaking, halting refugee resettlement is not likely to make us safer since entering the US as a refugee is one of the hardest ways to gain access to US territory and a would-be terrorist can enter much more easily in any number of other ways. Others have pointed out the moral problem with rejecting Syrians fleeing war on the grounds of security and distrust of their religion. The very same language being used by the right to reject Syrian refugees was used in the 1930s and 1940s to reject Jews fleeing Hitler’s Europe.

In the midst of this, we should not forget that the structure of the debate itself has already been settled on conservative terms. We are debating whether or not a mere 10,000 refugees from Syria should be resettled in the US over the next two years. This proposal in itself ought to be viewed as a morally insufficient response to the over 4 million people that have fled Syria as a result of war. The US has agreed to resettle far fewer refugees than countries with smaller populations (such as Canada), countries with less robust economies (such as Germany), and countries with more cultural homogeneity (such as Sweden). If capacity to aid can ground a responsibility to help those in urgent need, as philosophers often claim, the US ought to be doing a lot more. While taking in more refugees will not “solve” the refugee crisis nor end the civil war raging in Syria, it is nonetheless the morally right course of action. Given that the US has the capacity to take in a far larger share of refugees, we ought to challenge the very terms of the debate and question why the US is not even considering resettling far more than the 10,000 refugees President Obama has proposed.

We can challenge our states’ response to refugees in other ways as well. For example, since only a fraction of refugees are ever resettled in Western states (globally, only about 1% of refugees are ever resettled), we ought to pay more attention to the circumstances in which the vast majority of refugees live out their lives. The majority of Syrian refugees remain in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, living in informal settlements or camps run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The UNHCR has been so underfunded in recent months that Syrian refugees have chosen to return to the chaos of the civil war in Syria rather than remain in refugee camps in Jordan that lack adequate food, shelter or security. Since the US is the single largest donor to the UNHCR this failure is, to some extent, a failure of the US and other Western countries. In addition to insisting on the moral importance of a more robust resettlement program, we ought to be clear that morality requires that we fully fund aid to refugees abroad. If we want to improve the lives of the millions of refugees around the world, at least in the short term, we ought to encourage our states to see refugees living in camps and settlements around the world as our responsibility.

The question is not whether Syrian refugees are potential terrorists or not. The question is whether or not we are doing what morality demands that we do for refugees.


Discussion welcome.

(image: modified detail of photo by Bulent Kilic / AFP / Getty Images)

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Matt
8 years ago

Lots of interesting stuff here, not all of which I have had time to think about carefully, but I wanted to briefly reply to something that Chandran Kukathas said. He claims, Yet according to international law, almost none of the people leaving Syria are refugees.

Even if we stick closely to the UN Refugee convention definition (as I have argued we should), this isn’t so clear, and should not just be assumed. If people are fleeing because they are supporters of anti-Assad groups, and are targeted by government forces(even as a group) because of this, they are being persecuted because of political opinion, and are quite plausibly convention refugees. Similarly, if they are fleeing ISIS, a group that would plausibly persecute many of them (even Muslims) for their religious beliefs if they did not conform to ISIS’s extreme dictates, then they are quite plausibly convention refugees. Other examples are possible. This already covers a significant percentage of those fleeing. How big of a percentage? I don’t know, but I am sure it is a large enough percentage that the claim that “almost none” of those fleeing are refugees under international law is not accurate. Now, governments often want to impose artificially narrow readings on the refugee convention, or act like the fear of persecution must be highly individualized, but that’s not part of the convention and not a morally defensible position. Given the seriousness of this situation, it’s important to not make the refugee convention seem more narrow than it actually is.

Secondly, even for those who do not fit under the refugee convention, there are often more limited types of protection that are appropriate and often enshrined in various national laws. (In the U.S. this would include Temporary Protected Status.) This type of protection is often not sufficient and not generous enough, but can provide a legal basis for a claim of protection. This type of temporary protection is often the appropriate sort to apply to people fleeing war zones who would not otherwise qualify as refugees.

