The Myth of the Borderless World: Refugees and Repatriation Policy

Abstract

This essay explores the impact of the end of the Cold War on the counter-refugee-crisis policies of the United Nations and its strongest member states. I argue that during the Cold War, state interests were subordinated to the refugee interests for two reasons. First, refugees were few in number and tended to be educated, skilled, and informed (valuable). Second, the WWII experience of the Holocaust in Europe led to the institutionalization of concern for the fate of persecuted groups at the expense of state interests. After the end of the Cold War, however, a number of the Soviet Union's allies and successor states began to fail, and these state failures, combined with unprecedented access to information about living conditions abroad, led to refugee flows that impacted powerful states. Whereas the preferred counter-refugee crisis policy during the Cold War was resettlement, after the Cold War it shifted to repatriation: voluntary repatriation in the best cases, and forced repatriation in the worst. The essay's primary focus is an assessment of the consequences of this policy shift from resettlement to repatriation of refugees. After introducing a number of important empirical findings regarding the frequency and scale of contemporary refugee crises, I conclude that although in some cases the policy of supporting voluntary repatriation is a good thing, it may have the unintended consequence of involuntary or forced repatriations as receiving states feel little compulsion to resettle these refugees within their borders.

Keywords:

• Civil War
• refugee
• repatriation
• resettlement
• United Nations

Notes

¹The average U.S. aid per capita from 1981 to 1997 was $1.18.

²This definition is thus the flip-side of Weber's famous declaration that the state is the organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. When that monopoly is not achieved or is contested, we get a condition of failure, which can only be said to end when such a monopoly is established or reestablished.

³There are four types of UNHCR assistance: emergency relief operations, long-term assistance and maintenance, local settlement, and repatriation and reintegration operations. This paper is concerned largely with the fourth (UNHCR, 1995, p. 257).

⁴Ugandan refugees in Sudan and Zaire in the late 1980s faced such a difficult situation in terms of food and medicine when aid was cut off to the camps that many refugees thought they would be better off in Uganda. “Volunteering” to repatriate was focused on the negative condition of the host country rather than some positive inducement to return home (Crisp, 1986).

⁵One can imagine situations—rare—in which simple ignorance of conditions leads a well-meaning third party or an individual refugee to voluntarily seek repatriation into conditions which were objectively unsafe on either dimension.

⁶“No contracting state shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

⁷However, Tanzania failed to give the refugees “due process,” which is guaranteed under Article 32.

⁸Lischer has done some of the most comprehensive work on the subject, but she does not provide a sense of the general distribution of the characteristics of camps.

⁹Draper shows how the Holocaust led to the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions by the mid-1970s and how, by creating special exemptions for “national liberation movements” from physical coercion, the Protocols significantly weakened the prohibition against external intervention into another state's sovereign affairs by external actors.

¹⁰This is hardly to suggest that states touched by the Holocaust will welcome refugees with open arms. Rather, we should expect grudging acceptance of asylum-seekers until such time as the conditions that led to flight can be remedied. Alternately, host countries may facilitate the resettlement refugees in a third country by means of economic bribery or coercion.

¹¹This is not to say that India's policy has been cost free. Pakistan's bitterness over India's actions in Bangladesh, for example, colors every aspect of its current relationship.

¹²Based on an estimated world population of 6.379 billion. (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/xx.html)

¹³Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are not considered refugees simply because they have not crossed internationally recognized borders, and as a consequence are not recognized under international law. In response to the increasing number of IDPs and other peoples in need who have not crossed borders, the UNHCR created the category “persons of concern.” For a framework for formally integrating IDPs within UNHCR's mandate see Adelman, 2001 and United Nations, 1999.

^{14 27}Data obtained from USCR's annual World Refugee Survey, 1980 to 2004. There are two main sources for refugee statistics: the UNHCR and the USCR. The USCR's numbers are used here because the USCR includes the Palestinians in their figures (they fall outside of UNHCR's mandate and under the mandate of the UNRWA) and the exclusion of refugees who settled in more developed countries (e.g., the US, Canada and western Europe) and are thus presumably no longer in need of protection or assistance. For a discussion of the politics of numbers see Crisp, 1999.

^{15 30}This figure was calculated by dividing the total number of refugees by the number of civil wars that were ongoing or begun in a given year. The number of civil wars is based on data compiled by the author and is available on request.

¹⁶As does the number of internally displaced persons as referenced above.

