Refugees as precarious migrant workers: comparative insights from Jordan and Germany

Much critical scholarship on migration policies, by drawing sharp distinctions between global North and South, democratic and undemocratic regimes, overlooks dynamics that are, in fact, global. This paper looks at policies towards refugees as workers as an example from which we can infer important commonalities in migration governance across the globe. Based on extensive fieldwork in Jordan and critical scholarship on Germany, it looks at changing policies of labour market integration for refugees in both countries, which – in contrast to many others across North and South - have been relatively welcoming towards refugee labour, particularly Syrian labour. It explores the factors that may have led to this shared pattern, policy changes and the role of a range of (state and non-state) actors in ‘making refugees work’, and analyses the effects of these policies. It argues that in both cases, attempts to formalise (some) refugee labour have considerably changed the status of refugees. However, this has a) not necessarily meant an improvement of their socio-economic situation, and has often maintained their precarity, and b) it has been selective, such that in effect, different groups of migrant / refugee labour continue to fill different niches on the labour market.