Max_Cherem
Max_Cherem
Reply to  Matt
8 years ago

Hi Matt. I would like to strongly ‘second’ your points here regarding the sufficiency of the current refugee definition and the tendency in the political philosophy literature to overlook complementary protection statuses. Given that law is a blunt instrument, I think that the Refugee Convention definition of a refugee is about as good as we are going to get. If one thinks that refugees suffer a unique harm meriting its own legal status and remedies then, as long as it is interpreted and applied in the right way, the definition is a fairly good one. In my view, the real problems do not lie with the definition itself but rather with (a.) the implementation mechanisms for adjudicating claims and securing protection and (b.) the state of global institutional structures that are supposed to be coordinating the response of the international community to refugees. For those reading this post interested in complementary protection, see Jane McAdam’s “Complementary Protection in International Refugee Law” (Oxford, 2007). For those interested in the question of when and how socio-economic persecution grounds a valid refugee claim, see Michelle Foster’s “International Refugee Law and Socio-Economic Rights: refuge from deprivation” (2009, Cambridge). For those interested in the inconsistent state of asylum adjudication mechanisms for refugees who arrive on their own in the US, see “Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication” by Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Andrew Schoenholtz, and Peter Schrag (NYU, 2009).

Matt
Reply to  Max_Cherem
8 years ago

Thanks, Max. Let me second McAdam’s book on Complementary Protection, and also strongly recommend her book _Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law_ for anyone who is interested in climate-change related migration. It’s not a “philosophical” book, but is excellent for summing up the best opinions on likely movement related to climate change and showing how this fits (or doesn’t) into existing legal structures.

JCM
JCM
8 years ago

There’s lots to like about this, and I extend my gratitude to all, but I want to make some criticisms.

1. Most obviously, the demographic make-up is appalling. This is primarily a Syrian, and then Middle-Eastern, and then European crisis – the wider world is very much in the background here. It has strong obligations to help, of course, but it doesn’t really have expertise here. Why, then, is the contributor closest to the issue in London? Where are the Syrian, Turkish, German, philosophers?

Of course, we all know the answer: Analytic philosophers only really know other Analytic philosophers, and Justin is already doing a superb job in getting these symposia together: he is neither paid nor expected to work out what philosophy in Syria looks like and how he can get philosophers from there to contribute to a forum like this. This forum might be great just by being somewhere those more in the know than us might speak to us. So I criticise the demographic narrowness without ‘blaming’ Justin’s sterling work; but the criticism stands. It is ridiculous that we should consider a bunch of U.S. white philosophy professors’ opinions on the Syrian crisis sufficient for a symposia on it.

2. And this manifests in what is said. There is very little to disagree with in what any of the contributors finely say. But there is an academic pedestrianness about all of them, a lack of outrage, a lack of the deep criticisms that allow us to reach shocking heights of brutal clarity, or which spur us to action. I expect that such profundity cannot reasonably be expected from philosophers working tens of thousands of miles from the crisis, in a radically different culture; so this is reason to strive to hear from those in Syria, Turkey, Germany, etc.

(I make (2) tentatively – is this rage any part of philosophy? I suspect so, but can’t say why. However, it should no doubt be part of any discussion of the Syrian crisis.)

Jennifer Nagel
Reply to  JCM
8 years ago

Hi JCM, and thanks for engaging! I agree that it would be terrific to hear more from philosophers in Europe and the Middle East here at Daily Nous, too — by all means be the change you want to see and reach out to them, ask them to comment, coordinate with Justin to have a fresh group blog featuring these voices (I have every confidence he’d be willing to do this). One small point: not all philosophers in the group were from the US. I’m from Canada, and I’m harping on this because we are responding differently. If the USA were to be as open as Canada, proportional to their population, they’d be taking 220,000 refugees from Syria in the next fourth months, supporting them through a blend of public and private programs, and granting them green cards on arrival. I think the Private Sponsorship of Refugees program would in fact be a great fit for American culture: it brings together ordinary citizens, often from community or faith-based groups, to take the initiative to make a change. The PSR also means that newcomers are relatively well-settled, with a group of locals looking out for them and doing the labour-intensive work of getting them connected to schools, services, housing, health care and employment in their new communities. Canadians who sponsor refugees through the PSR program are freely choosing to spend some disposable income on the project. We also have a government that is willing to make direct expenditures, estimated at $6/Canadian per year over the next six years. Rage matters in many ways, I agree, but there is also something to be said for having some voices like mine raising policy alternatives like this. Sunny ways, we call it north of the border. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/ns-prof-trudeau-sunny-ways-1.3280693)

