Now that the entire Western world is embroiled in a debate about what we should do for the refugees, it's time to look toward the next question: What should the refugees do for us?
Giving asylum to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees is one thing. But the success or failure of this endeavour will depend very much on what the refugees do, and what they're able to do, after they've settled.
We are going to encounter the paradox of the refugee: They are not the same as immigrants, because of the unplanned and temporary nature of their arrival, because they are much fewer in number than immigrants, and because they are not joining a pre-existing community.
Yet their success depends on them becoming the same as immigrants as soon, and as fully, as possible.
This is partly in the hands of the refugees themselves.
"Often the biggest challenge is the mentality of the refugee – once you start thinking of yourself as being temporary, you will have problems living a normal family life in your new country," said Kazim Erdogan, a Kurdish-German social psychologist who for decades has run a counselling practice for immigrants and refugees in the Turkish quarters of Berlin.
He ought to know. In 1974, he made the same passage across Greece and the Balkans being taken today by tens of thousands of migrants, many of them Syrians and a substantial proportion of them Kurds like him.
He found temporary work in Munich, met a cold reception from a 1970s Germany tired of refugees, wound up in an immigration holding cell destined for deportation, then found last-minute salvation when he was accepted for graduate school by a major German university, where he thrived.
Then he moved to Berlin, and found himself surrounded by fellow migrants. Unlike him, they had not become part of the higher-education system of their new country. That's because they did not have a pathway to legal citizenship (Germany only granted that to Turco-Germans in 2000). They became, as Dr. Erdogan said to me, "the walking dead." He explained: "They cannot see themselves as part of their new country, because it only sees them as temporary. So they attach themselves, and their children, to an imaginary version of their old country."
This mentality is damaging – even for those who do move back (and it is likely that most Syrians will move back, unless the conflict drags on for decades).
During the past decade, he has watched his fellow Turks become one of Europe's integration success stories, in educational, economic and cultural terms. They've dropped the temporary mindset and now see themselves as Germans – in large part because Germany finally started seeing them that way.
There is a scholarly concept known as "myth of return:" the belief widely held among many new immigrants, and most refugees, that they will just stay a while and then move back. I know immigrants who have held this myth for decades. But their success depends on seeing their new location as home, and that home seeing them as fellow citizens.
Ending that "temporary" mindset is the refugee's job, but there are a number of things that host countries need to do to make it happen. In a research paper examining the obstacles to refugee integration, three Canadian scholars found a number of factors were key.
Employment, housing and schools make a big difference: The sooner they can get a job suited to their skills (and refugees tend to be middle-class), secure tenure in an affordable living space and a school for their children, the sooner they become "here." Cultural integration tends to follow naturally from economic and educational integration.
Equally important is the ability to be around refugees and immigrants from the same place. "One of the few resources available to most refugees is social capital in the form of social support networks," two Canadian scholars wrote in a paper on refugee integration. "These many formal and informal social networks are extremely valuable, providing much-needed support and assistance when refugees are faced with financial, employment, personal, or health problems."
Which means refugees should be allowed to relocate to join clusters of other refugees. A study by Citizenship and Immigration Canada found that 80 per cent of refugees who settled in Ontario, Alberta or British Columbia ended up staying there, whereas half the refugees settled in the Atlantic provinces or Saskatchewan ended up moving, presumably to the big cities.
The success of earlier, larger waves of even more foreign refugees shows that their integration tends to succeed. We just need to help them change their minds.
Doug Saunders