The Syrian conflict has reached its fifth year, but the European aspect of the refugee crisis it generated has dominated news headlines since the summer of 2015. Numerous academic panels have been convened to discuss how the European Union is (not) coping with its increasing numbers of asylum seekers. A supra-national entity of 500 million, the E.U. is up in arms at the 1 million Syrian refugees who entered its borders last year. To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of Syrian refugees currently in Lebanon, a country of just 4.5 million. While the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region currently hosts around 4.8 million Syrian refugees alone (not to mention Iraqi, Palestinian and many others), they are treated more as passive refugee-hosting vessels than as actors with their own interests. [...]
For almost 70 years, Jordan has accepted generations of refugees from the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Syria. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) indicates that 638,000 Syrian refugees live in Jordan; official Jordanian statistics put the number at 1.3 million [...]
Jordanian officials have not used the same xenophobic rhetoric that surfaced in Eastern Europe, the United States and Australia to discourage refugee settlement. But Jordanians have vocally criticized a perceived decline in their standard of living and feel the ache of “host community fatigue” as the refugee burden includes rising costs and crowded schools, streets and hospitals.
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