JCM
JCM
Reply to  Jennifer Nagel
8 years ago

Hi Jennifer, thanks for responding. I didn’t at all mean what my comment as a criticism of the posts that were there; in fact, I enjoyed your contribution very much, and am very pleasantly surprised by how generous (or minimally decent, as would perhaps Serena Parekh would argue) Canada and its denizens are being. My point was rather that sunny ways (I hope I’m using this new phrase right!) and academic measuredness are not *all* that such a symposium as this should comprise, but that it *is* all that this symposium contains.

Your suggestion that I put my money where my mouth is is humbly accepted. Let me here explicitly offer my help to Justin if he wants to do a follow-up symposium that includes voices from closer to the conflict; though my resources are meagre.

JCM
JCM
Reply to  Justin Weinberg
8 years ago

Hi Justin,

Yes, I’m not sure that ‘rage’ captures what I missed in the contributions. I was going to correct my comment, but even on reflection it’s not clear how to articulate what I think is lacking. I somehow want to connect it to the debate in emotion theory and aesthetics on how emotions can be epistemically productive (note: ‘productive,’ not ‘tolerable’), or the debate in standpoint theory about how being on the sharp end of injustice and disrespect can make one particularly aware of the existence and nature of it. ‘Gut reaction’ is absolutely not what I was wanting when I said I wanted more rage. In any case, though, it’s not clear that ‘putting aside the emotional heat’ of an issue is always virtuous, or even always philosophically virtuous; and it’s not even clear how to characterise the virtue that undoubtedly is in the vicinity of putting aside the emotional heat of an issue.

This point has ended up getting a bit technical and metaphilosophical, and perhaps there’s nothing more that can be said about it in the present context, but I want to perhaps close by claiming that if what we say here is one of those seemingly academic debates, then it’s one of immediate relevance to how we (not just philosophers) reason and argue.

grad student
grad student
8 years ago

I think it is worth pointing out that what governments of most countries are doing – using violent force, detention, deportation, barb wire walls, armed border patrols – can under no reasonable philosophy of action count as omission, as “not helping”. It must be seen for what it is: a violent and active intervention in the movement of persons, requiring organisation, resources and a protocol for sorting out people based on origin.

This is bad in the standard case, which is why the Berlin Wall was morally unsound. But in the case of people fleeing from war and trauma, it is not just morally unsound but amounts to complicity in the persecution of these people, and moral culpability for what happens to them.

Thom Brooks
8 years ago

Don’t know if my column last week might be of interest — http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/news-opinion/wont-easy-ways-can-fight-10470824
Have done a few dozen tv interviews on crisis much if which is in you tube, etc.

Philippe Lemoine
Philippe Lemoine
8 years ago

This fear is based on the now largely discredited idea that one of the terrorists involved in the attacks on Paris entered the country as a Syrian refugee.

There is a lot going on in those contributions, but I don’t have time to comment extensively, so I just want to make a factual correction here. Despite what Prof. Parekh writes, not only is the idea that one of the terrorists involved in the attacks in Paris entered Europe as a Syrian refugee not discredited, but in fact the French government has confirmed that at least 2 of them entered the continent in that way. It is true that, while a Syrian passport was found near the corpse of one of the terrorists at the Stade de France, there is evidence which suggests that it was probably false. But despite what many people have suggested, particularly in the US, it doesn’t follow that he didn’t enter Europe as a Syrian refugee. In fact, it has been known for quite some time that he did, for his finger prints were matched with those of a man who was registered as a refugee on the island of Leros in Greece a few weeks ago. More recently, it was confirmed in the same way that another man, who also blew himself up at the Stade de France, was registered as a refugee in Leros around the same time. What is true is that, at this point, the identity of both of those men is still unknown. So it’s possible that, despite having entered Europe as Syrian refugees, they were not in fact Syrian. What makes absolutely no doubt, however, is that both of them entered Europe as Syrian refugees. I wanted to make that correction because, although this has been known for quite some time now, I still see people making that kind of claims.

