How to Solve the World’s Refugee Crisis

On June 10, a boat carrying 260 Somali and Ethiopian refugees capsized off the coast of Yemen, killing dozens. The number of dead will almost certainly rise. It’s a tragic and underreported event that is part of a larger trend: According to a new report from the U.N.’s refugee agency, UNHCR, more than 7,600 people died or are missing after attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea over the last three years.

On the other side of this story, many potential host countries are becoming increasingly hostile to people attempting to start a new life on their shores. Immigration has been a divisive issue in elections all over the world this year. 

The global refugee crisis is only getting worse. Climate change and conflict are increasing the flow of people escaping their homes. The UNHCR reports that there are 43 million refugees globally, while 120 million people are classified as forcibly displaced. 

What can the world do to solve this problem? I spoke with Filippo Grandi, the high commissioner of the U.N.’s refugee agency. He has worked with refugee populations for 40 years in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Kuwait, and led the U.N.’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from 2010 to 2014. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page, or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript. 

Ravi Agrawal: Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order to suspend claims for asylum on the southern border when there are “high levels of encounters,” which is around 2,500 crossings a day over a seven-day period. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit challenging this move. How have you been processing the White House’s decision?

Filippo Grandi: We issued a statement a few days ago saying that we regretted that some aspects of it were, from our point of view, at variance with international law, particularly because, when applied, the executive order would prevent some people from exercising their right to seek asylum in the United States.

On the other hand, I think we must recognize that the United States continues to receive a very large number of asylum-seekers or refugees through a variety of ways of access: regular crossing points through the border, resettlement, parole mechanisms, family reunifications, and arrivals at airports. So, it’s a mixed picture if you wish. And I think we need to recognize also the incredible challenge that the U.S. is facing, as other countries, but perhaps on a bigger scale. And our message to the administration is that we are there to use our expertise to help them overcome some of these huge challenges.

RA: At the heart of the dilemma for the Biden White House is that largely because there was a perception that they would be welcoming, a lot of people were trying to enter. The Biden administration’s decision represents an understanding that there is a political cost to having a more open and a more humane asylum policy. How do you deal with that? Your job, essentially, is one that cuts against political realities. 

FG: My message to governments is that, first of all, a more welcoming and humane policy of receiving people can also be more effective, more rapid, and function better. That would not solve all the challenges, but certainly some of them, and would also send a better message about efficient determination of whether people are refugees or not, for example, and that for those that do not have any valid reasons to stay, there are ways to send back humanely to their countries. So there is an efficiency element that I think can and should be worked on. It requires resources, clearly, but resources spent for a good cause.

Second, in these very long journeys of these people, be they across the Americas or North Africa to Europe, too much attention is on the last border, which is usually the border of a rich country, because this is where the politics play out. This is where the media focus. But what about these long journeys? A lot can be done before people arrive at the last border. First of all, I think we need to be much more strategic in addressing the root causes of these movements. Even in transit, people can be given opportunities and states build their capacities to deal with the transit. It would reduce the pressure at the end. Don’t forget, of the 120 million refugees and displaced people that we count across the world, 75 percent are in poor countries or middle-income countries. They’re not in the rich countries. We always have this perception that the problem is all here. So it’s upstream that we need to work on.

RA: The global refugee population is now at about 43.4 million, triple what it was a decade ago. Why does it continue to increase?

FG: This is an important question. The figure actually has basically gone up and up and up and up for 12 consecutive years now. And if you look at the history of the last 12 years, it’s a history of some huge conflicts like Ukraine, like Gaza, like Sudan, like Myanmar. And it’s a history of older conflicts not getting resolved. This is a world that has become unable to make peace. The systems put in place after World War II to make peace are so obsolete, so out of date, that frankly, it doesn’t work anymore. And that means that this accumulation of conflicts with all the refugees and displaced people that it carries with it is growing every year.

RA: You’re part of that system. And you’re saying it’s all out of date?

FG: The system I’m part of is the response system to that. I’m talking about the political system that is tasked with maintaining peace and security, the [United Nations] Security Council, the regional organizations tasked with peace and security. That’s essentially states, of course, gathered in the U.N. as a political organization. This is what is obsolete and not functioning anymore. If you look at what the Security Council does, or rather doesn’t do, it’s not even able to agree on the most basic humanitarian resolution anymore. That says a lot about the state of the world, with the consequences falling then on the response system, which we are part of. That system also can be improved, but the root cause of this is the political system that is paralyzed.

