Young Syrian refugees in the UK: a two-tier system of international protection?

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences of young Syrian refugees in the UK. It looks at how settlement plays out for two ‘types’ of Syrian refugees, those resettled by the UK Government and those who claim asylum in the UK. Drawing on new empirical data from 484 Syrian refugees in the UK, the article compares and contrasts the two groups’ access to educational provisions, the labour market and general support mechanisms that should, in principle, be equally available to all refugees. This reveals the scale and consequences of the existing two-tier system of international protection based entirely on how refugees come to be in the UK, rather than any objective analysis of their reason for flight. In doing so, the article seeks to contribute to debates about the process and implications of how host states label people, in this case by de facto treating resettled Syrians as the ‘good’ refugees, while those who arrive of their own volition, regardless of their needs, are viewed as more problematic.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee settlement
• categorisation
• bounding
• Syrian
• asylum
• integration

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the funders for their generous support, as well as to our Co-Investigators Ben Colburn, Lesley Doyle, Andy Furlong and Kristin Hermannsson. We would like to extent our gratitude to fieldworkers, research partners and participants in this research, as well as to the journal’s anonymous reviewers, Gary Christie and Sebastian Popa, for their constructive feedback and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In 2011, the provision of free ESOL courses in England was tied to the condition of ‘actively seeking work’, henceforth, excluding asylum seekers, though it remains in other parts of the UK.

2 In the absence of a universal definition of 'youth’ across organisations and to obviate the need for parental consent, we adapt the UN Habitat’s (2016) 15–32 age range to focus on older youth from 18 to 32.

3 Our analysis indicates that there are no significant differences in results between the face-to-face and online interviews. The absence of an interviewer in the latter was compensated by more detailed written instructions, where appropriate. An identical questionnaire was administered in both cases, available in both Arabic and in English, and including closed and some open questions. Each interview on average lasted 45 min. The questionnaire is available on our project site [omitted for anonymous review].

4 From our sample, 93 respondents (19%) did not provide us with information regarding their mode of access to the UK or were not recognised as refugees at the time of the survey and are therefore excluded from the analysis. It is also worth noting that only 10 AR respondents (5%) in our sample were in the UK before the eruption of the war in Syria in 2011.

5 The second one was provision of cultural awareness training courses, from which 23% of RR refugees reported that they have benefitted compared to 10% of AR refugees.

6 A possible model of skills auditing can be found at the ‘UK National Recognition Information Service’ or the ‘European Qualifications Passport for Refugees’.

Additional information

Funding

The project which informs this article is entitled “Building Futures: Aspirations of Syrian Youth Refugees and Host Population Responses in Lebanon, Greece and the UK”, jointly funded through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (award reference: ES/P005179/1). Please see www.RefugeePolitics.net.