Refugee Poverty is Solvable

world's growing population of displaced people. My solvable is that refugees and displaced people should have poverty rates, inequality rates, lack of opportunity no greater than the rest of the population around the world. There are more displaced people than at any time in our history. There are nearly seventy million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and almost thirty million of

them have been forced to leave their countries. This global refugee crisis has been on the shoulders of the world's poorest countries, with eighty four percent of refugees staying in developing regions. In a global list of countries that have taken in the most refugees, the only European country to make it into the top ten is Germany. Last year here in the US there was a forty year low in numbers, with fewer than twenty three thousand refugees admitted

to the country. Actually, as you listen to this conversation, perhaps think about the parallels with what was happening back in the nineteen thirties with what's happening now here in the US. Syrians and refugees from several other predominantly Muslim countries are banned, and back then Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi

persecution were rejected. In nineteen thirty three, as fascism descended on Europe, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding a program to resettle scholars that were fleeing that fascism, and ultimately rescued hundreds of scholars in their families. In his work with the IRC, David Milliband oversees the agency's humanitarian relief operations in more than forty war affected countries, as well as

its refugee resettlement programs in cities across the US. David is actually the son of refugees himself, and you'll hear that this really informs his work. Okay, that's enough for me. Let's listen to Jacob and David and I'll chat you after. The problem is that refugees and displaced people are being failed by a humanitarian aid system that is out of date and needs significant reform. David, we're here at the

offices of the Rockefeller Foundation. I did a little research and discover that Rockeller has a lot of history with the IRC. In fact, it was one of the original funders of the work of the Emergency Rescue Committee, the ancestral organization to the IRC, which helped get Jews and other refugees out of Nazi occupied Europe beginning in the late nineteen thirties. You're right, and I always talk about International Rescue Committee because i ASC is one of those

acronyms that gets lost. The International Rescue Committee is a great New York institution in the same way that the Rockefeller Foundation is a great New York institution. I think that we can claim at the International Rescue Committee that if I had to choose between being founded by Einstein and founded by Rockefeller, I'd go for Einstein. I'd take Einstein over Rockefeller. Founded by Einstein, funded by Rockefeller, that double benefit. And Einstein in was here as a refugee

in the thirties. He was in Princeton when Hitler came to power. He never went back to Germany, and he was consumed by the fate of his other intellectuals, of family, members of the Jewish community across Germany and then across occupied Europe. And he wrote these incredibly moving letters, eventually to Eleanor Roosevelt, set pleading with her to persuade her husband,

the President, to allow Jews to come from Europe. Of course, American public opinion two thirds in forty opposed allowing Jewish refugees into America, and so Einstein in out of with this enormous sense of impotence, he brought together some colleagues of his to found the Emergency Rescue Committee, became the International Rescue Committee, and the first thing they did was send a man called Varion Fry, a New York Times journalists to occupied France, where he established a safe house

and forged two thousand fake passports and helped two thousand people escape from occupied France. It's an amazing history. I thought I might just show you this list they found in the Rockefeller Archive of scholars and intellectuals writers who Rockefeller helped to place at American institutions, most heavily at the New School in New York. And you look down that list and it's a who's who of physics in the twentieth century, but it includes Thomas Munn and Claude

Levi Strauss. And it's just it's just interesting that the story is so powerful. It's a resonant story today. And you're right, Mark Shagal as well. And it's worth saying for your listeners. The New School when it was found, it was called the University in Exile, the New School for Social Research, and you it was called the University Excellent. It was for exiled German intellectuals. Um it's extraordinary history.

And just to make it personal a little bit, your your parents, your your father was it was a refugee scholar, was he not? Well, he wasn't quite a scot Carl Polonia. I've just seen him amazing not he was what he was sixteen when he was a refugee my dad. So he wasn't quite a scholar by then, although he did. He and his father left Belgium, fled Belgium when the Nazis invaded in nineteen forty and he was sixteen years old. He became a scholar if you like, at Acton Technical

College in West London, where it's pretty amazing. Actually he learned English and in a year a year later did his matriculation and got into the LSE, the London School of Economics, and so he was and then he the LC at that point was in Cambridge, and so he spent a r own Cambridge, then joined the Royal Navy. My mum was spent the war in Poland and came to the UK as a refugee in nineteen forty was allowed to come to the UK nineteen forty six as a refugee on her own as a twelve year old.

