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We're going to have a celebration of UCLA migration sociology with a discussion of five recent books by UCLA PhD graduates. Those books are 11 papers how immigration policy affects romance and family by Laura Henriques through DeRose street vending, illegality and ethnic community in Los Angeles by rosio Salus football in the park, immigrants soccer and the creation of social ties my David tree, here there and elsewhere the making of immigrant identities in a globalized world by trusting chums and front of the house back of the house race and inequality in the lives of restaurant workers by Elie Wilson. So that's happening next week. But today, we are delighted to be joined by Professor Alexander Betts. He is professor of forced migration and International Affairs at the University of Oxford, and to discuss his book, The wealth of refugees, how displaced people can build economies. We're glad to welcome back to ccis, our commentator, Samuel buzzy, he is now associate professor of economics at the school for global policy and strategy here at UCSD. He's a former fellow grad Fellow at CCS. So welcome back, Sam. The order of business today is that we'll turn the program over to Professor bats for about 25 or 30 minutes to give us an overview, then we'll have commentary from Professor bazi. we'll kick it back to Professor bets for a quick reaction and then open up a group discussion. For the discussion period, I would invite you to use the q&a function at the bottom of your screen or simply raise your hand electronically. And you'll be welcomed into the panel to pose your question directly. So without further ado, please welcome Professor Betts take it away.

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Thank you very much, David. And thank you for the two centers at UCSD and UCLA. And thanks to Sam for being willing to act as discussing a book. I really wish I was in California with you. But I'm joining you from my office in Oxford, where the sun is setting on me as I speak. And the book is out in the US on the first of June. It is called the wealth of refugees, how displaced people can build economies. And it attempts as a book to weave a coherent narrative around a multi year interdisciplinary research project that looks broadly at the economic lives of refugees, and their impact on host communities the refugee economies program. And I want to say at the outset that that program has relied upon the work and input of a number of colleagues within the program, and around 300 research assistants who work with us in the communities we focus on mainly in East Africa. So I'm very grateful to them for all of the input that has gone into this work.

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The starting point for the work, and the starting point for the title of the book, The wealth of refugees, is an observation that playing on the the title of Adam Smith 1776 The Wealth of Nations in the 250 intervening years since Smith's treaties, economics has paid relatively little attention to people who fall outside the framework of the nation state as exiles, as displaced people, or otherwise. And so in a way, the starting point for this research program was to try to redress that to put refugees front and center in our thinking about the economy. But it's worth saying that this book is not just a work of economics, somewhat like Adam Smith's work. It's a work of political economy that attempts to be interdisciplinary, in its study of the economic life, reflecting that the contents covers four main parts. Part One, ethics were asked what is right, part two economics what works. Part Three, politics persuades part for policy, what next. And that flow is in a way and attempt to think through the sequencing of how one can do interdisciplinary, global challenge LED and politically engaged work to start by thinking about, even in a non ideal world, what the conception of the good looks like to look empirically at what we can understand about practices that have particular effect in the world. And then to think once those practices engage with politics, what are the conditions under which they can influence the behavior and actions of elites at particular levels of government in particular? And then to draw out of that, a series of policy implications? I think what unites all of this work is a focus on one particular central question, what are sustainable refugee policies? And what can they look like in a changeable, changing world? And the starting point then, is two simple premises. The first premise is that we live in an age of displacement What do I mean by that in the book? Well, I mean that we face a paradox of rising numbers needs on the one hand, and declining political will to protect and admit asylum seekers and refugees on the other. And what I suggest is that this is not a temporary fact, but it's likely to endure over time. For the structural reasons that underpin this paradox. We see rising numbers and growing needs, partly because of the growing number of chronically fragile states with state fragility in all its many forms, driving significant numbers of people from their homes, predominantly internally, but also across borders, we can add to that the impact of climate change, which is going to act as a multiplier on state fragility, and also increasingly drive people from their homes. We might also factor in as I do in the book, the legacies of COVID-19, particularly in the effects it will have on economies around the world, including some of the weakest economies. But on a structural level, I also suggest the decline in political will to support asylum is sadly also likely to endure, that we've seen particularly with a peak in 2016, a rise in populist nationalism, not just in Europe in the United States, but also in many other refugee hosting regions around the world. And partly that's linked to changes in international order. The shift towards multipolarity. The move away from a unipolar moment in the 1990s and early 2000s means the international liberal order faces significant challenges to retain its legitimacy. It also means that the power and influence of the United States and Europe, faced with decline, also faced challenges of internal polarization. And alongside that the international political economy is shifting such that disenfranchised communities faced with the offshoring and outsourcing of particularly labor intensive manufacturing, a shifting towards voting often for anti immigration parties. And so we face a real challenge of squaring that question of rising numbers of needs, with declining political will. But an additional premise to the work is that refugees also have skills and talents, they have the potential to contribute to their societies. And partly the political logic that says refugees are a threat or a burden is a false one that can and should be challenged.

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So I begin with the first part on ethics asking what is right? And the starting point for that is not ideal theory. Ethics thinks often about should ethical analysis should normative theory, should political theory be based on an idealized conception of the world? Or should it be based on a recognition of the political and other constraints we face when we make normative judgments about what is desirable. And indeed, in this book, I take that non ideal starting point. Now one of the challenges, of course, that we all have to grapple with is the question of what political constraints are fixed and which are changeable, which are changeable in the short term, and which may be changeable in the long term. And what I don't want to do in this book is foreclose the idea that narratives can change that discourse can change, and political constraints can be addressed. What I argue is that while this book takes what I describe as a migration realist perspective, taking many of the political constraints in the world as I find them, it doesn't have to be the starting point. People can start from an idealist framework, they can start with an activist framework, and they can seek to change. And what I suggest is that realistic conception is complimentary to more idealist conceptions that seek to push the boundaries of our normative frames, and they need to work together. I argue that when we think about sustainability, it needs to have three broad criteria, rights, politics and scale. On the rights level, a founding premise of what underlies sustainability is that the refugee system has to be able to provide protection assistance and solutions to refugees. It has to ensure that refugees and all displaced people have access to their full set of rights under international refugee law, and human rights law. But secondly, politics, we have to be able to reconcile that with support from local host communities, from national governments who host refugees from governments you offer resettlement places, and asylum and sanctuary to people who move long distances, but also from the international community. Without general political support, we rushed at risk the type of backlash and thresholds that we've seen in 2006 around the world, but we also see in local contacts from the Middle East to East Africa, where I work to increasingly parts of Latin America with the Venezuelan response. And the third challenge of sustainability is one of scale. We need a system that can address the increasing numbers and endure over time without risking backlash. So I think those are the criteria for sustainability. It's a real challenge to meet all of them simultaneously. But I think if you can meet those normatively, you have policies that are likely to be sustainable. And so identifying that ethics chapter three ideas of archetypes around the allocation mechanisms for distributing responsibility for refugees between states, broadly spontaneous arrival asylum, enabling people to have free movement to choose where they move to resettlement or alternative pathways, and equitable quota spraying work for distribution people around the world, and sanctuary in immediate neighboring states that neighbor conflict and crisis. And what I argue crucially is, country's refugee policies have to include all three of these, they play important and unique roles, and none of them can be perfect substitutes for the other. We need to recognize what each role plays. However, I suggest that the American majority of the world's refugees, the only option is going to be sanctuary in their immediate neighboring country, where 85% of the world's refugees currently get access to sanctuary. Of course, what we need to recognize is spontaneous arrival asylum needs to be preserved, both as a last resort for things like your class asylum if your circumstances change back home. And that principle that you need to sometimes be able to move onwards to access protection needs to be upheld. Alongside that, the option of resettlement is a very important one for people who are in protracted exile for long periods of time, or who have particular vulnerabilities, or simply as a strategic option to symbolically demonstrate that all countries have a shared responsibility. Alongside that alternative and complementary pathways should be available to people on the basis that they may have claims to move for Migration reasons, educational reasons for family reunification reasons. However, moving beyond that, the reality is the neighboring countries are the place where the majority of the world's refugees are, and will continue to be in the place where we need to look for sustainable solutions. So that's where the economics of this comes in, and the basis for our work in focusing on three East African countries. While it might seem particularly from a West Coast, United States perspective, obscure to begin with these countries, it's worth noting that when we embarked on the research in these countries, they hosted just ever so slightly more refugees than the whole of the European Union combined.

