Mohammed and Amal first fled Yemen in 2015. They were living in the capital when it was taken by Houthi rebels, and when the bombs of the Saudi-led, pro-regime coalition began to fall they took off on foot.
By the time they reached family in a neighbouring province, Amal, who was pregnant, was covered in blood. She survived, but they lost the baby. They decided they had to leave Yemen.
“Jordan was the only country that would accept us,” said Mohammed. “We were allowed in on a tourist visa, so we came and stayed for eight months. Then we were told the war had ended, so we went back to Yemen.”
The airstrikes resumed shortly thereafter. The airport closed, and by that point Jordan was no longer granting tourist visas to Yemenis. It took them six years to get back out.
Their chance came in 2021, when they were able to buy forged paperwork for a medical visa back to Jordan. The documents cost $2,800: $800 per adult and $600 for each of their two sons. “We paid everything we had to come here,” said Amal.
Mohammed and Amal are now far from the bombs. But they are still struggling to survive.
Safe, for now
Jordan has a higher number of refugees per capita than nearly any other country. By some measures, it has the most. Yet it is no easy place to be one.
Some 760,000 people are registered with the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR). Sixty percent of those live below the poverty line, and recent cuts to cash assistance programmes have forced them to tighten their belts even further.
Support is also greatly contingent on nationality. For more than a decade now the lion’s share of assistance has gone to Syrians, who make up 88.5% of the refugees registered with UNHCR. Those other nationalities comprising the remaining 11.5% – some 88,000 people – receive far less. There are also over two million registered Palestinian refugees in Jordan, however they receive assistance from a separate UN body, UNWRA.
The least support goes to the estimated 5,500 people who haven’t been able to register due to a 2019 change in the rules. This change to Jordanian law was described by Human Rights Watch as “effectively barring recognition of non-Syrians as refugees”.
Amal and her family are, by a stroke of luck, part of the 11.5%. They managed to keep their UNHCR status from their 2015 trip, which gives them access to some assistance with food and rent. But they still face enormous challenges.
A precarious existence
Asylum seekers often have to forfeit their protected status in order to get a work permit in Jordan. That feels risky to the couple. “There’s no point applying for a permit and giving up our UNHCR papers,” Mohammed said. “Most Yemenis don’t even get accepted.”
Be that as it may, they spent all their money on the trip and cannot live off the support they receive from the UN alone. They must work to survive, so like many in their situation they’ve turned to the informal market.
We had to be ready to run away whenever people came to check our work permits
The first jobs they found were at a large industrial area on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan’s capital. Mohammed broke up rocks for a stone masonry, while Amal stood at a conveyor belt in a potato crisp factory nearby. They worked six days a week, and each earned around 10 Jordanian dinars (~£11) per 12-hour shift.
“If we got tired and wanted to stop, they’d deduct it from our break time,” Amal said.
They became used to dodging the inspectors that periodically showed up. “We had to be ready to run away whenever people came to check our work permits,” Mohammed recalled. “They would arrest people and take them to prison.”
Linda Alkalash, executive director at the Jordanian legal aid and human rights NGO Tamkeen, explained that while Syrian refugees have been granted partial access to work permits in Jordan, refugees from other communities are left in a bind. “If they want to work, they have to work as migrant workers,” she said.
Mohammed and Amal didn’t stay at the factories for too long, and since then they have bounced between work at a petrol station, a restaurant and a research centre. But nothing has stuck, and neither are in work now.
“We recently spent a week eating only rice,” said Amal.
Risking arrest at work
Shams, 28, knows what’s at risk when he heads out to work. It’s a painful story for him to tell.
He and his younger brother entered Jordan on medical visas after they fled violence in southern Sudan in January 2020. This was after Jordan changed its registration law in 2019, making the brothers ineligible for asylum.
They found work in Amman, the elder in a coffee kiosk and the younger in a cake shop. Both worked 12 to 18 hours a day for 300 Jordanian dinars (£340) a month. “I’d get home at the end of the day and barely have time to sleep,” said Shams.
In October 2020, Shams’ brother didn’t come back home. Shams went to the cake shop to look for him, and the owner told him that his brother had been arrested. “He was in prison for two weeks,” Shams said, “then he was deported to Sudan.”
Shams never heard from his brother again. He believes his brother may have been targeted by local militias, or perhaps he tried to get to Europe. “Until now, no one knows what happened to him – maybe he’s stuck in Libya,” Shams said.
Kwaku Amoah
In September this year, Shams was also caught working. But, unlike his brother, he was eventually bailed out by a Jordanian contact. “The officer for foreigners told me they couldn’t deport me due to the current conflict, and because the airport in Sudan is closed,” he said. “But they said as soon as the situation in Sudan gets better and the airport opens, I will be deported. It doesn’t matter to them if it’s safe there.”
Alkalash said the Jordanian government and UNHCR must go further in supporting non-Syrian refugees forced into precarity. She said Jordan should ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, which would see all refugees protected by law, and that all refugees should be offered support and access to the labour market.
She added that deportations are currently carried out in Jordan as “administrative decisions”, which means decision makers are not obligated to provide a reason for deportation. “It’s very important that the decision comes from a judge instead,” Alkalash said.
Hopes for resettlement
For many refugees, the prospect of resettlement offers a distant beacon of hope. It’s an escape route from the daily trauma and precarity they experience in Jordan.
Abdul, 38, said he came to Jordan because he thought it would enable him to resettle in a country with more opportunities for him and his young son.
“I studied political science in Sudan and would like to be resettled so I can continue my studies,” Abdul said. He knows it’s an unlikely scenario, but he doesn’t have much else to hold on to right now.
While he waits, Abdul works informally at a wholesale produce market just outside Amman. He rents a cart for four Jordanian dinars (£4.50), and earns money transporting goods to vehicles. On a good day, he earns 15 Jordanian dinars (£16.80).
Abdul said he has been arrested five times at work, but he has enough UNHCR paperwork to keep from getting deported. That said, he does his best to avoid the encounters. “I have a lot of experience now,” he said. “If someone says the police are coming, I throw the trolley and hide.”
There’s no difference between this system and the system I was living under during the conflict in Sudan
Currently, less than 1% of Jordan's refugees are being resettled to other countries through UNHCR. Other pathways to safe third countries, such as employment schemes, family reunification and community sponsorship, are also limited and hard to access. Roland Schoenbauer, a spokesperson for UNHCR Jordan, said he is aware of around 300 people who have left Jordan on similar schemes in 2023.
Fatima, 47, was also hoping to resettle, but said she “lost all hope” two years ago. The mother of five from Sudan has been in Jordan for over a decade. She says she’s unable to tell her family back home what life is really like.
“In their opinion, we’re in a safer place than them – and we are. But life is still hard,” she said. “I’m not allowed to work and my children can’t go to university. If I applied for a work permit, I would lose my status and my right to resettlement. We’re all just waiting for resettlement.”
With humanitarian donors focused on the conflict in Ukraine and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, it’s unlikely change is coming for refugees stuck in poverty in Jordan. Schoenbauer said Jordan has made “significant policy concessions” for refugees in recent years. These include improved access to healthcare and education, and partial access to employment for Syrian refugees. But, he added, there is a “tangible risk” of a humanitarian crisis if donors do not “stay course in their support to Jordan”.
For Shams, that crisis is already here. “There’s no difference between this system and the system I was living under during the conflict in Sudan,” he said. “I left so I could build a better life, but I found worse treatment here. At least there, I’d die quickly. Here, I’m dying slowly.”
The names of the refugees have been changed to protect their identities. openDemocracy contacted Jordan’s Ministry of Labour several times for comment, but did not receive a response.