John
8 years ago

I’m surprised that one of the most important factors to the debate, the fear of radical Islamic terrorism, was hardly mentioned in any of the responses. I’m even more surprised because this article touts itself as a more thoughtful consideration of the messy public discourse. But then again the John Oliver quote is not especially a neutral way to begin a balanced, “philosophical” approach to the issue.

Omitting national security concerns and terrorism slants the debate in favor of those who argue for an increase in the acceptance of the refugees, since if we assume from the start there is no legitimate fear, then there is little reason to oppose accepting refugees, aside from the motives of selfishness, xenophobia, or “cultural purity.” But the position that there is no legitimate fear of terrorists infiltrating the influx of refugees requires argument. We might be morally obligated to help refugees, but it’s a harder to defend the position that we have a moral obligation to accept refugees (even thousands more) from a region with many many people at war with the US that uses a particularly barbaric form of terrorism involving the wonton murder of civilians. Analogously, it’s easier to argue that I have a moral obligation to accept hungry travelers into my home, but it’s harder to argue that I have this duty even if there is some reason to believe that my child could be murdered. And even this analogy doesn’t capture the moral dimension of the situation, since politicians and many others are making decisions that will most likely have little cost to their own personal situation, but potentially devastating cost on other fellow citizens.

Max_Cherem
Max_Cherem
8 years ago

Hi John. I chose not to speak about the fear-of-terrorism dimension of current public discussions for two main reasons. First, we were asked to respond to a prompt about refugees that, while occasioned by the Syrian refugee crisis, was not necessarily supposed to be limited to Syrian refugees (in that respect, the title of this post is misleading). While the US public imagination seems to have affixed this fear to refugees from Syria, there is very little reason to think this fear alone either is or should be among the most important dimensions of refugee policy discussions more generally. Second, at least in the context of the US, the inordinate amount of attention these fears have been getting in the media appears to be a classic example of dog-whistle politics.

It genuinely puzzles me that people seem to think that a terrorist would masquerade as a refugee just in order to enter the US. The process of refugee resettlement from camps is one of the slowest possible routes to use to gain entry, and would include many chances of getting caught. The process will likely take many, many years of uncertainty… and even then one may never be resettled. If one is resettled, then it isn’t even always clear until quite late in the process which country you will find yourself resettled in. Moreover, there are several layers of repeated, formalized interviews. Such interviews are conducted by officials who are trained to spot inconsistencies in stories, probe for radicalization, and delve into one’s past.

In light of all that, why not simply come through either human smugglers or normal immigration channels? Why not get a business, tourist, or student visa at a consulate abroad? Indeed, compared to getting resettled from a camp, it would likely be quicker to get an abbreviated technical degree and come through a points-based immigration system for skilled workers. Here’s the thing about all those (very sensible) ways of getting to the US: we are no longer talking about refugee policy.

Naturally, all this only applies to the contemporary US. I can imagine someone arguing that Europe might be in a different situation—especially because two of the Paris attackers may have entered the EU in the mass influx and filled out refugee paperwork along the way. Yet, it is worth remembering just how out of the ordinary such a large-scale mass influx scenario of the past few months has been. Instead of interpreting these terrorists’ travel route as some sort of evidence that we need to be worried about terrorists masquerading as refugees, we might see the same event as evidence that we need to be worried about (a.) the unilateral and uncoordinated actions of various European states, or (b.) the fact that the EU had no coherent, actionable plan to deal with a mass influx scenario… despite the fact that every policymaker who had been watching the Syrian civil war and increasing migrant deaths in the Mediterranean (http://www.borderdeaths.org/) had seen it coming for years.

So, for me, the reason why I chose not to talk about this fear is that I think it has already gotten way more attention than it deserves… and that the real issues concerning refugees that merit serious thought and attention lie elsewhere.

Also Named Max
Also Named Max
Reply to  Max_Cherem
8 years ago

“It genuinely puzzles me that people seem to think that a terrorist would masquerade as a refugee just in order to enter the US. … In light of all that, why not simply come through either human smugglers or normal immigration channels? Why not get a business, tourist, or student visa at a consulate abroad?”

It seems as though you are making a basic assumption that terrorists are rational actors. It seems to me that they are more likely opportunistic actors. Thus, it is likely that terrorists or potential terrorists would use the crisis opportunistically to migrate as refugees.

