Refugee Crisis

According to the recent UNHCR report, there are over 68.5 million forcefully displaced individuals in the world, with 24.5 million of them being refugees who have fled their homes to seek protection against violence or persecution. In September 2016, this problem was exasperated after 4.8 million Syrians fled their homeland amidst a gruesome civil war (Ngo, 2018). Although there are efforts by many countries to alleviate this problem, the Syrian refugee crisis continues to exasperate an already existing global refugee problem. This paper explores what moral values and obligations incentivizing state actors to resettle refugees within their borders by looking at the Syrian Refugee Crisis and comparing Germany's response to the United States' response. This paper begins with an overview of how refugee resettlement rationales fit within the context of human rights based approaches. Then, it examines which human rights based approaches compelled Germany and hindered the United States to take action. It concludes by taking into account what prompts state actors to take actions to resettle refugees at all, and how these approaches can be used to encourage state actors to do more in the future. There are three main arguments under the human rights evaluation that provoke action from the states: the Good Samaritan duty, the political responsibility, and the duty to protect.

The duty of a Good Samaritan rule instructs that states should take steps to assist non-citizens only when there is dire need and the expenses for the assistance is low (Momin). Thus, if a state's own wellbeing could be compromised in helping non-citizens, such as through national security concerns or through economic burdens, then it is reasonable for states to evade helping non-citizens (Lyon, 2009). The political responsibility argument highlights the responsibility that states must take for remedying the injustices that have occurred on behalf of their political actions (Carens,1992). Countries involved with global politics have a greater responsibility to fix structural injustices by joining with others and organization collective action against injustice. People that are pro-refugees will bring up the examples of the American administration making an arms deal with Saudi Arabia that leads to the bombings and brutal war in Yemen. In addition large corporate companies like the Carlyle Group and Wesco are supporting the war efforts by letting the Saudi government purchase large numbers of shares and influencing decisions made in America that influence innocent lives in vulnerable countries. There are many current examples of American military actions that are indirectly or directly causing war or displacement due to gang violence, unemployment, and severe corruption. There have been numerous lawsuits in Central America regarding the massacres in Guatemala that caused people to flee their homes.

The American government supporting these military efforts against indigenous people has put their lives at risk and forced them to flee their homes to seek protection elsewhere. Many times, Chevron, and other major American oil companies have caused severe oil spills in the Amazon. These actions, although beneficial for the United States, have caused many to die due to disease or starvation. These heinous crimes against the individuals, gives them the right to ask the United States for safe refuge. The counterargument that many propose, argues that there is no legal obligation or provision in international law that requires a country to take in refugees (Friedman, 2018). Since there is no legal document binding the United States in taking in refugees, it is not their legal responsibility to provide fleeing people with the resources to settle down in a safer environment. In the refugee context, many state and corporate policies have had a hand in causing turmoil, leading many to flee from their homes and seek protection. Thus, those states are responsible for helping bystanders who are subject to the meddling (Cromwell, 2016).

The third argument focuses on the duty to protect. It highlights that states have to protect human lives when their own states fail to provide protection to their own citizens.This argument is often used to help gain the support of NGOs and Endowments. The duty to protect is more of an ideal scenario, as in reality, much of this practice is declining in state policy. Often the enforcement of this particular duty is through media article and photographs as well as the UNHCR reports, but unfortunately, they serve as a subtle nudge to influence governmental policy, not as a hard enforcement. Both Germany and the United States are international leaders that receive numerous refugee asylum applications and have the resources to resettle refugees. Both states, based on economic and national security arguments, are not compelled to accept refugees. On the other hand moral arguments of responsibility seemed to motivate both countries to take more action than they previously may have under other legal obligations. In the case of Germany it was a combination of its political responsibility from their past actions in the Holocaust and its duty to protect that moved it to resettle refugees in August 2015. Despite the law or economic and national security concerns they faced during the initial resettlement, Germany still persevered in resettling refugees and creating programs to help the new population assimilate. For the United States, although the gesture was not as generous as Germany, the Obama administration did vow to allocate spaces for at least 10,000 Syrians, almost ten times as many Syrians admitted from the year before. This moral sense quickly decimated in the United States with the entrance of the Trump administration in 2017 into the White House (Sean, 2017). A ban was placed on the arrival of refugees as it posed a major security threat to the United States. In addition, The United States used the Good Samaritan principle to argue that their humanitarian efforts could be implemented more domestically.

The United States still continues to lag behind Germany in terms of the number of refugees resettled within its borders. It can be argued that this discrepancy between the numbers for Germany and the United States is due to the stronger moral responsibility Germany felt to resettle refugees. Unlike the United States, Germany recognized that it had a tainted past and the consequences of the worst genocide in human history continues to reverberate in the Middle East. Furthermore, Merkel, being a champion of humanitarian work, was confronted by the emotional appeals of individual refugees far more than Obama. This could be because the European countries would be facing a greater influx due to geographical proximity, or because of the economic power of the country and its progressive public policies. Although there is no conclusive measures to encourage state actors to settle more refugees, NGOs and the international community accountable for their actions and should push for policy favoring refugee communities. In addition, there needs to be a continuous movement to present moral, political, and economic arguments that benefit the United States to legislatures. This will not only expose them to the complexity of the refugee crisis, but present a more humane perspective of the refugee experiences and encourage them to gain a more holistic knowledge about the benefits of refugee resettlement for the international community.

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