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And they were also of interest to us because of the variation in the regulatory frameworks. But one end of the spectrum, Uganda has provided refugees virtually since independence, with the right to work at a high level of freedom of movement. At the other end of the spectrum, Kenya has adopted an encampment policy restricting refugees movement and right to work. And Ethiopia has gradually moved from Uganda from a Kenya like position towards the Ugandan end of the spectrum, in 2019, passed a refugee proclamation allowing at least the de jure a right to work and freedom of movement for refugees, albeit that that hasn't yet been fully implemented, and isn't expected to be fully implemented in the near future. But it's moving along that trajectory. And that means the regulatory variation is a particular interest. And one of the reasons for our selection in each country crucially, we focus our work on the urban and rural camp and settlement contacts. We focus on the capital cities, and at least one camp or settlement in each country dollarado in Ethiopia, the Kakuma camps in Kenya, and the Napa Valley segment in Uganda. And we look at different nationalities in all countries, we focus on Somalis in two of the countries Uganda, and Kenya, we're also able to focus on Congolese and we often involve control nationalities, in both qualitative and quantitative research across each of those countries to enable some degree of comparison. A key pillar of our work has been the aspiration to be participatory, to sequence in depth qualitative research, prior to quantitative research. Now, of course, to enable meaningful comparison of our work, we've had commonality across the surveys that we've designed for each context, we've adjusted a little bit in each context. What we've also tried to do as part of that work in recruiting and training enumerators and refugees and research assistants from the refugee and host communities, from different age cohorts, from different genders, is ensure that we also disseminate the research back to those communities to the greatest extent possible. For example, our research in dollarado we translated into smartly and, and disseminated at the community level. So that's the premise of the way we worked. We built quite a wide ranging survey questionnaire quite deliberately, with a whole series of modules. The purpose for that was to analyze a whole series of correlations across the economic lives of refugees, to look at modules across identification, household structure networks, living standards, economic shocks, and household history, the regulatory environment, access to aid and services, subjective wellbeing, the relationship with others and aspirations, mental health and physical health. For instance, our module on networks unpacked to look at family networks, social protection, relationships in the place, they're living, credit and savings, new technologies, mobility, social participation, and past connections. And so all of that was to enable us to explore a range of correlations while having control variables.

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And what it's led to is the economic the refugee economies dataset. We have a sample size of over 16,000 refugees and host community members spread across the site and split across those nationalities. what's worth saying is something about a sample frame, what we've partly tried to do is to obviously randomize our sample, that hasn't always been possible in terms of random sampling. So often, what we've used is what's called two stage cluster sampling, where we've needed to build a sample frame from which to randomly sample. So where for instance, in a camp or settlement context, UNHCR has had a ready made sample frame through its registration data that's been up to date, we've been able to randomize from that, where that hasn't been available. We've had to use either satellite data or a community mapping process to map out community structures, blocks, or in the urban context, conurbations and then randomly sample using community leaders and research assistants who know the community as interlocutors as part of that mapping process. What I think is fairly unique about this dataset is its attempt to be multi country to look at different nationalities, and crucially to focus on both refugees and host communities, and urban areas, and camp context. And having a commonality across the survey data has allowed cross country and cross contextual comparison is a data set that we will aim to make publicly available and published on our website early in 2022, and one that we hope other scholars will also be able to make use of in our initial work, we've tried to look at three research questions which I touched upon in the early parts of the book. And there if you like the three questions that can tell us something about sustainability, firstly, on welfare issues when the refugees thrive, or only survive social cohesion when the refugee hosts reproducing hosts Get on. And thirdly, mobility when the refugees stay or go, when did they move between camps and urban areas or select between them? When did they move and relocate within their own country of asylum? And when did they cross the border regionally, or aspire to move internationally. And across all those questions, were able to look at the correlations in the data set, but also triangulate that within depth qualitative research to try to look at potential sources of causal relationships. I'll unpack each of those very briefly, what's worth saying is that our program team has a series of co authored working papers that will soon be published on each of these themes. And the book draws upon and summarizes them for a wider interdisciplinary and general public audience. I think one of the general findings, and this is putting it slightly crudely, is that in each context, there is a role for both education and the right an opportunity to engage in meaningful work. So we're able to show that education and employment play a key role in a series of welfare outcomes that we look at, we're able to show that they play a role in supporting improved perceptions of host communities towards refugees and vice versa. And we're able to show albeit very tentatively, that actually improving a series of development indicators, including potentially access to education, and the opportunity to work can have an impact on people's mobility choices, but not in a way is predicted by existing theory. So let me just unpack some of that very briefly. One of the things we are able to explore in looking at welfare outcomes is descriptive statistics across the countries relating to income employment, subjective well being, food security, health scores and mental health scores. But we're also able to look at the variables that correlate with those variants in outcome. And one of the findings is there is analogously to what development economists call the poverty trap. There is arguably a refugee trap when we compare refugees to the immediate host community members. And it's worth saying that all of our host community members are proximate host communities. We've selected them based on drawing a particular radius around the refugee communities so that they're nearby members of those host communities. We say that generally with some notable exceptions in some contexts, such as

