Since the 1950s, Europe has tried to keep refugees outside its borders by funding large-scale refugee camps in Third World countries, countries that do not have the proper resources to help displaced persons. Despite the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ call for “durable solutions” for displaced people, the plan for most refugees is for them to wait in camps until they can return home, even when there is no foreseeable end to the wars or occupations that have displaced them. But while these camps offer politicians a convenient way to avoid making decisions about foreign wars and domestic immigration issues, the camps can only offer refugees a way of life that is permanently temporary.
Now think back to Europe, in 2017, right now is currently encountering the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees, including children, from Syria, Afghanistan, North Africa and Palestine, who are braving the seas in rickety boats, climbing barbed wired fences, and occupying abandoned train stations in their quest to resettle. It is being called a “crisis,” but the term crisis means the problem that will end. Thanks to more frequent and savage civil wars around the world, the global population of displaced people has more than tripled in the last ten years, from 20 million to more than 60 million, a population almost the size of the United Kingdom. Politicians may not want to admit it, but they are struggling with the central problem of twenty-first century global politics.
Refugee camps are designed for the short term: to meet an emergency need and then disappear. The temporary nature of camps shows up in their architecture. In Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, more than 83,000 people are housed in row after stark row of simple tents that offer little shelter from snow, subzero temperatures, or flooding, even though there are no plans for the refugees to return to Syria or resettle anywhere else. On Greece’s Lesbos island, 3 refugees have died after their summer refugee tents were covered by snow and the sub zero temperatures that came along with it.
Nobody—the United Nations, host states, or international aid agencies—wants camps to be permanent. But the purgatory of camp life lasts decades or even generations, as the politics of refugees’ home countries remains unstable. The average length of stay in a refugee camp is now more than twelve years. The Palestinians are entering their sixty-seventh year of displacement.
Another problem facing the crippling structure of refugee camps is the lack of service. Camps keep refugees alive, but they prevent them from living a proper life. Most camps lack schools, places of worship, and shops, such as a grocery store. Even when donors such as the United Nations create camps with more permanent infrastructure, most lack the amenities one would need to properly thrive.
The enormous rise in the number of the displaced means there are fewer and fewer options for containment. Today there roughly 20 million refugees and more than 38.5 million IDPs, all of whom could potentially cross an international border and begin moving toward the developed world. At the same time, the United States and the EU countries are more reluctant to finance the rapidly growing camps. By the end of 2014, only 25 percent of the UNHCR’s appeal for aid to Syrian refugees had been funded, and food, medicine, and energy were running out. The World Food Program, which gets its funding through the United Nations’ joint appeal process, dropped the budget for feeding Syrian refugees to a mere $13.50 per month. For many refugees, trying to get into Europe is not just about having a better life, it is about staying alive, having just enough for their families to live one more day.
There are 58 million more displaced people waiting for a permanent home. These numbers will continue to grow and if immobilizing them in permanently temporary spaces and segregating them from surrounding societies is failing to keep immigrants out of the developed world, how should the European Union respond to the oncoming wave of migrants? The only solution is to make permanence a human right and to help refugees create for themselves solutions that fully integrate them in their new societies early in their displacement.
The solution is not to fence them out or trap them in their home countries but to help them resettle in ways that benefit local economies and urban environments. Europe has an aging population, which is slowing economic growth and putting an enormous burden on social safety nets. An influx of young working people—computer repairmen, plumbers, architects and home health-care aides—could be an economic stimulus for Germany and Austria. Offering them flexible forms of aid, such as cash grants and housing vouchers, instead of isolating them in detention centers or other substitutes for the camp, will allow them to leverage the language skills, professional training, family ties, and financial resources they bring with them.
But those who choose to stay in camps—whether because they hope to eventually return home; remain close to relatives; or settle in a place with a language, religion, or culture more like their own—will need ongoing support from the West in order to integrate where they are instead of being forced to migrate.
The one thing that no country cannot do is wait for war to end and for refugees to return home. Most of the longstanding conflicts producing refugees are not amenable to quick political resolution, and the enormous destruction of war means there are often no homes to return to.
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