Next month will mark the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention. The treaty holds that refugees should not be returned to a country where they face threats to their life or freedom. Most countries have signed either the original convention or an additional 1967 protocol that updated the Convention language to remove time limitations included in the original agreement and to consider decolonization. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) implements the Convention among its signatories, ensuring that host countries respect refugee rights.
As the anniversary nears, there are two problems that need resolution if the Convention is to survive.
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The first involves the definition of refugee. Within Western Europe and among leftist circles in the United States, there has been a creeping notion of refugee to include economic migrants. Humanitarian activists argue that refugees, even those who have removed themselves from immediate danger by crossing into a neighbor’s territory, for example, deserve social services and stipends. It is no secret that many refugees flee to the European Union, for example, which has 6% of the world’s population, 15% of the global economy, and over half of the world’s social service spending. The same hold true for many of those crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, many of whom traversed multiple borders along their journey. Leftists may think they are fulfilling humanitarian law, but they are not: Instead, they are creating a moral hazard that endangers refugees, fuels coyotes and organized crime, and creates broader cynicism that spurs populist backlash and endangers the broader convention.
Preserving a separate definition for refugee for Palestinians, as UNRWA does, essentially holds a people hostage to use as a diplomatic cudgel. Put another way, if UNHCR applied the UNRWA definition of refugee to those displaced by the partition of India in 1947, it would count nearly half a billion refugees today in South Asia alone.
The other problem is that some of the greatest refugee problems today occur in or near countries that are not party to the refugee convention. Neither India nor Pakistan has signed onto the convention, nor have most Arab or Southeast Asian countries. Refusing to join the convention does not prevent refugee flows, however; rather, it just leads to exploitation and encourages criminality.
As the anniversary looms, the Trump administration should do three things.
First, support new UNCHR head and former Iraqi President Barham Salih’s effort to strip away mission creep and return UNHCR to the original definition of refugee. To treat economic migrants and refugees fleeing war as synonymous undermines sovereignty and national immigration policies. Second, Trump should encourage allies to join the refugee convention. Crudely speaking, the more countries that join, the fewer refugees will reach American and European shores. Finally, even when countries do not join, U.S. officials should support granting work permits.
Libya is not a convention member. But some sub-Saharan refugees face horrific treatment in Libya, most Libyans want Sudanese migrants to stay. The reason? They contribute to the economy. They are teachers, pharmacists, and doctors. Poles feel the same about Ukrainians who bolster Poland’s gross domestic product by up to 3% according to some estimates. More recently, Thailand — a non-signatory — has allowed 5,500 Myanmar refugees to take jobs in Bangkok. In an era of declining budgets, allowing refugees to support themselves should be a no-brainer. Given the nature of the Myanmar junta and its genocidal policies toward the Rohingya Muslims, permanent refugee status could destabilize; allowing refugees to integrate and resettle could be a model for Thailand and Bangladesh, where the Rohingya refugee crisis from Burma is even more acute.
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Nor do work permits only need to be a tool settle refugees permanently in new host countries.
Consider Venezuela: Once South America’s wealthiest country, Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro transformed it into one of the continents’ poorest. The professional and educated class were the first to flee. To facilitate work permits and perhaps even fund UNHCR returns to Venezuela would fulfill Barham’s mandate to end refugee crises rather than ossify them while upholding U.S. interests in stabilizing a decades-long source of instability in the region,
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