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the reversal of income in the Turkana County area, where refugees are systematically better off than the tukana host community, we generally see that refugees are worse off across most of these indicators than the nearby host community, there is a hit as it were a trap that comes from being a refugee. Even as we begin to control for other variables. The stars indicate that the gaps between the comparison between refugees and host community as statistically significant at a 95% confidence interval. And so we see that sense of refugee trap. Now one of the things I tried to do in the book is begin to theorize why that might be the case by drawing upon two bodies of economic theory, new institutional economics, which focuses on the role of institutions play in people's economic lives, and identity economics that plays a role in thinking about their identities. So drawing upon the work of Douglas north on new institutional economics, one hypothesis would be that the different regulatory frameworks experienced by refugees compared to the host communities define their institutional structures that shape their economic lives in different ways. On identity during upon the work of Akerlof and Trenton and others, one might hypothesize that refugees experiences as refugees prior to going into exile shaped their economic decision making and behavior in different ways. For example, there's some work looking at the impact of trauma on people's time horizons, and potentially, therefore their economic decision making. Those are hypotheses that aren't explored, but might explain why we might think about refugees as in a distinctive economic position compared to their home states. What we also tried to do is look at some of the correlations that underlie these. So for instance, when we look at regressions on income, and control for a whole variety of variables, we see that certain variables are statistically significant. So for instance, gender matters, being female is systematically negatively correlated with income. Education matters. So particularly formal academic education makes a difference to income. Mental health is negatively correlated with income, and networks. For instance, having a relative in a western country make a significant difference to income. When we get to employment, we see many of the same variables. But interesting, we identify that vocational education is positively correlated and statistically significant in employment, whereas formal education is not. So the unpack some of those. We also explore social cohesion. And this is an area where we've also been doing some work recently commissioned by the World Bank, and UNHCR. There's a whole body of literature on so called contact theory, stemming from the work of Gordon allport. In the 1950s. With work exploring immigration in Europe and the United States, the role that contact between as the immigration literature puts it, quote, unquote, natives, and migrants plays in shaping mutual perception and mutual regard. And what we're able to do because we focus on both refugees and hosts in the data collection, is look at the perception of host communities towards refugees, the perception of refugees towards host communities. And we've also asked questions about their interactions. So for instance, how often do they have a business exchange a conversation, or share a meal, and to begin to look at correlations between, for instance, those interactions and their perceptions and mutual regard. What we find looking at that perception data descriptively is that generally, refugees are more welcome in the camp context than the urban context. proximate host communities in the camp context tend to be more favorable than those in urban areas. And that may well be based on our qualitative research because of the humanitarian infrastructure, creating jobs and opportunities more so than the urban context where we see more evidence of competition over economic resources. What we also find in both urban and comp contact is there seems to be far greater emphasis and salient of economic interactions in defining perceptions than security or even identity. And this is a contrary finding compared to much of the immigration literature in Europe and elsewhere on attitudes to immigration, which says that what drives attitudes to immigration, voting data In electoral decision making is more likely to be cultural and identity related factors, what we find is some evidence that economic factors are more likely to have an influence. When we look at the role of interactions we find in our last regressions, that interaction is positively correlated with positive perceptions from the host community, and vice versa. And the type of interactions that matter or economic interactions, notably around consumption, and employment relationships, when refugees are buying from a host community shop, or seeking employment in a host community, local farms or shops that's likely to create and stimulate positive interactions. Now, of course, one of the challenges with looking at contact theory is the challenge of endogeneity and reverse causality. So one of the things we've had to do also in our wider work is to develop an instrumental variable effect. So in order to try and look at whether, in fact, it might be perceptions that drive interaction, rather than interactions, driving perceptions, we've tried to explore for instance, whether rather than using the individual's interactions, we can use instead an instrumental variable of their neighbors, or their immediate family members interactions, or to use an instrumental variable of where they live, relative to refugees who live in spaces in Uganda, where we focus on a lot of that instrumental variable work alongside the host community.

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We also are able to look at questions of mobility and migration. One of the features of our research was the attempt to also introduce panel data. And so we went back and we did data collection in Kenya, two years later, for Nairobi, and three years later, for Kakuma, going back to exactly the same respondent groups that we've done a survey with in the first wave of data collection. And that allowed us to look at what's called attrition, the extent to which the respondent population had been reduced for a variety of reasons, including migration and mobility, and to try to look at what the attrition correlated with in the characteristics of that population. And alongside that attrition data, looking at who had moved on between waves of data collection, we were also able to look at our data on migration aspirations that we systematically collected. And that allowed us to make a basic descriptive observation about what rate annually, attrition takes place due to different types of migration. And so you see a basic summary of the type of annual movement we see away from Nairobi, and away from consumer by refugees. And one of the findings is in both contexts, migration to Europe is tiny. It's about naught point 1%. But movement of some kind is relatively high. It's about 8.7% per year in the Nairobi context and about 7.1% in the consumer context. But most of that movement is within Kenya. And where it is international, it tends to be to other African countries, notably across the border to Uganda. So what that does is provides some descriptive evidence that migration and mobility are complex, but they're not promote primarily International, and they're certainly not primarily South north. In the case of these refugee populations. What we're able to do, also quite tentatively, given the size of the data set that it only relates to one country, is correlate the data on those international movements, and correlate our data on migration aspirations, with development indicators. And that's partly to explore what's called the migration hump relationship, which you see in this graph, which has been developed over a long period of time, in relation to what are called migration transitions for many labor migration in

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the Americas and Europe. What hasn't really been systematically explored is the extent to which that relationship, which predicts development in indicators, like GDP per capita increase in the short term migration will increase up to what Michael Clemens and others have suggested as about $8,000 per capita, as a threshold for that tipping point, beyond which the demand and ability to migrate begins to decline. What hasn't been explored is how that maps onto refugee communities. And we find some indication that that relationship may not hold for refugee communities. That instead, we find some indication when we look at our aspiration data and actual migration data based on attrition, that actually when we increase I mean, development indicators, such as assets, such as employment, the increase in assets, the increase in employment in the short term may actually reduce the aspiration to migration, and even actual onward migration. those findings are quite tentative But it's interesting. And it means that for our data set, we don't find evidence in support the migration hub. What we do find is really interesting patterns of migration, both at the international level, and particularly at the national level, we're able to look at where people are moving on from procurement, recognizing that it's not exclusively to Nairobi, but it's a number of urban centres across Kenya, which are not often accounted for in the official data. And equally when people move from Nairobi, they disperse off into different parts of the country. But one particular movement from Nairobi, Nairobi, is often back to Garissa, or back to Mandara and potentially back across the border to Somalia thereafter, or to reside close to South Central Somalia. What we also do, though, beyond the data set, is to use a variety of methods, including impact evaluation methods to look at what we can learn from the models adopted by the three countries, and particularly their more innovative practices. We look at the Ugandan model. And the Ugandan model obviously provides the right to work and freedom of movement, and has been heralded as a really progressive source of inspiration. And so what we did was trying to compare the data we had on refugees outcomes in Uganda, particular Somalis and Congolese with a series of outcomes for Somali and Congolese refugees in Kenya, and try to control for other variables. In that comparison. It's an imperfect comparison, there are lots of confounding variables. But what we found was that refugees in Uganda experienced higher incomes, greater mobility, lower transaction costs on their economic activity, for instance, bribes, arrests, and more sustainable sources of employment in the sense of being more likely to be employed by other refugees, or host community members than by international institutions, for instance. And for instance, for higher incomes element a purchasing power parity controlling for other variables, we find that refugees are Congolese and Somali refugees. In Uganda. In the urban context, we look at the settlement contacts receive, on average 16% higher incomes. Despite being in a country that has lower GDP per capita, we look and do impact evaluations that were done in collaboration with the World Food Program, on a new settlement called the color by a settlement opened adjacent to the Kakuma camps in Kenya in 2016. And caliber a was intended to be a very pioneering model, in the sense that rather than creating a Kakuma five, a fifth computer cam, that would simply replicate in kind assistance, it would try to create an integrated settlement for both refugees and the host community and pilot around a market based interventions. The aspiration was refugees and hosted them alongside one another. And rather than in kind assistance, it can have a variety of forms of capital cash assistance, it could pilot new ideas such as dry land, agriculture,

