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.