Did you grow up with the consciousness of being the son of refugees? Not really, no, And I think that I knew that my parents were foreign. I knew that the Holocaust had taken large numbers of the family. One of my grandfathers was killed in a ration camp in southwestern Germany in nineteen four y nineteen forty five. But so there was a consciousness of that history. And of course I was born only twenty years after the end of the Holocaust, so that was there. But I think

like many refugees. My parents wanted to give me my brother the security that they never had. And you know, my dad had grown up knowing communism, fascism, mother knowing Nazism, living under it, and they wanted to give us a more protected livelihood. But I knew that there was this sort of background music to my childhood was what we

had lost and what others had lost. How have the dimensions of the refugee problem globally changed from what the world dealt with in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust. I mean, I think there are three massive changes that people, well four massive changes. Actually, people need to understand why this is not just a European issue. In the wake of the Second World War, it was obviously a European issue, refugee flight. It's now

a global issue. Secondly, and equally significantly, the notion of a refugee was born of the idea that when states fought, civilians suffered and they fled, so it's intrinsically a political life. It was, yes, it was political, but it was also interstate. And the point I want to make is today's refugees are not the product of wars between states they're the

product of wars within states. So Syria being an obvious example, Afghanistan, Somalia, those are not Those countries are not fighting their neighbors, they are consumed by the civil wars. So that's the second big change. The third big change that I would point to is the duration of displacement has grown exponentially.

In other words, if you think about the Second World War, Germany had a huge refugee population coming back after nineteen forty five, but they were out of their own country for I don't want to say only six years, but a limited period of time. Today, the figures are hard to pin down, but for camp based refugee populations, the average duration of a displacement is around seventeen years, so

you've got much longer displacement. But the fourth difference is that in the Second World War period, post Second World War period, refugees generally were housed in camps. Today, the phenomenon of urbanization that you've talked about, and I'm sure you're going to cover in this series, that phenomenon applies to refugees as well. So sixty percent of the world's refugees today are in urban areas, not in refugee camps.

What about climate refugee Surely there are beginning to be significant numbers of refugees who are affected by climate change, and the expectation has to be that THIRSD numbers they're going to grow tremendously. Well, it's interesting. I want to push back against the first part of what you said, not the second, the first part, which is are their climate refugees today? Obviously climate change is happening. In the International Rescue Committee, we see that every day in our

work in the Sahel. You could argue that some of the challenges problems war in Syria has some of its origins in the drought in the northwest of the country that led to a large part of the population being driven to the cities in twenty eight, nine and ten. But there's the clue. Most people who are directly affected by climate change remain within their own country. So they're not refugees in that sense. They're not people who have left their own country and gone to a neighboring country.

They are what we would call, I suppose climate IDPs, climate internally displaced people. And so if you think about Banglad, there should low lying country in the south it's likely that at the moment, the direct impact of climate change is for people to move within their own country. There's a wrinkle to this though, which is important, which is there's no question that climate stress prompted by climate change. Resource stress prompted by climate change is a multiple player

for conflict. It drives conflict, and so indirectly climate change may be contributing to refugee flow. Just to give you an example, if you think about what's happening in the Lake Chad, based in northeastern Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Niger, there's a range of factors that explain the large flows of people. They're both within countries in between them Bakaharam but included. But there there's a massive climate induced problem of resource stress.

So that's a slightly long arm. Apologize for the longer answer, but beware just saying there are climate refugees today, but you're warning that climate change is going to be a driver of people movement in the future is undoubtedly right. It's an underlying condition. David. I know you have a sense of optimism about this problem, and I wonder what

you're solvable is around refugees. My solvable is that refugees and displaced people should have poverty rates, inequality rates, lack of opportunity no greater than the rest of the population at the moment. If you're a refugee, if you're an internally displaced person, it's the fastest route to extreme poverty. If you look at all the statistics, whether of Syrian refugees who are relatively middle class in Syria, who are now in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, even who those would come

to Germany. If you look at much poorer refugees, for example Rhinga Muslims who've been driven out of Burma, Me and Mah now in Bangladesh, poverty rates are much higher than international averages, levels of abuse of women and girls

much higher, early marriage much higher. And to what I would like to argue is that it's well within our power to ensure that the poverty, inequality rates, the oppression that people feel as refugees and displace people should be no higher than our performance for the rest of the population. How long do you think it would take us to get there, and what do you think it would take

for us to get there? Well, let me start with what it would take, because the first part of your question how long it will take is about the politics, because the truth is the policy problem is not the biggest one as in Einstein's day, the problem is a political one more than it is a policy problem. Really, there are four parts of this part one, what's the first thing that a refugee or a displaced person needs when they've left their own country or left their own home.

They need cash. They need that. They're likely to be in an urban environment rather than a rather than a camp environment, and so they need cash support either not necessarily literally dollars in their hand, but they need cash support. We know from our own research how much impact this has on their life chances, on the ability of their kids to go to school rather than be out at work, actually including reductions in levels of violence within the home.

So the first thing they need is cash, and we know how to deliver it. We know how to deliver it in electronic form, and we know how to deliver it in cash form. Cash transfer an increasingly influential idea in international aide. Generally, they were more influential Jacob, because there's only my figures are something like only six or eight percent of the global humanitarian budget goes in cash at the moment at the Internatal Rescue Committee were high.

We're probably three times that, but it's not yet enough. The default option we say in every you know, we've got thirteen thousand staff members and fifteen thousand volunteers in one hundred and ninety field sides in forty countries. The first thing we ask before we do any program is why not cash before food, before anything else? Why not cash because actually it's got the evidence base to show

it has the biggest impact. People know their own needs better than anyone from the outside, especially if you give it to women, heads of women in the household. Second thing is employment for refugee adults. We know from Uganda interesting test case which has the most progressive policy towards empowering and encouraging refugees into work, that if you allow refugees to work, they set up businesses, they become employees.

In a study in Kamparla in twenty fourteen, ninety plus percent of the refugees in the country were off international aid because they were able to work, support themselves contribute to the local economy. Both cash and employment reduce the tension between refugees and the host population, so there's a secondary benefit. Now it's important to say. You can't just say we want refugees to have a right to work,

that's the end of the story. Because the countries that refugees are in are generally poor or lower middle income countries. They are Ethiopia, Uganda, Bangladesh, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, these countries with their own problems. These are countries that have got unemployment in Jordan twenty six I think unemployment rate among

its own population. And so the only way to make the employment question solvable for the refuge population if you say, look, there's a big macroeconomic bargain to be done with refugee hosting states. You're delivering a global public good. The International Community is a World bank which has rewritten its mandate

to allow this. The IMF, We're going to really support the macroeconomy of countries that are delivering on this global public good to make it possible for those governments to say to their own people, look, we're not just taking care of the refugees, we're taking care of you as well. Yeah, so give refugees money, allow them to work. Yeah, what's next.

Third half of refuges and displays people are children, Yet two percent of the global humanitarian budget goes on education, which is obviously strategically geostrategically stupid as well as morally reprehensible. We're talking about education for kids who are not in

the middle of war zones. If it's a funding and organization challenge to get the right balance of expanding the mainstream schooling system so that kids can go to school, and expanding community based education where there are facilities, And just so you get a sense of the problem, fifty percent of refugee kids at primary school age have no education at all. Seventy five percent of refugee kids of secondary school age have no education at all. And that

is not an unsolvable problem. We know how to deliver education, but we also know, and I think this is important, it's not just a matter of quantity shoving kids into doubling the size of classes. We know that kids who've been through trauma need special help to access education. We've we call it healing classrooms. You've got to make sure that you're attending to the right quality of education, the

right support, sometimes the right language training and support. So the third element of the solvable puzzle, if you like, is to just take education seriously and not pretend, not succumb to the fiction that we don't need to do education because these refugees are going back home soon. They're not less than three percent of the world's refugees went

home last year. The fourth element is not the most important in numerical terms, but it is important, and it's difficult politically, and that is that countries that are not in the front line of the refugee crisis, countries like the United States where we're meeting Western European countries, but also advanced countries elsewhere in the world, and the Gulf, in China, Japan, you, you name it, they've got to be willing to take refugees as resettled refugees, and the

UN identifies resettlement in other words, the planned transfer of refugee from their own region to somewhere else in the world that can support them as being right for the most vulnerable, those who are for special medical needs, who are victims of torture. Historically, the US has led on this.

We haven't used many numbers interesting enough so far in this conversation, but just so people get a sense of it, there are twenty eight and a half million refugees and asylum seekers in the world today, and there are forty million internally displaced people. The UN says between five and eight percent should qualify as the most vulnerable should be resettled, and that is an area where the America historically has taken.

The average has been ninety thousand a year. Interesting. If I ask you which president admitted the most refugees, you probably know, do you know in ever in American? Yeah, there's a smile on my face because it's not the obvious, it's not the obvious most liberal one. Oh yeah, it's going to be Herbert Hoover. No. No, Reagan are admitted more two hundred thousand plus refugees in eighteen eighty two.

More refugees are admitted by role right. So there's no reason this has to be a quote unquote left wing thing. But he had a very clear view that people who are fleeing persecution, or in the case of Vietnamese refugees, people to whom America owed a debt it should be

allowed to come to America. I would argue it's an essential part of the policy package, but also the political package that refugee slots are opened up for refugees to come to countries like the US and make a success of their lives, and actually all the evidence is that they do. But their net taxpayers, they're not a security risk. Was they get vetted to the gills before they are allowed in. They actually we even did a study they pay back their car loans at a higher rate than

the American population. At the ultimate piece of Americana is to play back your car loss, your second car line. So that's the fourth part of the the back. So my argument is, this is the proposition that refugees, neet and displace people need be no more afflicted by poverty and inequality than the rest of the global population is a lot. If you do those four things, you'll get a long

way towards achieving the goal that we've said. Now, you're, of course continuing to drive distinction between refugees and economic migrants in many countries in the developed world that is not so clear a distinction. Why is it important to maintain It's a great point. I mean, it's it's important to maintain it in crude terms, and then we can come onto them subtleties and crude terms. There is a difference between the girl who is threatened with kidnap by

Bucoharam in Northeast Nigeria. The family who are threatened by sheer death squads in Iraq because they've worked had a relative who worked for the American diplomats or the military. There's a difference between them and somewhat people who are fleeing for their lives and someone who is poor but wants a better life. There's a difference. I would argue.

There's obviously a difference legally in international law, because the first group has rights in international law, above all, the right not to be sent back that the immigrant doesn't have. But I would argue there's also a moral difference. It's not that one is good and the other is bad. It's not. That's not the point I'm making. But the moral responsibility on a state that is receiving a refugee

is different from an asylum claim. It's different from the moral claim on a country that is receiving a would be immigrant. In between those two polar opposites, there are many shades of gray. And you can argue, well, you know, if someone's farm is no longer farmable because of climate change, are they forced from their home? You know someone who's someone's If there's famine in South Sudan and they flee, then you can see that there are gray areas because

the definition of a refugee is worth saying. That is someone who has a quote unquote a well founded fear of persecution on grounds of race, sex, politics, ethnicity that has been interpreted over the last fifty years by the courts to mean someone for whom it's not safe for them to be sent home. One should hold fast to that distinction and that definition for two reasons, one of which is principled and one of which is purely pragmatic.

The principal reason is that these are people who are in fear of their lives, and there should be a special quality of support for people who are in fear of their lives. The second pragmatic reason is that the politics of changing international law, on getting one hundred and ninety three countries to rewrite international law, A, it would never be achieved, and b if it was achieved, it would lead to a diminution of rights of refugees, which

is neither good for refugees nor for immigrants. So, notwithstanding all the gray areas and the difficulties, I think an immigration policy is different from a refugee policy, so we think that refugees can in the future suffer from poverty to no greater degree than non refugees. Putting on your hat as a political analyst, you were the foreign Minister

of the UK, how long will that take? We talked about some of the political obstacles, but being both optimistic and realistic, I mean, the problem is getting worse, not better. At the moment. The gap between needs and provision across the four indices or the four interventions that I've described,

that the gap is growing, not diminishing. And I don't want to just be a politician and pumped back the question you but a lot depends on America because America has historically been a leader both in refugee admissions and in humanitarian aid. And it's now we're talking about shutting the largest land border in the United States exactly. And also you're talking about cutting all aid to the northern triangle of countries on Juras, Guatemalo, and Neel Salvador that

