Why Refugee Resettlement Should Consider Changing Its Integration Policies Around Labour

As we think about labour market for integration for refugees, it is high time to begin thinking of them as workers who are essential to the very continuation of our economy and our way of life. Rather than merely, as the beneficiaries of our largesse.

For a long time now, the resettlement of refugees has been viewed as a humanitarian act; particularly in the US, where resettlement work is often carried out by groups affiliated with churches and other religious organizations. The integration of refugees into the labour market is viewed as a tool to promote neo-liberal values such as “dignity” and “self-sufficiency.” This labour is needed by the countries that are hosting them, and refugees are often placed in industries where they are tasked with jobs that the citizens of the host country shun. As they resettle in their new placements, refugees undergo stigmatization, a foundation upon which their labour is then devalued and racialized creating a labour niche that traps them in jobs that are sometimes life-threatening and almost always exploitative.

Refugees are thought of as surplus population as people contained in camps and expunged from the workings of capitalism. With that frame of reference, integrating them into the labour market and re-including them in capitalist circulation is a form of benevolence – a generous gift meant to re-endow them with self-sufficiency and therefore dignity. But what happens when we think of the insertion of the refugees into the labour market not as benevolence or humanitarianism but as a form of expropriation essential to the workings of capitalism itself? In what ways does the drive to quarantine refugees in low-wage jobs where English language skills are not required, act as a means of feeding the needs of capitalism rather than serving refugees themselves?

Where Does It Begin?

It can be argued that integrating refugees is not a humanitarian action but an indispensable part of the workings of capitalism that depends on their status as stigmatized workers to allow for the expropriation of unfree labour. My argument here is threefold:

1. When refugee resettlement agencies place refugees in precarious low-paying jobs, they are participating in what Marx called primitive accumulation.

2. This form of primitive accumulation is made possible by the intersection of the ideas of race and citizenship, which make refugees into stigmatized prohibited labour and confine them to a bounded racialized niche in the labour market.

3. This form of racial capitalism is essential to the capitalist economy as a whole which depends on racialized refugee labour to keep vital infrastructures functioning.

Refugee labour is not entirely free labour. The US resettlement system coerces labour from refugees, funneling them into a labour market niche that is marked by both ideologies of race and statelessness. Unlike in most European countries, the US resettlement system provides remarkably little help to newly arriving refugees.

In Germany, for example, resettled refugees are given state-subsidized housing for months or even years, along with mandatory language and civics courses; in the US, help is scanty. The US Department of State loans refugees money for plane tickets to the US but demands repayment in the first year. This means that refugees arrive already thousands of dollars in debt. Resettlement agencies rent apartments for them and furnish them with second-hand furniture, equipment etc. Every refugee receives a monthly stipend, intended to cover up to 90 days of rent and basic utilities. The amount received per refugee is expected to also cover the administrative cost that the resettlement agency incurs during the resettlement process. Most refugees are eligible for Medicaid (which is state-sponsored healthcare) and other state-sponsored social benefits but these are not enough to lift them out of poverty. The goal as outlined by the US Department of State is for refugees to be economically self-sufficient within three months of arrival.

For Resettlement Agencies and the refugees they serve, this enormous financial pressure creates a strong incentive to be placed in jobs as quickly as possible. These jobs are at the bottom of the economic pecking order e.g., food processing, cleaning hotel rooms, or doing assembly line work. The annual wage that most workers earn is below the official living wage while above the official poverty line, which disqualifies them from most federal aid while simultaneously not being enough to make ends meet.

Once refugees enter these entry-level jobs, they are often stuck. Shift work and a lack of transportation often preclude attending English classes at resettlement agencies, and because they work with co-ethnics many do not learn English on the job. Exiting these labour market niches is now nearly impossible. The cycle of low-wage work and the inability to gain new skills means that the job that welcomes them quickly becomes a prison.

Refugee labour niches are made by refugee resettlement agencies who pressure refugees to take low-wage dangerous jobs because they are in debt, and they are being made to be economically self-sufficient so quickly. Self-sufficiency is one of the primary aims of the Department of State-funded programme.

Refugees As Beneficiaries Of Our Largesse Versus Refugee Capitalism

We very often think of the need to integrate refugees into the labour market as a humanitarian imperative. Granting them dignity, self-sufficiency, choice, and other neoliberal virtues. Amongst scholars, refugee resettlement agencies, and host governments, integrating resettled refugees in host’s labour markets is often seen as crucial to successfully integrating them politically and socially. Getting jobs for refugees is supposed to reduce their reliance on local welfare systems, reduce local prejudice against them by proving their self-sufficiency, and by showing their contributions to the local economy.

Because this is seen as a politically winning argument, pro-resettlement activists increasingly define refugees not by their economic need or by their political and social vulnerability, but by their value to capitalists’ economies as workers and consumers. They aim to show that the cost of resettling them can be overcome by the economic value they produce. They argue that the economic value they produce is key in overcoming discrimination against them.

The ideologies that stigmatize refugees, the political status of statelessness that disempowers them, and their economic segregation into low-wage, high-risk work are thus foundational elements in their integration into market capitalism. These are integral elements of the capitalist system, not unfortunate anomalies. We therefore cannot think about capitalism and forced migration separately. Capitalism is a system that essentially depends on the social division of the population into citizens and non-citizens. It depends on the production of vulnerability and economic desperation among non-citizens. It depends on the stereotyping and vilification of forced migrants, their exposure to life-threatening risks, and the appropriation of their labour in difficult, dirty, underpaid jobs.

If capitalism is racial capitalism, it is also refugee capitalism. As we think about labour market for integration for refugees, it is high time to begin thinking of them as workers who are essential to the very continuation of our economy and our way of life. Rather than merely, as the beneficiaries of our largesse.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.