In the wake of last Friday’s attacks on Paris, much has been written about Syrian refugees, and the (remote) possibility that ISIS-affiliated jihadis might slip into the United States among the ten thousand displaced people (many of them children) that the Obama Administration has committed to taking in during the next year. In contrast with discussions about immigration generally, there has been less comment about the economics of the issue. There are many arguments in favor of settling refugees here—not least what President Obama, responding to the announcement by some state governors that they would not accept Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war, called “our values”—but from a financial perspective, too, there is little doubt that the U.S. has the capacity to absorb many more Syrian refugees, and that the long-term impact of such a policy would be positive.
Let’s start with an obvious point: With up to seven million Syrians having been displaced by the civil war, many countries much smaller than the United States have already allowed in a lot more than ten thousand refugees. Since 2012 the European Union has received about 1.9 million requests for asylum, and even that number is dwarfed by the number of people who have sought refuge in countries adjacent to Syria. According to the United Nations, Turkey has taken in an estimated 2.2 million, Lebanon 1.1 million, and Jordan six hundred and thirty thousand.
Based purely upon these figures, you might think that the economies of these countries would be sagging under the burden, but they aren’t. According to a new report from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the Turkish economy will expand by three per cent this year and by four per cent next year. Lebanon’s economy is also growing, at a rate of about two per cent this year, which will expand to more than three per cent next year, the World Bank reckons. Despite an influx of refugees that now amounts to more than ten per cent of its population, Jordan, too, is bearing up. Its gross domestic product will rise by about three per cent this year, the International Monetary Fund says.
These figures make the point that, even in countries facing huge influxes of refugees, the impact on the economy as a whole is usually not very large. The biggest challenges in accommodating refugees are social and political, rather than economic. To be sure, there is a cost to screening, housing, and feeding the entrants, but even in Turkey, which has received more Syrian refugees than any other country, this cost has proved manageable. In a blog post in September, Massimiliano Calì and Samia Sekkarie, two economists at the World Bank, noted, “The Turkish government has spent nearly 5.37 billion euros since the refugees first began arriving, entirely funded through its own fiscal resources. While this is undoubtedly a lot of money, there is no indication that this spending has jeopardized the country’s fiscal sustainability.” If you think about it, that’s not surprising. Turkey’s annual G.D.P. is about eight hundred billion dollars. At about one and a half billion dollars a year, the cost of resettling the Syrian refugees has been less than 0.2 per cent of the G.D.P.
In Lebanon, which is much smaller than Turkey, the cost of dealing with the refugee crisis has been greater relative to the G.D.P., but much of it has been met using money provided by international donors. Indeed, a recent study carried out under the auspices of the U.N. concluded that the refugee-aid packages actually boosted Lebanon’s G.D.P. by more than one per cent. (At the same time, though, the spillover from the carnage in Syria has hit tourism, one of Lebanon’s biggest industries, hard. Overall, the U.N. study estimated, the crisis in Syria has lowered Lebanon’s G.D.P. by about 0.3 per cent.)
Another concern that has been voiced frequently about refugees, especially in Europe over the past few months, in response to the influx of refugees there, has been that refugees take jobs from native workers and reduce wages. The evidence from the Syrian experience suggests that this can happen, but that the effects aren’t very large. In many cases, refugees take jobs that natives don’t want. They also set up businesses of their own and provide more customers for domestic enterprises.
Since so many of the refugees in Lebanon and Jordan are in temporary camps, the most relevant example for this pattern is Turkey. Earlier this year, the Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, in Ankara, published a detailed study of what impact Syrian refugees are having on Turkey. The report did find that the influx is causing economic tensions in the south, where many Syrians are working illegally in the informal economy. The cost of home rentals has increased, making it harder to find affordable housing, and inflation has risen. “There is unfair competition between businesses that hire illegal workers and companies that do not employ illegal workers,” the report said. “Locals believe that job opportunities have been taken away from them.” However, when the authors of the report investigated these claims, they found that “Syrians are generally employed in areas that locals are not willing to work in. Thus, Syrians meet the demand in unskilled labor.”