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cash for shelter, as a model. And over time, the learning from that could be mainstreamed and reintegrated into tumor and elsewhere. And what was crucial to it was the support from the local host community and the local governor. What we found through that research through a series of waves of data collection is that, albeit that the aspirations of the model have changed over time, as an overall level, the model hasn't quickly achieved its objectives in terms of increasing so called self reliance for refugees, it aspired to increase refugees ability to live independently of aid, and meet then their needs independent evade, and it doesn't achieve that. So we find, for instance, that only 6% of a newly arrived South Sudanese refugees in Calla Bay are able to have an independent income generating activity two years after Kobe opened and we found that two years after it opened, only 2% said they were able to be independent of aid and assistance. But what we've also tried to do is a series of more granular impact evaluations on particular interventions, to look for instance, at the effect that the shift to cash based assistance has had. And there's a really interesting model of going from, in kind assistance to restricted cash assistance to unrestricted cash assistance. And generally we've been able to identify the positive effect it's had on choice but also identify some some challenging outcomes that are particularly unique to moving to

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partly unrestricted cash before restricted cash around debt. And indebtedness, and that tethering refugees to particular retailers in ways that have, in some ways challenging outcomes. The overall conclusion we get from those impact evaluations is that caliber A is a step in the right direction, that it moves towards a model that can and should be effective. But the challenge around self reliance is that as it continues to circulate hate money, it needs to move towards building the infrastructure that allows procurement Calla Bay to receive more inward investment and to begin to export to the wider national economy and the regional economy. We've also looked at the role of the private sector in a particular context dot amado, the story of Don Eduardo is of the largest ever private sector investment in a series of five refugee camps. Over the last 10 years, the IKEA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the furniture company, has invested over $100 million in those five camps, initially in humanitarian response and building infrastructure, but then around a particular model that we looked at in detail, so called cooperative model, where in areas such as agriculture, livestock value chain, energy and the environment, refugees and host communities have been in it, give them a chance to work alongside one another in income generating groups to receive training to receive basic inputs, and gradually build sustainable opportunities over time. What we found is that some of those have been successful, and some haven't. Those that have been successful and have been built on clear market linkages, they've had a basis of demand and supply, they've been connected to local value chains, and supply chains. And those that have struggled, have struggled because they lack those market linkages, and aren't adapted to the pre existing economic structures of those communities. What we also find like alibag, is that one of the challenges has been to build the Borderlands economy at a macro economic level, rather than simply focus on the micro economic interventions. So across those three studies, we learn things about what sustainable century can look like that it involves the right to work, that it seems to involve thinking about opportunities for piloting market based interventions. And it involves a role for the private sector to build a board and land economies. But then I move on to think about the politics in those three countries. And I try to ask what persuades and what's particularly interesting in these three countries, is to look at why it is Uganda has adopted its self reliance model, and maintained it over so many years. Why it is that Ethiopia adopted the 2019 refugee proclamation changing its legislation. And why it is that Kenya has a pluralistic framework on refugees, economic rights and opportunities in the sense that while at the digital a national level, it's very strict, to kind of county has adopted a different approach, and embraced a different approach to hosting and assisting refugees. And so based on political economy analysis, I look at the factors that have been involved in that. So for instance, in the Ugandan context, I go right back to independence in 1962. And look at how even in this newspaper article, taken from the late 1960s, the Ugandan press was proclaiming a triumph for Ugandan refugee policy, or will soon become self supporting. And the language in UNHCR around the time mirrored much of that language today of supporting self sufficiency for refugees trying to move from a humanitarian response to a development response. And what that research and Uganda showed was that many of the elements of the settlement policy, many of the elements of a self reliance policy have been present through Milton a boat as two regimes were built upon by Idi Amin, and a bit consolidated under you very much 70. What I find when I look across the countries qualitatively is that what matters is a three way relationship between the global national and the local levels. What we see in a lot of the literature on the politics and Political Economy of refugee rights, refugee admissions, explaining variation in those variables is a look at the global and the national level. Look at the relationship between donor countries and host countries. And a rightful recognition of the role su linkage plays the interdependence plays, the very often donors are interested in questions like migration control, regional security, that national host governments are often very interested in accessing development resources. But what I argue has been missing from that is a focus also on the role that the local level plays, the regions that host refugees and the political actors that are involved in that process. So to kind of county for instance, in the context of Kenya, the local authorities and local order in the context of the Somali region of Ethiopia, and indeed, regions like this ngaro where Napa Valley is Based in in Uganda, and what matters is very often ensuring that resources come to the national level and are channeled to the local levels, many legitimacy, but historically, often also through patronage networks that support the buy in to offer access to these economic rights. And so there is a very key role for donors in eliciting these rights. Historically, the where donors have provided a payoff to the national level that's been of a significant level to offer value to citizens and those elites, they've often been willing to adopt the right for refugees to work on a jury level. But for that the jury level to translate into the de facto implementation at a local level has relied upon benefits for district authorities for the local level, including those hosted communities.

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So in a way, the dependent variable I tried to explore is this variation in the willingness to provide socio economic rights, including the right to work. Why is it Uganda has been at one end of the spectrum, why Kenya has been at the other and why Ethiopia has started to move across those levels. And I can unpack that in more detail, if you like. And then I finally conclude with a sense of the policy landscape. What do we mean in three areas, each of which the book has a chapter on? one chapter looks at how we can extrapolate from the three countries that I look at in the book to building refugee economies? What does it look like to shift from a purely micro economic perspective to build borderland economies. And that builds on a recognition that creating economic opportunities for refugees has to be both urban, and it has to be rural. And it's a very different thing to create economic opportunity and economic inclusion in those two areas. In urban contexts, it's a lot about breaking down the barriers of refugees inclusion in the pre existing economy. In borderland areas, it's often about building those economies from scratch. And that relies upon building infrastructure, it arise upon attracting external inputs, it relies upon ensuring that this political will, but to move beyond where for instance, color by $1 lotto is we have to have that move to building borderland economies in a way where there's been relatively little academic thinking, until at least recently, when the World Bank began to pick this up. I also look at reflections beyond Africa, and draw upon my policy experiences of working with the governments of Jordan, and Colombia, and the way in which they've engaged with some of the ideas and research that we've done in East Africa and elsewhere, and reflect upon what's different in those particular regions. And finally, I also look at the impact of COVID-19. And how that shaped the argument of the book. Most of the book was complete prior to COVID-19. But I think one of the things that I tried to think about is what it means for our overall trajectory and where we're going. And so I draw secondarily upon the existing literature on the role of economic shocks, economic recessions, on the causes and consequences of displacement, and state responses to displacement, to make the claim that what we're likely to see as a result of economic legacy of COVID-19 is continued rising numbers, increasing needs and political will, that the drivers of displacement are predominantly conflict, authoritarian and fragile states. And the social science literature, correlates depressions and economic shocks with each of those things, that when it comes to consequence, it's we know from existing literature on the current downturn, but also earlier recessions like the 2008 2009 financial crisis, or financial crash that that exacerbates, has particular impact on displaced populations around Employment Assistance, access to remittances, and there's also likely to be an impact on public attitudes, travel, and human rights. So in the interest of time, and to conclude, what the book tries to show is we face rising numbers and declining well, that sustainable policies have to involve spontaneous arrival, asylum, resettlement, and other pathways and neighboring countries. But the predominant focus is going to continue to be on neighboring countries. In those countries, it will have to be on urban context and rural context. But in East Africa, most refugees are not in urban areas, they continue to be camp and settlement based.

