Help Refugees Help Themselves Let Displaced Syrians Join the Labor Market

There are now some 60 million displaced people around the world, more than at any time since World War II. The Syrian crisis alone, which has created the largest refugee shock of the era, has displaced some ten million people, around four million of them across international borders. In recent months, Western attention has focused almost exclusively on the flood of these refugees to Europe. Yet most of the Syrian refugees have been taken in not by Western countries but by Syria’s neighboring states: Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, whose capacity has been overwhelmed. Lebanon, with a population of around four million and a territory smaller than Maryland, is hosting over a million Syrian refugees. Young people are overrepresented in the refugee population, so that more than half of the school-aged children in Lebanon are now Syrian.
International policy toward the Syrian refugee crisis is both antiquated and fueled by panic. It is premised on the same logic that has characterized refugee policy since the 1950s: donors write checks to support humanitarian relief, and countries that receive refugees are expected to house and care for them, often in camps. The panic comes from Europe, where debate has focused on how to fairly distribute hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, from both Syria and elsewhere, across the European Union and how to prevent asylum seekers from attempting the perilous journey across the Mediterranean or through the western Balkans.