Among the most alarming humanitarian trends is the growing animus toward refugees in advanced market democracies.Disturbing scenes emanating from detention centers along the southern U.S. border have underscored the Trump administration’s indifference to the suffering of strangers, even young children seeking asylum.
Late
last month, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, announced that its global
caseload had topped 74.8 million people in 2018—up from 43 million just five
years earlier. Some 41.4 million of these individuals are internally displaced
persons, or IDPs, uprooted from homes but still within their country, while
another 20.4 million are refugees, having crossed international borders. The
remainder includes 3.9 million stateless persons lacking recognized
nationality, 3.5 million registered asylum-seekers, and 2.9 million recently
returned refugees and IDPs.
Unsurprisingly,
violence is the single biggest driver of displacement. In Africa, refugees and
IDPs have almost tripled over the past decade, thanks to chronic conflicts in
the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and the Central
African Republic. The Americas, meanwhile, face “a displacement situation of
complexity and magnitude not seen in decades,” according to the U.N. More than
3 million people fled Venezuela in 2018. Most of them arrived in Colombia,
which was already grappling with 7.8 million IDPs of its own. To the north,
hundreds of thousands of Central Americans have sought asylum in the United
States to escape rampant gang violence and abusive governments.
In
Afghanistan, now entering its fourth straight decade of war, insecurity and
drought displaced another 500,000 people in 2018, bringing the total of
internally displaced to 2.1 million. An additional 2.4 million Afghan refugees
have fled to neighboring Pakistan and Iran. Bangladesh, meanwhile, hosts more
than 900,000 Rohingya Muslims who have escaped persecution in Myanmar.
Compounding their plight, the Rohingya—ethnic minorities in Myanmar—remain
stateless.
The
situation is even worse in the Middle East, which is home to “three of the
largest and most violent humanitarian and displacement crises in the world,”
the U.N. has warned. Conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Iraq have generated more
than 10 million IDPs and 7.2 million refugees and asylum-seekers. If that
wasn’t bad enough, UNHCR’s emergency appeals for Syria in 2018 attracted only
49 percent of required funding. In Yemen, “funds were insufficient to meet the
needs of even the most vulnerable.”
Many of
the world’s desperate have wound up on Europe’s shores—when they have avoided
drowning at sea, as one in 50 people did trying to cross the Mediterranean last
year, according to the UNHCR. Although refugee arrivals and asylum claims have
shrunk dramatically since 2015, Europe’s reception has turned chilly, with some
authorities prosecuting their own citizens who assist refugees.
It was not
supposed to be this way. Last December, the vast majority of U.N. member
states—with the conspicuous exception of the United States—approved a Global
Compact for Refugees. The nonbinding document endorsed a set of basic
principles of “burden- and responsibility-sharing,” intended to ease pressures
on host countries, enhance the self reliance of refugees, expand refugee
resettlement in third countries, and support conditions in countries of origin
so that refugees could “return in safety and dignity.”
In
practice, however, these countries have done far too little to fix a broken
humanitarian system. Among its defects are chronic funding shortfalls, failure
to recognize the right to seek asylum, growing political resistance to
admitting refugees, slow donor adjustment to the realities of prolonged
displacement, and the continued use of emergency humanitarian assistance as a
substitute for more vigorous diplomatic efforts to reduce, contain or end the
violence that is the root cause of human suffering.
Funding:
At the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, donors reached a so-called
“Grand Bargain” intended to close an estimated $15 billion financing gap in
relief assistance while making that aid more efficient, effective and
equitable. While the organizations that implement that aid have improved
coordination among themselves and with local actors in affected countries,
large funding gaps remain. According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, global financial requirements for humanitarian
emergencies amounted to $25.2 billion in 2018, while available funding was only
$15.1 billion—a more than $10 billion gap that left many urgent needs unmet.
Legal
obligations: The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as
someone with a “well-founded fear of persecution” and prohibits states parties
from returning refugees to countries where their lives or freedom would be
threatened—the principle of non-refoulement. In principle, international law
gives refugees the right to cross borders to seek asylum. The reality, though,
is messier. “The EU,” The Guardian newspaper reports, “has tried to prevent
asylum-seekers from reaching its territory whenever possible.” So has the
United States; President Donald Trump dismisses U.S. asylum law as “a scam.”
Even when countries do take custody of refugees, they may ignore asylum
requests. A case in point is Australia. Last year, the U.N.’s working group on
arbitrary detentions condemned Australia for its open-ended detention of asylum-seekers—including
one who was held for nearly a decade.
Refugee
admissions: Among the most alarming humanitarian trends is the growing animus
toward refugees in advanced market democracies. Under the Trump administration,
the ceiling for refugee admissions in the United States has been slashed from
85,000 in 2016 to 30,000 in 2019, and actual admissions have been significantly
lower than authorized. The president’s own hysterical rhetoric has helped
poison discourse on the topic, by depicting victims of violence as potential
terrorists or “frauds” seeking to exploit American generosity. Of the 25
nations that accepted refugees in 2018, Canada—with a population little more
than a tenth of America’s—ranked first, taking in 28,100 of the 92,400
resettled worldwide.
Linking
relief with development: The international community is still waking up to the
reality that displacement is rarely a short-term situation. It lasts, on
average, 17 years. Rather than warehousing IDPs and refugees in temporary
camps, humanitarian organizations and countries themselves need to work with
aid agencies to encourage long-term development in place. The World Bank has
been a pioneer here. In the most recent replenishment of its International
Development Association fund, the World Bank created a $2 billion Refugee
Sub-Window, or RSW, which allows it to support low-income countries that host
large refugee populations, such as Ethiopia and Pakistan. In a recent report,
the Center for Global Development and the International Rescue Committee
applauded the World Bank’s new role, while still recognizing the need for more
work to be done.
The most
enduring shortcoming in the global response to the worst refugee crisis since
World War II remains the failure to combine aid with diplomacy to address the
underlying grievances and conflicts that lie at the root of this human exodus
around the world. It is often said that there are no purely humanitarian
solutions to humanitarian problems. The scope of today’s relief efforts is at
once a testament to human generosity and an indictment of a collective failure
of political will.
***Stewart
Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and author of “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the
World” (Brookings Press: 2018). His weekly WPR column appears every Monday.