44:23

It requires us to have an evidence based approach to focus on refugees and development that involves research from international organizations and think tanks as well as universities. There are clear limits that we highlight to self reliance limits that stem from particularly the micro economic focus of interventions, and its struggle to grow borderland regions to allow refugees to live independently of aid. So the shift that has to happen is partly what I argue from Little economics to big economics from the micro economic to the macro economic and this can't be removed divorce. From a focus on the politics and political economy of the right to work, and that politics I share in the book is a deeply ambiguous politics. It's a complex and messy politics, not often driven by pure altruism or regard for refugee protection. But it needs to be analyzed, understood in depth, and take into account not just the relationship between the global and the National, not just what happens in capital cities, but also the relationship between those host country capitals, and the local authorities that often have policies and approaches that deviate from those of the central government and the gap between the majority and that factor. And finally, one thought that the book also engages with is the idea of refugee governance. When we think about self reliance, it's not just about economic aspects, the book primarily focuses on, it's not just about work, it's not just about employment. It's also about social and political autonomy. And that relies upon us recognizing the great work that refugee led organizations do, and the opportunities to expand refugees voice and participation in camp and urban contexts, including in countries that often restrict refugees, political rights. So I realize I've given you the architecture of the book. And there's probably a lot of depth that I've had to live over quite quickly. But I'll leave it there so that we can hear from Sam and move to the conversation. And if you would like access to a copy of the book, when it comes out on the first of June in the US, there's an Oxford University Press promotion code that you can access that I think reduces it to about 20 US dollars, or a little less. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Professor Betts, Professor buzzy, can I share my screen? Perfect. Great.

46:54

So this, this is really a fantastic book, I learned a great deal from it. And it's also sort of the mark of a great book and piece of scholarship is one where you can often read in a lot of your own experiences and knowledge and expertise in very different contexts, and kind of see them in a new light. And so that was certainly the case. For me, having spent time working in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon many years ago, and also more recently, working on in a research setting on resettlement program in Indonesia, which I'll mention in a bit in a moment, and really sort of seeing a lot of those experiences in a new in a new light. And there were really three things that I found quite compelling and attractive about the book. And the first was that it, you know, it was truly interdisciplinary, not in sort of a way that, you know, is often bandied about in conversations among academics. It sort of really did dive in, to in a very, with a very diverse toolkit. And I found that quite quite, quite compelling and useful. And the survey work, you know, Alexander went through it very briefly. But it's really, really complex stuff working with these highly mobile populations. And what they did was really pull off some heroic, heroic effort there. And it's really great that the data will be in the public domain soon. And hopefully, lots of lots of folks will make continued use it. And then finally, the the sort of emphasis on practicality over idealism. And this is, you know, really important in a lot of contexts, but perhaps especially so here. And you know, there's really the the fact that there's no one size fits all recommendations when thinking about these about refugee policy. So I see that there's already a lot of questions in the q&a. And I want to be brief, but let me just hit on sort of three sets of comments. And the first is

49:02

kind of seeing some work that I've done in in the Indonesian context on a resettlement program there and in a new light and making some connections with some of the themes in the book here. So Indonesia had transmitted what was known as a trans migration program, one of the world's largest instil ongoing resettlement schemes. Most of the resettled populations are not refugees or forced migrants, in the sense of this, the populations here, but some of them were, but nevertheless, the program itself had a very sort of strong focus on sustainability and building agricultural communities across this very large and diverse country. And it was also very controversial for a lot of the reasons that sort of come up in this book. And in looking at sort of the deep dive into the Ugandan context. In the bucket, it became clear that there are some similarities with the self reliance model in Uganda the ways that the land That location mechanisms work. But there were really sort of three lessons that I sort of came to from, from my work in Indonesia that I thought were closely related here and perhaps could have been drawn out a bit more, and maybe something sort of food for future thought. And the first is that, you know, sustainability really depends a lot on economic and political forethought. And this kind of came out a lot in the book. And you know, one thing that seems to be important is giving in a camp based context giving natives, the local populations a stake in the success of the camp, and maybe even giving them a stake in the actual resources that are being brought to these these new, these newly newly built communities. And so there's examples of this in the Indonesian context giving land avail and offering land access to, to local populations, we saw this in the book and the cooperatives, some of the cooperatives in the Ethiopian context. And then, you know, another important dimension of sort of the viability and sustainability of these, of these resettlement schemes is the extent to which natives and, and, and refugees or migrants are mixing in these different contexts. And when in diversity in context, where there's a lot of diversity, one thing that I found is that it's very important to avoid sort of a context where you have a high degree of polarization between refugees from different origins. And, you know, but then having a lot of different groups in the same community could be okay, but having two very large groups could be potentially quite detrimental. And then the the sort of final point is thinking a bit about that, how to better match refugees to local conditions, both in terms of the people and the places. And so I'll just sort of flesh that out a little bit more. In thinking about this sort of matching of refugees to places and thinking about sort of how to potentially design more optimal assignments, when you have the flexibility to choose between different locations to allocate refugees. You know, we want to sort of think about the ways to create opportunities for more collaborative and less adversarial intergroup contact. And this involves thinking about cultural dimensions related to the ethnicity, the language, the religion of the refugees being resettled in the native populations and the places they're going, it involves thinking about the extent to which refugee skills are going to be a good fit for the local economic environment. So in an agricultural setting, this is about the sort of agroclimatic similarity of the refugees origins and the destinations that you're choosing from which you're choosing to settle them. And then thinking about, in particular, about this dimension of economic competition between the refugees and the local population, and thinking hard about the sort of substitutability versus complementarity of those skills, in chapter five in the book has some really nice sort of material for thinking about this. And there's actually like a lot of work happening recently by Alex title goyim, and co authors, who Alexander surely surely knows and references in the book, but thinking about some of the scope for some tools from mechanism design, and economics can can how those can be brought to bear to design better allocation systems that achieve greater sort of sustainability and ensure the well being of both refugees and the local populations in the places they're being settled. And then just a couple more points, the one is sort of thinking about enclaves and the extent to which we want sort of refugees to be kind of an isolated places on their own, as opposed to interspersed,

53:54

you know, among among local populations, when that sort of opportunity avails itself. And then for a long time, we've sort of thought that the there are potentially a lot of adverse consequences of enclaves. My one of my students at Boston University, Thomas tomago, ta had some recent work, showing that, in fact, enclaves in among Syrian refugees in Turkey, happened to actually be more conducive to building bridges with the local Turkish population and sort of removed my priors in a very big way about this, this sort of long standing, you know, bias that I think a lot of people in this in this space, have against against enclaves. And then finally, the, you know, this sort of theme comes up a lot and kind of direct and less direct ways in the book but thinking

54:45

about,

54:47

you know, how important it is to manage refugee expectations about the duration of support various types of support, because when he you know, when thinking about and planning for the future, having sort of clear Knowledge and as much certainty as possible about the extent of support from external resources, is going to really be important for the types of investments we make, not only in sort of our economic well being, but in the types of relationships that we might be building as refugees with, with the local population. And then finally, the sort of last comment just has to do with politics. And I think, you know, this, the book does a really great job here and sort of highlighting the four issues and sort of in a very practical way, I tend to agree that tradable sort of refugee quotas are even, you know, thinking more broadly about migration are great in theory, but practically very challenging. And, you know, the key is sort of how can we convince rich countries and the voters in rich countries to do more to support the neighboring countries, most of which are in the developing world that have to host the bulk of these refugees? And so what if, for example, I mean, maybe this is a crazy idea, but what if, instead of, you know, instead of these refugee quotas trading those What about trading workers, student visas for host country nationals in exchange for those countries hosting more refugees? Right, so one, one student visa, for Uganda, for example, to go to the Uganda to go to the US in the UK, for every 10 Congolese refugees, to Uganda. So thinking a bit about the those sort of possibilities in an international sort of trade trainability framework might be might be useful, a useful way to go, or a crazy

56:40

one? Not sure.