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RA: I’d like to discuss a conflict that doesn’t get enough media attention. You will be headed to Sudan next week for World Refugee Day, where civil war erupted last April. 

FG: Who talks about these crises? Even when people die, you know, they die in oblivion and invisibility. This is what happens in so many places, and certainly in Sudan. The problem is that in Sudan, that invisibility is even more paradoxical because the estimate, and it is purely an estimate, is that 20 million people need humanitarian assistance. Nine million of them have fled their homes, either within the country or outside the country. I’m actually going to South Sudan over the weekend, and from there I hope to be able to cross into Sudan, to the middle of one of the most significant refugee movements of the world today. And I want to be there on World Refugee Day simply to say, “Why is this forgotten?” People in Sudan go through the same suffering, suffer from the same abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law as the people in Ukraine or in Gaza, and yet nobody speaks about them.

RA: On the question of why conflicts like Sudan are “forgotten,” in 2023, the United States contributed $1.9 billion to UNHCR. That is more than a third of the total pie and is more than the rest of the top 10 countries put together. Does that give the White House undue power when it comes to allocating where this money goes?

FG: The United States is and has been for a very long time by far the largest contributor to humanitarian operations, including the ones managed by my organization. And certainly, this is a symptom of great generosity, of projection of the United States on the global scene in a good way. But it does give the United States global influence. As a matter of fact, I’m always telling other countries that have ambitions to have influence that humanitarian aid is also a way to manifest that influence. That doesn’t mean that has to become conditional to a point that it paralyzes humanitarian assistance’s needs to maintain neutrality and impartiality. That’s our role, to try to be a buffer between pressures to be less impartial and less neutral, and our mandate, which is to remain such.

RA: Yes, but let’s say if Qatar or Saudi Arabia or India outfunds the United States by billions of dollars, and they ask your agency to focus more on Sudan or the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], would you then be able to change priorities that simply?

FG: First of all, it’s not happening. But as an assumption, I would say this question has two sides. On the one hand, yes, it would be good if countries that have a particular interest or willingness to help an underfunded area put money there. That would help a lot. On the other hand, this would be in line with a trend in humanitarian assistance, which we don’t particularly like, which is to increasingly “earmark,” we call it like this. Which means, donors say, “I give you $1 million, but you have to spend it in a certain place,” and we have to do that because parliaments are voting that way. We cannot change that if we accept those funds. Now, you understand that we are a global organization with many, many different emergencies and situations. We need to get flexible funding in order to meet the needs of everybody. This earmarked funding creates inequity in aid, which is not good.

RA: There’s a sense globally that, as it exists, the global order and the post-Bretton Woods institutions are rigged to some degree and don’t reflect the realities of today. And there’s also this sense that Western countries, your biggest donors, are outsourcing the problem to countries in places that are least equipped to deal with it.

FG: On the outsourcing, that is why, just to give you one example, we have argued that the proposal made by the British government to send asylum-seekers arriving in the United Kingdom to Rwanda for an assessment of their claim, basically ending asylum in Britain and externalizing that asylum to a third country, that we had to draw a line. We had to say, “We’re always ready to discuss pragmatic solutions to these big problems, but not at the expense of the most fundamental form of burden sharing,” because then you certainly outsource there.

You touch on an important issue. The secretary-general has been quite vocal about the need for the Bretton Woods institutions to reform themselves. This is not my particular domain. I will not go into that. Here, I would like to make, again, a little practical point. We have actually been working with the Bretton-Woods institutions because increasingly we are realizing that humanitarian assistance is fairly short-term and limited. And in this funding environment, you cannot count anymore on 10 years of humanitarian assistance waiting for that problem to be solved. So we have had to go to development organizations, say, “Help us out.” You know, bring in longer-term approaches and resources so that we can then pull out or diminish our focus and move on to the next emergency. This is called in jargon—I hate this word—the famous nexus between humanitarian and development, and actually quite a lot of work is being done at the very operational level with good cooperation from the World Bank and other institutions.

RA: Aid for most Palestinian refugees is overseen by UNRWA, not UNHCR, but you ran that organization for four years. And so, I’d like to ask you to put your old hat on and reflect on some of the challenges that UNRWA is facing, both on a humanitarian assistance level but also being caught in the political crossfire right now.

