500

Let 500 in.  2.3 million Syrian refugees, and Britain can find room for 500.  Not any refugees, of course – only the ‘most vulnerable’; the ‘most traumatised’; the rape victims; the children who need medical support.  And on our own terms – no UN quota that might collide with net migration targets.

Of course we could argue numbers all day.  How many is too many, when 2.3 million Syrians have been uprooted? But the fact is, while the Syrian emergency may have concentrated minds, there is a chronic shortage of resettlement places and has been for years. UNHCR estimates that, worldwide, around 800,000 refugees are in need of resettlement: there are about 80,000 resettlement places made available every year – and three-quarters of those are in the US.  Only 1 in every 10 recognised refugees who have been identified as needing resettlement will get resettled.  So here’s another number for you: the average refugee now spends 17 years in a camp.

So let’s debunk one resettlement myth right now: resettlement is not a heroic act and resettlement states are – with rare exceptions – not particularly generous.  When it comes to Syria, Hungary is taking 10.  Spain is taking 30. Switzerland 50.  So are we in the UK now 10 times more generous than Switzerland, or 20 times less generous than Germany? Of course lives are saved with such token gestures too, but the danger in praising states for doing very little is that in the long run, very little begins to look like enough.

This is a real problem when it comes to resettlement. There’s an unspoken code among those working on refugee and asylum issues that almost all resettlement is to be welcomed, that every newly promised place is to be greeted with praise, all criticism to be tempered. Resettlement is an industry as well as an act of charity: many NGOs are reluctant to bit the hands that feed them.  Others point to the fragility of states’ commitments to refugees and asylum seekers. In this light, every grudging concession is re-spun as a generous gesture.  But does this really protect the space left? Or simply allow states to claim kudos for doing very little at all? Is 500 really enough to claim that we are among the ‘most open-hearted countries’?  A press release from the Refugee Council has just landed in my inbox, telling me that ‘Britain has a proud tradition of protecting and welcoming refugees and we will continue to lead the way in offering refuge to people in their greatest hour of need’. Is that what 500 means?

It rings hollow. So it’s to be welcomed that Yvette Cooper is already arguing for the UK to match Germany, offering 10,000 places. That would certainly go some way from turning a token gesture into a significant contribution. Yet while Cooper is right to question the numbers, she’s fully on board with the idea that offering resettlement places demands exceptional suffering.  In many ways, it’s this trend that worries me most, for it carries with it the implication that a normal crisis is no longer enough. To qualify for resettlement, you must now be the most vulnerable. It is not enough to just be a refugee. This is an insidious logic, one that has already poisoned the Australian government’s asylum policy as the public are told repeatedly that “real” refugees wait in camps, that “deserving” victims don’t skip to the front of the queue.

Of course, given the gap between supply and demand, resettlement has to be rationed.  But it’s also worth remembering that economies that trade in vulnerability encourage new vulnerabilities. Refugees are often desperate: they are rarely stupid. Time and time again, refugees will explain that they cannot get a job, that they cannot support themselves: because then they will never get resettlement.  Arbitrary lines are drawn too, so that some vulnerabilities become more valuable than others. I still vividly remember one woman in Uganda asking me to explain why single women were being prioritised for resettlement. In her view, it was the women who still had husbands who were really worse off – because they were the ones who were still being beaten. How do you define fair in that context? Or explain to the bright ambitious young English-speaking engineer that he will never get resettled through official channels, because he just isn’t vulnerable enough - and he will never be able to migrate anywhere either, because he doesn’t have a passport.  In the end, there are just too many to choose from.

500 lives are 500 lives. When I wrote the first draft of this blog last night, I wrote that I could not imagine how anyone reading could needs persuading of the scale of the Syrian crisis, nor of the needs of Syrian refugees to find a sanctuary beyond bare survival. After all, when even Nigel Farage is fighting the refugees’ corner, you’d think not much room would be left for moral ambiguity. Yet reading below the line today, it seems there are plenty who think 500 is far too many, convinced that it’s the UK that’s shouldering an unfair burden.  So let me be clear.  Resettlement matters.  But resettlement needs to be the beginning of a conversation, not the end. And to be truly meaningful, this conversation needs to go beyond tired humanitarian tropes: beyond the languages of desert and purity. There are bold gestures that could be made beyond the language of victimhood and vulnerability. Why not, for instance, allow suitably qualified UNHCR-recognised refugees to apply for high-skilled work alongside EU nationals? Why not empower the ambitious, as well as save the needy?

The answer, of course, is that we cling to the insistence that refugees aren’t migrants: that they are victims, not workers. And in the end, that’s why we cling to the familiar humanitarian tropes about refugee resettlement -- because it lets us believe, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that the borders we’ve built are humane.  So let the 500 in.  But let’s be clear: this is gesture politics.  It is not generosity.