— In terms of structural issues with this: How can we better screen migrants? From what I understand many migrants/refugees have almost no documentation of their past. How can we verify why they say? If we cannot, how can we be sure they have not heard from others what to say; i.e. how can we be sure they were not told, ‘tell them you were tortured because you are Christian’, or something similar?

Matt
Reply to  Also Named Max
8 years ago

“It seems as though you are making a basic assumption that terrorists are rational actors. It seems to me that they are more likely opportunistic actors. Thus, it is likely that terrorists or potential terrorists would use the crisis opportunistically to migrate as refugees.”

The problem here, though, is that it takes a really long time, and is pretty difficult, to be re-settled in the US as a refugee (from anywhere, let alone from a situation like this, where there are reasons to be extra careful.) If we are thinking about the U.S., then (as Max Cherem was, in the post you’re responding to), then the “opportunistic” actors are pretty unlikely to take this path, as opposed to others. The situation is arguably different in Europe, but then, that’s not was Max was talking about, and even there it’s not clear that coming as a refugee is the best path.

Screening of refugees is sometimes hard and sometimes not. (A fair number do have good documents!) Often, those who cannot collaborate their stories are out of luck. It’s not a full-proof system, of course. Nothing could be. There’s very little reason to think that the US is currently doing an inadequate job of screening. (If anything, it’s probably too strict.) Unless you think we only have duties to others when it implies no or essentially no risk to ourselves, then it seems implausible to me that even stricter standards than are used in the US now are plausible. I don’t think that the claim that we only have duties to others in situations that impose such minimal risk to ourselves is at all defensible.

Max_Cherem
Max_Cherem
Reply to  Also Named Max
8 years ago

I agree with what Matt has had to say here. Especially in the context of the US, only a really deeply dull terrorist would try to gain entry by pretending to be a refugee and hoping to get resettled from a camp. With enemies like those, who needs friends! As I said, the smartest bet would be to simply use normal immigration channels. That observation may have consequences for normal immigration policy… but we are specifically concerned with refugees and refugee policy in this post. I think that, in part, the US public conversation on these issues is stunted and confused due to the media consistently conflating immigrants and refugees with the catchall term of “migrants”.

I also think part of the difficulty here is that sometimes people assume rationality is an all-or-nothing affair. But, I think it is pretty clear that there are many examples of people who may have irrational beliefs or goals but who still retain the basic rationality of prudential calculus (means-end reasoning). For my point to apply in the context of the US that is the minimal sense of rationality I assume a terrorist has… it is the same type of rationality every normal human adult has.

As for your concerns regarding screening: I would simply emphasize that, in the case of refugees resettled form camps, the interviews are very comprehensive, take place over a long period of time, and are repeated on many occasions. There are a lot of ways that interviewers can sniff out if someone is fabricating a story. A lot of it has to do with detail-oriented questions about components of their narrative. For instance, if someone claims to be a particular faith, they would be asked fairly detailed questions about the theology and belief structure, religious leadership hierarchy, where they attended services, who the other attendees were, how they first came to this faith, the ways in which their particular sect differs from others, the specific ways in which they felt they were persecuted due to their faith, how their persecutors found out about their faith (if they were keeping it secret out of fear), and so on. If they claim to be part of a certain political group, they would be asked much the same detail-oriented questions.

Here is the thing about such repeated and detail-oriented questioning: it is incredibly hard to fabricate and rehearse a convincing narrative that anticipates all the questions that you might be asked by multiple interviewers. Chances are, you’ll get tripped up at one point or another… inconsistencies and gaps will start to creep in. Is it logically possible that someone could “game” such an interview? Sure. Is it probable? Not so much… particularly if the screening is being carried out as it should.

anon
anon
8 years ago

I would like to see more diversity in the “Philosophers on…” series. Why is it that academia prizes ethnic and gender diversity so highly but not diversity of ideas? (e.g. Why not look to hire minority positions like reductive materialists, dualists, Thomists, nihilists, etc.) I know that the majority of philosophers–at least in my experience–support taking in refugees (I even find myself inclined toward this view), but it can’t be that hard to find e.g. a libertarian who doesn’t think America ought to meddle in foreign affairs, and it would be valuable to see their reasoning made explicit. Please make these more diverse opinion-wise (I don’t care about ethnicity or gender) in the future. They would be far more valuable.

the Onion Man
the Onion Man
Reply to  anon
8 years ago

“Why is it that academia prizes ethnic and gender diversity so highly but not diversity of ideas?”

