Disposable yet indispensable: refugees in the global economy

Refugee populations have become durable components of national labour markets in many regions around the world. They are central to garment production in Turkey, demolition in Japan, domestic work in Poland, and can be found filling out the ranks of the precarious, informal labour force in countries from Venezuela to Bangladesh.

Refugees’ reliance on work to survive is likely to increase in the coming years, even though most host governments continue to resist letting them do so legally. Major donor countries are reducing their humanitarian aid budgets – the shuttering of USAID in the US, for example, is an extreme rupture that has reverberated across the Global North aid infrastructure. As support drops away, refugees are faced with an inevitable choice: work, or go without.

Those who seek work generally do so under very adverse conditions. Immigration status, race and ethnicity, gender, high level of need, and the situation in the countries they fled all make them vulnerable to exploitation. So do stigma and anti-migrant/refugee racism.

Whether in the Americas, Europe, Africa or Asia, displaced populations are lightning rods for conversations around labour competition, integration and belonging in host states. Although decades of research have found no systematic adverse effects of refugee inflows on native wages or employment rates, this null finding has quelled neither the rhetoric nor the politics around refugee labour. Politicians worldwide know that scapegoating refugees is easy pickings – and too many never tire of doing it.

The rapidly shifting landscape of aid and the growth of insular, anti-migrant policies gives us cause to take a deep dive into the politics and economics of refugee labour around the world today. Because make no mistake – despite the rhetoric of “smash the gangs”, “stop the boats”, and all the other anti-migrant slogans in circulation these days, the global economy continues to quietly and precariously integrate refugees and asylum seekers into the machineries of capitalism.

We should understand how this works, and what the consequences are.

Precarious refuge

Refugees’ integration into labour markets is widespread, but highly uneven. States are increasingly allowing certain, narrowly-defined groups of refugees, whom they declare as deserving of dignity and protection, to access some jobs. The rest they are leaving on the margins in varying degrees of legal ambiguity and informality.

But even for those granted work rights, making them real remains a substantial challenge. Legal reforms might look good on paper, but in host countries like Poland, Colombia and Jordan, recent cuts to humanitarian and development aid, cost-of-living pressures, political hostility, and administrative bottlenecks continue to block their full conversion into decent jobs in practice. Most refugees, even those in ‘privileged’ groups, lack viable paths into decent work.

These policy failures are, if not always intentional, extremely convenient for low-wage and informal employers. Markets incorporate refugees and asylum seekers – supply chains must be staffed, crops must be picked, homes must be cleaned, after all – but at a discounted rate. Full protection is replaced by disadvantageous participation, and the displaced absorb the ebbs and flows of capitalism through their cheap, expendable and underemployed labour.

Refugee labour is profitable precisely because it is governable through fear and selective inclusion

This series asks how refugees form a distinct category of vulnerabilised labour precisely at a time when global politics swings toward insularity. Neoliberalism and globalisation appear to be collapsing with no replacement paradigm in sight. And the complete unmasking of the double standards of the Western-led, ‘rights-based’ order in Gaza is only accelerating their demise.

While this paradigmatic shift is global, its manifestations and harms are uneven. Disruptions to trade and economic demand have hit workers first, precarious workers hardest, and the displaced most of all. Our contributors trace garment lines, care chains, demolition crews and other pockets of industry across several regions to unveil the specific ways in which refugee labour is being reconfigured in the wake of insularity politics and drastic aid cuts.

WEEK ONE

• Evan Easton-Calabria, a refugee livelihoods scholar at Tufts University, argues that refugees are viewed as a disposable reserve army of labour, pushed into precarious, low-wage work under the guise of ‘self-reliance.’ Her Marxist reading exposes the limits of markets as vehicles of protection for the displaced.
  
  
• Isabel Ruiz, a political economist at the University of Oxford, shows how Colombia’s progressive refugee policies, including the removal of barriers to access the formal labour market, still leave millions of skilled Venezuelan refugees trapped in informality. She argues that legal status alone does not foster labour market integration and social mobility for refugees.
  
  
• Erick Moreno Superlano, a PhD candidate in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford, reflects on his experience seeking refuge in Germany. He observes the intersecting class and racial hierarchies that afforded him, as a Venezuelan, particular privileges in the labour market – advantages denied to many other refugees and migrants.
  
  
• Jan Bazyli Klakla, a migration policy expert at the Center for Social and Economic Research, dissects the promise and limits of Poland’s special law, which gave Ukrainian refugees swift access to formal jobs. He argues that, irrespective of the high employment rates that the law generated, structural barriers in the Polish labour market and growing political hostility against Ukrainian refugees have turned open doors into a glass ceiling of underemployment and precarity.

WEEK TWO

• Georgina Ramsay, an anthropologist at the University of Delaware, critiques the ‘empowerment’ model of humanitarian aid. With vignettes from Uganda, she demonstrates how the approach has pushed refugees to make ends meet in labour markets stripped of safety nets. She asserts that the paradigm turns exploitation into a survival strategy for refugees and a business model for host economies.
  
  
• Solenn al-Majali, Katharina Grueneisl and Katharina Lenner, all experts on Jordanian refugee politics, describe how Jordan’s recent crackdown on refugees and migrant workers – once welcomed under the Jordan Compact which has since unravelled – has pushed them further into precarity in a segmented economy. The authors propose that they form a disposable workforce in Jordan; exploited, easily deported and scapegoated for the kingdom’s economic woes.
  
