The picture of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying face down on a beach in Turkey has sparked outrage about the UK’s attitude to Syrian refugees. And rightly so. Of the 4 million Syrians who have fled the country, the UK has only taken in 216. This is even though they flee both from Assad’s regime and Islamic State, the latter almost a caricature of evil that the UK may be causally responsible for because of our invasion of Iraq.
Given the dire situation of the refugees, a lot of people want to help. But what’s the best way to do so?
Doing good is hard, especially in crisis situations. Inevitably, some ways of helping will be more effective than others. Giving musical instruments to those at Calais – as Music Against Borders is doing – is a kind, well-meaning gesture, but it’s hardly providing the refugees with what they most need at this time.
Donating to charities that provide more essential supplies, such as the International Rescue Committee or the UN Refugee Agency, is more promising. In general, I’m a big proponent of the power of donations to improve the world, and think that such donations will certainly help improve lives. But in this case I think we can do even more good through political action.
Unlike, for example, donations to global health, which help the extremely poor on the road to prosperity, donating to refugee camps is an example of unsustainable charity. With no end to the conflict in sight, Syrian refugee camps would need to be supported perhaps for decades. We do not want to end up with a situation like the South Sudanese in Kenya or Uganda, where children may spend their whole lives in camps.
Even more importantly, now seems to be a prime opportunity for massively beneficial political change. The core message is simple – “let more people in” – so political action is able to send a clear signal to those in power. Yet there is also a deeper policy proposal that we could stand behind: change the law to allow refugees with pending asylum claims who enter the UK to take temporary employment. No longer would hosting refugees be a burden on the UK; instead, we would allow them to become productive members of society.
The question of how many refugees to accept is purely a political one, not an economic one. Government officials have claimed that it’s a better use of public funds to help abroad. But that’s completely wrong. If we let refugees in and allow them to work (as they would be keen to do), the evidence shows that the standard of living and unemployment rates for UK natives would remain about the same; the main effect is to radically increase the quality of life for the refugee. Compare the situation now to the Hungarian revolution of 1956: Austria, still broken from the second world war, took in 2% of its population in refugees, and emerged even stronger as a result. The UK could welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees to work here without damaging our economy.
Finally, the current crisis provides an opportunity to take a step towards much larger political change. We condemn people all over the world to a life of poverty or persecution because we prevent them from entering our country and being productive members of our community. The economic costs to us are trivial or nonexistent, but the gains to those who come to our country are vast: economists Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro and Lant Pritchett of the Center for Global Development estimate that the same person will earn between three and 10 times as much simply in virtue of moving from a poorer country to a richer one; the benefits of escaping a civil war are similarly vast. We should push to welcome Syrian refugees into our country, but we should not stop there. Refugees from Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere all deserve our help just as much as those on our doorstep.
Given this, what should we do? The limited evidence on effective political action suggests that non-violent street protests are effective at changing political will, and the bigger the protest the bigger the change. In a study of the Tea Party protests by the economist Andreas Madestam and colleagues, the authors “[found] evidence of sizable effects … in terms of policymaking, both directly and through the selection of politicians in elections”.
At a minimum, you should therefore sign the government petition, which already has hundreds of thousands of signatures. But if you can, you should attend the Solidarity with Refugees march on 12 September, which has tens of thousands intending to participate, or one of the local marches all around the country, and use your network and social media to encourage as many others as possible to do the same.
Those fleeing Syria did not choose to be born into that country, just as we did not earn our birth into the UK. They have the right to a life free from persecution just as we do. Let’s make it happen.