Refuge and asylum in the Middle East has become a highly contested notion with many Western concepts competing with local and regional understandings. The Western legal standard of providing protection to a category of people who have crossed international borders and fit the definition of ‘refugee’ is a rights-based construction fashionable in public discourse at present. Such people, who are outside their country of nationality or habitual residence; have a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and are unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution (see Article 1A(2)) are deemed worthy of our sympathy and have rights enshrined in the UN 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. Local and regional constructions of duty-based obligations are, however, not appreciated or understood in the international arena. This paper explores the local culturally specific alternatives to UN rights-based recognition of ‘protection’ to people classified as refugees. None of the countries in the Middle East adhere to 1951 Convention; even Turkey does not accept the 1967 Protocol which extends the definition of ‘refugee’ to outside the European arena. Thus, it is not surprising that the current migration crisis in Europe revolves around notions of what is protection and who is a refugee. An alternative which this paper explores is the ‘duty’ approach to providing refuge and asylum, the social and sometimes religious duty to provide asylum to a stranger. In the Levant this is best expressed thorough the institutions of Karam and Sharaf (generosity and hospitality). Using as case studies the Syrian response to the Iraqi refugee crisis which commenced in 2003 and the Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian response to the Syrian refugee crisis which started in 2012, this paper will show the disconnect between Western rights-based approaches to refuge and the duty-based approach commonly accepted in local Middle Eastern civil societies and national ideologies.

Among the most urgent measures envisaged in the European Agenda on Migration (the EU Commission plan to face the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe) one finds a “scheme to relocate 40,000 people from Italy, Greece and other Member States” (a number later increased to 160,000) and a “scheme to resettle over 20,000 people from outside the EU”. Whereas some countries resolutely refused the plan, the Portuguese government supported the initiative and agreed to host more than 4,500 people. As a consequence, an issue that had gone almost unnoticed in the country (Portugal registered only 477 asylum requests in 2014), took center stage and became a matter of public debate. Opponents remarked that country-nationals impoverished by the economic crisis should be prioritized, while a number of local organizations and NGOs responded with an extraordinary public mobilization to receive the expected newcomers. While some refugee advocates were certainly driven by the interest to gain visibility and state commissions, the majority was motivated by considerations of solidarity and commitment that cannot simply be reduced to self-interest and profit. Although the images of death and despair coming from Syria, Turkey, Greece and Eastern Europe played a significant role, the wish to be “useful” and alleviate human suffering constituted a reason of collective ethical engagement. As time passed, however, it became clear that refugees, and particularly the awaited Syrians, were not arriving. Greek and Italian authorities were occasionally blamed for their supposed lack of organization, while some began to think that the Syrians might not want to come to Portugal. Based on this example and on interviews carried out with policymakers and community workers, I discuss how institutional representations of refugees hinders the possibility to consider their autonomy, and in particular their autonomy to move. I use this case to reflect upon the frequent clash between regimes of inclusion and expectations of migrants and refugees, but also on the imaginary geographies of power that underpin their itineraries. Drawing also on my research in other areas (Morocco, Tunisia and Italy), I argue that the notion of refuge as it is currently defined and enforced turns out to be a new tool of immobilization and subordinate inclusion. In this sense, the forms of “radical mobility” enacted by migrants in different ways today constitute a challenge to the common notions of refuge and require new ways of thinking reception and hospitality.

In the summer of 2015, chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Syrian war refugees who made it to Germany would not be turned back to the country of first entry into the European Union, as required by the Dublin Regulation. As a result, Syrian refugees in camps along the Balkan route from Turkey to Europe took buses, trains, or marched themselves to German reception centers, where citizens welcomed them. Germany’s asylum bureaucracy, unable to keep up with the rising numbers of applicants, created a fast track for Syrians that provided a three-year temporary humanitarian visa, with eligibility for work, education, and housing, as well as subsequent visa renewal. The events of 2015 contrasted sharply with those of refugees from Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s. Thousands arrived in then West Germany, many in the divided city of Berlin, and asked for asylum. Most applications were rejected, and those who were allowed to stay ended up in very restricted visa categories that did not permit them to work, go to school, or find legal pathways to integration. Refugees from Lebanon became one of the most marginalized Middle Eastern minority groups in Germany. Next to Germany’s large Turkish minority, which emerged as a result of post-war worker recruitment treaties between states, Arab war refugees and their descendants in Germany have received very little scholarly attention. Based on both archival research and interviews in Germany in the summer of 2015, this paper compares the changing legal landscape for war refugees, and the resulting changes in experiences, as well as perceptions of Arab refugees in Germany. Analyzing the turn from “political” refugees during the Cold War to the “humanitarian” refugee of the 21st century, as well as changing immigration priorities in a unified and demographically challenged Germany, this paper seeks to contrast legal regimes of exclusion and inclusion that have shaped profoundly different identities and experiences for Arab refugees residing in Germany.

Michigan is home to “Arab Detroit,” one of the largest Arab ethnic enclave communities in North America. Arab Detroit has been the major receiving ground for Iraqi refugees, more than 35,000 of whom were resettled there after the First Gulf War, and approximately 45,000 since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. These Iraqi Shia Muslim refugees joined an already large community of Lebanese Shia Muslim immigrants who were fleeing civil war in their home country. Although Arab Detroit has thus been a safe haven for Arabs fleeing war, it has also been the site of much Islamophobia and racial profiling since the post-9/11 “terror decade.” Furthermore, during the same period, Michigan’s auto-based economy faltered, leading to unemployment rates for Iraqis that were nearly three times the national average by 2011. The unprecedented 2013 declaration of Detroit’s bankruptcy, followed by the Michigan governor’s attempt in late 2015 to ban Syrian refugees from entering the state, suggests that Michigan is no longer a welcoming home for Arab refugee resettlement. This paper focuses on the reproductive lives of Arab refugees and war exiles who have fled to Arab Detroit. It is based on a five-year ethnographic research project involving 95 resettled Arab immigrants—55 men and 40 women, mostly Iraqi refugees, Lebanese exiles from the civil war, as well as smaller numbers of Palestinian and Yemeni forced migrants—all of whom were seeking reproductive health care at an Arab-serving clinic in the heart of Arab Detroit. As with an earlier study conducted by the author in post-war Lebanon, most of the men and women participating in this study were facing serious reproductive health problems, including both male and female infertility. Thus, they were dreaming of making a “test-tube baby” in order to achieve cultural mandates of adult personhood, to fulfill their ardent desires for parenthood, and to make citizenship claims through the birth of American offspring. However, this infertile Arab refugee population faced many arenas of constraint, including poverty and lack of health insurance, which limited their ability to seek effective health care. Furthermore, in the US, assisted reproductive technologies are not covered by insurance, even under the Affordable Care Act. Thus, Arab refugees face serious regimes of exclusion in the American health care system, becoming “reproductive exiles” within the promised land of test-tube baby-making.