Crisis for who?

A refugee is a person who is forced to leave their home. They do this to escape danger, like war, being attacked, or a harmful environment.

In 2015, headlines filled the news about a European refugee crisis. The Syrian Civil War partly caused this crisis. Millions of people left Syria. Many of them fled to Europe.

At the time, it seemed from the news that the refugees were flooding into Europe. Many Europeans feared that Europe was about to be filled with too many new migrants. Many protests filled the streets. But was Europe really having a refugee crisis? In reality, very few of the world’s refugees ever make it to Europe. Ten countries hosted over half of the world’s refugees in 2016. These countries are some of the world’s poorest, and none of them are in Europe. Since the Syrian Civil War started, Turkey has hosted more refugees than any other country. In 2019, over 4 million refugees lived there.

This situation is not only affecting Europe and Turkey. In recent decades, refugees have fled conflicts in North and East Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia, and Southeast Asia. The world had over 65 million refugees in 2015. That is more than at any point since the Second World War.

The European Union (EU) has strict border rules. That shifts the responsibility of refugees to neighboring countries like Turkey. The Syrian Civil War pushed millions of refugees to Turkey as they tried to reach a new home in Europe. Most did not make it to Europe. In 2016, the EU signed a deal with Turkey. They paid Turkey €6 billion.1 In return, Turkey agreed to stop refugees from migrating into the EU.

How did this situation come to be? Why are there so many refugees in the world today? The story begins a century before the 2015 crisis, with the First World War.

Nationalism, world wars, and new nations

People have fled wars and repression for thousands of years. However, refugee only became an official category in the early twentieth century. For the first time, governments considered refugees as a “problem” that needed a solution. Countries created organizations to care for refugees and control migration.

After the First World War, governments began regulating migration more. Passports became more common. New laws defined different types of migration.

Nationalism played a large role in creating stricter citizenship and migration laws. To be a nationalist means to have loyalty to one country over all others. The First World War tore apart many longstanding empires. Then, new nations rose from the ruins of these empires. Nationalist leaders focused on building a common national identity. Many leaders also chose to focus on getting rid of people who, in their vision, did not qualify as citizens.

Later in the twentieth century, the Second World War redrew borders and broke apart other empires. This continued to create new waves of refugees. Decolonization after the Second World War also led to massive refugee migrations. As new, independent nations emerged, ethnic, religious, and political groups struggled for control. The winners killed their enemies or made them leave.

Why seek refuge?

By the 1960s, some European countries began to recover from the Second World War. This sparked a demand for cheap labor. Some countries had more people than jobs. This gave rise to the migrant worker. People from across Latin America, the Philippines, West Africa, and the Indian subcontinent moved to places like the United States, France, and Britain for work. Governments from wealthy countries encouraged labor migration. That’s because it made them money. For example, in the US, migrants from Mexico helped fill agricultural labor shortages.

Most migrant workers moved because they wanted to build a better life. Others were pushed out of their countries. They wanted to escape violence and persecution. Others migrated to escape poverty, climate change, and bad government. Many migrated legally. Others moved in different ways to avoid legal restrictions. This meant that more and more migrants found themselves in debt to human traffickers. Meanwhile, nations increasingly closed their borders and passed laws regulating migration.

Building Fortress Europe

The numbers of labor migrants and refugees increased in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, Western European countries changed their immigration policies. They opened borders between countries in the European Union. At the same time, they placed restrictions on immigration from outside the EU, especially from countries in Africa and the Middle East. These policies are often described as “Fortress Europe.”

Worldwide, governments opened their borders to trade and investment. At the same time, they hardened their borders to migrants and refugees. This was true, for example, of Mexican immigrants in the US.

The century of the refugee?

Today, the “crisis” of 2015 is largely over. Yet European countries have not relaxed the restrictions they put in place that year. Governments continue to close their borders to migrants.

Wealthy nations are happy to welcome migrants when they need their work. These migrant communities grow. They influence culture in their host countries. But some react in response with fear and anger.

Some political parties have tried to turn public opinion against migrants. Some far-right candidates campaigned on this. They won in Hungary, Poland, Greece, Britain, the United States, and others.

Yet governments are still placing more restrictions on immigration. So more migrants will be forced to put their lives at great risk to flee environmental conditions, poverty, and war.

1 That’s a little over $7 billion in 2020.