Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Can The West Deal With The Refugee Crisis?

Robert Skidelsky 24th September 2015

Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky

The tragic exodus of people from war-torn Syria and surrounding countries challenges the world’s reason and sympathy. Since 2011, some four million people have fled Syria, with millions more internally displaced. Syria’s neighbors – Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey – currently house the vast majority of the externally displaced. But, as the crisis has progressed, hundreds of thousands of refugees have headed toward Europe, with most taking the extremely dangerous marine route.

The nature and scale of this exodus have rendered all previous legal and political assumptions about migration obsolete. In the past, the chief motive for migration was economic. The debate to which economic migration gave rise was between liberals, who upheld the principle of the free movement of labor, and those who wanted restrictions on movement among countries in order to protect jobs, culture, and/or political cohesion.

As the world filled up with nation-states, and empty spaces filled up with people, restriction triumphed over free movement. Controls on immigration became widespread after World War I. All countries developed population policies.

But there has always been another, much smaller, group of asylum-seekers – those individuals forced to flee their home countries by persecution, often on religious or ethnic grounds. The 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees recognized a right of asylum for those unable to return to their country of origin owing to a “well founded” fear of persecution.

In practice, however, it has never been simple to distinguish between economic and political migrants, because political persecution usually includes economic restrictions. The Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, or Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, were both economic and political migrants. So were the East African Asians forced out of Uganda in the 1960s.

But the number of those identified as political refugees with a right of asylum was much smaller than those whose chief motive was to improve their economic lot. This reflected the relatively settled political conditions of the world of the 1950s. Back then, the countries from which refugees are now escaping were under colonial or quasi-colonial rule, while homegrown dictatorships then emerged to preserve order in the old empires’ successor states. It was the collapse of these brutal systems in the wake of the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Arab Spring of 2011 that created the current refugee crisis.

The refugees’ flight from Syria and other war-ravaged countries comes up against legal regimes that are poorly adapted to cope with it. The European Union severely restricts labor from non-member countries, but allows free movement of labor within its single market. This is justified by the fiction that the citizens of EU countries are members of a single polity. The right of Greeks to work in Germany is no different from that of Parisians to work in Marseilles.

But the EU is an incomplete state – one that may never be completed. An obvious indicator of this is that it lacks a fiscal-transfer mechanism to reduce the pressure of emigration from poor to rich areas. In the absence of this, it is assumed that free economic migration within the EU will produce little net movement of populations. The implicit model is that of the “guest worker” who comes and goes; in practice, a sizeable share of economic migrants from poorer parts of Europe stay in their country of destination, fueling an increase in support for anti-immigrant parties.

The asylum system is totally unprepared to deal with the new generation of refugees, who are ineligible under the existing framework, because they are fleeing not from specific acts of persecution, but from the disintegration of their states. They can be provided “humanitarian protection” or be granted “discretionary leave to remain” for a short period; but then they can be deported as illegal immigrants.

So what is to be done? Temporary residence status, in Europe or outside, would be reasonable if a rapid return to normalcy in the refugees’ countries of origin was a realistic prospect. In Syria, for example, it is not: Although politicians and commentators talk about stemming the flood at the source, no peace plan is in sight. The US and Russia back different sides. The West cannot accept the possibility that the Assad dictatorship, however brutal, may be the least bad option on offer. So the civil war will continue, the number of refugees in transit camps will increase, and more of them will risk their lives to enter leaky Fortress Europe.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, has proposed distributing 160,000 of the refugees currently in Europe across the EU’s 28 member states. Germany is prepared to take far more. Indeed, Chancellor Angela Merkel has bravely asserted “the fundamental right to asylum for the politically persecuted with no upper limit; and that goes for refugees who come to us from the hell of civil war.” But other European leaders, faced with the rise of extremist, anti-immigrant parties, have not endorsed Merkel’s view; and the refugees still have to get to Germany through countries like Hungary, which are erecting walls and other border defenses to keep them out.

The truth is that the West cannot or will not absorb refugees in the numbers needed; and it has no solution to the problem of failed states. This means that, apart from doling out humanitarian aid to those in refugee camps, it has no policy. Unless and until that changes, the tragedy can only deepen.

© Project Syndicate

Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky, professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University and a fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, is the author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes and a member of the British House of Lords.

You are here: Home / Politics / Can The West Deal With The Refugee Crisis?

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin
central and eastern Europe,unions,recognition Social dialogue in central and eastern EuropeMartin Myant
women soldiers,Ukraine Ukraine war: attitudes changing to women soldiersJennifer Mathers and Anna Kvit
military secrets,World Trade Organization,WTO,NATO,intellectual-property rights Military secrets and the World Trade OrganizationUgo Pagano
energy transition,Europe,wind and solar Europe’s energy transition starts to speed upDave Jones

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube