Refugee crisisEurope’s failed response to refugee crisis risks fraying local labor markets

By Nikos Passas and Nicolas Giannakopoulos

Published 22 January 2016

As this crisis continues to unfold and countries in Europe reevaluate how to manage its challenges, it is essential that we take time to appreciate the broader context of the problem and some of the issues that have been neglected, specifically the negative effects on labor markets. While the plight of the refugees is desperate, the consequences of the crisis are also dire for some of the most significant achievements of European integration: open borders, social welfare, and human rights. They have also affected the functioning of European labor markets in ways that have been poorly understood. Understanding these effects is important because welfare, peace, human rights, and open borders all depend on the capacity of governments to generate wealth through work and production.

Co-authors Nicolas Giannakopoulos (l.) and Nikos Passas // Source: HSNW composite of images from The Conversation

Europe’s refugee crisis neither began nor ended when the body of a Kurdish boy was found washed up on a Turkish beach in September.

In all, he was just one of 3,770 people who lost their lives in 2015 as over a million people crossed into Europe fleeing wars in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Some are forecasting that many millions more will try their luck in 2016 and beyond, as the conflicts prompting this exodus offer no end in sight.

Doctors Without Borders this week called the response of European governments a “catastrophic failure,” pointedly summing up how countries’ “capricious” policies of opening and closing borders created “senseless stress and hazardous conditions of passage.”

As this crisis continues to unfold and countries in Europe reevaluate how to manage its challenges, it is essential that we take time to appreciate the broader context of the problem and some of the issues that have been neglected, specifically the negative effects on labor markets.

As specialized researchers in the fields of illicit flows, cross-border crime, corruption and development, our objective was to highlight how mismanaging the integration of refugees into local labor markets will not only harm the migrant themselves but could also imperil the system that has allowed our wealth and rights to flourish since the Second World War.

Abandoning one’s land
A lot has been written about the causes of this exodus out of the Middle East, but it is worth remembering that the migrants are generally fleeing disasters caused or prolonged by Western policies. They are not leaving their homes by choice, despite what some U.S. and European politicians claim.

People do not massively abandon their land, possessions and loved ones for a dangerous and uncertain passage to a foreign country that may or may not be welcoming newcomers for no good reason.

And the causes go far deeper than the civil war in Syria. Sociopolitical, economic and power asymmetries, such as lack of security and stability, inequalities and threats to livelihoods, underlie the massive flight from misery, starvation, massacres and insecurity that the West has either caused or done little to alleviate.