¹⁷Since 1999, the European Union has been attempting to harmonize its asylum laws and practices. Although promising, fears exist, including among UNHCR Ruud Lubbers, that this new system may result in a even more closed and exclusive system that allows fewer refugees to gain asylum and resettlement (cf. UNHCR Press Release, 2005). I thank the anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

¹⁸Although Chimni does quote a UN official who admits that most repatriations take place under duress (Chimni, 1999).

¹⁹Henceforth the abbreviation UN will stand for the organization itself, as well as the interests and resources of its most powerful members, namely, member states of the OECD.

²⁰The (former) United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogato declared 1992 as the first year of a decade for voluntary repatriation and that the UNHCR was going to commit itself to facilitating repatriation. Although repatriation had always constituted one of three possible solutions (the other two being local integration and third-country resettlement), Ogato and others presented it as the best, most durable solution at the time.

²¹Although the question of the relative autonomy of the UN vis-à-vis states is an important one it is beyond the scope of this paper. Loescher argues that although states have historically constrained the UNHCR's ability to act, it nevertheless did act autonomously in some instances.

²²There is recognition that much research is needed on repatriation and there has been an effort to increase it, notably questions related to how refugees adapt once they are repatriated. An exception is Stein, 1997. Nonetheless the literature remains sparse, especially in the general, more theoretical sense. A recent volume that addresses repatriation devotes 11 of 13 chapters to historical cases, leaving theory and overview chapters to only two (Black & Koser, 1999). Also see Allen and Morsink, 1989, especially chapter 2; Loescher and Monahan, 1989, especially chapters 12 and 13; and Rogge and Akol, 1989.

²³Refugees returning to reclaim homes in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 faced persecution, violence, and in some cases, death, especially in those areas where they constituted a minority. In another example, in 1997, 126 Burundian refugees accused of conducting armed activity in Tanzania were forcibly repatriated to Burundi in 1997; 124 of them were shot by the Burundian army (Human Rights Watch, 1999, p. 10).

²⁴These examples coincide with Lischer's (three categorical types of refugees: “situational,” “states-in-exile,” and “persecuted.”

²⁵The Great Lakes region of Africa is just one example where the flood and flow of refugees has seriously eroded domestic and interstate stability. The destabilizing effects of refugees were also heralded when ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo to neighboring Macedonia. Tensions were high, but violence and massive disruption were averted in this case, largely because of the presence of American troops on the ground.

²⁶The UN has also shifted focus from the refugees and host countries to the country of origin. This is an extremely important and far-reaching shift as it indicated that UNHCR and the UN will be proactive in attempting to stop refugee flows through development (referred to as the “aid to development continuum”) rather than reactive in dealing with them only once refugees cross borders.

²⁷The original definition of refugees was linked to a particular time and place, namely Europe and those individuals who were refugees prior to 1951 (about 1.25 million). There were an estimated 15 million worldwide. The definition was amended in 1967 to end the time and space limitations in delayed recognition that refugees were a global problem.

²⁸Paradoxically, once Europe's DPs were settled (c. 1953) the attention of the UNHCR was shifted almost permanently to so-called “Third World” refugee crises. One may easily—and perhaps too cynically—speculate that this bias in the UNHCR reflected the biases of its key members on the Security Council, who established the working principle that combatants in the Cold War would be responsible for managing refugees within conflict zones (e.g., Indochina, Korea) or areas of key strategic interest, while the remainder of cases could be referred to the UNHCR, which could be trusted—albeit with far fewer real resources—to manage “Third World” refugee crises on its own.

²⁹Large masses of Irish, Italians, and other groups fleeing harsh political and economic conditions in Europe had been welcomed in the U.S. in earlier times. However, two key conditions facilitating this immigration policy have changed. In the 19^th century, the U.S. was a country with an overabundance of land. When the frontier closed at the turn of the century, liberal U.S. immigration policy ended. Second, the economy of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was still largely muscle-based: that is, agriculture and industry could still make use of low-skilled workers. In the postwar economy and especially since the end of the Cold War, the demand for low-skilled workers is lower. For a history of the economics and the character of U.S. immigrants, see Borjas, 2001.

³⁰See “Holocaust factor” section below.

³¹Important U.S. examples of refugees as ‘locusts’ include the Cuban boat lift of 1987, and the Haitian crisis of 1994. The ongoing problem and tension over illegal immigration in California (e.g., Proposition 203) Texas, Arizona, and Florida only serve to underline the negative impact states anticipate from refugees, political or economic.

³²Andersen, section IV.

³³USCR lists the top 20 donor countries each year to three international agencies that handle refugees: United Nations Commission for Refugees, International Organization for Migration and Concern, and United Nations Relief and Works Act (dedicated to the Palestinians in the Middle East).