Large numbers of people are once again fleeing violence for Europe and the US, and failure to stem the tide is driving up support for the populist right wing on both sides of the Atlantic. Germany last week put checks on its some of its borders, Italy called for a naval blockade of the Mediterranean and a Britist Cabinet minister said the international treaty that assures refugees protection was no longer fit for purpose. Illegal immigration, said British Home Secretary Suella Braverman, has become “an existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West.”
Braverman’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington was unserious, based on fake facts and dog whistling, which is a shame because she was right that irregular migration is reaching a crisis point. Yet the first step in dealing with it is to acknowledge what is actually happening. The big fact ignored on the liberal side of this debate is the scale of the economic and political challenge that large, sudden influxes of refugees present, even for rich countries. This is an identity issue, stirring fears in many US citizens and Europeans that they are under threat, and moral finger wagging is not going to make that angst go away.
The current failure to deal with it honestly is politically dangerous. Both the victory of Robert Fico — a pro-Russia, anti-immigration, EU-skeptic former prime minster — in Slovakia’s elections at the weekend, and the decision by Republicans in the US House of Representatives to condition further security aid for Ukraine on a border control bill show the potency of the issue. Elon Musk weighed in too, with a false comparison of US and Ukrainian border issues, in a post to his 158 million followers on X.
On the other side lies denial that Europe in particular needs migrants to supplement a declining workforce and that refugees have to go somewhere, and wealthy nations are not exempt. Amid all the noise last week, Greece said it would consider normalizing the status of 300,000 irregular migrants so they can work legally, because it could not otherwise fill jobs in construction, farming and tourism.
Ever since Syria’s Arab Spring revolt quickly turned into a civil war in 2011, the number of people displaced by violence and persecution around the globe has been booming. By now it has more than doubled to 108.4 million, according to the UN agency that registers them, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Most — 62.5 million — remain in their countries of origin, often relying on international aid to survive. Another 35.3 million are refugees who fled, and of those 70 percent stayed in the first country they came to after crossing the border.
That is why Turkey, a neighbor of Syria, hosts more registered refugees and asylum seekers than any other country, at a little less than 4 million. Iran, a neighbor of Afghanistan, hosts 3.4 million. Columbia, next to Venezuela, has about 2.5 million. All of these are low or middle-income economies.
The number of refugees traveling farther to reach wealthier countries is much smaller, at about 10 percent of those displaced, but they are unevenly distributed — Germany has a lot more in per capita and absolute terms than the UK and France. According to an annual forecast by the Danish Refugee Council, there would be a further 5.4 million forcibly displaced humans on the planet by the end of next year, so in excess of 113 million in total, with about 11 million of them relocated to more distant, richer nations.
And that is just forced displacement. Worldwide, there are 184 million migrants, most of whom left their homes by choice, according to the World Bank’s development report this year. Given the current global trends, that growth is set to continue. These are big numbers, but not big enough for Braverman. She warned there are 780 million potential refugees to worry about, a nonsense figure that exaggerates by a factor of about 70 the scale of the threat to the UK and Europe. She did so to create the level of fear needed to support her proposal to put revision of the 1951 Refugee Convention on the table, in full knowledge that short of recreating the circumstances that followed World War II, nothing meaningful that guarantees rights for refugees could be agreed on today.
What made Braverman’s intervention more ugly was that she has failed to do what is in her power. The government itself describes the UK’s asylum system as “broken.’’ It takes an average of 21 months to process a claim in the UK, compared with about six months in France or Germany, at a cost of ￡3 billion (US$3.63 billion) a year. Rather than fix the process, the UK is doubling down on a policy of legislative deterrence that has not worked and is likely to fail again. A new illegal immigration act would mandate the automatic deportation of people who enter the UK without permission — except there is nowhere to deport them, so they would have to be detained and supported, without the right to work.
As of Tuesday last week, 24,208 migrants landed on UK soil in small boats this year, government data showed. The UK has detention capacity for 2,000, most of which is occupied, said Peter Walsh, senior researcher at Oxford University’s Migration Observatory. A deal to send some people to Rwanda is stuck in the courts. So the refugees would have to be supported in hotels on the state’s dime. Meanwhile, staff shortages last year at the nation’s care homes reached 165,000, which could be relieved. These dead-end policies are what former US president Barack Obama used to call “stupid stuff.’’At the same time, the British government has cut international aid, some of which enables displaced people stay where they are.
The UK is by no means alone in this. The Danish Refugee Council said that in the 26 countries it studies (because these produce 92 percent of all refugees), the amount of global overseas aid per refugee decreased by two-thirds between 2012 and 2021. Within that, funding for peace-building projects fell in 16 of the 26 countries. And yes, the report sees a correlation between lack of aid and the creation of new refugees. So you can build a real or legal wall or establish a naval blockade. All will come at significant human and financial cost and will, if successful, drive migrants to your neighbors or back to countries that are less able to afford it and already carrying far higher refugee burdens. That would add further strain to the regions producing refugees in the first place.
There is no silver bullet here, but a good place to start would be to manage the process more efficiently so refugees are quickly assimilated to the workforce, generating the taxes needed to build the schools and healthcare needed to accommodate them. Failed applicants can be sent home more quickly, reducing costs and numbers. Second is to reduce arrival numbers by focusing money and diplomacy on enabling refugees to stay close to their homes, or even better, return. That means stepping up with targeted aid, including for climate change mitigation.
More than a decade after the war in Syria began there are still 6.5 million Syrian refugees living abroad, and they remain among the top groups looking for asylum in Europe. The UN rapporteur, the European Parliament and China have all called for lifting international sanctions to enable reconstruction. That decision is morally fraught, given the nature of Syria’s government, but the goal of sending refugees home is not. There are similar numbers of Ukrainian refugees, this time mostly in Europe. They have a special temporary status and many already returned home, as the risk to life away from the front lines has receded, though not disappeared. Ukraine’s economy needs these people back. They should not be forced, but it might be time to talk to Kyiv about how to encourage refugees home in a managed process that makes them both safe and productive.
As the World Bank says in its report, migration is “necessary,’’ both on the supply and the demand side. It cannot be stopped, only diverted or managed to the benefit of both host countries and the migrants themselves. Good management can go a long way to assuaging the fears of host populations, and the World Bank has a list of recommendations, most as obvious as they are politically difficult.
Braverman should apply her reformist zeal when heads of state and nonprofits gather for the UNHCR Global Refugee Forum in December. How to “ease pressures’’ would be at the top of the agenda. Because yes, this is existential, if not the way British home secretary meant it. So do the hard stuff.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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