FG: My hat, as you said, is very old. I left UNRWA 10 years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then. But one thing that hasn’t really changed is that UNRWA is an organization that for more than seven decades has done amazing, heroic work. You know, they’ve just lost lots of people, many of whom I knew, in Gaza in this terrible situation. But this has been the history of UNRWA, though not at this dramatic level. For many decades, they have provided humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees. And even more importantly, they are the backbone of a system of education and health that has served millions of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East.

But there is an even more important problem to understand: The question of Palestinian refugees is a very controversial question. The Palestinian refugees are those that fled what is now Israel when Israel became independent and went to different neighboring countries. Some of them actually find themselves in Gaza and in the West Bank, because when Israel became independent, Gaza and the West Bank were not occupied by Israel. They were outside in Jordan and administered by Egypt. So that’s why you have Palestinian refugees in all these places.

When people say UNRWA should stop, well, first you have to solve that problem of Palestinian refugees. Israelis and Palestinians have very different views on that solution, but a solution has to happen before you can say that there are no more Palestinian refugees, and therefore no need for UNRWA. In the end, the Palestinian refugee question is one of the big, unresolved questions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, like the status of Jerusalem, like borders, like security. Unless discussion of all of that resumes seriously, we will never get out of the mess we are in in that region.

RA: You also served in Afghanistan. There’s been an exodus since the United States allowed the Taliban to take over. It seems to me that political decisions, often by your biggest donors, have an outsized influence on refugee situations.

FG: We find ourselves in an extremely difficult situation. Not everybody understands this very well, but humanitarian work has to occur anywhere people are in need of humanitarian assistance. In some places, everybody understands. Russians attacked Ukraine, bombed the cities, destroyed the infrastructure. People flee. You have to go there to help those people. Everybody understands that. But humanitarian needs may be present in places that are under the control of armed groups, of regimes that are not recognized internationally, like in Afghanistan, by armed forces that take over through violent coup, like in Myanmar. And yet, we have to be there. We have to work in those places, and working in those places means we have to interact with the forces in control. Interacting means having discussions, having to meet requests from these forces. It’s difficult. Dialogue doesn’t mean recognition; it doesn’t mean that we like the interlocutors. It’s a necessity in order to work.

I feel increasingly among our main donor countries, even those that have been unable to solve the problem, that there is a risk aversion. I understand that their parliaments are watching over the aid they’re giving us and don’t want it to fall in the wrong hands. We try, but we must be there. We must make some compromises in order to bring assistance to the people in need. Afghanistan is one such place, where this navigation is between the exigencies of the people in need, the pressure of the groups in control of the territory, and the apprehensions of the donors. That navigation is one of the most difficult challenges of contemporary humanitarian work.

RA: What are the things that need to change for you to be able to better serve the global refugee population and move toward solutions like repatriation or resettlement or just integration into a host country?

FG: Many things need to change. I think the political system is fairly broken. The multilateral peacemaking system, and even the regional systems, are now almost completely paralyzed. If you go back to that report that you mentioned, of the 120 million, the number of people who went back to their homes last year is 6 million people. And most of it is in places like Iraq that are relatively stable, but it’s very limited compared to those that have been newly displaced. So unless we solve that peacemaking conundrum, we’re not out of the woods.

Then, of course, we need more resources for humanitarian assistance. Unfortunately, we’re not in that place right now. Many countries in Europe have peaked in terms of humanitarian assistance. In the United States, every budgetary decision now is steeped in politics and becomes very difficult, and some countries that have the means, like in the Gulf, give us very little support financially. So we’re not in a good place. And then there is the other aspect, which is can we make our work more sustainable. And to do that in long, protracted humanitarian situations, refugee situations, we cannot depend only on humanitarian assistance. We really need development organizations to come in very early on in an emergency and look at everything that requires longer-term investments in education, health, sustainable energy, food security, and so forth.

For example, we help countries receiving lots of refugees. And again, please don’t always think about Europe and the United States. I’m talking about the countries receiving enormous numbers of refugees in Africa, in the Middle East, in Latin America, in Asia. We are telling them not to ask for us to create a parallel system for these refugees. The best is to have people in the communities, and then help those communities bear the brunt of an additional presence. This is where we need the development institutions not to give individual help to refugees in a camp, but to strengthen a country’s education health system, a country’s economy, so that it can create jobs and it can absorb, even if temporarily, a number of refugees. This is a much more sustainable model, which some countries have embraced, but we need to go much faster and further.