← The CGD Podcast
The CGD Podcast
The Upside of Accepting Refugees
00:22:41
The media often characterize immigrants and refugees as a burden, according to my guest this week, CGD board member and former deputy secretary-general of the UN Mark Malloch Brown. Lord Malloch-Brown says that past experience shows that refugees not...
Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:06]
B
Hello, I'm Rajesh Merchandani and welcome to the CGD podcast. I want you to think about a statistic. By the middle of last year, more than 13 million people around the world were registered as refugees. That's as if everyone in New York, Paris and Berlin all fled to different countries to escape conflict or persecution. Now, with World Refugee Day around the corner, I've come to London to speak with Lord Mallock Brown, whose long career as a humanitarian and diplomat has included working at the highest levels of the UN and as a British Foreign Office minister. He also helped design the Millennium Development Goals and is a CGD board member. Mark Malik Brown, thanks for joining us.
- [00:46]
A
Thank you.
- [00:48]
B
Now, you've written an essay which listeners will be able to see on our website where you talk about some of these numbers. 13 million refugees, 1551 million displaced people. That means people including in their own countries. That's almost the population of the UK, about 80%. That seems an insurmountable problem. Yet in this essay you suggest that it's not.
- [01:08]
A
Yeah, when you sort of scope it or compare it to global population as a whole, it's a fraction of 1%. And I think that's really the important thing, to hold onto that for the countries affected. And, you know, these refugee problems tend to be quite grouped. So, for example, Syria at the moment is the biggest refugee producer, but, you know, put it with a couple of countries of South Asia, particularly Pakistan and Afghanistan. And you see, you know, this very heavy concentration of these numbers in certain parts of the world where they've either come from or where they've settled in a temporary asylum that often becomes long term. So a small global problem, but a big local problem, and we need to find ways of dealing with it which reflects that contradiction, if you like.
- [02:04]
B
And that is certainly an issue that has been very heated in the media, especially here in Europe. The issue of refugees and migration is very heated right now. People across the Mediterranean losing their lives. You describe the thrust of that debate in your essay as burden and problem without solution. That's how it's characterized. What do you say, though, to people who feel that their jobs, their lifestyles, their benefits are being taken away by migrants?
- [02:33]
A
Well, I think we do have to very clearly separate between migrants and refugees. And if we take the people currently fleeing across the Mediterranean into southern Europe, they really are two distinct flows. They may individually be quite hard to sort of sort out which of the two baskets they belong in. But there are people coming from particularly Eritrea, but also to some extent from Libya, you know, who are genuine refugees who are fleeing political persecution. And then there are an awful lot of people whose lives are desperate in an economic sense, coming from West Africa, East Africa, North Africa, who are taking advantage of the lack of sort of state institutions, security, rule of law, in the North African staging posts of Libya, particularly, to set sail and try and get into Europe. And obviously, we've got to find ways of keeping these two pools apart. Both need to be treated decently and fairly, but they are very different categories of.
- [03:39]
B
Of people in the historical context. Just quoting your essay again. You talk about how there was the furore, the controversy, say, over the Vietnamese and Cambodian boat people back in the 70s, and then also Ugandan Asians leaving Uganda and coming to the UK in the early 70s as well. Large numbers. A lot of people in those countries were very worried about this influx, but the historical context shows they shouldn't have been worried, didn't have any reason to.