56:42

Okay, there's some other comments that, you know, for, for Alex, but let me just conclude and say, this is a great, great book, I encourage you all to read it. And I, you know, I hope we can get a lot of these insights into the hands of policymakers and sort of, you know, continue the building the academic work that's necessary to kind of think, in more innovative ways about about the best way forward for this, obviously, like first order global policy challenge in the years ahead. Thanks.

57:19

Okay, thank you very much. For that, Sam, we have a number of questions in the queue, and people would like to be recognized. But just to get us started, Alex, you know, I'm interested in how this texts fits into your broader contributions to the study of the political economy of refugees. And specifically, if all of the extensive empirical work that you've just shared has caused you to rethink in any way, some of the propositions that you made in your 2017 co authored book with Paul Collier.

57:50

Yeah, I mean, I think I think there are a series of things in this research that that are striking, and in many ways, quite sobering. I think I've been a longtime advocate for refugee self reliance and development based approaches for refugees. And I continue to be that, but I think partly what this reveals is how challenging it is to develop self reliance for refugees in in host countries in in low and middle income car, parts of the world. The data tells us that even in the most innovative contexts, dollarado and Catawba, most refugees are not able to live independently of aid. And that's very sobering because it says, Okay, if 85% of the world's refugees are in low and middle income countries, and around the world's most now moving to cities, but in in the African context, it's still very much about camps and settlements. How do we seriously take this idea of self reliance and make it work is going to require more investments, a conceptual rethinking, to make that work. So I found that to be one of the very sobering aspects of the economics. On the political side. I think one of the things that is is quite challenging is, is how murky and ambiguous the politics of all of this is that when you unpack it, it is about payoffs. And it's about who wins. And the elite politics, including around patronage, is deeply sobering. So I think in essence, it gives me a sense of, if we are to create a protection space that allows refugees to live purposeful and dignified lives as numbers grow, then the world needs to get its act together. And even if in Europe and North America, the position is that realistically most refugees are not going to be able to come to Europe or North America. There is still an awful lot that the rich world has to do to enable sanction. To fulfill its obligations to uphold refugee rights, including socio economic rights. So something very sobering about that, I think in relation to the 2017 book. So, I mean, the book in 2017, as we highlight in the preface is a co authored book with two authors that start from slightly different starting points. disciplinary but but also normative. And I think part of it was trying to think through given those different starting points. Could we agree with one another, given the polarization on this debate, given that there is so much disagreement, if two Oxford colleagues couldn't come to a consensus vision, what hope did we have to bridging political divides? And so aspects of that text I'm, I'm very happy with aspects of that text, I look back on and think I'm uneasy about that. So there are things that I reflect upon in this book, like the Jordan compact, where I say, hang on, we we really got behind it, we propose that we were part of what led to the Jordan compact, some parts of it have worked, like it's contributed to creating the right to work for refugees in Jordan, where it didn't previously exist. But some aspects of it were poorly designed, poorly implemented, and didn't work on an economic level. And so I tried to be quite open in reflecting about what we've learned, and it being different from those starting points. And I think also one of the the ways in which I think the 2017 book was characterized as potentially being a seeing responses in low and middle income countries as a substitute for refuge in the rich world. And what I've tried to do is, is make more clear that while I think the bulk of the response has to focus on where the majority of the world's refugees are, the role of spontaneous arrival and asylum and resettlement is indispensable. And if we're clear on what its purpose is, it also has to be part of the response. So I think that's my that's my fairly candid response on the trajectory since 2017. Thanks very much for your candor. We have a question from Hiroshi motomura. Hershey, are you with us? Yeah, here.

1:02:27

So thanks so much for this book, and we're looking forward to reading it. I got so much out of your 2017 book. But here's, here's a question for you. And I, if it turns out that you answered or addressed this question, in the eight minutes, when my internet was out in the middle of your presentation, just tell me that, then we'll move on. But if I take a step back from what your project is about, and this there's really two things, the two dimensions it's operating in, and want us to think about a definition of refugee and then and then the second is to think about, what what how we should think and what we should do. I'm really curious about the relationship between these two dimensions. So to put it more concretely, is some definition of refugee interior, it's to what we should do? Or is what we should do, does it circle back to shift the boundaries of the group that should they should be so treated? And I'm thinking about that in two different contexts? Is there potential? And I'm gonna ask him a series if you desire this, but do you foresee an impact of your work on how national laws define refugee and defined subsidiary protection? So that's one place where where this question, I think, has some practical traction. And another is that you spoke at one point about how refugees may be considered different is different from from, I assume, by application other migrants, for the purposes of assessing the effects of development initiatives on their migration, propensities and desires. And so there are two, there's some definition of refugee at work. And again, I'm curious about the relationship between how we define refugee and what implications that are for that definition of, of the work that you're doing to try to rethink and re assess what the approach to refugees should be.