  
• Chiaki Tsuchida, a migration researcher at Kobe University, illustrates how Kurdish asylum seekers in Japan face systemic rejection and xenophobia in an asylum system bent on keeping them in limbo. She reveals how they have carved out livelihoods in demolition work and community networks despite these obstacles, ultimately pushing towards de facto integration.

WEEK THREE

• Angelo Martins Junior, a migration scholar at the University of Birmingham, relates the history and present state of legal protections for refugees in Brazil. He posits that, while generous, this de jure regime belies a labour market built on racialised exclusion and systemic neglect for refugees and poor, mostly Black, Brazilians.
  
  
• Beatrice Jemeli Chelimo, Clarissa Paiva Guimarães e Silva and Mariana Zawadi Kitenge Mukuna, all researchers working with migrants in Brazil, demonstrate the specific ways in which migrant women in Brazil are trapped in precarious labour markets at the intersection of race, gender and legal status. They attest to the crucial role migrant-led organisations such as the PDMIG play to carve out spaces of dignity, solidarity and resistance against this backdrop.
  
  
• Haidar Abdalla Adam Ahmed, an activist and youth organiser from Sudan, traces his flight from Khartoum to Kampala, Uganda. He recounts how Sudanese civil society has rebuilt itself in exile to sustain activism, businesses and education even as refugees face precarity, dwindling aid and the uncertain prospect of return.

WEEK FOUR

• Hind Taha, a researcher based in Cairo, reflects on the war in Sudan as both personal adversity and global political betrayal. She exposes the double standards and neglect inherent to an international system which abandons rather than protects the displaced, leaving ordinary citizens to shoulder the burden of survival and reconfiguring livelihoods.
  
  
• Abel Vijayakumar, a programmes and partnerships manager at HOST International, offers a moving reflection on Rohingya youth in Malaysia. He demonstrates how, despite their legal invisibility and lack of access to formal education and work opportunities, Rohingya youth are rewriting what survival, identity and agency look like in exile.
  
  
• Kyaw Thura, a research analyst at COAR Global, lays bare how conflict, aid cuts and exclusionary legal regimes have left displaced Rohingya in Bangladesh and Myanmar trapped in informal livelihoods and deepening precarity. He urges for practical yet urgent policy improvements to prevent the further collapse of livelihoods.

Awaiting a new paradigm

Across contexts, a throughline emerges. When rights cannot enact policy promises, refugee labour is relegated to the lowest rungs of capitalist production. Their labour is profitable precisely because it is governable through fear and selective inclusion based on ethnic, racial, and gendered hierarchies of belonging. This renders refugees simultaneously disposable and indispensable to modern capitalism.

At the same time, the displaced are part of a much larger pool of precarious and vulnerable workers – migrants, citizens, and people of various legal statuses – whose collective exploitation underpins economies. We thus urge our readers to situate these reflections on refugee labour within the wider mission of building societies where all stand on the same, fair footing. Turning insular is a particularly unimaginative response to this challenge. Through our politics, we can instead forge solidarities and public systems that transcend divisions of origin, status and circumstance.

We hope that this series speaks across silos: to policymakers who set the rules of the game in their respective labour markets; to humanitarian and development actors tempted to fall back on self-reliance narratives for the displaced; to employers whose production and services rely on refugee labour; to unions and labour organisers who would like to reconcile fissures among the workforces on whose behalf they advocate; and to scholars, journalists and concerned citizens interested in a holistic snapshot of the current state of refugee labour globally.

As we await the birth of a new global paradigm, will we maintain the status quo of containment and adverse economic incorporation? Or will we finally align our labour markets and asylum regimes with the rights refugees hold under international law? The outlook may be bleak, but moments of rupture like this demand that we push harder for something fairer and better than what we’ve got.

Aslı Salihoğlu is a research associate at the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society, where she completed her D.Phil in Migration Studies. A specialist consultant in labour economics and migration policy, she has advised the British Red Cross, Mediation Group International, and the United Nations Office for Project Services, among others.

Cameron Thibos is the Managing Editor of Beyond Trafficking and Slavery.

Explore the series

• Disposable yet indispensable: refugees in the global economyAslı Salihoğlu and Cameron Thibos
• The search for self-reliance: refugees and the informal working poorEvan Easton-Calabria
• Ten years on, Venezuelans still face precarity in ColombiaIsabel Ruiz
• Displacement from Venezuela taught me that class has no bordersErick Moreno Superlano
• How Ukrainian refugees hit a glass ceiling working in PolandJan Bazyli Klakla
• Exploitation embedded in the business model of refugee supportGeorgina Ramsay
• Refugees caught in Jordan’s campaign against informal workSolenn Almajali, Katharina Grüneisl and Katharina Lenner
• Kurds increasingly deported after Japan closes ‘loophole’ lawChiaki Tsuchida
• Refugees in Brazil: Marginalised despite legal protectionsAngelo Martins Junior
• Brazil refugees: Forming collective resistance where policy fails
  Clarissa Paiva, Beatrice Jemeli Chelimo and Mariana Zawadi Kitenge Mukuna
• Sudanese in Uganda: ‘Life didn’t stop with the war’Haidar Abdalla Adam Ahmed
• The world doesn't care about Sudan. It's up to us to rebuildHind Taha
• Neither student nor worker: how Rohingya youth rebuild in exile
  Abel Vijayakumar
• ‘No way out’: the closing spaces for Rohingya livelihoodsKyaw Thura