- [04:07]
A
Yeah, I mean, there's a great virtue of having been doing this for decades, because one's old enough now to remember one's first refugee crises and to remember the daunting press, both internationally in the US and uk, but also in the region where the crisis was happening, which said, we're being flooded with these refugees. They're going to do so destroy local life, they're going to overwhelm services, et cetera, et cetera. And now, with the glorious hindsight of elapsed decades, you look back over your shoulder and you see that the Indochinese refugees have been a huge shot in the arm to the US economy, French economy, to the Australian and Canadian economies, the countries they mainly finally settled in. And similarly, the uganda nations, the 28,000 of them who were thought likely to overwhelm the social welfare systems of the UK are today one of the most successful immigrant groups into this country. Not only was retail transformed by the fact that suddenly we were a generation who could go buy a pint of milk till midnight what we'd never been able to do before, but when I look at my life, you know, I was in government with Triti Vadera. The new Tory government equally has a very distinguished Uganda nation in its senior ranks. These are people who, in the business of public life, business, the arts, have more than pulled their weight and made a real contribution. And, you know, in a sense, that's always been the refugee condition. These are remarkable people who are not willing to put up with local political circumstance, who want their freedom, want their aspirations and ability to thrive. So, surprise, surprise, when forced to flee, they actually usually fall on their feet and are a huge economic plus to their receiving country and not the burden people anticipate.
- [06:11]
B
You talked about them fleeing conflict. And we see that more than half the refugee population of. Of the world is made up people from Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia, countries riven by conflict, either past or current. What can the development community do to actually help end those conflicts? Because peace is a prerequisite for development.
- [06:30]
A
Well, the good news is, as you say, three countries are producing half the world's refugees. It's a bit distorting because the UNHCR numbers exclude Palestinians in the Middle East. But even at that situation, and it's four countries of origin, really, that one has. And so it's not that you've got to have sort of political strategies across half the world. Here are four target countries where, if you could intervene in ways that encouraged reconciliation, encouraged the development of a more tolerant, inclusive, pluralistic political environment back home, you'd be solving a huge proportion of the global refugee problem. And again, my experience of Indochina. I went back years later as the head of the UN Development Program to Phnom Penh, and there was the same leader in the country who had a big hand in generating the refugees in the first place. But now one of his senior advisors leant across the table to me and said, do you remember when I was in your refugee camp of Kauydang? So, you know, I'd gone home, thrived. And again, people forget that, you know, for the most part, refugees feel the same pull of home and kith and kin that anyone does. And therefore, the opportunity to go home is not something they're closing their minds to. Most would love to. And one's seeing that with the liberalization of the economies of Indochina. One's seen it even in Uganda, where a number have been able to go back and resume their farming and business careers, or at least a next generation have been able to resume family interests there. So, you know, again, the refugee is a reluctant departee. He's in that way, or she is different to some of the purer economic migrants who are just looking for a better life and have exhausted their economic possibilities at home.
- [08:26]
B
But. But with your development hat on and with your UN hat on having been Deputy Secretary General, how can the development community help bring about peace in those countries driven by conflict? Because the Security Council isn't doing it.
- [08:40]
A
Well, let's, you know, I think each country is in that sense, quite customized in particular. But let's take Syria, which is the single biggest Producer of refugees. At the moment, you have a Security Council which has got hopelessly ensnared on the sort of big power politics dimension of this. A Russia which won't drop its support for President Assad, an America and its allies that won't enter properly into negotiations unless Assad's removal is a precondition. Now, since my old boss, Kofi Annan first was the special envoy in 2012 for Syria, there's been a deal there, and it will one day be the method by which a transition happens, which is that Assad can lead his delegation or be head of that delegation when it goes to a new round of peace talks. But a precondition of the talks can be that any government that emerges from those talks has to be acceptable to all sides, which means an immediate veto against Assad. So a kind of diplomatic sort of finesse has been available from the beginning. But, you know, whether it was an unfortunate coincidence of the talks timing with American midterm elections, then with American presidential elections, or whether it was Putin's sort of very public commitment to Assad, you've just had big power egos getting in the way of a solution, getting also in the way of effective humanitarian intervention, even when there isn't yet a political solution. And here I have a particular point to make that, you know, when I started in this game in Indochina, there was never a reference to the Security Council. Those were the days of a gridlocked Cold War Security Council. So we intervened around the protection of refugees or the assistance to internally displaced people, around principles of international humanitarian law, around quoting the refugee conventions of the time. And we didn't appeal to the Security Council for a political mandate to do this. I think it's incredibly important that we try to restore that humanitarian law endorsement space, that we don't put these operations at the mercy of agreement in a now renewed, gridlocked Security Council.
