Migrants aren’t widgets

An American Nobel economist’s pressing advice for Europe.

The Mediterranean isn’t an effective barrier between Europe and refugee crises in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Europe could turn this challenge into a manageable opportunity to protect refugee lives as well as its own economy. But European countries must first agree on a strategy recognizing that refugees are not widgets to be distributed or warehoused. They are people trying to make choices in their best interest. Those decisions are often a matter of life and death.

August began with news of Abdul Rahman Haroun, the Sudanese man who, after having already risked his life to reach Europe by boat, put his life in peril again, coming within yards of successfully crossing the “Chunnel” on foot to reach England and claim asylum before being arrested. Then, on August 27, 71 men, women and children, at least some of whom were Syrian, were found dead in a truck near Vienna. These refugees also had already somehow safely reached Europe, but boarded a smuggler’s truck to make it to another European destination. Instead, they suffocated and perished.

These stories are shocking but not surprising. The developing world hosts over 80 percent of asylum seekers, but a growing number are making their way to industrialized countries. These refugees are trying to get to specific countries within Europe. Sweden, for example, received 81,325 asylum seekers in 2014, or 8,365 refugees per one million Swedes. In contrast, while Greece had 34,422 boat arrivals in 2014, only 9,435 applied for asylum in Greece. That’s only 859 per one million Greeks.

Greece and Italy have weak economies and weaker asylum systems. So refugees continue to risk their lives and conceal their identities until arriving at a chosen destination, which means some European countries are getting far more refugee arrivals than others. In July, the Luxembourg presidency of the EU tried to get member states to pledge to relocate 40,000 refugees throughout Europe. While that would be a small fraction of asylum seekers, governments agreed to take in only 32,256 “redistributed” refugees.

Refugee relocation is what economists call a matching problem, in the sense that different refugees will thrive differently in different countries. Determining who should go where, and not just how many go to each country, should be a major goal of relocation policy.

Far more refugees will want to go to countries with thriving economies than those countries have been willing to take. But economic strength isn’t the only factor.

Mark Hetfield, CEO of HIAS, the refugee organization that helped resettle my wife, Emilie, when her family fled from Egypt, told me that “refugees go and integrate where they have family, where they have community, or where they think they can support themselves — in that order.”

The issue matters not just because we want refugees to do well, but because it’s hard to keep them where they don’t want to be. In the U.S., where refugees may relocate at will, this is especially clear.

As Hetfield says, “Many Somali refugees initially settled around the country subsequently migrated to Lewiston, Maine. Lewiston has a weak economy but an established Somali community. Consequently, efforts to resettle these refugees elsewhere in the U.S. were less effective than they could have been. Their preferences should have been taken into account from the start.”

In Europe, rules are less clear. Asylees in one EU country must often wait years before they can work in other EU countries. But even if they could effectively be prevented from relocating (and can they be?), preventing refugees from acting in their own best interest is not in Europe’s best interest either. Shouldn’t the goal be to integrate refugees into the economy where they can be the most productive? If that is a goal, the information and preferences of the refugees themselves about where they could thrive shouldn’t be ignored.

My wife, Emilie, is living proof that refugees, when resettled in a conducive environment, can be a boon to their adoptive countries. After getting her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, Emilie helped pioneer a new discipline, cognitive engineering, focused on understanding the kinds of information that people need to solve the problems they face and making that information available to them. This work helps make many complicated systems safer. Others like her would gladly add their own contributions if given the chance.

We have learned in America that refugees can be assets, but that we could do a better job of integrating them into our economy. It will be hard for that to happen in Europe until there is a shared vision for an orderly process to allow refugees to go where they know they will do best.

Alvin Roth, who shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on matching and market design, is a professor at Stanford University, and author of “Who Gets What and Why: The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design” (HarperCollins, 2015).

Market Design

Thursday, September 3, 2015