Kelsey Norman
Egypt has traditionally been viewed as a transit country, through which refugees pass en route to Western states. While the Arab Spring and continuing conflicts in the region have caused a sudden and drastic rise in the number of Libyan and Syrian refugees over the past two years, the predominant refugee groups in Egypt since the 1990’s have been from the Horn of Africa countries, with Sudanese refugees being the most numerous. An important element that makes Egypt an attractive destination for refugees is the existence of one of the largest resettlement programs in the world, both through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and private sponsorship programs to Western countries like Canada, Australia, and the United States. And yet the numbers of resettled refugees are relatively small; an average of only 3,000 per year compared to the hundreds of thousands of official and unofficial refugees currently residing in Cairo.
In 1954 the Egyptian government signed a MOU with the UNHCR that allocated full responsibility over the process of refugee status determination (RSD) to UNHCR. While the outsourcing of RSD determination is not irregular in developing countries, this arrangement has come under much scrutiny in recent years. Usha Natarajan, a professor of international refugee law at the American University in Cairo, posits that developing countries turn to the UNHCR to administer RSD services when, a) states cannot afford to administer RSD themselves, and b) when the stakes matter little for who is admitted into the country. Unlike Western states that are simultaneously selecting future citizens when they accept refugees onto their territories, the governments of non-Western countries have neither the institutional capacity nor the self-interest to select refugees whom they view as transitory migrants.
For countries in which the UNHCR is responsible for RSD, the organization faces the paradoxical situation of serving as both gatekeeper for the host country and advocate on behalf of the refugees attempting to reside there. In Egypt, this dual role is viewed by the NGO community and by refugees themselves as highly problematic – how can the UNHCR simultaneously serve as both arbiter and advocate? A new strategy proposed by the UNHCR in Cairo further elucidates this dilemma.
According to an official interviewed, the UNHCR is in the process of implementing a ‘livelihoods strategy’ in Egypt. While the core mandate of the UNHCR is the protection of refugees, this can be defined both narrowly – protection from deportation and from detainment – and broadly – any measure that prevents refugees from resorting to ‘risky’ coping strategies. The livelihoods strategy will be implemented throughout Egypt and will target geographic areas in order to promote the employment of both refugees and Egyptian nationals in the informal economy. ‘Protection’ thus encompasses ensuring the right to residency in Egypt as well as the ability to access some sort of livelihood. Yet this strategy sounds oddly close to the promotion of ‘local integration’– a policy option that is not supported by the Egyptian government.
According to centralized UNHCR publications emerging from Geneva, there are three broad policy solutions to protracted refugee situations, defined by the UNHCR as a situation that has continued for longer than five years. The first solution is repatriation, whereby refugees are able (or forced) to return to their home country. According to Mark Kagan, voluntary repatriation in Egypt has become more relevant in recent years for some groups, in particular Iraqis, but remains an unviable possibility for Eritreans, Somalis and many Sudanese (Kagan 2011). The second possibility is resettlement, whereby refugees are transferred to a third country with assistance from the UNHCR and/or the International Organization for Migration (IOM). However, resettlement policy is extremely challenging because it requires the coordination of several institutional actors – the host government, third-country governments, international organizations like the UNHCR and IOM, among others – and because resettlement is not officially a right in international law (ibid). The third, less utilized, solution is local integration, whereby refugees are offered permanent asylum and integration into the host society by the host government. Yet in developing countries the full offer of permanent asylum and integration is highly infrequent; while many host governments permit refugees to settle amongst the local host community without official assistance, few, if any, governments grant refugees the full range of rights that are meant to accompany local integration (Grabska 2006).
Because of Egypt’s unwillingness to promote local integration, the UNHCR is hindered in its ability to adequately secure the protection of refugees. While the UNHCR may recognize that refugees require access to livelihoods in order to survive in Cairo, it requires the authorization of the Egyptian government to promote a policy that facilitates access to training and employment. Consequently, instead of framing the livelihood strategy as a means of building a sustainable life in Egypt, the strategy must be framed as training that serves another purpose: preparing refugees for either resettlement or repatriation, and preventing them from undertaking risky coping strategies while they are (temporarily) residing in Egypt. Further, the livelihoods strategy must be implemented in geographic neighborhoods as opposed to targeting refugees outright so as not to appear to favor refugees over Egyptian nationals (despite the UNHCR’s specific mandate to aid refugees). Thus, according to the official UNHCR stance, the livelihoods strategy is not related to the promotion of local integration but is instead a further emphasis on repatriation and resettlement as durable strategies.
Yet the Egyptian government unofficially permits the continued presence of refugees on its territory through both its inability to successfully prevent refugees from entering its borders and through its ambivalence and neglect of those refugees who settle in Cairo. And because the UNHCR is forced to operate under the auspices of the Egyptian government, it is also complicit in this refusal to acknowledge the realities of Egypt’s refugee situation: these migrants are not leaving, they are here for the long-term.
Egypt is undergoing immense political change in the wake of the revolution, providing the opportunity for questions of identity, citizenship and belonging to reemerge in public debate. While in some ways this tumultuous atmosphere intensifies the already precarious situation that refugees face as non-nationals, the policy space created by the dismantling of former institutions may, in time, provide the opportunity for a reconceptualization of access to citizenship.
Kelsey Norman is a PhD student studying political science at the University of California, Irvine. At the moment she is in Cairo completing research on citizenship and migration as a research fellow with the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. You can find more of Kelsey’s opinions and writing at kpnorman.tumblr.com or by following her on twitter @kelseypnorman.
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Grabska, Katarzyna. (2006). “Marginalization in Urban Spaces of the Global South: Urban Refugees in Cairo,” Journal of Refugee Studies, 19 (3): 287-307.
Kagan, Michael. (2011). “Shared responsibility in a new Egypt: a strategy for refugee protection,” School of Global Affairs and Public Policy Center for Migration and Refugee Studies, Cairo: American University in Cairo.