Out of the Shadows: Migrants and Refugees in Lebanon

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Posted on Aug 02 2018 4 minutes read
Out of the Shadows: Migrants and Refugees in Lebanon
© Illustration by Hassan Youssef
I first encountered Omar in the summer of 2016. He was a shy, soft-spoken 9-year-old with dreamy eyes and a piercing gaze. Omar had been working in the restaurant of one of Bekaa’s summer resorts for the past year. His job was fairly simple: delivering food to the restaurant’s clients. This, however, was a demanding job for a boy of his small stature and fragile build.
Weekends were a particularly busy time at the resort. So a few months into his new job, Omar was asked to work on a Sunday–his only day off. Omar felt that he had no choice but to accept and soon he was working seven days a week, eight hours a day. When he finally mustered the courage to ask for a raise, he was told with a threatening tone: «You should be grateful that you have a job at all!»

Omar’s family fled war-torn Aleppo in 2014. The family took refuge in a small tent that they rented in one of Bekaa’s refugee camps. His father, Waleed, a carpenter by profession, struggled to find work in Lebanon. Within a few months of arriving in Lebanon, all their savings were depleted and they were facing an uncertain future. Omar has one dream only: to go back to school and return to his room and play with the toys he abandoned when he left Aleppo. His father, on the other hand, says that life has taught him a precious lesson.  «Dreams are not for people like me. I just hope that my children will have a better life than the one I’ve had.»
Millions of migrants and refugees who call this small country their temporary home live in a state of heightened vulnerability. Their journey is one of indefinite waiting. Decades of failure to develop proactive policies to address the root causes of poverty and inequality in society has created and sustained an underclass of easily exploitable migrants. Denied many basic rights, they are essential to maintaining the status quo, yet disposable and easily replaceable.  The laissez-faire governance model, a feature of Lebanese public policy, was adopted long before the most recent influx of refugees from neighboring Syria. One of the earlier manifestations of this policy model can be seen through the State’s continued refusal to proactively regulate, through legislation and policy, the domestic workers sector, with rampant abuses afflicting it for many decades.
More recently, the loss of legal status or documentation, a phenomenon on the rise because of tightening restrictions on residence permit requirements for different categories of foreigners in Lebanon has become one of the primary reasons for reported increases in labor exploitation and of indecent working conditions. It is also one of the main reasons behind the increase in child labor, as children are less likely to be arrested and inspected for documentation. And whilst these kinds of exploitation mainly affect migrants and refugees, they have also created conditions facilitating the exploitation of Lebanese workers. Wage dumping and indecent working conditions have in fact resulted in lowering labor standards for the Lebanese as well as foreign workers.
In its modern history, Lebanon has witnessed large waves of emigration. And whilst the experience of Lebanese emigrants has taught us many valuable lessons, it has failed to reinforce the idea of the State’s responsibility to protect its own citizens.  To the contrary, emigration continues to be perceived as the natural solution to many of the problems facing us today.  
The public in Lebanon is fearful of any attempt to address the grievances of migrants and refugees through fair and humane policies. This has largely been the result of scare tactics that politicians employ, scapegoating migrants and blaming them for their failures and for the country’s deeper structural problems.  
Contrary to conventional wisdom, this is not a zero-sum game. While there are tremendous pressures and challenges facing Lebanon today, protecting migrants and refugees should not be one of them. Everyone stands to benefit from bringing migrants and refugees out of the shadows and ensuring decent living and working conditions. When migrants and refugees are integrated into society, when all children have access to education, when healthcare is no longer a dream, when documentation is not an obstacle to work and when we can all work in safety and dignity, we collectively build a better society, one that is more peaceful, tolerant and just. Only then can we start to address the underlying causes of inequality. And while migrants and refugees may be here temporarily, their journey will no longer have to be a journey of indefinite waiting.

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