1:04:27

That's a very sophisticated and very interesting question. I think my answer is that I think that the two questions are mutually constitutive, that the way we think about and define refugee shapes, how we think about what we should do in response. But also, what we think we should do probably defines a little bit how we define because of what we think is realistic to do, and therefore to think I think that weigh the implications, the mechanisms by which the definition shapes what we should think and do and numerous. One is the most crude level the boundedness. If we draw a clear distinction between refugees and other migrants, then it creates an impulse that what we do has an element of exclusion to it. That is, is for some people and not others. So it reifies and strengthens that boundary between refugees and other migrants on some level. I think the second mechanism is that it shapes the numbers. So once we say the boundaries of you has a human rights based entitlement to cross the border shifts from people facing individualized persecution to people fleeing generalized violence, to people fleeing the implications of climate change and environmental degradation to broader categories of vulnerable migrants, the numbers increase, and the numbers or potential numbers, influences the types of solutions we imagined, but also the politics of how we support those solutions. But I think this sort of third mechanism is it also shapes how integrated the responses can be, I suppose the the upside of moving towards the latter end of that spectrum. And having a very integrated approach and saying, people on the move or people on the move means that actually the responses, can we absorb them in urban areas? Do we need a regime? Do we need a distinctive institutional response? And is the challenge one that's created through having a distinctive institutional response? Or through? Or could it be partly resolved through not having that entrenched system? So just as an initial response, I think there's a there's a relationship between those two things. I think one of the things that I suppose the book does is try to look at how we can think about refugees as distinctive, as economic actors, is there grounds to think that irrespective of the legal definitions, people who are fleeing across borders are different from other people in those regions, who are otherwise similar or different from other migrants. And this is where, on a theoretical level, I use new institutional economics and economics of identity, to say that on an institutional level, the response to refugees creates differences in their economic lives, because it defines things like the right to work, freedom of movement, property rights, all the things that new institutional economics is concerned with an identity level experiences of trauma experiences of being an exile, that are not just specific to crossing a border, but are very specific to the displacement aspect, as well, may influence behavior. Those are just hypotheses that that could be tested. But it's that sense of economically and from an economic knowledge, sociology perspective, is this something distinctive about refugees, that shapes how we respond through a developmental framework. I think whether work thinks about this, from a legal perspective, is in touching upon some of my earlier work on what I've called survival migration. Now, that's a particular challenge in contexts like the Americas and Venezuela, the northern triangle. The international community struggled to define Venezuelans, it's used externally displaced Venezuelans to get it it's recognition that these are not voluntary migrants, but unwillingness to describe them as refugees, because the numbers are so great. And equally with the northern triangle, the complexity of the drivers means that people are reluctant to use the language of, of refugees for that entire population. And yet, there's that middle space of what I have described as survival migration. But I think that the definition of the population partly shapes, what we think is possible, because of numbers, but the type of interventions we prescribe, because of their separateness or otherwise, from the general population.

1:09:31

Yeah, I mean, just a comment or or not so much a follow up. But I think what's so exciting about what you're doing for me anyway, is that the definitions that we have of refugee in various contexts are so contested, so fraught, and lead to so many unintended consequences with regard to efforts to focus all the energy on the on particularly national law definition of refugee that I think what your your work does is it provides a way to separate out those questions and to provide more texture to the to in those national contexts that i think you know, really is where things need to go. So I repeat, I appreciate your answer.

1:10:12

Thank you.

1:10:14

So we have a number of questions in the chat. I apologize to anyone if I've misrepresented their their name mispronounce their name. But getting to what you just said, Alex, about this distinction between refugees and migrants. And sometimes it's not so clear. There's a very particular question on that from Slovenia, a Waco, who says, How do you differentiate between refugees and migrants when looking at Urban refugees, given that in places like Uganda, once one leaves the refugee camp, they lose the refugee status, and a majority of the migrants come from refugee sending countries?

1:10:49

It's a lovely question. And I think that's where the move from Camp to urban means that refugees lives become in many cases much more similar to other migrant populations. We see that in Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Kampala. But there are nevertheless clear distinctions that that refugee trap we describe, have a clear distinction across economic outcomes, welfare indicators for refugees, compared to very proximate host communities. Is is very clear. It's not that I mean, we're looking at registered refugees. And that's partly because we needed to define our population of focus, particularly in the quantitative research. And use registration as the basis on which is defined who was inside and outside. So the population we focus on, have not lost their refugee status in moving to cities. For the most part, they give up access to assistance, which is only available in in the camps, but they don't lose their status. The status is, is a key part of the recognition that they are refugees, albeit, but for many others who may be moved to cities and are not registered. They may come from the same countries as refugees. They may be refugees, but not recognized or not declared themselves to refugees. So there'll be in a different position. But there's no, there's no renouncing of refugee status because of the move from Kansas City. And we do still see that distinctiveness in development terms between the refugee population and the proximate host communities. One thing that's been very interesting from our work there is to compare the economic lives of urban refugees with camp based refugees in the same countries. And it's not, it's not axiomatically clear, that one is better than the other on all indicators. We find that urban refugees earn more and are more likely to be employed than camp and rural refugees. But they're not necessarily happier or healthier on subjective well being and mental and physical health camp refugees in our populations tend to be better off.

1:13:23

Here's the question from rock Hicks. You mentioned the importance of infrastructural investments in the context of cities and informal settlements. Could you speak to what infrastructure in particular housing loans,

1:13:33

etc? Yeah, it's it's different. I mean, when I was focusing on infrastructure when I was talking about borderland economies, one of the challenges is to move beyond circulating aid money. You have to produce productive capacity to be able to export things you produce, whether locally, regionally, nationally or globally through the digital economy. But to do that, you need certain things, roads, electricity, agriculture is going to thrive, you need access to predictable water, often through irrigation. And infrastructure is often very poorly invested in in remote border regions, particularly in Africa, in general. But it is, as we know, in general, crucial to macro economic development in these regions. So that was the level on which I was focusing. And in for instance, in Colorado, one of the IKEA Foundation's key investments has been to build irrigation where previously didn't exist to enable productive agriculture close to the refugee camps. But of course, there's a sort of lower level of infrastructure that's equally important, and the things you describe that are traditionally introduced by aid organizations wash relies upon boreholes. Housing is often provided through Stan dies to humanitarian housing. But there are different ways of doing that. So Keller Bay, which I mentioned, as introduced the first quote, unquote, cash for shelter program in a refugee camp context. And what that means is rather than taking the off the peg, off the shelf, designed for humanitarian organizations, refugees, refugee households are given a grant to go and commission local builders to build a design a house that they choose, and they can keep whatever money is left over. So it creates an economy around that kind of small scale infrastructure. But But what I was really focusing on was that larger infrastructure at the urban level, is a different challenge. As I said, it's not so much about building economies from scratch, it's more about breaking down the barriers to refugees participation in those pre existing economies. And that's things like access to financial inclusion of bank accounts, which are often unavailable to refugees, reducing sources of discrimination in labor markets, reducing the barriers created by in access to language training, or relevant vocational education. So it's a slightly different challenge. But what I was getting at was border region, large scale infrastructure.

1:16:21

You know, just to follow up on on her question, one of the exciting things about your study is that you include the host communities so equally in your survey research. Did you have any interesting evidence from that about the way that the hosts perceive co development through infrastructural development, for example, or what was working? What was not working? Yeah, it's

1:16:43

very interesting in it, it varies from case to case. So partly, this comes back to some of the questions around social cohesion. And what's evident is the idea of winners and losers. So host community members often will perceive refugees to be a benefit if they have refugees as employees or, or consumers for their businesses. But sometimes there can be competition for resources. So in the Ugandan context, access to land, and increasingly scarce land has introduced elements of competition. So when you see that competition over resources like land and agricultural resources, it can create sources of tension. Now, on the other hand, when we get to somewhere like Turkana county in Kenya, the presence of the humanitarian community is very important to the host, indigenous tukana. So there's a recognition that without the humanitarian community, there wouldn't be schools, there wouldn't be clinics and hospitals. And so basic public services provided by the international community, are seen as a positive. And that's one of the reasons why I think we see in camp and settlement contacts, a welcoming of the hosts by the host community of refugees, is not just the refugees as potential employees, potential consumers, is that the humanitarian infrastructure creates the jobs and the public services that otherwise wouldn't be available. Now we of course, find that where there's a linguistic or ethnic commonality between the refugee and host community, social cohesion is much more effective anyway. So there is a in the data. Very often, we find that Somali communities tend to do much better in context where they have a Somali language speaking host community like Southern Ethiopia. But I think in cities one of the challenges is we see much more concern about economic competition, and the around host perception, we've been able to create indexes that look at perception differently in areas like the economy, security, identity and culture. And we see that on the economy. The arrows of perception go in different directions in urban areas, compared to camps. So we see the economic perception is much more likely to be positive in the rural camp contact and much more likely to be negative in the urban context.

