Trump’s Right: Arab Countries Absent on Refugees

Asked at Sunday night’s presidential debate about his previous proposal to ban Muslims from coming to the United States, Republican Donald Trump shined the spotlight on the failure of Syria’s wealthy neighbors to care for refugees.

“I believe in building safe zones,” Trump said. “I believe in having other people pay for them, as an example, the Gulf states, who are not carrying their weight — but they have nothing but money — and take care of people.”

“I believe in having other people pay for them, as an example, the Gulf states, who are not carrying their weight — but they have nothing but money — and take care of people.”

Trump’s assessment of the response by wealthy Arab oil states in the Middle East finds common ground with some unlikely sources — liberal activists like Amnesty International.

As representatives from across the globe gathered last month at the United Nations to discuss the refugee crisis, Amnesty International Secretary General Salil Shetty complained about a leadership crisis.

“With few exceptions, many world leaders failed to rise to the occasion, making commitments that still leave millions of refugees staring into the abyss,” Shetty said in a prepared statement.

Statistics from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which runs the international refugee program, back up Shetty’s complaints — and Trump’s assessment. The six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council together donated less than $22.3 billion last year, short of what Italy gave by itself.

Among those countries, only Saudi Arabia is among the top 20 donors to the U.N. fund. But the $19.1 billion is contributed this year is down from $29.6 billion the year before. The country last month pledged an additional $75 million in refugee relief efforts. Kuwait chipped in only $1 million, after giving almost $122 million in 2015. Oman and Bahrain contributed nothing.

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“The Arab countries don’t contribute much,” said Nayla Rush, a senior policy analyst for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

In raw dollars, the United States is the biggest contributor to the fund, which pays for clothes, food, medical care, and other expenses of refugee camps. It also pays for the U.N. bureaucracy that administers the program and screens applicants for relocation. The U.S. contribution this year is $1.35 billion, about 41 percent of the program’s entire budget. The next-biggest donor was the European Union, which gave $341.6 million.

As a percentage of gross national product, the United States ranked ninth among the top 20 contributors, behind several wealthy European countries and Canada.

The nearly 6-year civil war in Syria has displaced millions of people and caused a humanitarian crisis in the region. The bulk of the burden has fallen on three relatively poor neighboring countries — Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. According to the U.N., some 2.5 million refugees are living in Turkey, while 664,100 are in Jordan, and 1.1 million are in Lebanon.

The United States has relocated more than 10,000 Syrians since October 2015, and President Obama has pledged to take even more in the coming year. Democrat Hillary Clinton, who has called for increasing annual resettlement of Syrian refugees to 65,000, ignored comparisons to wealthy Arab countries on Sunday and focused, instead, on Europe.

“And we need to do our part,” she said. “We by no means are carrying anywhere near the load that Europe and others are.”

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But even Clinton’s proposal represents a fraction of the displaced people. An unprecedented 65.3 million people worldwide have been displaced from their homes, including 21.3 million refugees.

Bringing the refugees to the United States has been met with criticism over the ability to properly vet migrants for extreme views and jihadist infiltrators. Resettlement in the U.S. is also a very expensive option compared with the establishment of safe zones in the region.

Sensitive to international criticism, Gulf leaders have argued that they are doing their fair share. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef said in a speech at the World Summit on Refugees that his country has welcomed more than 2.5 million refugees since the start of the Syrian civil war, although none have come under the auspices of the U.N. program.

Such claims have met with skepticism in the past. Last year, Human Rights Watch Emergency Director Peter Bouckaert told Euro News that the country “has offered no evidence to support its claims that it has ‘welcomed’ so many Syrians,” and added the figures provided by the Saudi government appear to mostly consist of refugees who passed through the kingdom on their way to someplace else.

Luay al-Khateeb, then a nonresident scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote last year that the Gulf Cooperation Council states could make an enormous impact if they matched the economic aid they give to friendly countries.

“But it matters more for the GCC because nations with the resources and shared history, culture, religion, and language have an undeniable moral obligation to assist,” al-Khateeb wrote. “Given their combined annual defense spending exceeding $100 billion — coupled with 40 percent of global sovereign wealth funds— the GCC have the capacity to match the great efforts of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift.”

Rush, the Center for Immigration Studies scholar, said there are legitimate concerns over how transparent the U.N. has been.

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“I think the money is not very well-managed by the United Nations,” she said. “Where’s all the money going? And how much is the burden on Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey?”

Rush said the influx of refugees has flooded already-filled public schools in Lebanon and overwhelmed other social services.

She argued that a better option would be to set up “safe zones” in Syria, which would alleviate the burden on neighboring countries and put refugees in a better position to return home once conditions have returned to normal.

“The international community for some reason, I don’t know why, has refused this option,” she said.