Refugee Resettlement and Preferences

Aid organizations spend considerable time lobbying for aid to be sent to refugees in poorer states, rather than campaigning for more refugees to be resettled to wealthy states. Lawmakers in wealthy countries similarly tend to focus on aiding refugees abroad, rather than resettling more refugees into their countries. One justification raised for focusing on aid rather than resettlement is that refugees prefer to remain in poorer neighboring countries so that they can quickly repatriate when the time is safe. Yet, few have established what refugees’ preferences are. Drawing upon an original data set of a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, we find that most prefer remaining to resettling when the details of resettlement are not clarified, but roughly half prefer to resettle if offered certain types of resettlement. We further argue that organizations and states have reason to account for whether preferences are “adaptive.” Such preferences arise when refugees prefer remaining in neighboring countries to resettling only when resettling to other countries is not an option, but would prefer resettling if this option were available. We present a novel philosophical reason for not appealing to adaptive preferences as a justification for not resettling refugees. We further apply a novel experimental method for evaluating whether preferences are adaptive.