the economics of syrian refugees - linn–benton...
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The Economics of Syrian Refugees
By John Cassidy, NEW YORKER, November 19, 2015
Refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war, like the metalworker pictured here, who now resides in
Turkey, have not negatively affected the economies of their host countries. Credit Photograph by
Nish Nalbandian / Redux
In the wake of last Friday’s attacks on Paris, much has been written about Syrian refugees, and
the (remote) possibility that ISIS-affiliated jihadis might slip into the United States among the ten
thousand displaced people (many of them children) that the Obama Administration has
committed to taking in during the next year. In contrast with discussions about immigration
generally, there has been less comment about the economics of the issue. There are many
arguments in favor of settling refugees here—not least what President Obama, responding to the
announcement by some state governors that they would not accept Syrians fleeing their country’s
civil war, called “our values”—but from a financial perspective, too, there is little doubt that the
U.S. has the capacity to absorb many more Syrian refugees, and that the long-term impact of
such a policy would be positive.
Let’s start with an obvious point: With up to seven million Syrians having been displaced by the
civil war, many countries much smaller than the United States have already allowed in a lot more
than ten thousand refugees. Since 2012 the European Union has received about 1.9 million
requests for asylum, and even that number is dwarfed by the number of people who have sought
refuge in countries adjacent to Syria. According to the United Nations, Turkey has taken in an
estimated 2.2 million, Lebanon 1.1 million, and Jordan six hundred and thirty thousand.
Based purely upon these figures, you might think that the economies of these countries would be
sagging under the burden, but they aren’t. According to a new report from the Paris-based
Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the Turkish economy will expand
by three per cent this year and by four per cent next year. Lebanon’s economy is also growing, at
a rate of about two per cent this year, which will expand to more than three per cent next year,
the World Bank reckons. Despite an influx of refugees that now amounts to more than ten per
cent of its population, Jordan, too, is bearing up. Its gross domestic product will rise by about
three per cent this year, the International Monetary Fund says.
These figures make the point that, even in countries facing huge influxes of refugees, the impact
on the economy as a whole is usually not very large. The biggest challenges in accommodating
refugees are social and political, rather than economic. To be sure, there is a cost to screening,
housing, and feeding the entrants, but even in Turkey, which has received more Syrian refugees
than any other country, this cost has proved manageable. In a blog post in September,
Massimiliano Calì and Samia Sekkarie, two economists at the World Bank, noted, “The Turkish
government has spent nearly 5.37 billion euros since the refugees first began arriving, entirely
funded through its own fiscal resources. While this is undoubtedly a lot of money, there is no
indication that this spending has jeopardized the country’s fiscal sustainability.” If you think
about it, that’s not surprising. Turkey’s annual G.D.P. is about eight hundred billion dollars. At
about one and a half billion dollars a year, the cost of resettling the Syrian refugees has been less
than 0.2 per cent of the G.D.P.
In Lebanon, which is much smaller than Turkey, the cost of dealing with the refugee crisis has
been greater relative to the G.D.P., but much of it has been met using money provided by
international donors. Indeed, a recent study carried out under the auspices of the U.N. concluded
that the refugee-aid packages actually boosted Lebanon’s G.D.P. by more than one per cent. (At
the same time, though, the spillover from the carnage in Syria has hit tourism, one of Lebanon’s
biggest industries, hard. Overall, the U.N. study estimated, the crisis in Syria has lowered
Lebanon’s G.D.P. by about 0.3 per cent.)
Another concern that has been voiced frequently about refugees, especially in Europe over the
past few months, in response to the influx of refugees there, has been that refugees take jobs
from native workers and reduce wages. The evidence from the Syrian experience suggests that
this can happen, but that the effects aren’t very large. In many cases, refugees take jobs that
natives don’t want. They also set up businesses of their own and provide more customers for
domestic enterprises.
Since so many of the refugees in Lebanon and Jordan are in temporary camps, the most relevant
example for this pattern is Turkey. Earlier this year, the Center for Middle Eastern Strategic
Studies, in Ankara, published a detailed study of what impact Syrian refugees are having on
Turkey. The report did find that the influx is causing economic tensions in the south, where
many Syrians are working illegally in the informal economy. The cost of home rentals has
increased, making it harder to find affordable housing, and inflation has risen. “There is unfair
competition between businesses that hire illegal workers and companies that do not employ
illegal workers,” the report said. “Locals believe that job opportunities have been taken away
from them.” However, when the authors of the report investigated these claims, they found that
“Syrians are generally employed in areas that locals are not willing to work in. Thus, Syrians
meet the demand in unskilled labor.”