- [11:13]
B
Let's talk about the nature of some of those programs, if they do actually take place. In your essay, you don't seem to have a very high regard for aid programs. You say the old images of white relief workers tipping rice bags off the back of trucks to outstretched black and brown hands should now be consigned to history. This is the kind of thing that you would have overseen at the undp.
- [11:33]
A
They were my right arms, too. Well, I mean. I mean, that is really a comment on the fact that the location and means of helping refugees is dramatically changing. In my youth, these refugee problems. In my youth, when I was a young relief worker in my 20s, and 30s. You know, the locus of these caseloads was largely rural areas and they were largely camp environments. And even then I was very skeptical about the prudence of putting people in the semi incarcerated conditions of refugee camps, cutting them off from work and etc. But increasingly refugees are to be found now as informal populations in urban areas.
- [12:23]
B
Syrian refugees in Lebanon is a classic.
- [12:25]
A
For example, and in Jordan as well. Indeed, and even in Turkey. So that's where the locus of relief and distribution needs to be. And because they're within cash economies, not in camps. Whether it is the work that CGD itself is doing on cash transfers to relief to refugees to allow them to access and buy services and food locally, that this is much more the way of the future. It happens coincidentally. And that also natural disasters have become much more urbanized. This is because of sprawling urban growth across earthquake fault lines into areas prone to flooding and other natural disasters. Disasters has meant that you've had more Port au Princes in Haiti or Kathmandu's in Nepal, where it's urban structures that have come crashing down onto people, creating again, very different kinds of programmatic needs and responses to, you know, long, thin logistics lines out of far off rural areas.
- [13:38]
B
You talked about what the CGD is doing on cash transfers there. We are doing some work on that. We haven't made any of it public yet. We're probably going to do that in the next couple of weeks. This is a panel that CGD Europe's Owen Barda is chairing, convened by DfID, the UK's development agency, looking at whether humanitarian aid would be better, more efficient, more transparent, more equitable if we gave cash instead. We may broadcast more about that on the CGD podcast next week. You broke the story there, Mark. Thank you very much for doing that. But let's talk a little bit about the MDGs and the SDGs. You were heavily involved in developing the MDGs at your time at the UNDP. How can the SDGs help in the face of changing modern global poverty?
- [14:24]
A
Well, I think, you know, the fact that there are a lot more of them and they're a lot more complicated than the kind of simple eight MDGs is a reflection of the changing nature of poverty. First, that, you know, we've had a pretty successful run in fighting absolute poverty. A lot more still to go, but, you know, we've done a lot better than the critics expected. But, you know, on the wake of reducing extreme poverty, we've nevertheless seen inequalities in many ways increase in countries between countries etc. We've also seen a kind of spreading out of the development challenge from the kind of targeting of hardcore poverty issues to more complex issues of provision. Just to take one area, education. In the original Millennium Development Goals it was really all about the quantity of primary education delivered. Today it's both about the quality of that primary education, is it delivering the educational outcomes of literacy etc that were anticipated? It's not just about enrolment numbers but secondly it's if you get people through primary, hey ho, very understandably they want secondary and tertiary. And the kind of competitive knowledge based global economy that we're always talking about is one which needs people to have secondary and tertiary education as well. So, you know, the field of development is getting more complicated, not easier as.
- [16:02]
B
A result of some of this, as.
- [16:03]
A
A result of some of the successes, which is a very nice thing, you.
- [16:07]
B
Know, but it almost feels as if there's 17 goals and 169 targets in the SDGs. They're everything to everybody, almost. I mean there's a few things that are left out, but there's so much in there, it almost feels like it's meaningless. Well, I think means so much. Yeah, it doesn't mean anything, you know.
