There are 66 million forcibly displaced people in the world today. A third of those people left their homelands, crossing a border; most will not likely return, even though repatriation to the country of origin is claimed by UNHCR to be the preferred solution for refugees. Further, most do not qualify as Convention refugees because they were not targeted for individual persecution; they fled war and mass violence. The second-best solution is said to be settlement in countries where they have found initial asylum. Certainly, those countries—Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey in the case of the Syrian refugees (some 5.4 million were forced to leave their nation with another 6.1 million uprooted within Syria)—are burdened with 90 percent of those fleeing war and oppression. However, not one of those countries wants the refugees to remain as permanent residents.
What moral obligations do we have toward these refugees? Three timely books grapple with this question from three...
Howard Adelman was a professor of philosophy at York University for thirty-seven years and then a research professor at Princeton University and Griffith University in Australia. He initiated Operation Lifeline, founded the Centre for Refugee Studies and the journal Refuge, in addition to writing or co-authoring nine books.
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