1:19:33

Okay, we have a question here from Samuel benja, who's identified himself as a refugee from Kenya, who's participated in a program at Oxford. For a better refugee economic sustainability. I hope refugee led organizations have a greater role to play. My question is why do the UN entities or international organizations not trust these refugee led organizations to give them direct funds to implement their projects?

1:20:01

Changing very slowly. This year, the Government of Canada has been the first bilateral donor to create a fund that can support refugee led organizations. A handful of foundations like the open society, foundations have started to give direct funding to a handful of refugee led organizations. UNHCR is starting to think about a partnership status for refugee led organizations. But historically, refugee led organizations have done great work, but not been recognized for that have not been able to access funding. The real block on funding is at the donor government level, that governments have very high fiduciary and audit and accounting standards. And find it very difficult to disperse small amounts of money to organizations that can't meet the audit criteria of those donors who want to be accountable to their citizens for the money received in in tax. And so it's the donors where the big block has been. The starting point of getting philanthropic and foundation money in creates an opportunity to pilot interventions that support refugee led organizations, and demonstrate the conditions under which they can be effective, and move from anecdote to evidence and show under what conditions are more effective, efficient and legitimate than, for instance, an international NGO provider or an international organization. And once we start to get that evidence, I think that might gradually bring the donor community on board, in part because they'll be motivated to back more efficient providers.

1:21:51

Okay, here's the question from Elizabeth Milligan. Her question is How would political persuasion towards a development approach work when refugee populations are in countries with repressive regimes, where governments might have political incentives to resist improving a lot of refugees in their care? For example, Irwin has used refugees in Turkey as leverage for demands on the EU. How would political persuasion in favor of this approach work in that type of situation?

1:22:18

Well, I already said the politics of this is very murky, and the relationship between democracy and willingness to protect refugees is not an unambiguously positive relationship. The three countries in the world that probably have the best record in terms of numbers of refugees hosted, and the quality of rights offered to those refugees are probably Turkey, Uganda, and Colombia. And none of those three countries is a perfect substantive democracy. And when we look sort of more broadly, at data on the quality of democracy, and around admissions and rights granted to refugees, we would probably see a negative relationship, that democracies are more likely through a mechanism of majority arianism and accountability to citizens for the allocation of scarce resources to exclude refugees from key rights like the right to work and freedom of movement. And semi authoritarian governments are often those that are insulated from the preferences of their own citizens, but incentivized to look outwards to the international donor community to provide resources. And so word of one has hosted more refugees than than any other government in the world. Turkey has an urgent way and in exchange has taken significant incentives from the European Union. To do that, similarly, Uganda, the long standing country of allowing refugees self reliance, freedom of movement, right to work has done so because it has been extremely good for the government to extract donor resources that had not exclusively gone to support refugees, but it also supported elite networks, patronage networks, and host communities. Similarly, Colombia has, I think, the best record in Latin America for its response to Venezuelan refugees, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue that it has a perfect record on human rights or democracy.

1:24:41

So we have just about, you know, five more minutes. Sam, do you want to get back in on this conversation? Um,

1:24:50

I'm happy to sort of chime in if there any particular things that you know, you think I might have value to add on, but I Yeah, I think the comments, and the questions have been, you know, have been been quite good. And I think yeah, this. The one other thing I might add is on this last point of this trade off between rights and numbers, I think it goes well beyond questions about refugees. And, you know, just in thinking about the future of labor, mobility and, and, and global, the well being of global populations, I think, you know, we need to be a little more open to the possibility of, of leaning more on giving people the right to move across international borders for work, even if that means the only way to do that is by limiting some of the rights and the countries that they're granted the opportunity to work in. You know, I know, this is a controversial issue that we won't resolve in a couple of minutes. But I think it's something that I feel needs needs more conversation. And the refugee context is obviously an extreme case of that part of that conversation. But one that, you know, I think is in the book, how that sort of crystallized some of the these other sort of bigger issues about other types of migration from the east, so,

1:26:16

but a few years ago, in the speaker series, we had Martin Roos, talking about his book on the rights versus numbers trade off. And I think he was talking about labor migration, quite specifically. And I think, if anything, that discussion of refugee movement, fits his argument much better than the labor migration. Yeah. You know, I was interested salmon in your suggestion that, you know, perhaps there should be some kind of mechanism for allowing greater mobility from mass hosting states. In return for hosting refugees, it seems like in effect, that's what the European Union tries to do with its various mobility compacts against it. And in hearing Alex's reaction to that suggestion.

1:27:00

Yeah, I think that's right. I think what I really enjoyed in your comments, Sam, was that the shift towards mechanism design and design thinking in this space, and Alex typing volume, and others have started thinking about that. It's not something I do in my own work. But I think it's particularly exciting to sort of stretch the boundaries of how we think about these questions. And to kind of look at the avenues into policy that can, can be Pareto improving, that can create those kind of Win Win opportunities. I think the thing that often leaves refugee rights advocates uncomfortable, is the recognition that the existing structure is already implicitly based on a trade. It's already based on specialization, comparative advantage and exchange. And the reality of how it works in simple terms is that rich countries, for the most part, want to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers and refugees who come to their territory, and have a general sense of global order. low and middle income countries that neighbor, unstable countries want to get access to development aid. And they trade based on those linked interests in migration on the one side, and development on the other. And organizations like UNHCR and the International System of brokers for those bargains. And they insofar as they achieve those bargains, they get resources from the donors, and they get access to territory from the host countries, and they can operate and deliver that systems. And so I think the once we once we recognize that that exchange logic is an implicit part of how it functions, then I think we can say, Well, how can we begin to improve that? Once we also recognize and I think others are uncomfortable with the idea of exchange, or the language of commodification in particular, around resettlement, I think we can start to recognize that practically, pilots around resettlement matching have the potential to increase resettlement numbers. I mean, my own country's embarking on a pilot of resettling refugee health workers from the Middle East, in the UK, and in the context of COVID-19, that has resonance has the potential to open doors that would otherwise be closed. And so I think that avenue of research and applying some of the ideas you've explored in other aspects of your work is is very relevant. It just enters a space where the the normative starting point of many scholars in this area he gets perhaps irrationally uncomfortable about the introduction of some of those market based mechanisms? Yeah,

1:30:06

no, I appreciate that. And it's something that I mean, certainly, you know, not to speak for all economists but we we need to do a better job of understanding that that perspective, when you know, when bringing our ideas to these debates.

1:30:24

Well, unfortunately, I think that is all the time we have for now. And of course, it's already nighttime in the UK. So thanks very much to to Alex for joining us, I hope that we'll be able to welcome you in person to California when you get out your your next book, which they seem to come out every two years or so. So we won't have to wait very long. Thank you to Sam for your comments to everyone else for your participation. please do join us next week as we discussed these five great new books from recent graduates of the UCLA sociology PhD program with a focus on international migration. And wish everyone happy weekend. Thank you