I think we all know the answer to that.

JCM
JCM
Reply to  anon
8 years ago

Hi anon, I don’t know if your response is in part a response to my call for greater diversity, but let me treat it as such. (a) Ideological diversity is of course extremely valuable, just as you say, and I don’t mean to deny that in the least. An isolationist’s point of view would be very interesting in this symposium. (b) Standpoint epistemologists have worked for decades on why demographic diversity is important. I won’t list the myriad ways now, but one relevant reason is that it’s a good proxy of ideological diversity and a good way of ensuring ideological diversity, so much so that if there is extreme demographic homogeneity, then full ideological diversity is all but impossible.

the Onion Man
the Onion Man
8 years ago

Let’s see: a laundry list of left-liberal talking points, jabs at Republicans, vague calls for social justice… where is the “philosophy”?

Notably absent: any discussion of what a national border is or ought to be, any discussion of the interplay between ethnicity and statehood or the consequences of mass immigration…

If this is how Philosophy is supposed to stay relevant we may as well start boarding up the departments now. But hey I guess at least you might be able to get a gig consulting for the DNC?

John Protevi
8 years ago

OnionMan: what articles would you recommend on “what a national border is or ought to be, … the interplay between ethnicity and statehood or the consequences of mass immigration”?

the Onion Man
the Onion Man
Reply to  John Protevi
8 years ago

I don’t know if there are any, my point is that Justin asked a bunch of philosophers to comment on the refugee situation and, with the quasi-exception of Kukathas, none of them brought conceptual resources to the question beyond what you might find at the Huffington Post or Talking Points Memo. To me, this indicates a major problem with the way “philosophy” is being deployed, both as a rhetorical category on its own and in terms of the discipline’s relationship to questions of public policy.

Undergrad
Undergrad
8 years ago

Philosophers Chris Bertram (Bristol) and Sarah Fine (KCL) on the refugee crisis and the Paris attacks:

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/11/20/should-the-atrocities-in-paris-affect-our-response-to-the-refugee-crisis/

Sofia
8 years ago

Hi everyone. Just weighing in: not to give a philosophical opinion, but an invitation to action in two ways. First, I have tried to assemble helpful refugee resettlement resources on my website, https://sofiaortiz.mit.edu/help-refugees-factsheet , and will be updating it in the weeks to come. Secondly, another philosophy grad student and I are organizing a group call-in to our state and federal representatives to express support for refugees and opposition to restrictive anti-asylum bills. We would like to invite you to join in at home or start your own group event that mirrors ours. Here is the link to the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/469679833211679/

Chandran Kukathas
Chandran Kukathas
8 years ago

According to World Vision 12 million Syrians have been rendered homeless by the civil war.
It says there are three reasons why Syrians are fleeing:
“1. Violence: Since the Syrian civil war began, more than 240,000 people have been killed, including 12,000 children. One million more have been wounded or permanently disabled. The war has become more deadly since foreign powers joined the conflict.
2. Collapsed infrastructure: Within Syria, healthcare, education systems, and other infrastructure have been destroyed; the economy is shattered. An estimated 4.8 million people are in areas of Syria that are difficult to access because of the conflict. It’s hard for aid groups to reach them.
3. Children’s safety: Syrian children — the nation’s hope for a better future — have lost loved ones, suffered injuries, missed years of schooling, and witnessed violence and brutality. Warring parties forcibly recruit children to serve as fighters, human shields, and in support roles, according to the U.S. State Department.”
None of these reasons have to do with persecution or the activities of ISIS, which is one among a number of warring parties. This means that under the terms of the UN Convention almost none of those fleeing are refugees.
Matt is quite correct to point out that there are other weaker forms of legal protection. These do not describe those seeking protection as refugees.
– See more at: http://www.worldvision.org/news-stories-videos/syria-war-refugee-crisis#sthash.IshmYKnu.dpuf

Thom Brooks
8 years ago

Chandran – to be a refugee, one need not only be a victim of persecution by Isis. If there is a well founded fear of persecution subject to certain factors, a person may be found to be a refugee. If “almost none” are refugees, this is not the view of the UK, Germany or most others — while noting that typically most applications for asylum are refused (certainly in the UK) and there are other forms of “humanitarian protected status” that people might qualify for instead. Certainly people I have spoken with who have just come back from the area did not find “almost none” appeared to qualify even if many did not.