Not all the migrants are unskilled workers, however. Another study, by Soner Çağaptay, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, pointed out that many Syrian traders from places like Aleppo, which has been devastated by the civil war, have moved their operations across the border to cities in southern Turkey, boosting business there. In general, Çağaptay wrote, “Turkish business, and the country’s trademark export market, has registered remarkable success in dealing with the fallout of the Syrian crisis.”
If the United States were to take in more Syrian refugees, the numbers would be tiny compared to what is happening in the Middle East and Europe. At the top end of the range, Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have called for sixty-five thousand migrants to be admitted over the next five years. As O’Malley pointed out during last week’s Democratic debate, “Accommodating sixty-five thousand refugees in our country . . . of three hundred and twenty million is akin to making room for six and a half more people in a baseball stadium with thirty-two thousand.”
There is also a relatively recent precedent for the country admitting and successfully assimilating far more refugees than even sixty-five thousand. In 1975 and 1976, after the fall of the pro-Western regime in Saigon, about a hundred and fifty thousand Vietnamese were admitted to refugee centers in Arkansas, California, Florida, and Pennsylvania. During the late seventies and early eighties, as flotillas of desperate “boat people” set sail from Vietnam, the U.S. admitted hundreds of thousands more refugees. (By 1995, the total number was close to half a million.)
At the time, the policy of admitting large numbers of Vietnamese encountered a great deal of opposition. (In a 1975 poll, only thirty-six per cent of Americans were in favor of admitting them.) There were the usual self-contradictory worries that the refugees, few of whom spoke English, would take jobs and prove to be a permanent burden on the country. Several decades later, however, these concerns have proved largely unfounded.
Today, there are almost 1.9 million Vietnamese-Americans, more than half of whom live in California or Texas. Although the data shows that Vietnamese-Americans haven’t done as well economically as some other Asian immigrants and their descendants, such as those of Korean and Chinese origin, they are generally earning a fair amount. Indeed, a statistical portrait put together by the Washington-based Center for American Progress shows that they’re doing better than the typical American household. The median income among Vietnamese-American households is about fifty-nine thousand dollars, compared to a national average of about fifty-three thousand. The participation rate of Vietnamese-Americans in the labor force is a bit higher than the national average as well: 64.9 per cent in 2014, compared to 64.3 per cent for U.S. households as whole. And the unemployment rate among Vietnamese-Americans is lower than the national average.
There are still some problems: Vietnamese-Americans still tend to live in separate communities, a practice that is often associated with low rates of social mobility, and about half of them still have limited proficiency in English. Evidently, however, this hasn’t stopped them from integrating into the U.S. economy and helping it to grow. They also generally reflect American economic ideals, a Pew Research study found: eighty-four per cent of Vietnamese-Americans believe that most people can get ahead if they work hard, and almost half of them believe their children’s standards of living will be “much better” than theirs.
Should the U.S. government decide to allow tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of Syrians to come here and stay, there isn’t any obvious reason why they couldn’t replicate the Vietnamese experience, or even surpass it. Unlike the early Vietnamese refugees, migrants from Syria would be coming to a country where, according to figures from the Census Bureau, about a hundred and fifty thousand of their compatriots have already made their homes. Certainly, the Syrian population in the U.S. is pretty heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and religion. But its presence means that there are social and economic networks in place to help the new arrivals assimilate.
As many people have pointed out in recent days, Steve Jobs’s biological father was a Syrian migrant who met his mother while teaching and studying at the University of Wisconsin. If we did the right thing and helped to alleviate the current humanitarian crisis, there would be no guarantee that we’d get another Jobs. But we could be pretty sure that, eventually, the Syrian refugees would repay the favor, and then some.
