British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The invisible cage: Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon
Dr John Chalcraft (LSE) on behalf of the Council for British Research in the Levant
This presentation explores how Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon have been woven into the regional political economy and key political controversies over the last decade
The Council for British Research in the Levant provided funding for this project over two years. The research was also funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the British Academy.
For further information, visit: www.cbrl.org.uk
Summary
Syrian workers rebuilding
downtown Beirut, August 1998
(Joseph Barrak/AFP)
Worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Lebanese employers and the Syrian economy alike, and comprising the bulk of Lebanon’s unskilled workforce, Syrian migrant workers have laboured in Lebanon in their hundreds of thousands since the 1960s, in a prolonged cycle of migration and return. As has been aptly said, ‘Lebanon was built with Syrian muscles’. During the 1990s and 2000s Syrian workers became highly controversial, seen by many in Lebanon as a fifth column for Syrian control and a cause of numerous economic and social problems.
Far from either denouncing or celebrating the presence of Syrian workers in Lebanon in conventional ways, this presentation attempts to understand and explain the dynamics of this drastically under-researched circulatory migration ‘from below’. I aim to offer a glimpse of how Syrians’ attempts to improve their lives have made them vulnerable on many levels. I show how a form of economic migration apparently based on choice in fact subjects Syrians to forms of power outside of their control.
This approach draws attention to the harsh ways in which market forces enmesh and control those to which they are subject. The aim is to shift attention from both xenophobic and rose-tinted debates about migration, to a better understanding of the powerful social, economic, and institutional mechanisms that drive economic migration forward. In place of benign notions of market functioning associated with the notion of the ‘invisible hand’, I highlight the ways in which migrants are enmeshed in an ‘invisible cage’. This research argues - against the prevailing wisdom - that market reform in Syria will only exacerbate this problem.