are the source of people the border. So there's a double hit. It's not beyond the wit of politics. In the next twenty years to achieve that goal. We are committed globally. Nations have committing themselves to something called the Sustainable Development Goals that promises to eradicate extreme poverty by twenty thirty. And my point is that it's going well if you're if you're poor in India, the trends are in the right direction. But there are more extreme poor

in Nigeria today than there are in India. And that's because it's a conflict in fragile state or parts of it are. The concentration of poverty is going to be increasingly among those affected by conflict. Now, the truth is that there's a fifth element to this, which is what's

happening to diplomacy. If the crisis of diplomacy continues, if the US carries on its retreat from diplomacy in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, if Europe fails to become a major diplomatic power, if Russia stays on its Vanshiest course, then all of the treatment of the symptoms that I've described becomes that much more difficult. But we're dealing with more and more people. But I the optimist in me says that fact based policy, interest based policy, as well as values based policy still

has a majority. There are the rising levels of education mean that people around the world can increasingly have their voice. We're meeting on the day when President urdu Grand's increasingly one man rule in Turkey has been rolled back by mayoral elections in Anchor and in Istample. Actually, President one has been pretty good to the Syrian refugees, so when one's got to recognize that, I think the biggest challenge we face is that people think we can't solve this problem.

That's why it's important for me to do this podcast. The biggest mountain is not a policy mountain. It's not even the political mountain. It's the thought, oh my god, it's just so complicated. It will never be able to sort this out. Actually, if you think about the global population, the numbers that I gave you, twenty eight and a half million refugees forty million in terms of this place. Yes, that's together one in every one hundred and ten people

on the planet, but it's not that many. The number of if you take the refugee resettlement numbers, I mean we're talking, we're begging America please go back to ninety thousand refugees. Yeah, no, one's going to tell me. I mean, we've got fifty states in America, less than two thousand refugees per American state. No one's going to tell me that either California, but not even Wyoming is going to be overwhelmed by two thousand refugees arriving in one New

York City can settle a multiple of that. Exactly, there's no reason to succumb to this tyranny that says the problems to complex, the problems impossible. I think the Pope says there's a globalization of indifference. I say it's not indifference, but there's actually more global consciousness. And it's not apathy either. It's a sense of agency. And that's what hopefully our work around the world allows people to see that there. We call ourselves as Solutions based NGO. We're out there.

If you look at our social media, it's about solutions, it's not about suffering. And I think that we've got to break this tyranny that says the problems to complex, problems too big, we can't solve it. This is solvable, And I think listeners would like to know what they can do to help. Can you lift five things that individuals can do. I would love your listeners first to use their voice to stand up for the principle that

people who are fleeing for their lives deserve help. I would love your listeners to volunteer at a local refugee resettlement center of the International Rescue Committee runs twenty five ephases across the US. Other agencies need support. I would love your listeners who are employers to give refugees the

chance to work. And I would love your listeners to become supporters of the International Rescue Committee by visiting rescue dot org getting the information about the work we do, being armed with the facts about how to make a difference. And of course, since I've lived in New York for five years, I'm no longer ashamed of saying this. I hope they'll become financial supporters of US as well. You still have your accent, I still have my acts, and

I still have my patriotic British heart beating. David, thank you for joining us Unsolvable, and thank you for the work that you do. Thank you so much, Shacob. Isn't it confronting to hear just how few displace people the US actually takes in? I loved hearing how the IRC, this organization that Einstein founded, has grown up to be this voice of reason. I mean, who is going to

argue with Einstein? And a big takeaway that I got from listening to David was it refugees and displace people need pretty much the same things the rest of us do. Help to get back on our feet after a lass work that's paid a fair wage, and education for our children. I really love what he's got to say about cash. Basically, if somebody needs money, give them money. David is like, straight up, you need cash here, cash, which if you've ever been broke, you'll know that's the exactly right thing

to do. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefeller Foundation, with production by Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Mia LaBelle, Engineering by Jason Gambrell and the great folks at GSI Studios. Our theme music was composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks go out to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fane, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. I'm Mave Higgins. Now go Salvert