The idea that refugees are taking advantage of government services is nothing new, said University of Toronto political science professor Phil Triadafilopoulos.
“For ages, politicians have said refugees A) most of them are lying and B) they are sort of a suck on the welfare state, a suck on social services [and] they take more than they can contribute,” he told Global News.
In fact, says Gillian Zubizarreta, settlement coordinator for the Halifax Refugee Clinic, government bureaucracies — difficulty in obtaining a work permit, for example — can often be more of a barrier to refugees’ contributing to the economy than refugees’ desire to milk social programs.
“There is so much stigma around refugees not contributing, which not well-founded at all. It’s patently untrue,” she said.
“From what we see, our clients are so entrepreneurial in spirit and the moment they have work authorization they are out there doing whatever they can, Even those who barely speak English are taking jobs that are well below their expertise.”
And Canada recoups most of what it spends on refugees: They’re all obliged to repay the cost of their transportation and initial medical assessment — with interest. (Critics have argued this debt actually hampers their ability to get a good economic start in Canada.)
As well, the lion’s share of the Syrian refugees the Canadian government has committed to resettling are expected to be privately sponsored, meaning private individuals or groups “commit to provide assistance and support to refugees for their first year of residence in Canada.” A 2007 evaluation from Citizenship and Immigration Canada found that “privately sponsored refugees tend to become more self-sufficient sooner and are less likely to go on to social assistance.”
A table on the Citizenship and Immigration Canada website shows privately sponsored refugees survive with approximately half the amount of income support than those resettled with government assistance.
There’s also evidence suggesting refugees benefit economies, rather than drain them.
A study released this week from Oxford Economics, a U.K-based forecasting and analysis firm, estimated the impact 1 million new asylum-seekers will have on Germany, the world’s fourth-biggest economy. The researcher found that if Germany accepted an extra 1 million refugees over the next three years, it “could raise GDP by 0.6% by end-2020 and reduce inflationary pressures.”
That boost to Germany’s GDP, according to the Oxford Economics research, would come thanks to a “rise in the labour supply” which would also “ease growing supply bottlenecks in the labour market and ease wage pressures
