(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Exploitation embedded in the business model of refugee support [1] [] Date: 2025-10 In 2013, I conducted ethnographic research with refugees living in Uganda whose experiences demonstrated these points. In 2007, Uganda implemented a “self-reliance strategy” to address the needs of refugees. This essentially meant that humanitarian aid tapered off after refugees were provided with the resources to establish sustainable livelihoods. One of the problems with the model was that it was very narrowly conceived. It generally required refugees to live in a designated settlement, and limited their livelihood options to small agricultural businesses. But not every refugee wants to farm. I worked with refugees in Kampala, the capital city, who felt unsafe living amongst other refugees in the settlements. But they didn’t have sufficient resources to establish their own businesses in the city. So they became part of the urban, informal labour force in order to survive. One of the people I met worked in construction, and more than once returned home with visible injuries. He explained that, as a Congolese refugee, he was paid far less than his Ugandan counterparts. His injuries were the result of being assaulted on the jobsite by other workers, presumably Ugandan. They had retaliated against his inclusion, which they felt was replacing other Ugandan workers who had to be paid more. Despite the violence, he said he could not change jobs because many Ugandans discriminated against hiring refugees. He also could not report his assaults to the police, who might try to force him to return to one of the settlements – or worse. He had little choice but to remain exploited and abused, even as outside commentators praised Uganda for its reconfiguration of humanitarianism from dependency to self-reliance. Migrant agency, and the backlash Many of the refugees I worked with saw formal resettlement in the West as the only way to escape the gruelling poverty and exploitation of displacement. But another option was emerging too. While in Uganda, I began to hear whispers of refugees thinking about leaving the camps, leaving Africa all together, to travel north and seek a boat to go to Europe. In the ten years since I first heard these whispers, increasing numbers of migrants have rejected their immobilisation, choosing instead to journey towards what they envision as a more secure future for themselves. The political backlash to this temerity has been swift. In Uganda, as in many other countries, the political climate towards refugees has become more hostile. The result has been a significant second shift from policies of humanitarianism to anti-migrant securitisation. Such measures are increasingly being implemented not only because of hostile national policies toward migrants, but also because of demands from countries in the Global North that the nations that host refugees – overwhelmingly located in the Global South – must do more to contain them or risk a reduction in international economic support. Development funding, for example, is increasingly dependent on recipient nations introducing measures to intensify border controls and prevent onward migration. Displaced people are no longer to be protected – they’re to be guarded against with seemingly all the power the state can muster. More and more people are being prevented from legally seeking refugee status, which also absolves states of any legal obligation to provide them with humanitarian aid. The move from humanitarianism to securitisation has vastly expanded a private militarised border security industry that profits from government contracts to create ‘effective’ – that is, often lethal –systems of migration monitoring and intervention. But, as this populist turn against humanitarianism continues to take shape, it remains to be seen how refugees will respond. When Donald Trump suspended the US refugee programme, he also extinguished a source of “cruel optimism” that kept many people playing by (the West’s) rules. Now that that’s no longer an option, it is entirely possible that more people will now choose mobility, not less. Exploitation: a survival strategy and a business model For refugees who still find themselves stuck in transit zones, unable to move to another country or back to their country of birth, economic exploitation remains the main option for a livelihood, just like I observed in Uganda. Often this means working informally for local industry, but it increasingly means being incorporated into global supply chains. High profile examples of this include Syrian refugees picking hazelnuts in Turkey and Burmese refugees in Thailand’s garment industry. In such cases, refugees’ exploitation as cheap labour ultimately benefits companies and end consumers in the West. And for those who do make it to the Global North, many find themselves shocked that even there they are targets of exploitation. Their persistent “refugee-ness” becomes the basis of ongoing exploitation in poorly paid jobs that citizens of the country that has offered them “refuge” do not want to do. Simply put, world over, refugees have become a particular class of exploitable workers. Scholars are still grappling to make sense of the move from liberal humanitarianism and its framing of refugees as victims in need of help to neoliberal humanitarianism and its framing of refugees as economic potential in need of empowerment. The risks inherent to this shift are real, but we must be careful not to pretend that they are a crack in an otherwise good system. The material basis of refugees’ lives is not so different from that of many of the citizen workers they are so often contrasted with – they are not uniquely vulnerable. They suffer under capitalism and social hierarchies as many others do. Only by recognising that displaced people are a crucial part of the global political economy and its need for exploitable labour, and not external to it, are we able to acknowledge the ‘crisis’ of mass displacement and rising precarity as one and the same. The answer is not a return to humanitarian appeals that only conceive of displaced people as “victims.” Rather, it lies in a humanising of migrants as people seeking sustainable livelihoods and futures of possibility. Explore the series so far Georgina Ramsay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Impossible Refuge: The Control and Constraint of Refugee Futures (Routledge, 2018). Her research focuses on what it means to be displaced in a world in which precarity is increasingly the norm, not an exceptional condition. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/exploitation-embedded-in-the-business-model-of-refugee-support/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/