- [16:24]
A
I mean, you know, obviously as an old timer on this, I have mixed feelings because it was kind of like a fixed menu, the eight MDGs. It really framed the development conversation in a way that had never happened before about these pretty straightforward important outcomes of development. We're now moving to a la carte in that nobody's development strategy can possibly incorporate with equal priority these 17 goals and 100 plus targets. I mean people are going to have to select around their own prioritization and the cost will be a real dilution of the global conversation about priorities. The gain will be probably a stronger sense of local ownership of a set of goals and targets that have in their numbers already emerged from a much more global consultation than was possible 15 years ago, but which will then be, as I say, self selected by countries, communities, organizations to reflect their own priorities and agendas.
- [17:40]
B
Could the strength of that commitment be lessened because it's self selecting? So national politics could get in the way?
- [17:45]
A
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think this is a, you know, whether we end up ahead or behind through this proliferation of goals, you know, I think is as yet uncertain. I mean, I think you can detect a certain tone of disappointment on my side that we have been forced to expand the number in this way. But I also, you know, I started by being a quite strong critic of this, this inflation of numbers of goals and targets. I've become a much more quiet critic because I have come to respect the process of consultation and the importance that so many people attached to these goals that they were determined to have their particular cause included. And, you know, it's hard not to respect that. But I think the challenge now will be for national and other policymakers to grab the bits that really work for them and frame development strategies that are meaningful and effective around it. And in that way, I think really when I look ahead, the big challenge is that these goals were largely carried in this first phase by the global public sector and not the profit sector, the NGOs. There has to be a third leg to that stool, which is the private sector. It's been there implicitly because none of these things would have happened at all if there hadn't been strong economic growth across the developing world for many of these years. And a lot of that was private sector driven. But they've now got to be, the private sector has got to be there more explicitly dealing with the issues from infrastructure to health and education provision to job creation, which are going to be at the heart of both further poverty reduction, but, but of inequality reduction going forward. And so the private sector has got to become a much more overt partner. And I think in a way the debate about the proliferation of goals mustn't let us lose sight of that even more important objective, which is how do we bring the private sector in?
- [20:00]
B
Are you optimistic about where the world will be, the developing world will be at the end of the SDGs in 2030 or how do you feel about it?
- [20:09]
A
Well, you know, I remember being treated as a sort of looney tune UN optimist when declaring that we might make progress similar to what we've achieved with the MDGs. That was considered incredible. And in fact, you know, many people around the world, maybe even some listening to this podcast, still don't completely accept the that fact fact that the proportion of those living in absolute poverty has more than halved during this period, therefore, you know, leading to that goal being achieved with a, you know, great panache. But I do think that we are, in a sense, this first phase was the easier bit. Inevitably there's a low hanging fruit issue and we're now working our way up the trail tree. And you know, an awful lot of the poverty in the next 15 years, the kind of hardcore poverty is now concentrated not at the poor end of big countries. It's not the China and India. So much anymore. It's weak and failing states, an arc of them. Second, the issue of how you sustain this lift out of poverty becomes much more based on building out a modern infrastructure for the emerging middle classes of these countries. You know, it's not anymore just getting some basic light school health, social service provision in place and some local employment. This is a transformative investment, a trillion dollars a year in infrastructure to sustain the kinds of levels of population that we're now seeing across, across much of the developing world. So it's just got many times harder to go on scoring success at the rate we've been lucky enough to do over the last 15 years.
- [22:01]
B
Okay, well, let's hope that your vision does actually come true. We'll come back and speak to you in 15 years time, hopefully before then as well. Mark Mack Brown, thank you very much for joining us on the CGD podcast.
- [22:13]
A
Thank you.
- [22:14]
B
Don't forget, you can find out more about all our work at our website, www.cgdev.org. i'm Rajesh Merchandani and join me again for the next podcast from the center for Global Development.