Not all the migrants are unskilled workers, however. Another study, by Soner Çağaptay, a fellow
at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, pointed out that many Syrian traders from
places like Aleppo, which has been devastated by the civil war, have moved their operations
across the border to cities in southern Turkey, boosting business there. In general, Çağaptay
wrote, “Turkish business, and the country’s trademark export market, has registered remarkable
success in dealing with the fallout of the Syrian crisis.”
If the United States were to take in more Syrian refugees, the numbers would be tiny compared
to what is happening in the Middle East and Europe. At the top end of the range, Hillary Clinton
and Martin O’Malley have called for sixty-five thousand migrants to be admitted over the next
five years. As O’Malley pointed out during last week’s Democratic debate, “Accommodating
sixty-five thousand refugees in our country . . . of three hundred and twenty million is akin to
making room for six and a half more people in a baseball stadium with thirty-two thousand.”
There is also a relatively recent precedent for the country admitting and successfully assimilating
far more refugees than even sixty-five thousand. In 1975 and 1976, after the fall of the pro-
Western regime in Saigon, about a hundred and fifty thousand Vietnamese were admitted to
refugee centers in Arkansas, California, Florida, and Pennsylvania. During the late seventies and
early eighties, as flotillas of desperate “boat people” set sail from Vietnam, the U.S. admitted
hundreds of thousands more refugees. (By 1995, the total number was close to half a million.)
At the time, the policy of admitting large numbers of Vietnamese encountered a great deal of
opposition. (In a 1975 poll, only thirty-six per cent of Americans were in favor of admitting
them.) There were the usual self-contradictory worries that the refugees, few of whom spoke
English, would take jobs and prove to be a permanent burden on the country. Several decades
later, however, these concerns have proved largely unfounded.
Today, there are almost 1.9 million Vietnamese-Americans, more than half of whom live in
California or Texas. Although the data shows that Vietnamese-Americans haven’t done as well
economically as some other Asian immigrants and their descendants, such as those of Korean
and Chinese origin, they are generally earning a fair amount. Indeed, a statistical portrait put
together by the Washington-based Center for American Progress shows that they’re doing better
than the typical American household. The median income among Vietnamese-American
households is about fifty-nine thousand dollars, compared to a national average of about fifty-
three thousand. The participation rate of Vietnamese-Americans in the labor force is a bit higher
than the national average as well: 64.9 per cent in 2014, compared to 64.3 per cent for U.S.
households as whole. And the unemployment rate among Vietnamese-Americans is lower than
the national average.
There are still some problems: Vietnamese-Americans still tend to live in separate communities,
a practice that is often associated with low rates of social mobility, and about half of them still
have limited proficiency in English. Evidently, however, this hasn’t stopped them from
integrating into the U.S. economy and helping it to grow. They also generally reflect American
economic ideals, a Pew Research study found: eighty-four per cent of Vietnamese-Americans
believe that most people can get ahead if they work hard, and almost half of them believe their
children’s standards of living will be “much better” than theirs.
Should the U.S. government decide to allow tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands)
of Syrians to come here and stay, there isn’t any obvious reason why they couldn’t replicate the
Vietnamese experience, or even surpass it. Unlike the early Vietnamese refugees, migrants from
Syria would be coming to a country where, according to figures from the Census Bureau, about a
hundred and fifty thousand of their compatriots have already made their homes. Certainly, the
Syrian population in the U.S. is pretty heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and religion. But its
presence means that there are social and economic networks in place to help the new arrivals
assimilate.
As many people have pointed out in recent days, Steve Jobs’s biological father was a Syrian
migrant who met his mother while teaching and studying at the University of Wisconsin. If we
did the right thing and helped to alleviate the current humanitarian crisis, there would be no
guarantee that we’d get another Jobs. But we could be pretty sure that, eventually, the Syrian
refugees would repay the favor, and then some.