Refugees

Interesting NY Times article about Sudanese doctor Hiba Omer, who has remained at her post in a Khartoum hospital as something close to a civil war has broken out around her:

I will never leave Khartoum. I will stay here, until death. I have a responsibility, and I will be staying until we do our job. It is a professional commitment.

Which brings me straight to a question I have been wondering about lately: what does the flight of refugees do to the places they leave behind? According to the UN, there are around 33 million refugees who have crossed international borders to escape from violence or oppression. Without wanting to judge any of them, I sometimes wonder how any country is supposed to recover from a civil war if millions of its most energetic and productive citizens have left. For an extreme case like South Sudan, where more than 20 percent have fled, I imagine this is crippling. On the other hand, what would they really accomplish by staying in South Sudan?

The reason there is anything to say about this problem is that the international refugee apparatus probably encourages people to become refugees. When the UN set up a chain of refugee camps in Kenya to house people fleeing civil war and famine in Somalia, some poor Kenyans went to the camps, which I would say is good evidence that the camps can exert an attractive pull. Each person in a troubled country makes a calculation based on how bad things are, how bad the trip to somewhere else is likely to be, and what will be waiting at the end of the trip. If refugee camps with adequate food are set up just over the border, it seems to me inevitable that this will induce more people to flee.

On the other hand, if those people stayed, no doubt some of them would be tortured or killed, or starve to death.

Sometimes the ability of people to flee across the border and be sheltered in UN camps becomes a problem of its own. The best example I know is the way the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide fled to the Congo, where they were put up in refugee camps, which were then taken over by the genocidal militias, which used the camps as bases for launching attacks on the new Rwandan government, which responded by attacking the camps, which was the trigger for a decade of civil war in the Congo.

There is also the question of what happens to the people in the camps and where they go. Some never go anywhere, and their children become some of the millions of stateless people in the world, with no home to go to even if they wanted to go there. But sometimes when the camps are closed, as when Kenya forced the closure of its camps for Somalis, the people somehow go somewhere without their being a humanitarian crisis. Which says to me that sometimes people stay in the camps when they could go back, or go somewhere else.

Of course there can be major refugee flows without the UNHCR being involved, for example, the 5.5 million people who have fled Venezuela since its economy went into free fall. That, I would say, is a clear case in which the departures have badly hurt the country they left, since most of the leavers were economically productive opponents of the government. Could a wicked, incompetent government stay in power indefintely by encouraging all of its able enemies to leave?

If the people who most want work and freedom leave, is the nation weakened?

I suppose that is an old question. In the late 1800s millions of Poles left the Russian, German, and Austrian empires, millions of Irish left British-ruled Ireland, and millions of south Italians left Italy. I believe that at the time there were big debates over whether the migrants were the most energetic people or the ones who had failed. But given how well they did in the US, Canada and Argentina, I can't believe there was anything much wrong with them.

I think the steady stream of people leaving Ireland across the whole period from 1923 to 1980 certainly changed Ireland. The people who left were on the whole more liberal and modernizing than those who stayed, allowing the conservative Catholic faction to take control of the nation and retain it for decades. For decades, Irish dissidents congregated in London, along with all the Irish who wanted to get divorced or have an abortion. If more had stayed, how might things have been different?

Whenever Americans announce that they are going to leave the country if their side loses the next election, I think, "quitters." If you think it is important who wins elections, maybe you should stay and work toward that end.

I am left wondering to what degree I should think that way about other people who flee their countries, and to what degree I should simply want to help all who need it, and extend a welcome to all who need a home.