Sixty percent of Syria’s population are either refugees or internally displaced. Of those thirteen million Syrians, nearly six million are refugees who fled to neighboring Middle Eastern nations—five times more than the one million in Europe and the U.S. Unable to return home and with minimal, if any, access to education, jobs, and health care in host countries; Syrian refugees are trapped in a legal and economic purgatory.
The challenge facing the international community is whether it will stand by and watch as a generation of Syrians is lost to illiteracy, malnutrition, and increased mortality; or meet its obligations to do its part in empowering Syrians to be gainfully employed and educated until they can return home.
Turkey, with 3.5 million Syrian refugees, hosts the largest Syrian refugee population. The smaller countries of Lebanon and Jordan each host the two largest refugee populations per capita. Although these two countries comprise just one percent of the world’s economy, they host nearly 20 percent of the world’s refugees. Jordan alone has between 666,000 and 1.3 million Syrian refugees. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees approximately one in fifteen people in Jordan is a registered refugee.
The principle of non-refoulement—a legal norm prohibiting host nations from sending refugees back to countries where their lives are in danger— requires host countries to provide refuge to Syrians until it is safe for them to return home. The United Nations says return to Syria is still not safe; nor will it be for the foreseeable future. In the few areas where a safe return may be possible, entire neighborhoods are demolished, and basic services are non-existent.
Approximately eighty percent of Syrian refugees in neighboring countries live in urban and rural areas among the natives of the host countries. Between sixty to eighty percent of these refugees, depending on the country, live below the poverty line.
The consequences are threefold: 1) a humanitarian crisis for Syrian refugees, who must compete for public services and limited jobs (most of them without legal authorization) with members of the host community; 2) further pressure on host country economies already strained by longstanding economic problems; and 3) social tensions between refugees, host citizens, and other vulnerable groups within the host country.
— Read the full article published on June 20, 2019 on The Wilson Center’s blog here.