Thom Brooks
8 years ago

See this from UNHCR on refugees and Syria:
http://tracks.unhcr.org/2015/11/once-a-refugee-now-a-helping-hand/

Max_Cherem
Max_Cherem
8 years ago

It was unclear to me what the quoted World Vision list was supposed to show in this context. And, I agree that the claim that “almost none of those fleeing [Syria] are refugees” is just false given interpretive precedents in Europe and the US. Perhaps the list was supposed to show that some persons seeking protection as refugees don’t technically qualify for that status. This is surely correct, but this is also precisely why complementary protection statuses exist. While they are weaker than refugee status, it is worth remembering that their scope is quite wide, that they do often secure extended or indefinite permission to stay, and that this is often far preferable to life in a refugee camp. I take it that the worry might also have been that some people don’t qualify for complementary protection statuses either. Here I’d say that much depends on what country we’re talking about, the complementary statuses that they have, how broadly or narrowly they tend to interpret and apply them, and so on.

But, even if there is a protection gap, little straightforwardly follows from simply noting it. Sure, it would need fixing… but the question is how, by which actors, and why? Pointing out a protection gap does not immediately tell us the proper part of international law and institutions to be used to fill that gap nor which actors are most strongly obliged and why. It certainly doesn’t follow, at least not without further argument, that we should redefine the legal category of a refugee to be broader so as to include those currently caught in such protection gaps through specifically the refugee framework rather than through some other legal framework (with this last point I’m simply responding to a widely held position, not necessarily the point behind the quoted list). Under current global institutional conditions, here would be my worry about simply redefining the very specific legal category of a refugee so as to include any and all those in desperate need throughout the world: it would very likely reinforce the “refugee warehousing” in camps dynamic I described above. I can imagine states accepting that the term “refugee” now means “everyone in desperate need”… but simultaneously increasing their use of extraterritorial border controls so as to prevent these people from leaving in the first place or to funnel them towards camps where they stay indefinitely. That actually seems worse than the status quo even though it would be premised on an “expanded” definition of a refugee. To my mind, the current definition is about as good as we’re going to get given the nature of international law and relations… and the real efforts that have a chance of making a difference deal with the nitty-gritty institutional entrenchment of that definition and its supplementation by other complementary protection statuses and even separate institutional innovations in national and international law.

Max_Cherem
Max_Cherem
8 years ago

Oh, and as a follow-up to my responses from above regarding the security worries others had in the comments… here is a useful “primer on refugee law”* from what I think of as a good national security blog: https://www.lawfareblog.com/primer-refugee-law.
It reaches the exact same conclusions as I and others do above: the “fear of terrorism” dimension to US public resistance to resettling Syrian refugees is, at best, overblown and not connected to institutional realities (at worst it is dog-whistle politics). This was follow-up today by an open bipartisan letter from about 20 US former national security officials (also available at the same blog): https://www.lawfareblog.com/letter-former-national-security-officials-refugees
*a terminology caveat: the first post deploys the US usage of the labels ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’. This difference itself is an important one but I prefer the labels ‘irregularly arriving person’ and either ‘camp refugee’ or ‘refugee awaiting resettlement’ as this avoids connotative confusion (the terms ‘refuge’ and ‘asylum seeker’ have slightly different connotations when used by UNHCR officials or in Europe) and I also think the US usage eliminates persons who are in a liminal legal space by definitional fiat (it neglects those neither on US soil nor in a camp / awaiting resettlement but who have left their country and who are trying to access either of those routes; taking note of such people is important if you think refugee law (in either national or international manifestations) applies in extraterritorial encounters between state authorities and potential refugees.

carol
carol
7 years ago

I feel that the United States definitely has a moral obligation to accept Syrian refugees.