Tala Jarjour
News of tragedy and triumph travel well, owing perhaps to the simple fact that headlines attract extreme stories, stories which catch the eye, seeming unusual. So, we often hear of migrant success stories; the housewife who now runs a catering business in her adopted country is a particularly pleasing one to read, especially when it comes with pictures or videos of delicious Eastern Mediterranean food. These stories, it would not escape the keen reader, are juxtaposed with many an account of desperate crossings – more so when the latter turn fatal. But what about those in between? What happens to the millions of people who neither triumph with economic success nor succumb to a premature death? The millions of lives uprooted by insecurity, destabilized by the lack of safety and unsettled by economic worry. Theirs is the reality of the in-between.
After more than a decade of horrifying news from Syria, two decades of increasingly worrying developments in Iraq, almost five decades of various instabilities in Lebanon and as rapidly shrinking a set of citizen rights in Palestine as the territory, it is small wonder that the region is one of the largest sources of migration in the world today.
But the world has gotten tired of cliches and I am not talking only about refugees or the hundreds of thousands who are in desperate need for humanitarian aid. The Syrian woman who started a successful street corner restaurant, the man who discovered his passion for tagines, are also becoming deja vu. That Syrian cuisine is finally being noticed by global markets might be a good thing. But is cooking all that Syrians know how to do? Where are the engineers, the doctors, the academics, the scientists, the designers, the artists, the musicians, the thinkers, the traders? We occasionally hear of an actor on stage here or a musician performing there, but where are they really? And where is everybody else? Where did they go? What are they doing for a living? At least until well into the war years, Syria had one of the strongest tertiary education systems in the region. High school students often found no problem integrating into any of the neighboring countries’ school systems when their families moved, often for employment opportunities, to Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other Gulf countries. Similarly, high school graduates, holders of the national baccalaureate, found transitioning into universities, nationally and internationally, seamless, apart from the language shift. So, what happened to the masses of scientifically prepared, academically qualified and professionally trained working-age Syrians who left during the war years and their aftermath? Success stories, no doubt, showcase exemplary adaptability and resilience, especially when they come on the heels of great difficulty. Yet, the world ought to hear more about the stories of migrants and refugees whose uprooting came at a less flexible stage of life. People whose unplanned departure came at the height of a professional path and career, permanently damaging or at least seriously interrupting hard-earned success. Having invested a good decade or two of their better years in setting strong foundations for what they had hoped might carry them to a comfortable retirement, many Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis and, before them, Palestinians found that conditions in their host countries were not set up to allow professional practice.
Even if they cook well, a doctor, teacher, journalist, entrepreneur or engineer would much prefer the ability to be productive in what they know best – in their field of expertise. There, too, is where they would bring invaluable additions to the host societies and to their adopted countries’ economies. They just need a little more encouragement – structural encouragement, that is, in the form of facilitating the transferability of skills and allowing job flexibility. Where there is talent, a little reassurance goes a long way. And there is no dearth of talent among the well-trained professionals and university graduates of Arab countries whose homelands await better days. Westbound migration from the region is not new, of course, but the ongoing wave is undeniable. It is certainly beautiful to see young Syrians graduating from Western universities, young-adult professional Iraqis entering new jobs, established Lebanese career men and women making their mark in advanced professional positions and retired – or globally renowned – Palestinian professors and doctors. But let us not wait a generation before the next wave of Arab migrant professionals find their place among the workforces of London, Toronto and Berlin.
